Yesterday evening, my counselor asked, "Who do you agree with most, theologically?"
I said Gavin Ortlund.
Why?
Because he's irenic, hopeful, saying he wants to dedicate his life to translating the deep primary sources of church history for the ordinary people who are interested in finding solid answers based on something real.
My counselor said that's not content; that's method.
So maybe I forgot about content. Is theology in my preference just about how it makes me feel -- smart, deep, historic, peaceful, hopeful?
This is a bit disturbing, because two years ago I was a constant fan of Preston Sprinkle for similar reasons -- he's a good listener, he respects his opponents, he reads deeply and widely and is open to changing his mind -- but now I've moved away from actively listening to him because I perceive that he's too squishy and not historically rooted enough, and I tried on his view of conditional immortality/annihilationism because it was daring, but couldn't quite square it with the portrayal of hell in Revelation. If I was attracted to Sprinkle because of his method and personal qualities but now am less than one hundred percent enthusiastic about his conclusions, where will I end up in the future?
So let's go beyond method and attitude and examine some theological instincts that I've picked up from favorite authors in recent years.
The Spirit in the sacraments
Let's start with Baptism and the Lord's Supper. I want to highlight the role of the Spirit in uniting us with Christ and the Father, in a tangible way through the words of institution and the action (being dipped in the water, or eating bread and drinking wine). It is not just a symbol, but a symbol enchanted by the Spirit, and yet the Spirit has perfect freedom and is not bound by our actions.
Free will and God's freedom and presence
And then on free will, I want to highlight the goodness of creation, the seriousness of our responsibility, and the mystery of how God accomplishes his will under, beyond, and through our willing and working and even empowering our willing and working -- God with us *and* God beyond us.
Praying to the Trinity
And I like Thomas Cranmer's collects (short written prayers) precisely because they pray to the Father, Son, and Spirit by name. Not a hazy spirituality, this. I know whom I have believed. For example, "All this we pray in the name of your dear Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen."
Personal, relational theology
I like it when a theologian presents God's working in the world as personal.
I first heard this in a lecture by Greg Bahnsen, who said that providence or the laws of nature are simply God's ordinary and regular and consistent way of working in the world -- it's not a clock wound up, but rather God himself moving the clouds.
Moving on now from nature to the process of salvation, Cornelis van der Kooi and Gijsbert van den Brink (Christian Dogmatics) present effectual calling as something like the personal calling of Jesus to Matthew that enabled him to leave his tax booth and his old life, and this same story is repeated in different ways in the life of everyone who becomes a believer.
Similarly, Oliver O'Donovan in his commentary On the 39 Articles, chapter 5 (on Articles 9-10), speaks of effectual calling through the analogy of a friend's personal influence -- it is indeed greater than this, but it's a more personal and relational analogy than a cold and clanking chain of causation.
And speaking of chains of causation, I prefer the view of Aristotle, filtered through Aquinas to the Reformed Orthodox scholastics (as explained in Richard Muller's dictionary of Latin and Greek theological terms) of four types of causation, so that God upholds all things and yet supports our freedom on a lower level.
There's also a neat little bar-graph diagram in DA Carson's dissertation book Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility, which shows God's work as 100 percent and our work as 10 percent -- co-occurring action on different levels, with God mysteriously empowering our work. John MG Barclay has several articles on the same theme of "not monergism, not synergism, but energism", dwelling on Paul's phrases like "I yet not I", "Christ in me" and "the grace of God that was with me" (1 Corinthians 15:10; Galatians 2:20; Philippians 2:12-13) replacing "I yet not I" and "the sin that is in me" (Romans 7:17,20).
Again on the personal theme, there is a complex yet satisfying diagram on the work of the Spirit by Volker Rabens (in The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul) -- it shows that the Holy Spirit does not fill us up like water in a cup, as the Stoics taught, but rather the Spirit is a dynamic connector, sparking our connection with the Father, the Son, the Word, and other believers.
And again, Roger T. Beckwith, in his proposed supplement to the 39 Articles in his book with JI Packer, The 39 Articles: Their Place and Use Today, says that grace is not a substance poured out to us, but is rather the light of God's presence and favor.
Figurative speech
Let's move on to metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche -- figures of speech where a part represents the whole or where one member of a pair is spoken of in terms properly attributed to the other member of the pair because they are so closely associated.
