Helm's Deep

February and forward

2012-01-23T15:01:00.001Z

In February there will be a post ‘Taking Jesus into my heart’ which aims to reflect about popular evangelical expressions and their relation to the theology and confession of the church. Later on in the year we shall be looking at a new book on B.B. Warfield and at a couple of issues arising from that. Then, for good measure, there will be a piece on Richard of St Victor’s book on the Trinity, recently translated into English for the first time, and by an Italian.

It Ain’t Necessarily So - Second Half

2011-12-31T12:12:00.003Z

So although Calvin does not employ the apparatus of alternative possible worlds, nor the ’foreknowledge of possibilities’ in the manner of Gomarus, it is clear that Calvin envisages the divine mind as having before it various alternative possible outcomes, no doubt myriads of them. There are alternative outcomes, which are consistent states of affairs, that God could have chosen, each of which is in accordance with his nature. No doubt there are also consistent states of affairs that God could not have chosen, possibilities that are abhorrent to his nature. And any outcome which God might have chosen, if he had chosen it, that outcome would be necessary only because he chose it, spontaneously and willingly. So there is a distinction to be drawn between God willing a certain outcomes according to his nature – wise, just, and so forth, and God willing a particular outcome necessarily. The latter does not follow from the former. The particular outcomes that he wills are thus hypothetical or conditionally necessary.

So the necessity that God should act in accordance with his nature is a different sort of necessity than that possessed by states of affairs brought about by the divine will. God is necessarily wise, for example. Wisdom is a discriminable feature of his essence, such that any individual lacking such wisdom could not be God. Such wisdom is not given to him, nor imposed on him. God’s wisdom is ontologically or necessarily possessed by him, in virtue of his aseity. By contrast God creates the heavens and the earth. These states of affairs are brought about, causally necessitated, by God’s wisdom. He wills them. They are product of God’s ontologically necessary wisdom, but they are not themselves metaphysically or ontologically necessary. ‘I shall not hesitate with Augustine that “the will of God is the necessity of things” and that what he has willed will of necessity come to pass as those things which he has foreseen will come to pass.’ They are logically contingent, and causally necessary in virtue of his will, his choice of this and not of some other alternative. But because God wills them omnipotently and immutably they have the necessity of the consequence.

So there is an ambiguity over the expression ‘Whatever God wills, he wills necessarily’. Necessarily whatever God wills is wise, just, good etc: the action-type is necessitated by God’s nature. But it does not follow that each action token is necessitated in the same way, or indeed that any action-token is necessitated in this way. Actions ad extra are causally necessitated by God’s will. Such outcomes, if willed by God, must be in accordance with his nature and caused by him. Jesus said that his Father could of these stones raise up children to Abraham, and were he to have done so he would have brought about this state of affairs, causally necessitated it, a state of affairs that would have been a consistent expression of his nature. That is, there is a distinction between

Necessarily, whatever God wills he wills wisely.

And

If God wills some particular wise act W, W is necessitated.

Whatever God wills ad extra has the necessity of the consequence.

In its first occurrence ‘necessarily’ denotes metaphysical or ontological necessity, while its second occurrence ‘necessitated’, it denotes causal necessity, and its third occurrence draws attention to the immutability of whatever he wills. That caused action is willed by God in accordance with his nature, but its choice is not logically entailed by that nature. But the choice having been made it cannot fail.

Calvin himself respects the distinction between the manner in which God possesses powers, such as wisdom, and the manner in which creatures possess such powers in a number of places, most notably in his Excursus ‘Coercion versus Necessity’ in The Bondage and Liberation of the Will. The question is whether necessity excludes responsibility, praise and blame. Not so, says Calvin. ‘We reply that God is good of necessity, but he obtains no less praise for his goodness because of the fact that he can only be good’.

We do not argue that people are good or evil of necessity because God is good of necessity, but show by means of this example that it is not contrary to reason for a quality which exists of necessity nevertheless to be deemed worthy of praise or censure.

Similarly with contingency. In discussing contingency in connection with divine providence in the Institutes Calvin reserves the term ‘contingent’ for causal contingency, never denying that, should God have willed it, there could have been an alternative causal outcome from that what in fact occurred. What he does deny is the presence of uncaused or self-caused events, Fortune, or (it seems) libertarianly-free human choices. He steers a mid-course between Epicurean Fortune and Stoic Fate. So the necessity that he ascribes to divine action is conditional or hypothetical necessity, contrasting ‘chance’ (in a metaphysical sense) with divine contingency.

Putting this in a rather different way we can suppose that for Calvin, all the particular actions that God wills he wills so as to necessitate the outcome, with a hypothetical necessity . It is because he chooses to bring about some action that it is necessarily comes to pass, his choice being infallible and all powerful and in accordance with his nature. ‘What necessarily happens is what God decrees, and is therefore not exactly or of itself necessary by nature’.

So, when Vos concludes that according to Calvin, ‘therefore, everything is necessary. Because the whole of reality is necessary, God knows and acts necessarily, and because God knows and acts necessarily, everything is necessary too’ these words are an inaccurate account of Calvin’s view due to the failure to disambiguate what is ontologically necessary, a feature of God’s essence, and what is causally necessary, a consequence of his will, and what is hypothetically necessary. Only in this way can Calvin’s attitude to God and necessity be made clear, and its relation to those that followed him in Reformed Orthodoxy be properly assessed.

A sidelong glance at Reformed Orthodox treatments of the divine will does not give the impression that they are engaging in a reconstruction of the doctrine of God, along Scotist or any other lines. For example, take Turretin’s short section on the divine will. (III.14) He makes the following points. A contrast needs to be drawn between absolute necessity and hypothetical necessity with respect to God. God wills himself necessarily, but other things freely, because created things (with respect to God) are contingent. God’s freedom consist in acts that are spontaneous and indifferent. Indifferent acts are those which God ‘so wills that he could have nilled them’. (An ita illa velit, ut potueruit ea nolle). There is no suggestion that such indifference is a case of synchronic contingency: no reference to ‘moments’ or structures in the divine mind, for example, or to time, but simply a reference to God’s sovereign choice. Instead, indifference is linked to divine aseity. God cannot do without his wisdom, which is thus absolutely necessary, but he can do without planet Earth, which is thus only hypothetically necessary. ‘Contingent’ is understood by reference to the divine essence. No created thing is necessary with respect to God but contingent ‘(as he could do without them) so he wills all things as that he could not will them.’ Such things are contingent with respect to his own being. Interestingly, Turretin’s emphasis is not on God’s freedom to create A or B, but to create A or to refrain from creating it, the ‘freedom of contradiction’. I suggest that all these points are consistent with Calvin’s doctrine of God. The only difference is stylistic, whereas Calvin’s views are scattered throughout his writings, Turretin gathers together his views in a formal and more self-aware mode.

There are of course difficulties in understanding divine freedom given the general position regarding divine simplicity that Calvin adopts. As Brian Leftow has shown, if one thinks of divine freedom principally in terms of the opportunity to choose between alternatives to it is impossible to fit this into Aquinas, not on because of his atemporalism but also because of the strength of his commitment to divine simplicity which seems to imply the necessity of the divine will, since for Aquinas the divine volition is an aspect of God’s simple nature. I think it is fair to say that wherever Calvin dwells upon these features of God – his simplicity and atemporality, the application of the difference between necessity and hypothetical necessity - his outlook is very similar to that of Aquinas, but he tends to cast a veil over the divine mind rather than attempt to work out a position in detail as Aquinas does. Rather than try to work out a version of divine simplicity that is more hospitable to divine freedom than Aquinas’s, (assuming Calvin was aware of the difficulties of Aquinas’s view), Calvin takes the approach that the Creator – creature distinction sets up not only an intellectual barrier to understanding, but should also remind us of the moral and spiritual difference between ourselves and God. Calvin insists that it is impertinent, a loss of creaturely reserve, to try to bridge the ontological gap between the Creator and his creatures.

It Ain't Necessarily So

2011-12-01T07:49:00.004Z

In ‘The Systematic Place of Reformed Scholasticism: Concerning the Reception of Calvin’s thought’, Antonie Vos has a discussion of Calvin’s attitude to necessity, and especially to God’s own relation to it. He claims that Calvin argued that necessity is consistent with the absence of coercion, and that God does what he does necessarily by nature. So for Calvin, God is not forced and cannot be compelled to be good. He is so ‘internally’ by virtue of his nature. Similarly by necessity God acts voluntarily; if he is good, he cannot want other than to be good. Vos goes on to argue that for Calvin the primary essential meaning of necessity is that it is impossible for God to be different and alleges that ‘a stronger meaning of “necessary“ is impossible'. Calvin expresses his own understanding of necessity, Vos thinks, in such passages as these taken from his The Bondage and Liberation of the Will.

But if his [God’s} goodness is necessary, why am I not permitted to deduce from this that he wills the good as necessary as he does it? Indeed since he continues unchanging in this respect, he is in a certain sense a necessity to himself, he is not coerced by another, nor however does he coerce himself, but of his own accord and voluntarily he tends to that which he does of necessity.

Does this mean that everything that occurs does so of absolute necessity? There is no need for speculation about the answer to this, for Calvin provides us with instances of such possibilities. For example, in the Institutes Calvin writes about the spread of the gospel, and about it being possible that God should will that the Gospel be promoted in one country and not in another, or in both countries together. In his treatment of the atonement, he claims that while in fact God has redeemed through the oblation of Christ, ‘God could have saved us by a word.’ So that ‘saving us by a word’ is a possibility, one that God does not make actual, but which, according to Calvin, he could have. Nonetheless the word that he could have saved us by is a state of affairs fully in accord with his good nature, and capable of being spontaneously and willingly promulgated.

Besides providing such particular examples as these, Calvin also makes the point in general terms, as a matter of theological principle.

The astrologers of today imitate the Stoics, for they hold that an absolute necessity for all things originates from the position of the stars. Let the Stoics have their fate; for us the free will of God disposes all things. Yet it seems absurd to remove contingency from the world….What necessarily happens is what God decrees, and is therefore is not of itself necessary by nature.

And what he concludes about natural necessity is true about the will of God

What God decrees is necessary by a hypothetical or conditional necessity. It is because he has freely decreed that p that p is necessary, not otherwise. Consistently with this Calvin goes on to indicate that he is prepared to accept the ‘received forms of speech’ that is, the distinction between absolute and consequential [or hypothetical] necessity. There are similar passages in the Institutes.

We ought undoubtedly to hold that whatever changes are discerned in the world are produced from the secret stirring of God’s hand. But what God has determined must necessarily so take place, even though it is neither unconditionally, nor of its own peculiar nature, necessary….Whence again we see that distinctions concerning relative and absolute necessity, likewise of consequent and consequence, were not recklessly invented in schools, when God subjected the fragility the bones of his Son which he had exempted from being broken, and thus restricted to the necessity of his own plan what could have happened naturally.

As all future events are uncertain to us, so we hold them in suspense, as if they might incline to one side or the other. Yet in our hearts it nonetheless remains fixed that nothing will take place that the Lord has not previously foreseen.

God foresees it by his will. And whatever God wills, He is not compelled to will. So it does not follow that the spread of the gospel in a particular way in a country, or in its denial to a country, is necessitated other than by what God in his wisdom wills. Such a will is a choice, and a choice necessarily implies selection from a set of alternatives. Nothing is forced upon God. So Calvin invites us to think of alternative things that God could will, that he might perfectly consistently have willed, each alternative being in accordance with his necessarily good nature. This is not to say that he provides us with a transparent reason for what he does, only that his will is the uncased cause of all things. Calvin makes this clear in a number of places, for example, in this passage of the Institutes:

For his [God’s] will is, and rightly ought to be, the cause of all things that are. For if it has any cause, something must precede it, to which it is, as it were, bound; this is unlawful to imagine. For God’s will is so much the highest rule of righteousness, that whatever he wills, by the very fact that he wills it, must be considered righteous. When, therefore, one asks why God has so done, we must reply: because he has willed it. But if you proceed further to ask why he so willed, you are asking for something greater and higher than God’s will, which cannot be found.

Calvin is clearly thinking of the will of God as an aspect of his simple essence; it is essentially righteous, Calvin says. And God wills whatever he wills for a reason.

But since the order, reason, end, and necessity of those things which happen for the most part lie hidden in God’s purpose, and are not apprehended by human opinion, those things, which it is certain take place by God’s will are in a sense fortuitous.

Presumably this reason for willing as he does must be as specific as the character of what he wills. If what he wills has feature F then God has a reason for what he wills having feature F. ‘For the will of God is ‘the highest rule of perfection, and even the law of all laws. But we deny that he is liable to render an account; we also deny that we are competent judges to pronounce judgment in this cause according to our own understanding’. God has the highest reason for willing as he does but he has no obligation to disclose that reason, and in any case were he to do so we would not be competent to pass judgment on it. So that God has a reason does not amount an explanation (in the epistemic sense) for us. God has a reason that is transparent to his own mind, but what that reason is may be shielded from us.

It is fundamental to Calvin’s view of divine action that God has a reason for what he wills. For his will is not capricious, a rootless volition, nor is God a tyrant, but his will is intrinsically and essentially related to his character. For each of his willings, therefore, we are to reckon that God has a reason. But Calvin never speculates over whether the reason God has is ‘the best of all possible reasons’ or an ‘overriding reason’ or somesuch.

One reason why we can refer to God’s will as ‘indifferent’ is because what God wills is not the outcome of some prior reason, nor of any prior cause, but is formed by God’s essence, and exercised sovereignly and independently, in accordance with God’s aseitas.

December – Two New Books

2011-11-20T15:16:00.014Z

The piece on Calvin on necessity, promised for the middle of November, has grown a little and so I have decided to divide it in two, the first episode to appear in Helm’s Deep in December, the second in January 2012.

