Theology Proper
The Doctrine of God
Atheism
Feuerbach – Perhaps the Father of Atheism. 1804-1872. In the beginning, Feuerbach wanted to do theology. He became exposed to Hegel. Hegel’s pantheistic influence moved Feuerbach offcenter and he turned to the Hegelian World Soul view. After overthrowing this, he moved to an anthropocentric view. His basic claim was that God was a mental projection of man’s highest desires and ideals.
God is in essence a wishful thought; Goodness is God. Whatever is god to man, there is his heart and soul. Religion is the unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures. Romanticism and Schleiermacher’s version of Christianity gave rise to Feuerbach’s response to theology. Schleiermacher moved the emphasis of theology from God man’s experience. Schleiermacher defined religion as a feeling of absolute dependence on God. Feuerbach said that the experience was not of God, but an experience of experience. He called Schleiermacher’s bluff.
Schleiermacher saw Jesus as a religious genius and therefore he became the Christ (he had utter dependence on the divine). Feuerbach said that the divine Jesus was merely the objectification and personification of our highest values. Tim Janiszewski states that we must go beyond experience, otherwise, we too are open to Feuerbach’s criticism.
Faults with Feuerbach –
*This is a claim. Not a proof. He has not disproved anything.
*He did not deal with any integrity with the person and works of Jesus Christ.
*He did not deal with the revelatory aspect and doctrinal beliefs of Christianity. While Schleiermacher was an easy target, orthodox Christianity would have made a tougher challenge to Feuerbach.
Marx – Marx was inspired by Feuerbach. He was a materialist that believed the ills of the word were caused by inequity. If everyone had an equitable share of goods, there would be harmony and the world would progress in its evolution. In capitalism, there is the haves and the have-nots. The haves wish to remain where they are and leverage the resources at their disposal to keep the imbalance.
The strongest card in the hands of the haves was religion. The have nots are told that if they rock the boat, then there is eternal damnation awaiting them. If you simply play the roll that God ordained for you to play, then you are to be rewarded in the next life. At the moment, you are where God has called you. In the words of Marx, “Religion is the dopa/opiate of the masses.”
Marx desired to get rid of religion. He preached action to acquire equity in goods. People are not called to read history, but to make history via the revolution.
Faults of Marx -
*He was overly optimistic about the human condition.
*He neglected to address the positive value of religion and its flexibility. Christianity has survived communism.
*Marx makes an assertion with no evidence to support it. He does not make it logically incoherent to believe in God.
*Marx never addressed the beliefs of the Church.
Protest Atheism – In the late 1800’s the state of western culture and many of the advances made mankind extremely optimistic about its innate nature. The world was being discovered and conquered like never before in the realms of science, transportation, etc. The Enlightenment ideals were coming into full bloom. Adolf Harnack stated, “The fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.” There was a rosy tinge to the world. Even the Protestant orthodox were flirting with postmillennialism.
World War I and II destroyed this optimism. Protest Atheism is a position that says, ‘Look at what has happened. Look at the carnage and genocide and the chapters of blood. What kind of God would allow this to happen?’ Whoever the gods are that have been trusted, they should be cast aside due to the history they have permitted. Protest Atheists wanted a new god or no god at all.
Death of God – In the 1960’s Paul Van Buren, William Hamilton and others promulgated this viewpoint. There are two forms of it. In one, man has come of age and God has relinquished His being into the world because He is no longer needed. There is a more practical version that states that as we have mastered our circumstances, we no longer need God.
Per the Death of God View those in the past were so uncomplicated and ignorant that they needed a god figure. There is less conscious need of God. Deus ex machina – God from the machine. God of the gaps. People live there lives as if there were no God until they encounter the unexplainable. To these mysteries, they ascribe the work of God.
Agnosticism
Acts 16 talks about the dedication to "To an unknown God".
The impact of Kant’s noumenal and phenomenal. 1724–1804. Many see him as the one that informed the end of the Enlightenment. He defined it as the “Courage to think your own thoughts.”
Kant was the prototypical ivory tower philosopher. Born, studied and died in Königsberg, Prussia.
Before Kant came on the scence there was the Correspondence theory of truth – What is in actuality is what you perceive it to be. There is a one-to-one correspondence between our perceptions and reality. Kant stated that Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumber.