Augustine in On Marriage and Concupiscence said that the evil inclination is not actual sin, but it is called sin metaphorically because it comes from Adam's sin and leads to actual sin when we obey it. (Augustine also did some fancy footwork in his letter to Boniface on the reason for infant baptism and the theory of metaphorically attributed infant faith via the faith of the sponsors and the church, and baptism being a "sacrament of faith", but I don't agree with that, so it just goes to show that not all metaphorical speech is legitimate or helpful in my opinion.)
Robert H. Stein ("Baptism and Becoming a Christian in the New Testament") says that baptism is attributed with all the benefits of salvation in the New Testament because it was meant to accompany faith, repentance, confession of Christ as Lord, and receiving the Spirit, so that the benefits of salvation that accompanied these is attributed synecdochally to baptism as a figural stand-in for the whole conversion-initiation process.
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646-1647) and the Consensus Tigurinus (1549, by John Calvin and Henry Bullinger), in their own way, also affirm this -- the Spirit works in baptism but is not bound in time by it, *and* by the "sacramental union" the effects of the (outer) sign are attributed to the (inner) thing signified, and vice versa -- and yet, we can speak of *both* an inner regeneration and a sacramental (symbolic, official) regeneration that are sometimes separated in time, if we are careful. (See WCF 27.2 and 28.6.)
The Consensus Tigurinus (Article 19) says, "Thus the sins of Paul were washed away by baptism, though they had been previously washed away. So likewise baptism was the laver of regeneration to Cornelius, though he had already received the Holy Spirit. So in the Supper Christ communicates himself to us, though he had previously imparted himself, and perpetually remains in us."
And then we can also speak of memory (anamnesis) in the Lord's Supper in an imaginative way, as the Jews were instructed to speak at the Passover (and the offering of first fruits every year) *as if* they themselves had personally walked out of Egypt. It's more than a memory; it's immersive imagination at a corporate level. (See Doug Moo, A Theology of Paul and His Letters, p.591; Exodus 12:24-27, 13:14-16; Deuteronomy 26:1-11.)
Themes in theology
And so we see several themes develop:
1) personal relational theology,
2) theology concerned with careful distinctions but also open to speaking in metaphor as long as it is explained, and
3) theology that cares about language and the presence and work of the Spirit as both mystery and positive good with nuances and layers that can be clearly seen but not completely grasped.
Speaking hard truth through gritted teeth
I also have mad respect for the church I'm currently attending, in that the preaching pastors say hard things but through gritted teeth, reading from their manuscript so they don't misspeak -- full of anxiety and yet caring enough to speak the whole truth. Contrast this with another church I have visited, which does so many wonderful things with ethnic inclusion, and yet they passed a new doctrinal statement seven times longer than the old one, and forgot to mention hell, which was clearly explained in the old doctrinal statement.
Catechesis as a concertina
I also value the pedagogical method of catechesis where it starts with the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles' Creed, so that people can memorize these three key texts, and then use them as a framework for the rest of doctrine, prayer, and ethics. For example, like a concertina, the Ten Commandments can be reduced to two Great Commandments, that is, to love God (Commandments 1-4) and to love neighbor (Commandments 5-10), and then can be expanded outward into many different applications. The command to honor one's father and mother, in the Westminster Catechisms, is expanded to include instructions on how to treat and how not to treat our leaders, peers, and subordinates, both with our attitudes and our actions. This is a valuable insight, and a helpful teaching tool.
What is faith, and how does it lead to worship?
Finally, I want to close with a summary of what true faith is, partly drawn from Kevin DeYoung's Daily Doctrine and partly from Roger Beckwith's definition of faith in his supplement to the 39 Articles. I want to hint at faith as loyalty as Matthew Bates argues (The Gospel Precisely), but major on faith as an attitude of trust.
True faith is knowledge, assent, and trust, leading to treasuring Christ above all things, and loyalty until the end. This is evoked by the Spirit through the Word and nurtured in community. True faith always depends on Christ and his merits, not on oneself. But it works itself out through love, in response to the love of God that roots and grounds the believer.
True faith continually seeks to know God more, learning with the aim of closer personal union. (I find that this comes most naturally to me as I wrestle through tough intellectual problems.)
As faith works itself out through love, this always requires sacrifice. I hesitate to call it surrender, because surrender suggests passivity. Rather, I want to call it offering oneself, one's time and attention, one's work, and one's possessions to God and then to others as an expression of lifelong and daily worship of God.
To be sustainable, this often paradoxically requires solitude for resting and thinking, reading, writing, and praying. This is worship too.
A question for you
What about you? Do you find yourself drawn first to content, or attitude, in theologians? What attitudes, methods, themes or images have been most helpful for you?