To make up for this I here draw attention two previously-announced books which are now published. The first is William Young’s Reformed Thought: Selected Writings of Dr William Young, (Reformation Heritage). Bill is a nonagenarian, who at present has frail health. I learned much from him in earlier years and in fact the debt I owe to him is enormous. He taught for many years in the Philosophy Department of the University of Rhode island, and subsequently a minister in the Presbyterian Reformed Church at Greenwich, R.I. which he continues to attend. His Writings, some previously unpublished, include theological and philosophical articles, encyclopaedia entries, pieces from the magazine of his denomination, sermons and reviews. In one way and another they reveal the depth of his theological knowledge, and the acuteness of his judgment, and most of them indicate the strength of his adherence to the Reformed faith in its purest and most uncompromising expression, especially to the doctrinal and experimental writings of the seventeenth century. The book has taken a while getting to print, and has been helped along in its final stages by the energy and enthusiasm of Joel Beeke; so a special word of thanks to him.

The second title is James Dolezal’s God Without Parts, (Wipf & Stock, Pickwick Publications) the wording of which is taken from Chapter 2 of The Westminster Confession, where God is stated to be ‘without parts’, and so ‘simple’. In a way the entire book can be said to be an articulation and defence of that entire chapter, or at least of its ontological assumptions.

One wonders how much those who adhere to the Confession and extol its teachings are familiar and in sympathy with this material. It is surely part of the intellectual discipline of being a Christian that one inducts oneself into its theological grammar. James has an excellent grasp of both the historical and the contemporary dimensions of perfect being theology, and the work is to be warmly welcomed. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia.

Romans 2 & 3 - Again

2011-11-01T07:24:00.006Z

[Here the original text of the July post on Romans 2 & 3 is reproduced, along with the dissenting comments that Simon Gathercole has kindly provided. Read on!]

The view that the argument of Romans 2 1-16, and then 2 25-9 concerns Gentile Christians is not a novel one. But it is becoming a fairly dominant interpretation. One can find it, for example in Simon Gathercole's Where is Boasting? (Eerdmans, 2001) as well as in N.T. Wright's book on justification, and in other places. For example, Gathercole says that there is a considerable body of opinion that accepts that 2.25-9 talks of real Gentile Christians. (127)

The traditional view is that the argument is part of the overall Pauline argument that all people, Jew and Gentile, have sinned and come short of the glory of God, and so face divine judgment. They face this judgment equitably, since all have the knowledge of the law. To show this Paul claims that as the Jews have the Torah, so the Gentiles have a law; indeed, they have the law written on their hearts. And as Jews have the experience of keeping and transgressing the law, so the Gentiles have the experience of the law accusing them and excusing them. They do not escape judgment because they have no Torah, for they do have the law God in foro interno. (This harks back to 1.20.) So God’s judgment will be fair with respect to these two groups. He is no respecter of persons. The argument goes something like this:

The Judgment of God is based upon the law of God

The Law of God is equitably administered in the case of both Jew and Gentile

All are therefore bound by the terms of the law; obedience brings reward,

disobedience delivers punishment.

So Paul’s argument in these verses has to do with the standard of divine judgment and its fairness as between Jew and Gentile, and with nothing more. It states terms, it does not make predictions. It is a major error to suppose that Paul is here dealing with the method of justification by faith, or even hinting at it, or with the destiny with the justified at the final judgment. Sometimes upholders of the Gentile Christians view register their dissent from the idea that Paul’s language is hypothetical, that Paul is hypothesising the case of those who are vindicated at the judgment, even though no one ever will be aside from pardon and righteousness procured by Christ.

But why, on the traditional view, is Paul said to be hypothesising? Certainly holders of the traditional view must also hold that it was Paul’s position that ‘If any Gentile were to keep the law of God, then he would be justified’. But that’s not a hypothesis, in the sense of a possible or likely outcome, but a straight inference from the argument just given. Paul is simply stating the terms of justification or judgment by personal fulfillment of the law. Anyone, by those terms, if they keep the law will be justified. So it needs to be noted that

The keepers of the law will be rewarded

Is consistent with each of

There are none who are keepers of the law

Therefore, none will be rewarded

And

If A were to be a keeper of the law, then A would be rewarded

For these are the terms of the law viewed as the way to procure deliverance from judgment.

On the ‘Gentile Christian’ view, this short section and 2.25-9 is the beginning of Paul’s argument regarding the method of justification by faith through Christ, of course developed in extenso in the central chapters of Romans, the theme announced at the beginning of the letter, that the Cross is the power of salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. The difference between the views may be expressed as offering different answers to the question, When in Romans does Paul begin a positive argument for this? The traditional view is that the argument begins at Romans 3.21 ‘But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it – the righteousness of God through faith to all who believe’. The ‘Gentile Christian’ view is that the argument begins earlier, in the introduction of a theme which has ‘forward echoes’ as N.T. Wright puts it (166) to 2.26 and thus to the central argument of Romans. Referring to those who are considered in 1.16f. Dr Wright says ‘These people are Christians, on whose hearts the spirit has written the law, and whose secrets, when revealed (see .2.29 again) will display the previously hidden work of God.’ (166-7) Simon Gathercole, says that 'the gentiles who have the Law written on their hearts will be justified on the final day' (126), (though it has to be said that the place that this view of Romans 2 plays in his overall understanding of Romans 1-5 is rather different from that of Dr Wright).

So on the Gentile Christians view, while Paul argues that all are under the just judgment of God, the section 2.1-16 is not a direct contribution to that argument, but it is a section within it which takes us forward to the last judgment, and anticipates what Paul has to say later about those who face the judgment and are vindicated at it by their works. (158) (Or, in Gathercole’s case, since justification by works is impossible, this reference must therefore be to people who are under grace and not under the law – Gentile Christians).

But such a claim might simply be a begging of the question at issue. Whether or not Paul is anticipating matters later in the chapter (we shall look at this lower down) or anticipating his account of justification dealt with at length in the body of Romans, cannot simply be assumed. It is only a reasonable assumption if Paul has in mind Gentile Christians, which is precisely the issue we are considering.

To try to resolve that question, the question of whether or not Paul has Gentile Christians in view, more attention should be paid than has perhaps been paid to what Paul actually says about the context of his remarks, and then what he says about these alleged Gentile Christians referred to in Chapter 2.

What does Paul say?

2.1-16

He says that not the hearers of the law, but the doers of it, will be justified, and that the Gentiles on occasion do by nature the things contained in the law. Obviously this is a claim that is based upon empirical evidence. And there is plenty of evidence that they do. They respect property, honour contracts, marry, recognize the obligations that children have to parents, and so on. And on those occasions when they do such things, Paul says, it is in view of the fact that ‘the work of the law’ (the ‘matters’ of the law) are written in their hearts, in their consciences. In such situations, a person’s conscience either vindicates his practice, or accuses him of falling short, in anticipation of the day of judgment when the secrets of men and women are revealed by Judge Jesus. Incidentally, when Paul says that the secrets of men by Christ Jesus is ‘according to my gospel’, this does not mean that justification by works is a part of that gospel, but that the last judgment is. (As for example, in Acts 17.31).

That’s it. These are the data.

DATA

PH: "What does Paul say?

2.1-16

That’s it. These are the data. So how do those who take the Gentile Christian view get from these statements to that view? I think, by two pieces of interpretation."

SG: I question first the interpretation that "the Gentiles on occasion do by nature the things contained in the law." I don't think the interpretation "on occasion" can be borne by the Greek, because in my view ta tou nomou has to be in Greek idiom something rather more comprehensive than "things of the Law" or "parts of the Law": there is no sense of limitation in the phrase. Hence my view that the statement refers to those who are characterised by the same kind of "fulfilment of the Law" talked about in Rom. 8.4. Secondly, I've argued that the doing "by nature" is also a misreading: the word phusei goes more "naturally" in terms of Gk syntax with the preceding clause than the following: so the meaning of 2.14a is "For when the gentiles, who do not have the Law by birthright, do what is encompassed by the Law...". (The alternative, I would certainly concede, is not impossible.) I think one reason why the traditional reason becomes so well established is that when the Greek word order is followed by the Latin, it then becomes impossible for the "naturaliter" to go with the preceding habent, and it has to go in Latin with the following faciunt, because of Latin's different syntax from Greek.

I think too that one must reckon with the close connection between 2.15 and 2.16: the Greek clearly states that 2.15-16 are a single sentence. The NIV (which I love dearly!) is misleading to put a full stop and close parenthesis at the end of 2.15. The ESV (which I don't love nearly so dearly!) is correct here. It's not just "in anticipation of the last judgement" that the events (or at least some of them) of 2.15 take place. (Again, in the “interpretation” comes a point also in the data. I do think it is straightforwardly wrong to say that “their conflicting thoughts etc. does not refer to the procedures on the day of judgment, but provides a phenomenological description of ... here and now.” I think that Paul says just the opposite.)

I hope I haven't just been playing the classicist card here, but I don't think it's so easy to isolate the data and their interpretation: the whole issue is one of translation.

[A brief addendum on the point about the gentiles having “the Law” in the sense of an enlightened conscience: I do think Paul distinguishes quite sharply between Jews and gentiles on this point in Rom. 2.12]

So how do those who take the Gentile Christian view get from these statements to that view? I think, by two pieces of interpretation.

First they seem to take the expression ‘the work of the law written on their hearts’ to be a reference to an aspect of the regenerating work of the Spirit who according to Jeremiah's prophecy, for example, will write his law on the hearts of men and women. As we have noted, N.T. Wright says ‘on whose hearts the spirit has written the law’ and Simon Gathercole ‘the gentiles who have the Law written on their hearts will be justified on the final day’. (126) Clearly there is an equivalence being claimed here between the law being written on the heart and regeneration. And perhaps such a view also has in mind Paul’s language in Romans 7 about the regenerate person delighting in the law of God in the inner man, though of course this view cannot be taken if the language of Romans 7 is judged to that of the unregenerate person, as these days it frequently is. (Another issue!)

But in terms of Paul’s argument at this point this equivalence seems rather gratuitous. Regeneration, the work of the Spirit, and so forth – these factors are not in view. Paul is referring to the matter of the law, ‘not isolated parts but the Torah in its entirety’, including its writing on the Gentiles’ inner selves as a witness to the law expressed in Torah, in a parallel way to the Jews who have Torah as part of special revelation. The replacing of the heart of stone with the heart of flesh and all such associated matters do not arise here. Paul is quite simply maintaining the symmetry between the situation of the Gentile and the Jew, blocking the possible inference that since the Gentiles do not have the law they will escape the judgment of God.

And the phrase ‘their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them’ does not refer to the procedures on the day of judgment but provides a phenomenological description of how (for the Gentile) having the law written on the hearts operates here and now. The Gentiles’ consciences bear witness to the 'matters' of that law, t its various commands and prohibitions, and sometimes they observe that law and are excused, they experience an internal relief; and sometimes they disobey it and are rightfully self-accused.

What Paul is arguing is that the Gentiles are acquainted with the content of the law by possessing it ‘internally’, not through the divine revelation through Torah, but innately, or connaturally. He is not discussing inner motivation, but the equity of an arrangement according to which both Jew and Gentile are judged by the law - the Jew by written Torah, the Gentile by an inner representation of that law in the conscience. God can only be impartial in judgment of Jew and Gentile alike if to the Jewish Torah there corresponds another representation of the law made evident to Gentiles. At that judgment whether or not Jew and Gentile have obeyed that law from the heart will be made clear when God judges the secrets of men. And such judgment will reveal hypocrisy in the lives of all men, including those of the Jews, as Paul has already stated (2.2-5), and will state again (3.9f.)

Second, the Gentile Christians view takes the words ‘glory and honour and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek (2. 10) …..God judges the secrets of men by Jesus Christ’ (2.16) to imply the moral and spiritual vindication of a class of Gentiles. And those who interpret the words thus also believe that Paul asserts that the vindication of these Gentiles, of some Gentiles, is established when their lives are judged at the last by the measure of his gospel. For in an overall argument designed to establish that there is no one that does good, and that both Jews and Gentile are ‘under it’ we find Paul writing (in anticipation) of those who go good and are vindicated at the last. Surely (as Paul is going to argue) these are Gentile Christians. Otherwise the language does not fit.

But in fact Paul is saying nothing about actual outcomes, but stating how law operates, what its demands are and how these are satisfied. (To use the language of Deuteronomy 30, he is setting out the alternatives of ‘life and good, death and evil’ (Deut.30.15) This passage also contains its share of conditional sentences.)

That’s one step.

2.25-9

Further, it is claimed that what just might have been hypothetical language in 2. 6-11 or 2.25-6 simply cannot be in 2.27-9. (Gathercole 129) The hyothetical interpretation is not an essential part of the traditional view. Nevertheless, let us turn to 2.25-9.

Does what Paul goes on to say in 2.25-29 overthrow this older view, showing us that when the chapter is taken as a whole he has a class of Gentile Christians in view throughout? In my view, to go in this direction is to misunderstand the force of 2.27-9, which (as with the earlier passage about the Gentiles having the law) is not observational but definitional, answering the question, who is a true Jew? How is true Jewishness to be defined? Answer: in terms of the circumcision of the heart. (Deut 30.6) Such circumcision is sufficient for true Jewishness. If it is present, then physical circumcision can only be part of the bene esse of true Jewishness, but not essential to it, for he is a Jew who is one inwardly, whether physically circumcised or not.

From this definition some conditional sentences are implied. Paul mentions two.

(1) If a person who is uncircumcised and keeps the law he is in effect circumcised

And

(2) If a person is physically circumcised but breaks the law that physical circumcision is cancelled, made null and void.

And from the passage we are surely warranted in adding a third:

(3) If a person is uncircumcised but keeps the law (and so is circumcised in the heart) then such a person condemns anyone who is physically circumcised but a lawbreaker.

We might also add: Such circumcision of the heart is a fruit of the Spirit in who ever it occurs, and it is inward, known to God alone, who alone knows the secrets of the hearts of men, whose praise it receives.