Kant pioneered the turn to the subject. Our minds bring a lot to the table in understanding physical and metaphysical reality. The point that he emphasized that you cannot know the thing in itself. All you can know is your own personal, experiential grid as you perceive the thing in itself. Kant stated that you could not know God noumenally (God in himself). You only know God in the realm of what you think He is. All you have is your limited perceptions. The closest that you can get is the mysterium tremendum of Rudolph Otto (i.e. tremendous mystery).
Kant missed the point of revelation and the incarnation.
Agnosticism and Constructive Theology – Gordon Kaufman – Revered professor of theology at Harvard. He and others do constructive theology. He states that we cannot get to the noumenal or really know God, so we construct models of what God might be like. After we construct the model, we fine tune it in correlation with other things that we know in reality.
Kaufman uses the coherence theory of truth – metaphysical truth is that which coheres internally and coordinates all the pieces of reality together. Kaufman is looking for a theory of God that coheres with what is seen in the phenomenal world.
Models of Perceiving Truth -
Three ways to call pitches in baseball –
*I call them the way they are – There is a reality out there. Correspondence theory of truth.
*I call them the way that I see them – Turn to the subject. They are there, but we cannot necessarily see them the way they really are. Kantian.
*They are what I call them – This is a radical side of the coherence theory. We are limited to perception and there is no reality beyond what I perceive it to be. This is very narrow and subjective.
Theism
We are now going to build a case for theism that will contend with atheism and agnosticism.
Natural Theology
Humans can obtain particular knowledge about God by focusing on reason and the observation of the world.
Five views on demonstrating God via Natural Theology1. John Locke – died 1704. Full confidence. He had full confidence that we could very close to God by using our minds and observing reality and the created order. He also valued human experience as somewhat revelatory.
He did not intend to set the history of thought in the direction that it went, but… Locke’s view was that the Bible was the affirming point of confirmation of what we were able to perceive through natural means. Locke was a believer, but set the groundwork for the thought that perhaps we do not need special revelation to know God.
The Bible and Christ are a republication of what may be discerned through empiricism. An American Congregationalist minister who founded Pittsburgh Xenia Seminary, Henry Ward Beecher – “The great world is but another Bible.”
2. Thomas Aquinas – Analogia entis – There is an analogy of being between the being of God and the cosmos He created. Per Aquinas, nature could take you part of the way toward God. This is Guiding confidence. It can lead you toward him, but not take you all the way. Nature is perfected by grace.
Bruce Demarest – “Special revelation completes, not negates, the special revelation of God in nature and conscience.”
3. John Calvin – Convicting confidence. Calvin chides Aquinas’ analogy of being. Apart from special revelation, human beings have failed to create satisfactory gods. He stated that the Catholic scholastics had failed to account for the impact on sin and how it has radically undermined our ability to use nature to find God.
Calvin did state that people have a sense of the divine. By and large, what you can get from a natural theology is the sense that there is a divine something out there (a seed of religion). Most religions contain a sense of the divine and the idea of accountability to God.
4. Karl Barth – Misguided confidence. There is no point of contact between natural theology and an understanding of God in Christ.
Emil Brunner and Karl Barth squared off over this issue. Brunner wrote that there was a point of contact in every human being that God could use to bring redemption. Barth wrote to Brunner, “Nein”.
Natural theology tells us nothing about God unaided by special revelation. Barth stated, “Apart from Jesus Christ, I would be an atheist.”
On Romans 1 and 2 and Psalm 19, Barth would say that this is from the believer’s perspective (even though the passage is speaking about unbelievers). Barth said “no” to apologetics and “yes” to proclamation.
5. Tim Janiszewski – Eclectic confidence. Tim is with Calvin quite a bit. Sin clouds our perception of reality. He also has a weak affirmation of the Aquinas view. We should not adhere to the fallacy of either/or.
Natural Theology
Proofs or Testimonies to GodBarth would totally skip this section. Calvin would be weakly supportive. Locke would have a party. Hebrews 6:1, Romans 1 and other passages talk about the existence of proof.
A posteriori and a priori. A posteriori – Have the experience and reason from it. A priori – This is prior to experience. There is only one proof that is a priori.
