[this post is unpolished, in progress, needs further editing]
It's been a while since Kevin posted his piece, "The Apotheosis of God." He expresses partial agreement with what I wrote here. He also says some things that I didn't say, (but which I agree with) and that are more important that many of the things I did say. Principally: Our apotheosis is rooted in the apotheosis of Christ.
It is my habit to spend most of my time talking about our disagreements. I sometimes get the awkward feeling that this gives the misleading impression that we disagree more than we agree, or that I regard our disagreements as more important than our agreements. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Where we agree, Kevin said it so very well that I have nothing to add. Where we disagree, I'm eager to get into the argument so that we both may come closer to the full truth of the matter.
First, I'm going to accuse Kevin of a historical error. He writes, "Under the intellectualist school, God had been a cosmic manager who, himself, bowed to an even higher authority." The problem with this is that the intellectualists all held to a robust understanding of divine simplicity: according to them, God's justice was not some exterior standard, existing independently of God. Rather, God's justice is God. He himself is the justice by which he is just, He himself is the highest standard, the ultimate authority, and it is precisely because his character is such that he cannot fail to give creatures their due: God cannot send an innocent person to hell because he will not do so, because justice is his essence. On this question, I believe that, while Kevin rejects what he says the intellectualists thought, he agrees with what they actually thought: "justice is an integral part of who God is."
But there is a difference. Like the voluntarists, and unlike the intellectualists, Kevin sees divine justice (vis a vis creatures) as always
(?) in the context of covenant. In this he follows Meredith Kline. I'm not familiar with Kline's work first-hand, but Lee Irons sumarizes the Klinean way of approaching this issue here. One of the problems I have with this approach is that I believe it overemphasizes the influence of late medieval Aristotelian philosophical theology on Reformed soteriology. Irons writes,
It was left to the Reformation to take the fundamental covenantal insights put forward by the via moderna ["voluntarists" -cm] and develop them several steps further. Justification was now by the imputation of the righteousness of another -- a purely covenantal act with no ontological aspects. Original sin inherited from Adam was further developed and refined to become an immediate imputation of the guilt of Adam’s covenant breach instead of an Augustinian realist participation of the human race in Adam’s sin. The ontological elements in the medieval view of the sacraments were removed, so that they became signs and seals of the covenant rather than rites which ex opere operato infused the divine nature into the soul. All of these developments flow from the nominalistic development of the notion of pactum. And, therefore, to a certain extent we in the Reformed camp today are all the theological heirs of the via moderna.
I contend that the Reformers got their notion of pactum, or covenant, not primarily from the philosophical theology of the scholastics, but from the Bible. "Dixitque ei Deus ego sum et pactum meum tecum erisque pater multarum gentium." (Gen 17:4) If we must look for a more recent historical influence, the ad fontes movement in Rennaissance classical studies influenced the way the Reformers read the Bible, and the superior role of the Bible in Reformed theology came about as a reaction to the medieval hierarchy's claimed authority to define the apostolic tradition.
Why did the Reformers get rid of the ontological aspect of medieval theologies of justification? It wasn't primarily because of how the voluntarists dealt with a puzzle in philosophical theology. It was because the Reformers read Paul, and tried to understand what he meant in his original context. And they discovered that he used the term "justification" in a forensic sense, not an ontological sense. From there, they followed the parallel Romans 5 draws between the way we recieve righteousness from Christ, and the way we are made sinners in Adam. That too is understood in forensic terms. Similarly with the sacraments. I think it is misleading to say that the ontological elements were removed. Calvin and Luther at least allowed a high degree of what we would call covenantal realism in their understanding of the sacraments. The reason they are viewed as signs and seals of the covenant is that Scripture ties them to the covenant ("this is the new covenant in my blood"), and they don't work ex opera operato because they are signs and seals of faith -- (Romans) -- and tied in that way to justification.
One may wish to criticize the Reformers interpretation of Scripture. But it was from their interpretation of scripture that these doctrines primarily flowed, not from the speculative theology of the via moderna. That's not to say that voluntarism had no influence at all. It is simply to recognize that the things the Reformers themselves felt were most important provide the the best place to look for the sources and principles of their theology.
If I'm right about this, then I'm, probably also right to find the following argument-sketch unconvincing: "The dubious voluntaristic presuppositions of the Reformation had set the course for Protestantism in general. Either maintain technical orthodoxy by retreating into the anti-intellectual propositions of fundamentalism; or go soft on doctrines the contrary of which do not pose an immediate logical contradiction to salvation." To the extent that general Protestantism is afflicted with this dilemma (and it is), I believe that it derives from the influence of anabaptistic and Enlightenment sources, not from anything in the theology of the Reformers.
But to come nearer the heart of the issue: What I think Kevin needs most of all for his reasoning to go through is the idea that justice requires that God act a certain way toward man, simply because God had already created man in his own image, and God owes it to himself not to treat his own image in a way that would dishonor him. The concept of justice involved in this claim does not require us to have read Vos or Kline. It is available to those who would restrict the notion of covenant to a pact imposed after man was created. We do not have to say that justice is always in the context of covenant. All we have to do is say that God is his own standard of justice and owes it to himself to honor his own name.
Posted by mccartney at August 10, 2007 11:19 AM | TrackBack