N.T. Wright says that Paul may be teasing his readers at this point, ‘wooing a reader on from the challenge in 2.1 to a different way of approaching the whole moral task’. (166) There is a course a different method of justification about to be set forth than the method of works-righteousness. But Paul is not yet ready to make that move. One step at a time. At this point he sets out the scheme of salvation by works. He follows this by setting out what true circumcision is. These are definitions, reminders, stage settings: divine justice and equity, divine judgment, circumcision, true Jewishness. The implication of these definitions is that the Jews, because of their hypocrisy (2.17-24) are condemned, as were the Gentiles earlier. (1.18-2.11, 2.1-5)

Is this section all definitions, no observations? By no means, for Paul claims that the Gentiles by their hypocrisy (like the Jews later (2.17f.) are storing up ‘wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed’. (2.5)

That’s a second step.

Finally Paul reproduces the scriptural verdict on the moral state of all mankind, both Jew and Gentile. (3.9-20) ‘All, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin’. All are under the law, and all are therefore to be held accountable to God. (2.19)

That’s a third step. And then, having taken these steps, he takes the final step. (‘One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind’)

There is an explosion: ‘But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it – the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe’! (3.21-2)

Hurray!!!

A brief clarification of one point may help in this. I don’t think Paul is arguing for how gentiles might be saved in Rom. 2.14-15 or 25-29: cf. your point “When in Romans does Paul begin a positive argument for this?” I think that everyone agrees that “the argument [proper] begins at Rom. 3.21.” (This may be related to a point of disagreement, namely who the addressee is in Rom. 2.1-16: you think it is a gentile, where as I think it is the same person as in 2.17ff. It follows from my view that a Jew is the addressee in Romans 2 in toto that Paul is not explaining how a gentile could get saved. He is, as it were, “provoking the Jew to jealousy”. Perhaps this is not such a significant point of disagreement, because a Jew is addressed in Rom. 2.25-29 in any case.)

This does all touch upon your concern, Paul (Helm!), about perhaps the principal point overall about “A.D.” matters intruding into a “B.C.” argument (reflected in the title “One step at a time”). I don’t think one can dictate in advance how Paul is allowed to argue. He doesn’t necessarily argue in the manner of a logician. (Rom. 3.1-8 is often taken by commentators as a kind of excursus, for example, which is flagging up in a preliminary way matters which will be dealt with at greater length in Rom. 9-11.) While I do think that Rom. 1.18 – 3.20 and beyond is an argument (or a kind of legal case), this does not require that everything mentioned in those verses is in terms of its content “B.C.” Presumably you accept this both in principle and in fact, because of course Paul refers to his gospel in Rom. 2.16.

I think there are a couple of false antitheses that arise out of this. First, “Paul is saying nothing about actual outcomes, but stating how law operates...” Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what you mean by “actual outcomes”, but it seems to me that Rom. 2.12-16 is full of outcomes, many of which are also integrally about how law operates . The second antithesis is “not observational but definitional”. (I realise you may be using these in a technical sense I’m not aware of though.) You may well be right about “the force of 2.27-29”, but again I would say that in order to make an argument which gives an answer to the question “who is a true Jew?” Paul may well bring in a reference to Christians. (Indeed given passages like Phil. 3.3, how could he do otherwise?)

I wasn’t quite sure what your position was on Rom. 2.29, because it sounded an awful lot like you were conceding that he was a Christian. I do think this conclusion is unavoidable, given the business about circumcision of the heart by the Spirit. Again, this doesn’t need to mean that Paul is mounting an argument about what a Christian is, or how one can become one. But it does mean – as I think with 2.14-15 – that references to Christians are allowed to intrude when Paul is actually arguing about something else.

One point about the significance of this debate. You remark at the beginning that it’s a “major error” to take the line that Wright and I take. I take it that this means one of two things (though there may be other options I can’t think of): either that it’s not necessarily important in its implications but is just plain silly, or that taking this line has big implications. The first might be right, but are there major implications to this debate? I don’t ask the question because I think this whole discussion is trivial, because I think understanding God’s word correctly is always important. But of course some things are more important than others, and so perhaps another concern implicit in your observations, Paul, is that you put this in the “really rather important” category.

November

2011-10-24T10:25:00.004Z

In July in Helm's Deep , 'Romans 2 and 3: One Step at a Time, Dear Jesus' ventured some remarks on parts of Romans 2 and 3. I showed these to my friend Simon Gathercole, whose views I had ventured to criticize. He has very kindly responded to them. And I republish those parts of what I wrote that Simon has commented on, together with his comments, as the first post in November. I remain unconvinced on the main issue, whether those referred to in Chapter 2 are Gentile Christians. But let each one be persuaded in his own mind!

Thanks, Simon.

Later in the month I shall put out something more typical of the posts on Helm’s Deep, a short discussion of Calvin’s views on necessity and contingency as these affect the liberty of God’s action. These have been prompted by some views of Antonie Vos, recently published.

'The Books of the Platonists'

2011-10-15T11:01:00.001Z

Book VII of the Confessions recounts how Augustine was leant certain books of the platonists i.e. of the Neoplatonists (such as Plotinus), and the impact they had on his search for the way to think of the immutability of God.

What the books of the Platonists were to provide Augustine with, among other things, was a way of thinking about God that would free it of physical implications, implications about time and space, and so of the need for physical imagery, as well as providing him with an epistemological discipline, the ascent of the mind through which he could be certain of this God’s existence.

The books say that before all times and above all times your only-begotten Son immutably abides eternal with you, and that souls ‘receive their fullness (John 1.16) to be blessed, and that they are renewed to be wise by participation in wisdom abiding in them.

Eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity: you are my God.

I was certain that you are infinite without being infinitely diffused through finite space. I was sure that you truly are, and are always the same; that you never become other or different in any part or by any movement or position, whereas all other things derive from you, as is proved by the fact that they exist.

Note how immutability and eternity now come into focus.

There is another thread to this, for early on in his transition from his Manichean sympathies, Augustine seems to have become concerned with the Trinitarian godhead, and particularly the relation of the Father to the Son. One problem seems to be, how can the Father be the generator of the Son (as according to Nicene Christology he is), and not change? Platonism was of immediate help to him on that issue. He believed that the platonic thinking provided him with an answer compatible with divine immutability. But as far as the Incarnation itself is concerned, he more than once says rather dismissively that the books made no reference to that.

Here we shall focus on the first of these benefits, the acquisition of a way of reading the Church’s language about God’s threefoldness. This reading is better understood not as an hermeneutic for Scripture, but as a proposal for a translation, the development or appropriation of a cognitively equivalent language, which expressed ‘in different words, and in a variety of ways’, such dogmas as the only-begottenness of the Son by the Father, and the Johannine idea that wisdom comes by participation in the Son. But yet his reading of the books was not exactly cognitively equivalent to Scripture, for he relies on them to expand upon the biblical account. For one thing that they state is that ‘before all times and above all times your only begotten Son immutably abides in you’, which is certainly not to be found in the Prologue to John’s Gospel, though Augustine may have thought that it was implied by it, or at least consistent with it: he does not say.

But he is happy to take this filling out of the meaning of Scripture (as I call it) from the Platonists, citing the precedent of Moses spoiling the Egyptians, and (what is more apt) Paul’s appropriation of Aratus and Epimenides the Cretan in his address to the philosophers of Athens. So it seems that what he received from these books, at least, was a way of thinking about God as ‘before’ and ’above’ all times and places, an atemporality and non-spatiality shared, of course, by his only-begotten Son. This is the ‘immaterial truth’ that the books of the Platonists taught him.

So one significant gift of the platonists was the grammar of timeless eternity and immutability which Augustine readily applied to God, and which took him where Aristotle’s Categories could not go. Of course it was not the only gift of the platonists, but it is the one that chiefly matters to us here. There was also the matter of the ascent of the mind to God, the experience of which provided Augustine with direct ‘evidence’, or at least confirmation, of the divine eternality as being an intrinsic part of the conceptuality of the Creator-creature distinction. The light that he experienced was ‘utterly different from all our kinds of light’. It superiority lay in the fact that this light was the light of the Creator. And so ‘Eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity: you are my God’.

There is an interval of discussion in the Confessions between the accounts of two ‘ascents’, to be found in Confessions VII. x (16). ‘I entered and with my soul’s eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than any mind ….’ and then in Confessions VII xvi 22. ‘’So in the flash of a trembling glance it attained to that which is. At that moment I saw your ‘invisible nature understood through the things that are made (Rom.1:20) But I did not possess the strength to keep my vision fixed.’ These are either two accounts of the same thing, or of two different phases of experience. What Augustine says in that interval is crucial to our understanding. He tells us that in his Manichean phase his soul created for itself ‘a god pervading all places in infinite space’. This god he now cheerfully abandoned because another conceptuality was at hand. God is spirit, immutable and eternal, supremely good, giving all else its being which is also good. Augustine thought that as such God is incapable of pervading all places in infinite space like a gas, or luminosity, but that he is omnipresent in a deeper, more spiritual, non-sensous way. He had found an intellectually satisfactory way of appropriating the Church’s teaching about divine immutability.

So one of the fruits of his reading some books of the platonists is that Augustine is able to begin to develop a grammar of God about whom such questions as ‘Where is he?’ and ‘How long has he existed?’ and ‘How large is he?” and ‘What was he doing before the Creation?’ make no sense.

Yet Augustine is not totally carried away by his reading of the books. Just as Aristotle’s Categories took him so far, to the level of the creaturely, and no further, so the books of the platonists also took him so far, to the Father and his only-begotten Son, and no further.

For he is clear that there is no equivalent translation of the Incarnation of the Son or of his offering upon the Cross into platonic conceptuality. Nevertheless, the books most certainly given him a grammar of God, or the beginnings of one, of an immutable God who Is ‘before all times and above all times’, a true Creator. ‘I was sure that you truly are, and are always the same; that you never become other or different in any part of by any movement or position, whereas all other things derive from you, as if provided by the fact that they exist’. Parts, movement, position – these are Aristotelian categories. And the immutability of the Word of God means that he is not merely ‘a man of excellent wisdom’, nor that he is incarnate in a mere body, but that since change is ascribed to the incarnate Son he must have a human nature, body and soul.

'God Without Parts'

2011-10-01T06:58:00.002Z

GOD WITHOUT PARTS:

SIMPLICITY AND THE METAPHYSICS OF DIVINE ABSOLUTENESS

James E Dolezal

FOREWORD

Dr James Dolezal’s treatment of divine simplicity, which provides a defence of this doctrine in perhaps its strongest form, is a first–rate piece of work. He shows himself to have a grasp not only of the primary and secondary intellectual sources, but also of the arguments of contemporary critics as well as of defenders of the doctrine, especially those in analytic-style philosophical theology, ‘analytic theology’ as it is coming to be called. He does not simply dust off the cobwebs of old ideas, and rehearse antiquated positions. Not content with mere exposition, able as this is, the author likes to argue, presenting robust defences of divine simplicity against some of its eminent detractors and modifiers – for example, Alvin Plantinga, Thomas Morris, and Eleonore Stump. He takes these on, utilizing some current arguments, of Brian Leftow, William Mann and others, but also offering arguments of his own. The result is the best at-length philosophical treatment of divine simplicity that I know.

God’s simplicity is a central element in the ‘grammar’ of classical Christian theism. The data regarding the essence and nature of God, as revealed in Scripture, have by and large an occasional and unsystematic character to them. But because Scripture, as God’s word, is self-consistent, the varied data must be self-consistent, and when properly appreciated, must also be seen to be. Or at the very least, it may be recognized that alleged inconsistency cannot be proven. The classical conceptual shape of Christian theism offers a template in terms of which that consistency may be appreciated. For it provides rules, drawn from the varied data of Scripture, in terms of which the varied language of Scripture about God, not only in his unity but also in his Trinitarian glory and in his actions in the economy of redemption, can be learned and used without falling into inconsistency or serious error. It is not so much an explanatory as a grammatical template.

So in thinking about divine simplicity as an account of divine unity we are not to think of it primarily as a description of that unity, much less as an explanation of it, but as offering rules for appreciating and employing the character of divine unity. This is a central part of the fuller grammar of Christian trinitarianism. It aims to bring together a way of thinking and speaking about divine unity, that God is one, and that the Lord our God is one Lord, that does justice to the manifold witness of Scripture to that unity, and to ways of handling its apparent references to divine complexity and disunity, in a way that considering each isolated datum in turn could never do. Fundamental to that grammar is a conviction about God, made evident throughout the Scriptures, that he is the creator of space and time and all that it contains, existing at a point beyond space and time and not therefore subject to it. God is not spread out in space, or in time, a creature among fellow-creatures. How then are we to think and speak of him?

Part of the answer to that question is that we are to think of God partly in negative terms, as we have just been doing: not in space, not in time. An account of divine unity must be consistent with such timelessness and spacelessness. But there is more. For in being the Creator, and not a creature, or creaturely, God does not depend for his existence on operations or forces working upon him. He is not fashioned, or the product of parts forming themselves into a unity in an arbitrary fashion. He is necessary, self-existing. This means, for example, that God is not composed of elements that are more ultimate, in a logical or metaphysical sense, than he himself is.

It is by attention to such considerations that the doctrine of simplicity has been developed, in order to safeguard that divine sovereignty and transcendence to which Scripture richly testifies. Divine simplicity is not the doctrine that God has no features, an infinite tabula rasa. Nevertheless he has no parts and so is not divisible.

But what of the Trinity? Christian theologians have routinely stated that the threefoldness of the Trinity, that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each person being wholly divine, refers to distinctions in the godhead, not to divisions in it. All divisions involve distinctions, but not vice versa. This distinction between distinctions and divisions has been in service in Trinitarian thinking a long time; it can be found, for example, in Tertullian.