Picking a taxonomy
Arguments based on the nature of the cosmos are called cosmological arguments.
Cosmological Arguments
*Cause and effect – Aquinas’ based on correspondence theory of truth. Look at the cause and effect in nature. Where does it go back to? There must be a first cause or uncaused cause.
*Motion – Things that are in motion must have been moved originally. If this is followed far enough back, we must have an inception point of motion. Aquinas used Aristotle who said that God was the Unmoved Mover.
*Contingency – We are contingent beings. We are dependent on other things. Aquinas believes that there must be a Necessary Being, not merely a contingent being. This Necessary Being has created all contingent beings.
*Teleological – This is the argument from design. If things are in order, there must be someone who has ordered them. God is the grand systematician.
*Degrees of Being – eminentiae. Don’t we all see things in order of degrees of perfection/value. Follow the trajectory from good, better, best, superlative, etc. and you arrive at God. God is the best that we could every possibly conceive of.
--Feuerbach would say that this view is aligned with his own. God is merely an emanation of our greatest hopes and aspirations.
Arguments based on human beings specifically
*Why do people have conscience? Why does the sense of moral oughtness exist. God puts this sense of oughtness into us.
*Moral argument. Immanuel Kant stated that when we look at the universe in which we live, do the just always succeed? At the end of the day, is life fair? There must be a God out there, that at the end of the world, would bring justice.
*Pragmatic argument. This is extremely weak. Belief in God makes people healthier, happier and better adjusted.
Based on God
*Ontological argument. This is the only a priori argument and it is from Anselm. Anselm wrote Pros Logion as a devotion to God, but developed the ontological argument within it. Are we able to think about the idea of an absolutely perfect being? Whatever that absolutely perfect being is, is that being more perfect if that being is only an idea or if that being actually exists? For Anselm, the more perfect being actually exists. God is that being about which nothing greater can be conceived.
Value of proofs or testimonies
These proofs are not bulletproof. They should be used to move someone towards the probability of God’s existence rather than as definitive proofs.
Limits of proofs or testimonies
It is better to call them testimonies than proofs. The limitation that Tim would impose on this is that these arguments might tell us that there is a God, but they tell us nothing about what kind of God. You might be able to get beyond thinking atheism and agnosticism is the way, but we then need to move to God’s character and works. Natural theology dead ends before reaching this point. Is God limited or unlimited, finite or infinite, loving or cruel, etc?
In The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, D.A. Carson believes that the Openness of God people are dangerously close to creating a finite god.
Revealed Theology
Special revelation and personal illumination.
The need for “Revealed” Theology.
*Scripture
*Illumination of human beings – There is a both/and between human illumination and Scripture. Scripture is the word of God, but personal experience with the Word brings it home.
A rightly situated special revelation in regard to knowing God.
*Divine incomprehensibility – We can comprehend God a whole lot better with personal illumination and Scripture, but God is ultimately and finally incomprehensible. Augustine – “To have a very slight knowledge of God is a great blessing. To comprehend Him is utterly impossible.” John Calvin – “It is a vain speculation to attempt an examination of God in essence, but we can know God in His revealed character and actions.”
*Uses and limits of language – God, by necessity, communicates Himself by using our language. Calvin called this accommodation. Even by using special revelation, God has to stoop to speak a language we can understand. “For who is so devoid of intellect as not to understand that God, in so speaking, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children? Such modes of expression, therefore, do not so much express what kind of a being God is, as accommodate the knowledge of him to our feebleness. In doing so, he must, of course, stoop far below his proper height.”
God uses anthropomorphisms to communicate. God also use anthropophatic or emotion centered words to reveal Himself. Scripture does not contain a few antrhopos, but all Scripture is anthropo (Bovick). God is condescending to our vehicle of language to explain Himself. The greatest anthropomorphism is Jesus Christ.
Models and their nature – There are models of God from the Bible and theology, but God is complicated. He is not readily reducible by a single model or even many models.
Revealed Theology
Unity of God
Theism – A Case from Biblical Theology
Biblical models of God
God as a shepherd - Ezekiel 34:1-17
What does this passage tell us about God?
· God cares about the flock.
· God is concerned about neglect of the flock.
