When God Becomes Flat

As I've tracked and engaged the writings of the late Stanley Grenz and his theological comrade John Franke, I've tended to use them as dialogue partners primarily with respect to issues of theological methodology and epistemology. However, it's been intriguing as of late to mull over their statements on the doctrine of God. In his Theology for the Community of God, Grenz makes this assertion:

In that God is love apart from the creation of the world, love characterizes God. Love is the eternal essence of the one God. But this means that it is not merely one attribute of God among many. Rather, love is the fundamental "attribute of God." "God is love" is the foundational ontological statement we can declare concerning the divine essence. God is foundationally the mutuality of the love relationship between Father and son, and this personal love is the Holy Spirit....Because throughout eternity and apart from the world the one God is love, the God who is love cannot but respond to the world in accordance to his own eternal essence, which is love. Thus, this essential characteristic of God likewise describes the way God interacts with his world. "Love," therefore, is not only the description of the eternal God in himself, it is likewise the fundamental characteristic of God in relationship with creation (p. 72).

Love as the "fundamental" divine attribute is picked up in Franke's new book Manifold Witness: "In seeking to know the character of God in response to the action of divine self-revelation, we must seek to understand the fundamental biblical assertion that 'God is love'" (p. 56, emphasis mine). I must add that I have been reasonably optimistic about the methodological progress Franke makes in this book. He seems less insistent on buying into hard linguistic constructivism and focuses more on the notion that the truth of the gospel demands to be set forth in multiple heuristic models (hence the book's title). However, I'm wondering what to do with the thought of combining the claims that love is the fundamental divine perfection and that theological reality should be rendered polyphonically.

It seems to me that Grenz and Franke flatten out the divine essence and so pass up the opportunity to stress one vital way in which the testimony of theology should be pluriform. Those of a more classically theistic bent can say, "Yes, love is God's essence. But his righteousness, immutability, aseity, faithfulness, and so on are equally his essence. Each of the divine perfections just is God's essence considered under some aspect." However, it seems to me that Grenz and Franke lose sight of an important piece of the Christian tradition and at the same time shoot down a potentially illuminating feature of doing theology in a multiple-models manner. In short, I would like to hear more on why not only, say, the atonement but also the multi-aspectival divine nature deserves a pluriform theological witness.

I also have questions about the biblical case for the centrality of the divine attribute of love. To be sure, the apostle John teaches us that God is love, but the same teaches also that God is spirit and God is light. Why not argue that God's spirituality is his fundamental perfection? Here Grenz and Franke would probably appeal to their doctrine of the Trinity, but that is an issue for another day. Any thoughts on this?

Listening Theology as Via Media (cont.)

The last post unpacked how a listening theology avoids the blunders of modernism. But for thoughtful Christians postmodernism also has its problems. How might a listening theology address these?

The term postmodernism is used in several ways, but here I mean a cluster of philosophical emphases held together by a tendency toward conceptual relativism and linguistic constructivism. Conceptual relativists argue that, because we use our communally-devised conceptual resources to investigate reality, we are encased in them and do not have access to the world in itself but only the world as our concepts allow us to see it. Our knowledge is merely relative to our conceptualizations of things. This commitment may be wedded to linguistic constructivism, the belief that our linguistic constructs actually construct the world around us. This is to move away from metaphysical realism, belief in mind-independent reality. These emphases, though not adopted uncritically by them, have found a place in the works of Stanley Grenz and John Franke. Grenz and Franke have several beneficial things to say about the task of theology (e.g., it must be done in and for the body of Christ, it is not enshrined in any one systematic presentation and so must be ongoing), but I have concern about their openness to conceptual relativism and linguistic constructivism (even if they would prefer not to speak in those terms when describing their approach to theology).

A listening theology differs in a couple of ways. First, it affirms that we can in fact listen to reality and the canonical exposition of it without our use of concepts automatically distorting it as it comes before our minds. We can 1) have some pre-conceptual experience and knowledge (the epistemological distinction between belief de re and belief de dicto is helpful here) and/or 2) in virtue of the God-givenness of our noetic equipment faithfully conceptualize things as we experience them. With respect to (2), we of course have great intellectual limitations as finite creatures who have plunged into sin, but our Creator desires for us to obtain genuine knowledge of the way things are. In sum, we listen and reply to reality and what God has to say about it; we don’t necessarily do conceptual violence to it every time we seek to understand it.

Second, a listening theology rejects the idea that our conceptual-linguistic construals construct reality. (The exception would be the case of performative speech, speech by which we do bring into being certain states of affairs. A classic example is the case of a minister pronouncing a couple to be husband and wife. This state of affairs does not obtain before the minister says so.) A listening theology gives more weight to the fact that there is already an objective world created by God, a world which he describes in the canon of Scripture. We listen to God speaking and, in turn, do not presume that our theological statements in themselves actually create things. Rather, if they are faithful to God’s self-communication, they help us see who God is and what he is up to and help us properly to engage reality and join in the drama of redemption. This is less a matter of creating reality and more a matter of finding our place in it as creatures of the living God. Having said this, we should always remember that, while our use of language does not create the world around us, Christian leaders still have the joyful responsibility to describe and illumine the contours of reality such that the church is prodded to go out and serve others with the result that the world does look different for the glory of God.