To suppose that the distinction between the Father and the Son (for example) is a division between them is to suppose that the terms ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ denote different parts in God each of which is separable from the other. A triune Godhead that consists of a divisible threeness would thus be made up of three parts – Father, Son and Spirit – who together comprise it. The obvious problem with such a proposal is that it violates the biblical affirmation that God is one, which the doctrine of divine simplicity articulates. Another consequence of supposing a division between the persons is that Father, Son and Spirit is that each would each be part of God, and so not the whole God, and so not wholly divine.

God the Creator is one God, and not creaturely. Because God is timeless he is changeless, immutable. Not simply in the sense that he has chosen to be so, or covenanted this, proposals which offer a rather unstable account of God’s changelessness, and are probably incoherent. He is metaphysically changeless. Such changelessness in turn entails divine impassibility, an idea frequently misunderstood and derided. But impassibility is not to be confused, as it often is, with impassivity or with dispassion. Although it may seem paradoxical, the stress on impassibility is meant to safeguard the fullness of God’s character. He is eternally impassioned, unwaveringly good, not moody or fitful as he is buffeted by the changes of his life, some of them, perhaps, unexpected changes.

Another way of entering this territory, a way which is quite consistent with what we have been thinking about, is via the idea of God as the most perfect being. God is a being than which no greater can be conceived. This is not a piece of metaphysical speculation, but is clearly stated or implied in Scripture, as in Hebrews 6 13-14 which refers to God as one besides which there is none greater. For had there been a greater than God then in establishing his covenant God would have sworn by that greater. But he swears by himself and so establishes a covenant which is immutable and which for that reason is utterly trustworthy.

Of course there are other biblical data to support the wonderful verses of Hebrews in their assertion about God’s unsurpassable greatness. David refers to the greatness of God, and the fact that there is no God besides him (2 Sam. 7 22); Nehemiah refers to the great, the mighty God, (Neh. 9.32, also Jer.32.18, Titus 2.13)). Besides, the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods (Ps. 95.3); he is to be feared above all gods (Ps. 96.4. 77.13); he is greater than all gods (Ex.18.11) ; his greatness is unsearchable ( Ps. 145.3). It is hardly plausible to suppose that God’s kingship over other gods is a mere contingent matter of fact. Paul’s ‘golden chain’ (Rom. 8. 31-9) is mere rhetoric if is not supported by a view of God who necessarily transcends his creation. And so on.

It is not that these biblical writers suppose that there could be a greater than the God of Israel, and that one day there might be. The God who is the creator of the heavens and the earth is one than which no greater can be conceived. How could God be worshipful if he could have been greater than in fact he is? If there is a being greater than God then why is that being not God instead? So all the grammatical features of the doctrine of God that we have mentioned express metaphysically necessary truths.

James Dolezal’s favored way of approaching divine simplicity is through the distinction between act and potency. He offers a close and careful reading of Thomas Aquinas. A subject’s potency or potentiality expresses its liability to change and develop, or to be changed. So it is a sign of compositeness. Every creature in space and time has such potency. By contrast, a simple God does not develop by acting, much less by being acted upon. He does not develop at all. His actions express his perfection, they do not contribute to its attainment. I think that it is fair to say that it is in this area, that of God’s freely expressing his perfection in creation and in human redemption, that the sense of ineffability and incomprehension of the doctrine of God’s absoluteness is at its highest.

Noting the author’s close adherence to Thomas’s approach to divine simplicity, some may think that this book is a work of ‘Catholic’ theology, meaning by this an exclusively Roman Catholic theology. But this judgment would be seriously mistaken. Dr Dolezal is at pains to show that adherence to the doctrine, and an appreciation of both its strengths and of its profundities, is the property of the entire ‘catholic’ church. He draws the reader’s attention to Stephen Charnock, John Owen and other Reformed and Puritan theologians, to Reformed confessional statements, as well as to their present-day expositors, notably Richard Muller. He flags up the thought of a notable Dutch Reformed theologian who straddled the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Herman Bavinck. The work deliberately reinforces the view that divine simplicity is the property of truly ‘catholic’ Christian theology.

It might be objected that if an argument for some fundamental feature of God’s existence, such as divine simplicity, concludes in emphasizing the ineffability and incomprehensibility of the life of the Creator, we ought to suspect its premises. Dr Dolezal touches on such matters in his fascinating dialogue with a contemporary evangelical philosophical theologian, Jay Richards, over the conflict, or apparent conflict, between divine simplicity and divine freedom to create worlds other than our world, or to refrain from creating any world at all. This is, in effect, a debate about a concept of God who is first and foremost anthropomorphic and anthropopathic, and on the other hand of a God who creates and upholds everything that exists in space and time, as their transcendent Creator and Lord, while working immanently within the creation.

It is God’s transcendent will, the expression of his simple nature, that generates in the most acute way the in creatures’ apprehension the sense of incomprehensibility and ineffability. This is hardly surprising. Indeed, it would be surprising if such bafflement were not felt. Yet its presence hardly amounts to a reason for denying or attenuating God’s absoluteness, central to which is his simplicity.

Such debates will be taken further, and without doubt Dr Dolezal’s work deserves to be an impressive and powerful stimulus to them.

Paul Helm

Teaching Fellow, Regent College, Vancouver

October

2011-09-25T18:38:00.007Z

Plotinus

God Without Parts: Simplicity and the Metaphysics of Divine Absoluteness is the title of James Dolezal’s new book, an excellent exposition and defence of the doctrine of divine simplicity. lt is to be published shortly by Wipf and Stock, in their Pickwlck Publications Series. James has kindly asked me to write a Foreword to the book, and a draft of this will appear on Helm‘s Deep in October. I hope that it will serve to draw attention to the book and to underline its importance. Also posted is the final instalment in the short series on Augustine’s discussion and use of pagan philosophy in the Confessions. It concerns Augustine's discovery of 'the books of the Platonists'

Colin Gunton’s Point

2011-09-17T07:20:00.005Z

In his article, ‘Augustine, The Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West’, which first appeared in the Scottish Journal of Theology for 1990 and then formed part of his The Problem of Trinitarian Theology (T & T Clark, 1991), the late Colin Gunton, whose friend and colleague at King’s College I was for several years, made a number of serious charges against Augustine. Since his death, that article, and Colin’s approach, have been subject to a certain amount of criticism. Here I wish to defend my old friend on one point, not on all his criticisms of Augustine, for some of them seem extravagant and rather hurried. But in this short piece I concentrate on the one charge, that in view of Augustine’s understanding of the persons of the Trinity as purely relational he imperils the personhood of the persons, and tilts towards modalism. But I believe that the point that Colin raised here is not so much an argument against Augustine as a general problem with Trinitarianism.

Preliminary

The business of contrasting Western with Eastern views of the Trinity, which Colin was very concerned about, has become quite an industry. But possibly an industry that has been financed with junk bonds? For surely the significance of this contrast, and with it the alleged superiority of the Eastern way of construing the Trinity, has been overdone. Suppose a triangle. How are we to understand it? Maybe one way, the ‘Western’ way, is to understand it as one plane-sided figure with three internal angles. Or maybe, the ‘Eastern’ work, as a three-angled or three-sided plane figure. It does not seem to matter much.

Nor does the charge that Augustine was a modalist in view of the three-personhood of the Godhead seem plausible.

The Point

But Colin did have a valid point in one of his charges, though I don’t think that it’s an argument in favour of ‘the East’, but in favour of social trinitarianism. But then ‘the East’ may be a form of social trinitarianism, if indeed there is ‘an East’ that is distinct from ‘a West’.

The point is as follows. First, in Colin’s words, and then in mine.

Colin’s Words

On the ‘Eastern’ view:

…concepts are developed, that is to say, by means of which the Christian God can be thought of as triune without loss to his unity. The second is that, as this is done, a new ontology is developed: for God to be is to be in communion….

When we look at Augustine’s treatment of the topic, it becomes evident that he has scarcely at all understood the central point….for despite his avowed reason for the use of the term, he has prepared the way for the later, and fateful, definition of the person as a relation….But where do the three persons fit? Uncomfortably, it must be confessed. Augustine uses the concept of relation to designate that which can be predicated of God in the plural but which is yet not accidental…..

In all this, Augustine is taking a clear step back from the teaching of the Cappadocian Fathers. For them, the three persons are what they are in their relations, and therefore the relations qualify them ontologically, in terms of what they are. Because Augustine continues to use relation as a logical rather than an ontological predicate, he is precluded from being able to make claims about the being of the particular persons, who, because they lack distinguishable identity tend to disappear into the all embracing oneness of God.

It is for reasons such as this that there is in Augustine, and in most Western theology after him, a tendency towards modalism. (39-42, Colin’s italics).

My words

What Colin is alleging here is that in Augustine’s account of the relations of the three persons in the one God, ‘relation’ is being used in a purely logical, not an ontological sense. And what he means by that, it appears, is that such usage robs the three persons of their distinctive ontological characters. For what it is that these relations are relations of, or between?

Let us separate the question of whether Colin was right to impute this view to Augustine from the view itself.

We could put the issue in the form of a dilemma: either the three persons are persons in their own right, or they are not. If they are persons in their own right, and each is fully divine, what is the status of the ‘personal distinctiveness’ that each is, or has? Is the fatherhood of the Father divine, the sonship of the Son divine, the spirituality of the Spirit divine? If so, then in turn, Father, Son and Spirit possess a divinity (or a feature or aspect of divinity) lacked by the other two. If they are not persons in their own right but (as Colin says Augustine is committed to) their personhood is merely relational, then that personhood looks altogether insubstantial; at best, modal.

From this dilemma it is easy to see that what Colin called the Cappadocian approach is no more satisfactory than the alleged ‘Western’ view. For in that view, according to him, God’s being is to be in communion, and the problem then becomes the apparent insubstantiality of the one God whom the three persons are persons of. For God’s oneness then consists only in the relatedness of the three persons. God is the point of intersection of the threeness. What sort of a substantial oneness is that?

(Incidentally, for those interested, Colin is not the only one who thinks that Augustine is committed to this insubstantial view of personhood. See A.C.Lloyd, ‘On Augustine’s Concept of a Person’ in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. R.A. Markus (Doubleday Anchor, 1972))

This crux is not an issue for Augustine, or for the Cappadocians, but for the Trinity as such. This can be further illustrated from contemporary literature by something that Lewis Ayres says in his exposition of Augustine on the Trinity in Nicaea and its Legacy. (Oxford University Press, 2004) Ayres is to be applauded for expounding Trinitarianism in grammatical terms, as providing ‘appropriate rules’ (374) for the development of habits of mind, and also for being skeptical about the fashion of contrasting ‘East’ with ‘West’, usually to the disadvantage of the ‘West’. He insists that on Augustine’s view the persons are not just relations (378) and recognizes that on that view (and on the traditional view more generally, no doubt) we cannot comprehend the divine essence (385).

Maybe he should have left the matter there, applauding Augustine’s view as a way of avoiding self-contradiction (377) but he ventures further. Rather ominously he refers to ‘explanatory resources’ (371) and of deploying the principles, the irreducibility of the persons and the oneness of God, to ‘show how’ God can be three and one. In a further attempt to elucidate Augustine he goes on to claim that the Son has or is an essence (379), a truly simple essence, and then, and as a consequence ‘they are of one essence’. Notice the ‘of’ there. Is that warranted.? What is it to be ‘of one essence’? Or ‘of one being and substance’ (381) Is it to be one essence, one being, one substance? Or is it to be ‘generated by’ an essence? The Son has a truly simple essence and so that essence is one with the Father’s simple essence, and ‘more than we can grasp’ (379), to put it mildly.

Thus, in using the grammar of simplicity to articulate a concept of Father, Son and Spirit as each God, and as the one God, we find that the more we grasp the full reality of each person, the full depth of the being that they have from the Father, the more we are also forced to recognize the unity of their being. (379-80)

For if the essence of the Son is the essence of the Father, then there is one essence. But then (once again) what is it to be the person of the Father as distinct from being the person of the Son? Does the Son have a ‘standing’ that the Father does not share? In view of the simplicity of the godhead, hardly. Ayres claims that the Father generates the Son’s essence (378) and then, a page later, maintains that the Son’s essence is the one essence that is also the Father’s. (379) Granted that God’s essence is independent and self-sustaining, it is not a part of such aseity that God is self-creating, surely an incoherent notion if ever there was one.

This way of further elucidating the Trinity begins to court formal self-contradiction: The Father’s simple essence is both uncreated and the begetter of the Son’s simple essence with which it must be identical since according to the grammar there is but one simple essence which is God.

Why not resist the itch and stop? Why not merely ‘There is one God, three divine persons distinct from each other?’ Why not rest with the ancient ‘distinct but not divided’?

Anyhow, we can see that Colin has raised a good point, but one not about Augustine per se (as he claimed, nor about ‘East versus West ‘), but about the pellucidity of the entire Trinitarian ‘grammar’ if it is pressed into service to provide us with an explanation or two.

Augustine and The Categories

2011-09-06T08:49:00.017Z

Augustine’s deliverance from Manicheism brought its own intellectual problems, which focussed on how to understand the Church’s teaching regarding divine immutability. He comments that he had yet not come to see that the hinge of the matter of God’s immutability lies in his being the Creator. It is during this earlier phase that he also has an encounter with a notable philosophical work, Aristotle’s Categories.

In a way that is rather uncharacteristic of him, he notes that though Aristotle’s book was reputed to be difficult, he easily read it with understanding and without the help of anyone else.

The book seemed to me an extremely clear statement about substances, such as man, and what are in them, such as a man’s shape, what is his quality of stature, how many feet, and his relatedness, for example, whose brother he is, or where he is placed, or when he was born, or whether he is standing or sitting, or is wearing shoes or armour, or whether he is active or passive, and the innumerable things which are classified by these nine genera of which I have given some instances, or by the genus of substance itself.