· God holds people accountable. He expects them to follow a code of conduct. He is willing to intervene when that does not happen.
· God is willing to remove those who are inadequate leaders.
· God has a plan for human life. He has ordered it a certain way and deviations from this are considered wrong.
· God is a protector. God understands our human weaknesses and what must be done to care for them. God is not impassive to the human condition.
· God gives strength and prosperity to be expended on others.
· God has social concern. Inequality draws His attention.
· God is a judge.
· God expects leadership and a multitude of leadership capable individuals.
· God does not allow his people to be lost.
· God is able to discern human intent and actions.
· God is a healer.
· God is sovereign; He is the over-shepherd.
God as spirit
Biblical names for God
What is in a name? Names often were descriptive or connotative. They revealed identity.
OT names
Yahweh – The covenantal name of God. I am that I am. The tetragammatron. It is based off of the Hebrew word for “to be”. Most scholars agree this is as close to a proper name for God that may be found. This name is given first at the burning bush with Moses. The two predominant ideas are constancy and immutability. II Timothy 2:13 – If we are faithless, He remains faithful because he cannot deny Himself (constancy). The word also points to God’s aseity or self-existence.
El – God is “almighty”, “strong” or “revered”. This also carries the connotation of fear. Underlying fear is the idea of obedience being requisite.
Adonai – Means “Lord” or “Master”. The one who rules over or to whom we submit. The way that Yahweh got vowel pointed was through dots and points. The vowel pointing was done in the 12th century. Pronunciation in the OT times was done through tradition. This was God’s secret or sacred name (per tradition). Traditionalists replaced YHWH with Adonai in an attempt to keep the 3rd commandment. Best way to not take the name in vain is to never say it.
NT names - Repetition of OT names in NT. For example, Revelation 1:8 is loaded (alpha, omega, lord, almighty, etc. go back to OT derivatives).
Father -
The matter of maleness in God
There are Roman Catholic theologians that play with the Sophia or female aspects of God.
Mainline denominations have met and prayed to the goddess Sophia.
The Presbyterians, in 1991, talk about God caring for us like a mother.
Princeton Theological Seminary – Students are not allowed to write using male pronouns for deity. They are forced to use “God”.
Central objections to male language.
Patriarchical. It treats women as second class citizens. It is too exclusive.
It is injurious to certain people who have had abusive fathers.
Response to objections.
We should not get rid of God as father, but we should uphold God as the father that can heal the wounds inflicted by human fathers. We should not eschew an image of the father God merely because there have been bad fathers.
God has revealed Himself using this male language and identification. God does not clearly identify Himself as female.
The Jews in Jesus’ times even refused to use the name Yahweh. They feared to invoke the name of God. Jesus turns around and calls God “abba”. This would have broken cultural rules of intimacy with God. To throw out the imagery of a father God would be to throw out one of the most precious endowments given to the Church.
God’s relationship to the cosmos. Most world religions had male and female deities. Judaism and Christianity stood out for their exclusion of a female deity. The birthing of the world was portrayed in other religions as being out of the female womb. The created world was seen as an extension of the divine substance. If the cosmos is organically linked to the female deity, then you get into pantheism and panentheism. The God of Israel did not birth the world, but all creation was brought into existence ex nihilo.
God is personal. God wants to be seen and recognized as personal. God did not want to be identified as a it or a she.
The Unity of God
· Divine Attributes – A Taxonomy
o Westminster Catechism – 1643-1649 - Question and Answer 4 – “God is spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His Being, Wisdom, Power, Holiness, Justice, Goodness and Truth.” Charles Hodge boasted that this was the best definition of God ever penned by man.
§ God is spirit – God is not material. God is spirit and those who worship Him must do so in spirit and in truth. Deut. 4:15-16 – Watch yourselves that you do not make an idol. Lex orandi, lex credendi – The law of our creed needs to define the law of our worship. The way we worship must correlate with God’s invisible spirit nature. This disallowed icons, etc. Calvin – “Man is a factory of idols.” The idols of our day are still here. Many of the idols of our day are human beings. We have a culture of celebrity.
· All the properties of God are indivisible. They cannot be separated from one another. The simplicity argument states that all attributes cohere in God. Many have tried to identify a suman bonum or highest attribute. However, it is probably best to leave them all as indivisible.