The books seem to have established in his mind the presumption that the ten Aristotelian categories had universal application, embracing God himself within its categorization. And so, later on, and consistently with Aristotle’s outlook, and still manifesting the remnants of Manichean anthropomorphism, he tried to conceive God, ‘wonderfully simple and immutable’, (as Ambrose and his circle taught) as if he was a substance with temporal and even spatial location and having distinct properties, like one of Aristotle’s substances. It must be noted that in reference to the simplicity and immutability of God, Augustine was willing to appropriate the language of the Christian faith of his Christian acquaintances in Milan, appropriating their words, but still casting around for a way to understand them.

He tells us that he then thought that the beauty and greatness of God were

In you as if in a subject, as in the case of a physical body, whereas you yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty. By contrast a body is not great and beautiful by being body; if it were less great or less beautiful it would nevertheless still be body. My conception of you was a lie, not truth, the figments of my misery, not the permanent solidity of your supreme bliss.

That is a remark made by Augustine with the benefit of hindsight, as is this. ‘I thought that you, Lord God and Truth, were like a luminous body of immense size, and myself a bit of that body. What extraordinary perversity. But that was how I was…’ Despite having rejected Manicheism he had as yet no alternative but to continue to think in terms of Aristotle’s Categories, and so to claim that God is a subject with a nature known to us through the appraisal of his various attributes or properties, just as, according to Aristotle, we understand how it is with plants and artifacts such as tables and chairs. And he continued to think like this for some time. For at the beginning of Book VII, despite some development, we find him still in essentially the same frame of mind.

Although you were not in the shape of the human body, I nevertheless felt forced to imagine something physical occupying space diffused either in the world or even through infinite space outside the world. Admittedly I thought of this as incorruptible and inviolable and unchangeable, which I set above what is corruptible, violable and changeable. But I thought that anything from which space was abstracted was non-existent, indeed absolutely nothing, not even a vacuum, as when a body is removed from a place, and the space remains evacuated of anything physical, whether earthly, watery, airy or heavenly, but is an empty space – like a mathematical concept of space without content.

We note here once again his firm adherence to the language of the Church, the language of incorruptibility, inviolability and unchangeability. If the frequency with which he used certain terms is anything to go by, it is the immutability of God, his unchangeability, that particularly impressed him about the God of the Church. But thinking of such immensity and immutability in terms of the Aristotelian categories, (which, of course, at least as Augustine understood them, when applied to God, overlapped with his old Manichean ideas), had ridiculous and therefore unacceptable metaphysical consequences, for example the consequence that an elephant’s body would contain more of the divine being than a sparrow’s. A little later he affirms that that despite these oscillations in his mind God did not allow him to be carried away in his thinking from the faith which he held, that God exists as an immutable substance and cares for humanity and judges it and has provided in Scripture a way of salvation.

September

2011-09-05T10:01:00.004Z

Colin Gunton

I must apologise for the hiatus in Helm’s Deep. This has been due to an unexpected change in circumstances. In September I hope to post the second of the series on Augustine’s use of pagan authors in the Confessions, followed by a piece on Colin Gunton’s trinitarianism, ‘Colin’s Point’.

Christian Hedonism: Further Thoughts

2011-08-02T05:10:00.011Z

John Piper: The Pleasures of God

Hedonism of whatever kind implies a calculus. In the case of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, the calculus is in terms of utility or satisfaction or pleasure, a ‘felicific calculus’ as his disciple Jeremy Bentham called it. Bentham worked out this idea in some detail. So we may ask, how does one calculate Christian hedonism? What are the units of satisfaction? How do we decide when we have enjoyed fewer or more of these? Are there different qualities of such units, some ‘higher’ than others? It is easy to see that such questions are not easy to answer. But if we cannot answer them satisfactorily, Christian hedonism falls at the first fence, along with its non-Christian cousins.

What pleasure is

Naturally enough, hedonism of whatever kind brings pleasure or satisfaction to the front of a person’s mind. Pleasurable states of affairs are identified, and those states of affairs which are judged to produce the greatest amounts of satisfaction are sought, however these amounts are to be calculated. A person may be absorbed in his hobby, restoring a classic Mini to its original state. He seeks out parts on eBay and in boot sales; he trades them with other collectors, he works at the car, at its electrics, its various fittings, and so on. Is that person getting pleasure out of what he is doing? Of course he is. But the pleasure is not the first thing; the first thing is restoring the car, and the pleasure piggy-backs on the activities that this involves, the skills that have to be learned, the problems that have to be solved, the sight of the restored car taking shape. The pleasure is not some separately identifiable state, but a bye-product of the activity. And of course as there are many different kinds of activities, there are many different kinds of pleasure.

This reminds us that a pleasure, in the hedonists sense, is not a sensation, like that provided by a painful toe, or a cool drink. There is an ‘aboutness’ to the experience of hedonistic pleasure. It is a reaction to beliefs and desires that one has, activities that one engages in to secure certain ends, or the unsought things that happen to a person, and so on. If I weep because I’m peeling the onions, I do not weep about the onions or about my eyes. But if the optician tells me that I shall never see again, then I might weep about my eyes. But the peeler’s crying over the onions is not like that; there is no aboutness about it, but a purely physical reaction. The joy that came to Jesus’s disciples from knowing that their names were written in heaven is a different kind of joy from that of having won £161 million on the Lottery, or of having become a parent, and so on and on.

The basic problem here is distraction. For the consistent and serious-minded hedonist no activity is ever performed for its own sake but for its yield of happiness or satisfaction. In an extreme form, as every beginning student of Mill’s utilitarianism quickly realizes, the problem is that in an effort to be a consistent hedonist such hedonism becomes impractical. A calculation has to be performed before any action is done. This requires a quick calculation to see whether we are more satisfied in doing A than B, and whether A rather than B is more likely to be achieved, In the case of Christian hedonism, this is a consequence of the belief that God’s glory is to be sought not because it is a good in itself, the supreme good, but because of what, according to the mantra, its precondition is, the greatest possible degree of satisfaction in God.

It may be argued that the famous answer to the question about the chief end of man that is found in the Westminster Shorter Catechism supports Christian hedonism in its reference to enjoying God forever. Certainly the hedonic element is present. But the structure of the answer is rather different from that of Christian hedonism. The chief end of man does not refer to the gain in satisfaction that each of our actions may provide as we perform them, but it has a distinctive eschatological strand to it. The chief end of man (here and now) is to glorify God and (at the last, when experiencing the vision of God) to enjoy him for ever. Here and now human life is to be dominated by glorifying God by what we think and do and feel, and endure, whatever the pain. Then, the Christian’s pilgrimage over, the faithful Christian will enjoy God when he shall be like him, seeing him as he is.

It seems that Christian hedonism takes these two elements, the present Christian life and the life to come, and collapses them together. It proposes to integrate the enjoyment of God into our present life as a vital ingredient in every Christian action, and the motive for each of them. But the Catechism simply refers to glorifying God, leaving open the degree of self-awareness and calculation that ought to be present in a Christian’s action.

And of course such glorifying of God is the ‘chief end’, not the only end. It provides a place not only subordinating what we do to God’s glory, but also for enjoyment, including the enjoyment of creaturely gifts for their own sake. The Catechism makes room for the hobby of growing insectivorous plants, or of collecting old opera programmes. This is a vital feature of Christian morality, according to which there are actions that are commanded, and actions that are forbidden, and ‘indifferent’ actions, neither commanded or forbidden. ‘Indifferent’ actions provide the space that Christian liberty occupies, and it ought to be jealously guarded now, as at the Reformation. Systems of Christian morality ought not to add to the commandments or prohibitions of God. The trouble with hedonisms, Christian and other, if they're taken seriously, is that they confine us to a moral or spiritual treadmill from which is not easy to escape.

May we not find satisfaction in God in such innocencies as opera programme collecting? May he not be glorified in them? May God not be glorified for the provision of such innocent pleasures? A Christian hedonism may perhaps reply ‘Yes’. But if so then the link between satisfaction in God and glorifying him becomes more and more tenuous, and the claim runs the risk of being true by definition. Either the actions that express Christian liberty are ways of finding satisfaction in God, or they are not. If they are not, then Christian hedonism is at once refuted. If they are, then the idea of it is stretched, perhaps stretched to the breaking point of unreality, for then almost any action might count as one in which a person finds satisfaction in God.

Using and enjoying

What we are discussing, using and enjoying, is an aspect of the distinction that caused Augustine so much trouble. (For some details, and a comparison of Augustine and Calvin at this point, See Paul Helm, Calvin at the Centre, 29-31). One problem that exercised Augustine was: may created things be enjoyed for their own sake? May I have friends? Or may God alone be enjoyed for his own sake, and are all other creaturely enjoyments to be thought of only as obstacles to the enjoyment of God for himself?

The hedonist of whatever stripe has some difficulty with the idea that anything at all may be enjoyed for its own sake, just as he has difficulty in thinking that there are actions that ought to be performed simply because they are right, or avoided only because they are wrong.

Self-examination

All this affects the idea of self-examination. There is no denying that self-examination was central to the piety and personal religion of Puritanism. They took seriously the New Testament teaching that a person should examine himself (2 Cor. 13:5), take heed (1 Cor. 10:12), judge himself (1 Cor. 11:31), abase himself before God (Luke 18:14), and be watchful (Matt. 25:13), as well as the self-knowledge depicted in its various phases in the Psalms. This is an integral part of Reformed religion, and cannot airily be dismissed as ‘pietism’. (If you doubt this, glance at Q.171 of the Larger Catechism.) And most certainly this present critique of Christian hedonism is not undertaken in order to support an outlook which is all head and no heart.

Yet self-examination must be undertaken bearing in mind our capacity for self-deception, and so on the basis of as much hard evidence as possible. If we are to examine ourselves to see whether or not we are in the faith, this first and foremost concerns what we believe, the faith we confess. In connection with the Supper, Paul stresses the need for ‘discerning’ the Lord’s body, and for judging, on which he places a repeated emphasis. These activities involve the discipline of the mind, and may result in a ‘worthy’ eating, valuing the Supper at its true worth. It is such matters as these, not how much satisfaction in God am I enjoying, that are the principal activities of self-examination. Right belief, and so a ‘worthy’ observance of the Supper. And likewise with our conduct. The question is, are the commands of God being kept? Is Christian virtue being formed? These require the careful assessment of solid evidence about what we believe and do.

As far as Christian hedonism is concerned, since ‘God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him’, the focus in self-examination as to whether or not we are living for the glory of God must fall on estimating the degree and amount of our satisfaction in God. (‘Satisfaction in God’ seems an odd phrase, by the way.) As we have mentioned more than once in this piece, hedonism involves calculation. Not only does living the Christian life properly involve the discovery of whether or not we are more satisfied in God than in other, creaturely things. It also involves striving to maximise our satisfaction in him. And as we have also already noted, the strong tendency must be to focus on the Christian’s satisfaction in God rather than on her confession of faith in him, and her obedience to him. After all, we must remember that the first question of the Shorter Catechism is followed by the second. In the emphasis of current Christian hedonism, is not the balance and variety of the Christian’s life which the New Testament sets forth being sacrificed for a neat phrase?

Augustine at 18: The Love of Wisdom

2011-08-02T05:09:00.005Z

Augustine's Confessions

This is the first of three posts on Augustine and pagan philosophy, using his Confessions.

Aged eighteen, Augustine was top of his class, learning rhetoric so that he could function as an advocate in the law. He believed that even at this time, long before his conversion, God was chastening him for his evil. As top dog he noted that he was ‘pleased with myself and was inflated with deceit’, but quieter than the others in the class, who were addicted to acts of vandalism, and known as the Wreckers. To be a Wrecker you have to be wrecked, Augustine drily observed. So what of Augustine himself? ‘I wanted to distinguish myself as an orator for a damnable and conceited purpose, namely delight in human vanity’. (38)

The curriculum led him to Cicero’s book Hortensius, an advocacy and defence of the worthwhileness of philosophy.

Cicero was a Stoic, perhaps best known today for his work The Nature of the Gods, an imagined conversation between men with different religious points of view. The book provides a good window into the religion and theology of the ancient world. In later life Augustine came to have an ambivalent attitude to Cicero, and to Stoicism more generally. Among other books Cicero wrote is On Divination, in which rather than believe that the future could be foretold by divination he preferred to think that any foreknowledge was impossible. This is certainly a strange view to hold in anyone who is a Stoic, and Augustine wonders out loud how much of a Stoic he actually was. He exploded: ‘to acknowledge a God, and yet to deny that [he has foreknowledge of things to come], is monstrous madness”, which he observing, went about to provide even that which ‘the fool hath said in his heart; there is no God’. (City of God, V.IX) The entire discussion is worth reading.

One of the great benefactions of Augustine to Christian posterity was the provision of a sort of league table of philosophers. Top of the table was Plato and the Platonists (who we shall meet later on), and following them the Stoics. As we can see, any denial of God’s foreknowledge from them, or from those who are sympathetic to them, called forth his condemnation. Their teaching on fate, as well. He did not sympathise with their view of emotion and its expression, citing the emotions of Jesus as refutation. But he placed value on their view of nature and the natural, or natural law, which became the foundation of the natural law tradition in the church. So the Stoics were a mixed bag, but they were better than the Sceptics and Epicureans, who were altogether condemned. (One of the first works Augustine wrote after his conversion was a refutation of Scepticism.) What of Aristotle? We shall offer a limited answer to that question later on. But the general problem was that Aristotle was not translated from the Greek, except for a few works, such as The Categories, until the 12^th century. We shall meet The Categories in the next post. What this league table shows is a kind of philosophical eclecticsm which has often been the attitude of Christian theologians to philosophy – to pick and choose. There is no revealed Christian philosophy, so why not?

Cicero’s Hortensius is a book that is now lost to us, and all that we know of its contents we only know through Augustine’s citations from it, and summaries of it. It is fair to say that this book, read in the course of his studies, had a transforming effect upon him.

The book changed my feelings. It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you yourself. It gave me different values and priorities. Suddenly every vain hope [such as those hopes to be derived from success in rhetoric] became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardour in my heart.

This was, intellectually speaking, the beginning of Augustine’s return to God. He continues -

I began to rise up to return to you. For I did not read the book for a sharpening of my style, which was what I was buying with my mother’s financial support now that I was 18 years old and my father had been dead for two years. I was impressed not by the book’s refining effect on my style and literary expression but by the content. My God, how I burned, how I burned with longing to leave earthly things and fly back to you.

What more does Augustine tell us about the book and its impact? It kindled his love for philosophy, but it did not convert him to one particular philosophy. And even when, later on, we shall see the influence of the Neoplatonists on him, that influence was not total, but selective. If Augustine was a ‘platonist’ he was a very selective one. For what Augustine seems to have liked about the Hortensius was that it helped to form in him the judgment that the truth of God must be acknowledged whatever its source.

But he is even bolder than this. He thinks that what Cicero is doing (unbeknown to him, of course) is providing ‘a clear demonstration of the salutary admonition given by your Spirit through your good and devoted servant, ‘See that none deceives you by philosophy…..’ (Col.2.8-9), even though Cicero was not acquainted with the words of Paul.

The one thing that delighted me in Cicero’s exhortation was the advice ‘not to study one particular sect but to love and seek and pursue and hold fast and strongly embrace wisdom itself, wherever found’. [But….]’One thing alone put a brake on my intense enthusiasm – that the name of Christ was not contained in the book…..Any book which lacked this name, however well written or polish or true, could not entirely grip me’.

This attitude recurs when later on he is influenced by ‘the books of the Platonists’, as we shall see. The philosophers took him so far, but no farther. As in Acts 17 Paul could quote from the pagan writers ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ and ‘We are his offspring’, for these sentences express the truth of God. But those writers had nothing to say about the coming of the Saviour, about Incarnation and Crucifixion and coming judgement.

One might think from these last words that, helped by Cicero, Augustine would return at once to the Catholic Church. But not a bit of it. When he turned to the Scripture, due to his ‘inflated conceit’ he found it to be a disappointment. The bald style of the Bible with its was ‘unworthy in comparison with the dignity of Cicero’. So what happened? He ‘fell in with men proud of their slick talk, very earthly-minded and loquacious. In their mouths were the devil’s traps and a birdlime compounded of a mixture of the syllables of your name, and that of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that of the Paraclete, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit. These names were never absent form their lips, but it was no more than sound and noise with their tongue’.

He is referring to the Manichees, using the language of hindsight, naturally. It took quite a while for them to lose their appeal. And when eventually he was pulled free, and sought to return to the Faith of his mother Monica, he found more help from pagan philosophers.

August

2011-07-20T07:12:00.000+01:00

In August Helm’s Deep will begin a short series, ‘St. Augustine’s Books’. Readers of the Confessions have long puzzled over the structure of the work, particularly the relation between the autobiographical Books I – IX and the focussed discussions on memory, time and creation, and Genesis I, of Books X - XIII. One of the ways of thinking about the autobiographical books is to see them as structured by three separate episodes in which Augustine reads works of pagan philosophy, and the varied, mainly positive impact that they had on him. He certainly thought that they had come his way by the providence of God. We shall consider these three episodes in turn.

The post on John Piper’s Christian hedonism and its relation to Jonathan Edwards’s view of emotion of a couple of weeks ago aroused quite a bit of interest. So in August Helm’s Deep is also offering ‘Further thoughts on John Piper’s Christian Hedonism’.

So, Augustine and also John Piper.

Baring Our Souls - John Piper & Christian Hedonism

2011-07-14T10:52:00.007+01:00

Recently on Helm’s Deep there has been a number of posts on affection and emotion, mostly in connection with Jonathan Edwards. The other day I received from the publishers a complimentary copy of the new Piper & Carson book, The Pastor as Scholar, the Scholar as Pastor, at the request of ‘the author’. (I wondered, Which one? Is this a well-intentioned nudge, or sheer disinterested kindness?) Whatever the reason, I thank publisher and authors alike.

On beginning the book I was immediately struck by the way that John Piper distances himself from the late F.F. Bruce’s remarks in his autobiography about self-disclosure. Bruce says:

While some readers have observed that in these chapters I have said little about my domestic life, others have wondered why I have been so reticent about my religious experience. The reason is probably the same in both instances: I do not care to speak much – especially in public – about the things that mean most to me. Others do not share this inhibition, and have enriched their fellows by relating the inner story of the Lord’s dealings with them – one thinks of Augustine’s Confessions and Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. But it calls for quite exceptional qualities to be able to do this kind of thing without self-consciousness or self-deception. (In Retrospect: Remembrance of Things Past, (Eerdmans 1980), 306)

And Piper comments

My second reaction was to say (this was in 1980, the year I left academia and entered the pastorate), ‘Good grief! You say, I do not care to speak much – especially in public - about the things that mean most to me.’ I say ‘The only thing I care to speak about - especially in public – are the things that mean most to me!’

He proceeds to register ‘zero empathy’ with the FFB outlook and adds

I am regularly bursting to say something about the most precious things in the universe – and not in any disinterested, dispassionate, composed, detached, unemotional, so-called scholarly way, but rather with total interest, warm passion, discomposure, utter attachment, and fully emotional, and I hope always, true. At least true is my goal. (23)

Dr Piper’s Christian Hedonism (‘God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him’) shares a good deal of the outlook of Jonathan Edwards’s view of the place of ‘raised’ affection in true religion which Helm’s Deep has recently posted on. There is an emphasis upon visibly expressed emotion, and upon truth as its basis. But more, I mean not only the emphasis on affection per se, and on exuberant emotions, but also the one-size-fits-all approach to understanding and characterising the Christian life. While for Edwards true religion consists much in holy affections, for Piper ‘God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him’. He seems starkly to reveal the onesidedness of his outlook in those remarks about FFB.

Piper’s mantra that ‘God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him’ is either tautologically true or it is open to empirical test. If it is tautologically true then we may safely ignore it. If it is testable then (I say) it fails that test and is false. There are lives lived in which God is glorified, lives of self-forgetful service to God, in which the question of whether or not the person is ‘satisfied in God’ never arises.

Behind Piper’s banner headline lies the same sort of misunderstanding about affection (or passion or motion) that we have found in Edwards. In brief, there are, I believe, two misunderstandings, one about passion, the other about experience.

The misunderstanding about passion is to equate it with what Piper calls ‘discomposure’ and being ‘fully emotional’ and the aim he shares with Edwards ‘to raise the affections of our hearers.….in synch with what is true and in proportion to the nature of the truth.’ Time and again Piper privileges the affections over the will. For example he says, truly enough, that ‘the Devil, on some doctrines, is more orthodox than us – more correct than we are. But none of these doctrines, in the mind of the Devil, gives rise to any love for God, any worship of God, any delight in God…..So knowing right things about Jesus doesn’t automatically produce right affections’. (50) True. (Notice, like Edwards, the tendency to understand Christian virtues as emotions or affections.) But there is no mention of the fact that the Devil does not serve or obey God either. So distorting is this that Piper fails to appreciate than an academic who seeks ‘objectivity’ and whose attitude he excoriates may nonetheless be consumed with a passion for the exclusion of factors that distort his enquiries. The dispassionate is not to be equated with the passionless. To be dispassionate may be to be impassioned with the aim of not letting ‘raised’ or ‘full’ passions, or passions of any other kind, sway the judgment.

Second, experience. Always, for Dr Piper, ‘experience’ is some awareness of what is happening in a person. In this sense of experience, what such a person experiences is always worth talking about, and can be talked about. FFB is inhibited from this practice, caring not to talk about himself in this way, in the way of Augustine or Bunyan, though he is not laying down the law about this. He takes the view, evidently, that for him some things are too deep for words, and other things are simply not for public consumption. As Augustine memorably said, there are actions that are fitting in the bathroom that are not fitting in the lounge.

Note the emphasis and the gaping hole in these typical statements

The heart of magnifying God’s worth is feeling God’s worth. (47)

The word hypocrisy was created precisely for the effort to say with deeds what we do not feel in our hearts. (47)

Right thinking about God exists to serve right feelings for God (50)

Thinking exists to serve admiring. (50)

Thinking is meant to serve worship and delight and satisfaction in God. (50)

Thinking rightly and deeply about the Word and the world with a view to seeing the greatness of God and his works (especially the work of Christ) so that the affections of our hearts might rest on a true foundation and God might be honored by how we feel toward him and by the behaviours that flow from this heart. (52)

[Gaping hole? Think for a moment about what Dr Piper says above about hypocrisy and then about what Paul and Jesus say. Paul: while you preach against stealing, do you steal? And Jesus: Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self indulgence’. Always, hypocrisy denotes a failure of the will, and ne’r a word about feelings in our hearts.]

It is this almost exclusive stress on felt feelings, on self-awareness, the need to register and to check our emotional level, that enables Piper’s hedonistic calculus to operate. Checking themselves out with the calculus enables his followers to estimate whether what they feel shows whether they have some satisfaction with Christ, are more satisfied, or are most satisfied in Christ. But Jesus places his emphasis elsewhere, on self-forgetfulness: ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?’ (Matt. 25.40)

In support of his autobiographical approach to the Christian gospel Dr Piper quotes Paul. But in the cases he cites, except perhaps one, Paul is focusing his attention on what happened to him, to public events, - ‘affliction’…’struggle’…’what happened to me’…and in one case, to his personal reaction. Elsewhere Paul also refers to the unspeakable, the ineffable, the unlawful. There are some matters that are not simply too deep for words, but too great for words. And Paul regularly urges on his readers not the cultivation of emotion, but the growth of virtue.

The alternative to adopting Piper’s hedonism is not to become Stoics. Augustine said: I refute Stoicism with two words: ‘Jesus wept’. We ought not to confine the shape of Christian character by a definition that focusses exclusive attention on passion, but to recognise the part to be played by every mode of the full human personality – not the understanding and the felt affections alone, but also the will and the virtues.

Romans 2 and 3: One Step At A Time, Dear Jesus

2011-07-01T05:53:00.007+01:00

Simon Gathercole, Where is Boasting? (Erdmans)

The Judgment of God is based upon the law of God

The Law of God is equitably administered in the case of both Jew and Gentile

All are therefore bound by the terms of the law; obedience brings reward, disobedience delivers punishment.

The keepers of the law will be rewarded

Is consistent with each of

There are none who are keepers of the law

Therefore, none will be rewarded

And

If A were to be a keeper of the law, then A would be rewarded

For these are the terms of the law viewed as the way to procure deliverance from judgment.

What does Paul say?

2.1-16

That’s it. These are the data. So how do those who take the Gentile Christian view get from these statements to that view? I think, by two pieces of interpretation.

That’s one step.

2.25-9

From this definition some conditional sentences are implied. Paul mentions two.

(1) If a person who is uncircumcised and keeps the law he is in effect circumcised

And

(2) If a person is physically circumcised but breaks the law that physical circumcision is cancelled, made null and void.

And from the passage we are surely warranted in adding a third:

(3) If a person is uncircumcised but keeps the law (and so is circumcised in the heart) then such a person condemns anyone who is physically circumcised but a lawbreaker.

That’s a second step.

That’s a third step. And then, having taken these steps, he takes the final step. (‘One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind’)

Religious Affection and Enthusiasm

2011-07-01T05:45:00.006+01:00

Sarah Pierpoint Edwrds

Locke’s Essay, first published in 1671, went through five editions in Locke’s lifetime. Edwards is reckoned to have read the book around 1717 (Marsden 62). The fourth edition of the Essay (1700) contained, amongst other new material, the chapter ‘Of Enthusiasm’ which was retained in the fifth (1706) and subsequent editions. Locke died in 1704. A question is, was the version of the Essay that Edwards read the one that lacked the chapter ‘Of Enthusiasm’, or did he read the fourth or the fifth edition? In what follows I am going to try to show from internal evidence from the Affections that he read Locke’s new chapter, but this would count for nothing if in fact he did not.

Happily, the following seems to be true. Edwards had access at Yale to the 1690 London ed. of Locke's Essay, for it was included in the collection of books provided by Jeremiah Dummer. (See Louise May Bryant and Mary Patterson, "The List of Books Sent by Jeremiah Dummer," in Papers in Honor of Andrew Keogh, Librarian of Yale University, by the Staff of the Library, 30 June 1938 (New Haven: privately printed, 1938), 435). More importantly, however, Edwards purchased and used the two-volume seventh edition of the Essay (London, 1716). It is listed in his "Account Book" (a register of books that he owned and lent to others). See the Yale edition of Edwards’s works, vol. 26, 337-38. (I am grateful to Doug Sweeney for this information.) The Affections was published in 1746. So it appears that while Edwards first read the edition of the Essaywithout the chapter ‘Of Enthusiasm’ he later bought, (and no doubt read) an edition with it.

Locke on Enthusiasm

The chapter on enthusiasm is situated towards the end of Book IV of the Essay, entitled ‘Of Knowledge and Opinion’, coming immediately after ‘Of faith and reason, and their distinct provinces’, and can be thought of as supplementing Locke’s views on faith and reason.