§ God is personal – The God who is a spirit is a “He”. Tillich defines God as the “abyssive silence” and the “ground of being”. This idea is destroyed by personal pronouns.
§ God is infinite – This is the idea of omnipresence. An infinite being can be in all places all of the time. Sometimes people get mixed up with ubiquity, divine manifestations and omnipresence. How can He be locally manifested and also omnipresent?
§ God is eternal – We are speaking from our human frame of reference. We are spatio-temporal and have never been not so. There is a heated debate behind this. Is God timeless or is God eternal? The difference is whether God transcends time or is subject to it.
· Per the Eternal position - If God is in time, then He is actually involved and real in our lives. If God is out of time, then He must not be able to relate. Time in the future does not yet exist, therefore, God does not know it. This does not compromise the greatness of God if He is not part of something that is not real.
· Per the Timeless position – They claim that God knows the future because He transcends time. If God is in time, He knows all past events. If God is in time, He knows the present moment.
· There is a third possibility. God is both in time and out of time. As God, He is subject to nothing. Nothing, even time, exists independent of God. We see God operating in both spheres. God is not within time, but time is within God.
§ God is immutable
God is a Being
God is infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his Being
Immutable – Unchanging.
Impassable – Not subject to passions or vulnerable to passions. Number 23:19 – “God is not a man that he should lie or change his mind”. Psalm 102:26 – “God remains the same”. Malachi 3:6 = “I do not change, therefore you are not consumed.” James 1:17 – “God does not change like shifting shadows”. ETC
The influence of Greek philosophy was important to developing these ideas about God. Aquinas came along and said that God is the greatest possible being (Anselm), but what implications did this have for God changing? If you change for the better, you were not God in the first place. If you changed for the worse… The attempt to say that God doesn’t change was an attempt to protect God. Unfortunately, it might fall into the realm that God is impersonal/apotheia. If God doesn’t change, then God might be indifferent to the human condition. Does this logically and necessarily follow? Many point to the Scriptures that talk about repenting and relenting. Can you have a relationship which does only involves a one way “interaction”? Perhaps the most stunning question surrounds Christ and the cross. If God is unemotional, etc how can Christ on the cross be a part of God? Are we in danger of making God so transcendent that we have no way of relating to Him?
Proposed ways that attempt to keep God as the greatest possible being:
God is immutable and impassable in His transcendent self, but he accommodates us by revealing Himself through anthropomorphisms, etc. God is transcdentally immutable and impassable, but he relates in such a way that this seems to be not the case.
The ontological Trinity is immutable and impassable. The economic Trinity is relational and encounters emotion and changes in relationships.
God is impassable in His character, attributes and person. God knows all things (spatio-temporal), but God actually does experience these with us. God knows from all time that we would be in this class.
Proposed attempts that do not hold that God is the greatest possible being
Process theology – They celebrate the change of God. God has a primordial fixed pole, but He also has a temporal pole that changes with us. They believe that immutability is an illegitimate Platonic concept. Alfred North Whitehead – ‘We want a God who is a fellow sufferer with us.’
Open Theism – There is some truth to the way that the Hegelian dialectic comes true. There is a dialectic going on here. The thesis is classical theism. The antithesis is process theology. The Evangelical Theological Society is debating this. Open Theism claims to be the synthesis. They want to affirm that God is immutable in His character, purpose and attributes. God does not know the future and must risk to accomplish His purposes. Our free will choices must be negotiated to achieve His purposes. All Open Theists are Arminians, though this group itself is experiencing division over the issue.
Open Discussion
D.A. Carson – The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God
Memorize the 5 categories of love (Tim mentioned them several times and had committed them to his own memory).
(i) The peculiar love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father;
(ii) God's providential love over all that he has made;
(iii) God's salvific stance toward his fallen world;
(iv) God's particular, effective, selecting love toward his elect;
(v) God's provisional or conditional love toward his own people.
All of the attributes of God must be kept in play at the same time. None can become ascendant over the others. If love ascends, the wrath of God totally disappears, etc.
God’s wrath is on the sinner, not just the sin! Carson says that we must equally and firmly say that God’s wrath and love are on the sinner.
God’s love and wrath are summarized in the cross.