Here are some of the claims that Locke makes (the page references are to the Dent edition of Locke’s Essay, ed. John Yolton, volume II)

Enthusiasm puts reason and revelation to one side, and ‘substitutes in the room of them the ungrounded fancies of a man’s own brain, and assumes them for a foundation both of opinion and conduct’ (289). By contrast reason is natural revelation, and ‘revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated tby GOD immediately, which reason vouches for the truth of, buy the testimony and proofs it gives that they come from God. So that he that takes away reason, to make way for revelation, puts out the light of both’. (289)

The enthusiast: ‘whatsoever odd action they find in themselves a strong inclination to do, that impulse is concluded to be a call or direction from heaven and must be obeyed’ (290)

So enthusiasm has to be distinguished from true religion which is grounded upon special revelation, validated by God’s natural revelation, the use of human reason. Locke proceeds to set up tests for the presence of enthusiasm. It is interesting to note some of these:

The question then here is: How do I know that GOD is the revealer of this to me, that this impression is made upon my mind by the Holy Spirit, and therefore I ought to obey it? (292)

If they say that they know it to be true because it is a revelation from God, the reason is good; but then it will be demanded how they know it to be a revelation from God. If they say by the light it brings with it, which shines bright in their minds and they cannot resist, I beseech them to consider whether this be any more than what we have taken notice of already, viz. That it is a revelation because they strongly believe it to be true. (293)

The strength of our persuasions are no evidence at all of their own rectitude: crooked things may be as still and inflexible as straight, and men may be as positive and peremptory in error as in truth. (293)

Light, true light, in the mind is, or can be, nothing else but the evidence of the truth of any proposition; and if it be not a self-evident proposition, all the light it has or can have is from the clearness and validity of those proofs upon which it is received……For if strength of persuasion be the light which must guide us, I ask how shall anyone distinguish between the delusions of Satan and the inspirations of the Holy Ghost? He can transform himself into an angel of light. (294)

God when he makes the prophet does not unmake the man. He leaves all his faculties in their natural state, to enable him to judge of his inspiration, whether they be of divine original or not. When he illuminates the mind with supernatural light, he does not extinguish that which is natural. (295)

If this internal light, or any proposition which under that title we take for inspired, be conformable to the principles of reason or to the word of God, which is attested revelation, reason warrants it and we may safely receive for true and be guided by it in our belief and actions.(295)

Thus we see that holy men of old, who have revelations from GOD, had something else besides that internal light of assurance in their own minds to testify to them that it was form GOD. They were not left to their own persuasions alone that those persuasions were form GOD, but had outward signs to convince them of the author of those revelations. (295)

In what I have said I am far from denying that GOD can or doth sometimes enlighten men’s minds in the apprehending of certain truths, or excite them to good actions by the immediate influence and assistance of the Holy Spirit, without any extraordinary signs accompanying it. But in such cases too we have reason and Scripture, unerring rules to know whether it be form GOD or not. (296)

These extracts will be sufficient, I hope, to get Locke’s drift in his own words. Note the framework of reason and revelation; the approval of the terminology of ‘internal light’ and ‘supernatural light’, familiar to readers of the Religious Affections; and above all the method of testing claims to be imbued with the Spirit of God in the light of certain criteria, those provided by reason and revelation.

Edwards the Lockean

Edwards agrees with Locke’s religious epistemology on reason and revelation, but he makes the most of Locke’s concessions. His references to a new inward perception etc. (205 f.) are in accord with Locke’s recognition that God ‘doth sometimes enlighten men’s minds in the apprehending of certain truths…by the immediate influence and assistance of the Holy Spirit, without any extraordinary signs accompanying it’. (Essay 296) and he broadens Locke’s tests to include moral and spiritual fruit. No doubt theologically-speaking he ‘puritanised’ Locke by his more developed appreciation of the Word and Spirit.

Nevertheless Edwards’s doctrine of the ‘new sense’ deliberately meets the Lockean arguments – it is an immediate, supernatural intuition from God, not from man, which Locke allows, provided that this is subordinated to and informed by revelation. Edwards provides the tests, appealing to reason (eg 132) and revelation to do so, in (as we have seen), a broadly Lockean fashion. For Edwards, Lockean ‘enthusiasm’ is not ‘spiritual’ 210f. He dismisses the idea of new revelations, and the provision of new faculties (210f.) No doubt Locke would have regarded the various agitations of the body that Edwards condoned or encouraged as rather unbecoming and even somewhat embarrassing, but he could hardly have argued that in and of themselves they had great epistemological significance. In any case, as we know, Edwards thought that such agitations were neither here nor there.

Jonathan and Sarah

As is well known Edwards’s wife Sarah experienced at least one period of heightened religious affection, in which she was so conscious of God’s love in Christ, and a willingness to resign herself to the will of God, that this brought on various bodily agitations: swooning, fainting, bodily weakness, coldness in the body, weeping, waving and leaping, the onset of bodily exhaustion requiring her to lie down for several hours, and so on. Edwards was impressed, so much so that he asked her to write an account of what happened, which she did. He edited out the personal references and then published it. The edited version concludes with the following editorial comment:

Now if such things are enthusiasm, and the fruits of a distempered brain, let my brain be evermore possessed of that happy distemper! If this be distraction, I pray God that the world of mankind may be all seized with this benign, meek, beneficent, beatifical, glorious distraction! If agitations of body were found in the French Prophets, and ten thousand prophets more, 'tis little to their purpose, who bring it as an objection against such a work as this, unless their purpose be to disprove the whole of the Christian religion. The great affections and high transports that others have lately been under, are in general of the same kind with those in the instance that has been given, though not to so high a degree, and many of them, not so pure and unmixed, and so well regulated.

Sarah receives the husbandly seal of approval - her great affections and high transports were pure, unmixed and well regulated.

‘Enthusiasm’ was one of the charges that opponents of the revivals leveled against them. But it was not a charge, Edwards believed, that his hero John Locke could have endorsed about all the effects of the revivals, though perhaps of some of them. Edwards concurred with this outlook and framed the argument of the long, repetitive Parts II and III of the Affections accordingly

July

2011-06-20T21:23:00.001+01:00

Finally, finally on Helm's Deep, the series on Edwards and Locke on affection and enthusiasm is drawing to a close! In July I hope to publish the final instalment. Honest. And yet...and yet....

A few days ago a complimentary copy of the new book by John Piper and D.A.Carson, The Pastor as Scholar & The Scholar as Pastor arrived. I could not but be struck by the similarities between Dr Piper and Jonathan Edwards on emotion and experience. Given the prominence that these topics have in Dr Piper's ministry of propounding Christian Hedonism, I thought it would be worthwhile to briefly examine what he says in the new book. So the result will appear, God willing, in August. And then we really have finished, I hope.

Following the piece on justification and sanctification in June, for the second post in July we stay in the general area of justification, looking at some of the arguments for the novel view that Romans 1 and 2 refers to Gentile Christians. I believe that this involves a serious misunderstanding of Paul's argument in Romans 1 to Romans 3.20, and that the older view is to be preferred. It forms a vital part of Paul's case for his conclusion that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and stand under the judgment of God.

A Twenty-Minute Bike Ride Away

2011-06-14T16:08:00.006+01:00

Having recently relocated, not long after that I had the opportunity to attend for the first time the morning service at the Anglican church in the nearest village, a twenty-minute bike ride away. I knew nothing about either the church or the service beforehand, except that there was to be a celebration of the Lord’s Supper, and that it was Easter Sunday.

The minister was serious, clear and direct, his affirmation of the Resurrection, in a sermon of not more than ten minutes, also clear, with the call to faith in Christ and an affirmation of the need for the new birth. The congregation, forty or so, was attentive. Two passages of Scripture were read clearly and intelligibly, good hymns were sung, prayer was offered. We received the elements in what was largely a Protestant and Reformed manner, word and sign, dignified and restrained, richly Trinitarian. The whole was over in a little under an hour.

At present, it is not a difficult task to critique the very existence of the Church of England, at least the Church of England in England, its present stance, the tendency of its ethics, the weakness of its leadership. And there is much that, were one to set about doing so, one could criticize about that particular service. Without encountering much difficulty, we can all describe the church we want - the ‘perfect church’ - as easily as we can depict the God we want. Often enough, on both counts we have to manage with not getting our own way. Yet despite the temptation to criticize what was going on around me gnawing away at me, I both believed and felt it to be a privilege to attend that service and to have the opportunity to engage in public worship that affirmed the historic faith in words that were scriptural and credal in the best sense. This was my overriding reaction, and its presence rather surprised me.

For someone who, like me, is baptistic in outlook, it is not difficult to see the drawbacks of a connexional church, as well as the dangers of a church that is by law established. But such a church has this distinct advantage, that at present, in hundreds of places up and down England, in villages and in towns, it is possible to hear the elements of the faith, even when not delivered in quite the way that one would choose. Perhaps the majority of the English population (if only they knew it, or cared), is only a twenty-minute bike ride away from hearing the gospel and learning the rudiments of the Christian faith. Where else on earth is that true? Certainly not in France, or in many other parts of Europe. The US? Canada? I rather doubt that. But I am of course willing to be put right.

This Sunday morning reaction has led me to reflect a little bit more generally on church, and fellowship, and community. For some, fellowship suggests sharing, which is a particular form of one important element in fellowship, the idea of parity, and transparency. Fellows are those who are in some important senses equal. Those who, though different from each other, have the same standing which together they acknowledge or recognize, and who open themselves to each other. In many places in evangelicalism, fellowship is construed exclusively as this call to openness, to the development of intensity.

But there’s another emphasis that I wish to note here. The idea that church, and fellowship, has other dimensions to it, than the one that comes to be emphasized in modern evangelicalism, the intensity of the ‘small group’, or the crowd-psychology of the mega-church. I was unexpectedly reminded of this other emphasis on Easter Sunday morning, reminded of that aspect of fellowship that consists in being there, in that place, with those people, having the same corporate objective, the worship of Almighty God through Jesus Christ by his Spirit. The fellowship of a place, and a people, and a common purpose. There is also parity here, of course, and solidarity, but of a different kind than that of the ‘small group’ kind. The New Testament emphasizes both. But such solidarity extends beyond being physically present at the same place at the same time. We weep with those who weep, not only those who weep in our presence. And we remember those in the bonds of imprisonment, as though we were imprisoned with them. No physical presence there either. There used to be regular references to fellowship and unity with both the church 'militant' and the church 'triumphant' but this language, and the thought that it expresses, seems to have gone out of use.

When John in opening verses of his first letter writes of fellowship – he uses the word several times - it is this more objective note that is sounded. For John says that he proclaims what he had seen and touched, the Word of God made manifest, who is eternal life. The purpose of his proclamation is ‘that you too may have fellowship with us, and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.’ That is, 'our fellowship' that transcends the apostolic band and is a common features of all Christians. After all, John had never seen most of those with whom he affirms his fellowship.

This transcendence of particular times and places, the times and places where we happen to be present, reminds us of a different dimension to Christian fellowship. There is the parity element. Whether Jew or Greek, bond or free, we are all one in Christ Jesus. He is our brother and friend. But there is the ‘otherness’ aspect. Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. It is from these Trinitarian persons, engaged together in the redemption of the church, that light and goodness are brought to us to make possible and to foster and to enrich the parities of Christian fellowship.

It may seem at first that there is a principle of transparency about parity fellowship that one finds in some non-Christian groups. In the pub we might say, anyone who is a friend of my friend Joe is my friend too. But it is not quite like that in the church. For John says that if you have fellowship with us who have fellowship with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ, then this is because you also have fellowship with the Father and the Son. So for people to have fellowship (in this Christian sense) with each other they are also to have fellowship with Jesus Christ, with the Father and the Son and the Spirit. Christian fellowship is not first and foremost a horizontal affair. It is a horizontal affair founded on a vertical affair, acceptance of what John calls ‘the message that we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all.’ To use Pauline language, we are members of one another because we first have the same head, Jesus Christ.

I think that it is this vertical, solidarity that I recognised in the village church. Years ago I was in Czechoslovakia when it was a part of the Soviet empire, and I sought out a church on Sunday morning. Of course when I attended the service I could not understand many words. Those words that I caught referred to our common head, our Saviour and Lord. I also noticed a row of books at the side of the church, one of which has the word ‘Spurgeon’ unmistakably printed on the spine. Spurgeon in Czech translation! I remember thinking, these people are my people. I had Christian solidarity with them even though we could do little more than smile at each other and shake hands.

You may think that my attitude here is excessively individualistic. For what seems to matter is being there, rather than giving and receiving, than ‘sharing’. To which I respond ‘Yes and No’. I am emphasizing 'being there’ and extolling the importance of being physically present, shoulder to shoulder with the people of God confessing the same Christ. I am most certainly not arguing that a virtual church, consisting only of electronic images available on the web, would do equally well.

Just as John says that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and Peter writes of the apostles being ‘eyewitnesses of his majesty’, so it is important that the body of Christ expresses itself in physically visible and tangible ways , a body of real human beings that we can join ourselves to and enjoy solidarity and fellowship with, simply because we confess the same God and Lord.

Based on a Chapel talk at Regent College, May 23rd 2011

Of Faith and Reason: Locke and Edwards

2011-06-01T06:54:00.004+01:00

In the last post on Edwards I attempted to show that he depended on Locke’s unitary account of the human self and of passion in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding for his account of the nature of passions/affections and their connection with the will. This is a fact which, if it has been noticed before, hasn’t been stressed. In this second post on Lockean influences on the Affections I shall brieflylook at the influence of Locke’s chapter ‘Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces’ on Edwards’s discussion of the affections. Then, next time, there's a discussion of the relation between Locke’s chapter ‘Of Enthusiasm’ and theReligious Affections, particularly Part II, ‘Shewing What Are No Certain Signs That Religious Affections Are Truly Gracious, or That They Are Not’. In all these matters we shall find Edwards to be a respectful and faithful, though not a slavish, follower of Locke

The two chapters which now concern us, are towards the end of Book IV, where Locke is discussing reason: a chapter (XVIII) ‘Of Reason’, followed by the chapters on faith and reason, (XIX) and then one on enthusiasm (XX), added in later editions of the work. We shall discuss the provenance of the last of these chapters next time.

Locke’s aim in the chapter on faith and reason is to subordinate faith, and particularly any appeal to divine revelation, to the judgment of reason. The guidance of reason, and the guidance of faith, form ‘two distinct provinces’. Reason has to do with establishing the certainty or probability of propositions deduced from our ideas. Faith, that is, true religious faith, is reliance upon propositions upon testimony to such and such as the word of God, coming to us in some extraordinary way.

What I shall try to do, briefly, is this. First, to identify Locke’s main arguments in the chapter. And then to argue that, by and large, Edwards accepted these arguments and organized hisAffections within their parameters, even though the surface appearance may be the exact opposite of this. Whether or not he was successful in carrying out this part of his project is not our main concern. Obviously, he thought that he was successful.

In his two chapters, on faith and reason, and then on enthusiasm, Locke was principally arguing against the left-wing sects of the commonwealth and post-commonwealth period who claimed immediate revelation and inspiration. [For shorthand, I shall use the terms ‘quaker’ and ‘quakerish’ to cover these sects, though the Quakers then had a rather different character from the Quakers now.] In earlier posts we have seen that Edwards had a political motive in writing on revival, particularly writing the Religious Affections: to capture the centre ground, stressing affection, and so denying those who denied its importance in religion, but also arguing forcefully against undue prominence being given to the ‘phenonema’ of the revivials.

In arguing against quakerish religion Locke also had a (much grander) political ambition, to draw the boundaries of religious toleration in post-Commonwealth England against the unpredictability of the enthusaists on the one hand, and Roman Catholics whose prime loyalty was to Rome and who would like nothing better than the overthrow of the English protestant establishment. Locke’s chief point against quakerish enthusaism is that reason has a place in the Christian religion and that an account of religion operates discursively, that is, by the consideration of the arguments and the evidence that people offer in making religious claims. The trouble with the sectaries was, in a nutshell, that they claimed to hear the voice of God, but they had no arguments, whereas there are arguments for accepting a divine revelation from God, as mainstream Christians do. To use Thomas Hobbes’s example, it was impossible for the quakers to distinguish ‘I met God in a dream’ from ‘I dreamed that I met God.’

Naturally enough, Locke starts his discussion of faith and reason from the conclusions of the previous chapter, ‘Of Reason’. There he established that it is the task of reason to provide certainties (where possible), and probabilities where not, arising from our ideas, that is, from the evidence of our five senses, our generalisation from them, together with the testimony of others. So any candidate for a revelation must be considered by reason in this sense, and any revelation cannot be more certain than the probabilities. Though we might suppose that a revelation could include evidence of what we can discover by our deductive or inductive reasoning, its testimony to these things will not be more certain than our independent evidence for them. So we might conclude from the New Testament that there is a Sea of Galilee, but we shall be more certain that there was by the direct evidence of our senses and those of others than by consulting the Bible. (This is my example. Locke uses the example of Euclidian geometry: he says ‘whatsoever truth we come to the clear discovery of, from the knowledge and contemplation of our own ideas, will always be certainer to us than those which are conveyed to us by traditional revelation’. (282) He also discusses the Flood.) ‘Probability’ here includes very great probability. This calls to mind what B.B. Warfield has to say in his paper ‘The Real Problem of Inspiration’, writing about the trustworthiness of Christ and his apostles as teachers of doctrine.

Of course, this evidence is not in the strict logical sense “demonstrative;” it is “probable” evidence. It therefore leaves open the metaphysical possibility of its being mistaken. But it may be contended that it is about as great in amount and weight as “probable’ evidence can be made, and that the strength of conviction which it is adapted to produce may be and should be practically equal to that produced by demonstration itself. (Revelation and Inspiration, 218)

Locke is not a sceptic about revelation. He sets out the distinction between faith and reason not to disparage the possibility of divine revelation.

But…there being many things wherein we have very imperfect notions, or none at all; and other things, of shoe past, present, or future existence, by the natural use of our faculties, we can have no knowledge at all: these, as being beyond the discovery of our natural faculties and above reason, are, when revealed, the proper matter of faith. Thus, that part of the angels rebelled against GOD and thereby lost their first happy state, and that the dead shall rise and live again; these and the like, being beyond the discovery of reason, are purely matters of faith, with which reason has, directly, nothing to do. (287)

Reason must judge that there is a revelation, and that revelation may deliver to us matters which are above reason. However, whatever God immediately reveals in of the highest certainty. (283)

Though faith be founded on the testimony of God (who cannot lie) revealing any proposition to us: yet we cannot have an assurance of the truth of its being a divine revelation greater than our own knowledge: since the whole strength of the certainty depends upon our knowledge that GOD revealed it; which, in this case, where the proposition supposed revealed contradict our knowledge or reason, will always have this objection handing to it (viz.) that we cannot tell how it conceive that to come from GOD, the bountiful Author of our being, which, if received for true, must overturn all the principles of knowledge he has given us; render all our faculties useless; wholly destroy the most excellent part of his workmanship, our understandings; and put a man in a condition wherein he will have less light, less conduct than the beast that perisheth. (284) [Locke is not overly fond of full stops. Still, his meaning is clear.]

The substance of faith/revelation reveals what falls outside the normal boundaries of human knowledge, but a necessary condition of receiving it is that we have good reason to do so.

In the main, Edwards is in agreement with this approach. [He lived before the days when some people who adher to the Reformed faith were captivated by ‘presuppositionalism’ in one or another of its varieties]. This can be seen at length in his Miscellanies (e.g. Misc. 1340). For an exposition of this aspect of Edwards’s theology see John Gerstner, The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, (Berea Publications, 1991) Vol. I. Chs. 5 and 7.

The same approach is present in the text of Religious Affections. There are a number of appeals to reason. He claims that neither reason nor revelation rule out the idea that when God manifests his power in the soul, a power different from all natural powers, he makes in evident that this is his work. (139) He appeals to ‘philosophers’ in giving his account of judgment or taste, of which spiritual judgment is a species.(283) A person may, by a judgment of this kind, be assured ‘of the divinity of the things of the gospel’. This is a ‘reasonable conviction’. In the case of such intuitive knowledge, ‘the argument is but one; [that is, it involves one inference] and the evidence direct; the mind ascends to the truth of the gospel but by one step, and that is its divine glory’. ‘We can’t rationally doubt, but that things that are divine, that appertain to the supreme Being, are vastly different from things that are humane….it would therefore be very unreasonable to deny that it is possible for God….’ (298-9) He appeals to the ‘nature and reason of things’. (323) Reason teaches what Scripture teaches. (409 f.) ‘Reason plainly shews’ that what a person prefers ‘when left to follow their own choice and inclinations, are the proper trial what they do really refer in their hearts’. (426-7) A distinction between experience and practice ‘is not only an unreasonable, but an unscriptural distinction’. (450-1)

What do these appeals to reason and what is reasonable establish? We shall try to answer that question next time, when we look at Locke on enthusiasm and the Affections reveals itself as a project that sits within Lockean parameters.

Does Justification Cause Sanctification?

2011-06-01T06:37:00.002+01:00

More particularly, is it the view of Calvin and of Reformed Orthodoxy that justification causes sanctification, or not? There seems to be some difference of opinion about this. Some detect the presence of causal language in the discussion of these questions by these theologians. And this seems to be sufficient to answer the question in the affirmative. Others stress the pivotal factor of union with Christ and of Christ’s double gift of justification and sanctification, and believe that this justifies answering the question in the negative, presumably on the grounds that there is no causal language visible at this point, and that there is symmetry between the two gifts.

What I have seen of the presentation of such opposing viewpoints suggests a certain amount of confusion, or at least a lack of exactness, among the parties. So though I do not want here to engage directly in attempting to answer the question, I think it may help to make some general remarks about causation. (For those who are curious about sources I refer to writers such as Mark A Garcia, Life in Christ (Paternoster, 2008) and John V. Fesko ‘Metaphysics and Justification in 16^th and 17^th Century Reformed Theology’, (Calvin Theological Journal, April 2011); and 'Peter Martyr Vermigli on Union With Christ and Justification', (Reformed Theological Review, April 2011). But as I say it is not my intention to engage directly with these chaps.) Instead we shall look particularly at Aristotelian four-fold causation to which Calvin and the RO were indebted (to one degree or another) in their endeavours to make justification and its relation to sanctification plain, as well as in other areas of theology.

Three or so points

1. In the Aristotelian four-fold causation schema – material, formal, efficient, and final – ‘cause’ is not used univocally. Calvin writes of these being different ‘kinds’ of causation, and so they are. (Inst. III.14.17) This ought to be kept in mind. It is best to think of these four ‘kinds’ of causation as providing different but compatible answers to the question ‘Why?’ Why is this a statue? Answer, because a sculptor made the sculpture (efficient cause); or because it is composed of sculptable material such as gold or clay or stone, and not of frogspawn or tissue paper (material cause); because it has the form of a statue and not of a bar of gold (formal cause); because it was the intention of its maker to create a statue (final cause) and not a gold chain. Each these answers the ‘Why?’ question differently, each answer complements the other answers. Which answer is offered or discussed would depend upon the interests of one asking the question. Additionally, the sculptor’s tools may be thought of as the ‘instrumental’ cause, a term made famous in Reformed theology by Calvin and others (including the Westminster Confession) who refer to faith as the instrumental cause of justification. So the four causes refer to different features of a complex situation, not to a case in which X causes Y which in turn causes z, three efficient causes, like the falling of a line of dominoes or the shunting of wagons in an (old fashioned?) railway yard. Even if justification may not be the efficient cause of sanctification, perhaps it is its cause in some of the sense? (There's the additional factual question of whether this four-fold scheme is ever applied to the justification-sanctification distinction.)

2. This schema, according to Aristotle, when we see it operate in the physical world, does not do so infallibly, but only ‘for the most part’; acorns produce oaks, but occasionally there is a sport, or a mutation; lions beget lion cubs, but occasionally such cubs are born de-formed; there are Siamese twins, and so on. And in the case of our sculptor, his skill may not be very great and though intending a masterpiece the result of his efforts may be a botch. Clearly when the language of Aristotelian causality is used of divine activity, recognition must be given to divine power and wisdom. No sports or deformities or failures in intention here. So whereas in the physical world there is a contingent relation between an efficient cause and its effect, even if we were to suppose that sanctification is an effect of justification that effect may be necessarily, or certainly unfailingly connected.

But is justification the efficient cause of sanctification? It is hard to see that it is or could be, at least in the Pauline-Augustinian outlook of the Reformers, according to which every step of salvation is due to the unmerited, efficaciously powerful grace and mercy of God. The associated question, Could there be justification without sanctification? seems to be unnecessarily speculative. They are held together at least by the divine decree that this be so, and so are connected by at least a hypothetical or conditional necessity, and may even be intrinsically connected. So the fear that if causal categories are applied to justification and sanctification they may come apart, that justification may fail to bring about sanctification, would appear to be groundless.

3. The question, Could justification be the cause of sanctification? is also ambiguous regarding the sense in which justification and sanctification are being taken. For each word may refer either to an effect; the event of coming to be justified, which is instrumentally caused by faith; or it could refer to the state of being justified. Most likely, in the claim that justification is the cause of sanctification, justification is being referred to as a state, the state of being justified. But can a state be a cause in the sense of any of the four Aristotelian ways? If the question raised in this area is, does justification cause good works? then this presumably refers to the act or acts of reliance on Jesus. Can the state of being justified bring about sanctification? Sounds weird. But ‘sanctification’ has a similar ambiguity: it also may mean the event of becoming sanctified, or the state of being sanctified. Which?

Faith along with hope and love form a small constellation of Spirit-given virtues. So that faith, even considered as the instrumental cause of justification, is a subjective grace of the Spirit, and so a sanctifying fruit, and inseparable from other Christian virtues. If we are not to get into a further tangle at this point we need some further distinctions. (I have discussed the point briefly, with the expert assistance of Francis Turretin, in ‘Word and Spirit in Conversion’ inSpirit of Truth and Love, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Experience, ed. David F. Wright (Edinburgh, Rutherford House, 2007, 129-31)).

It is hard to see where the Reformed theologians cited earlier teach that justifying faith gives rise (even instrumentally) to hope and love. Certainly, faith works by love: it is the combining of the graces of saving faith, relying on the promises of God, and love to God and neighbour, shed abroad in our hearts, as Paul puts it, that lead to good works. So if we are going to see some light in this area, a bit more sorting out needs to be done.

And why, in any case, is there an opposition made between ‘causal language’ and Calvin’s language about union with Christ and the two distinct but inseparable gifts of justification and sanctification? As does the Johannine language of the vine and its fruit. Does all this not look like causal language as well? [We must be careful not to fall into the mistaken of thinking that it’s a condition of language being causal that the term ‘causal’ or its family members are used.] If union with Christ is the source of good works, does this not mean that the union is the cause of the good works? I suspect once the necessary sorting out has been done, there won’t be a hairsbreadth between the language of union with Christ and ‘causal language’.

But there is a weaker sense of ‘cause’ in which we find the Reformed theologians in the 16^th and 17^th centuries writing of the connection between faith and works in which ‘cause’ simply and loosely means ‘condition’. If we refer again briefly to the four-fold causation schema, then any of these may be said to be a cause in the sense that each is a necessary condition for the achieving of causation in its full, four-fold sense. So in this sense faith may be said to be a necessary condition of good works. Without faith, no good works. So there is a close connection between faith and good works, an indispensable connection, but this does not entail that the saving faith, the faith which justifies, is an efficient cause of sanctification. Though of course it does not rule it out either.

So….?

My thought is that if due regard is paid to the peculiarities of the Aristotelian schema and its transposition to the arena of divine activity, there are perfectly good senses in which one might say both that justification and sanctification are the twin fruits [causal effects?] of the duplex gratia which flows from union with Christ, and that justification is the cause of sanctification, its necessary precondition. But not, merely for this reason, an efficient cause of sanctification.

Spit it out!

2011-05-27T17:31:00.006+01:00

N.T. Wright’s answer in a question and answer session to a question about hell is an object lesson in evasion. Trevin Wax and Carl Trueman have had interesting and appropriate things to say about it, but neither has noted publicly how Dr Wright conducts himself in giving the interview.

This is how it goes. When asked about the reality of hell, Wright says that his usual counter question is why Americans are fixated on hell.

My usual counter question is: “Why are Americans so fixated on hell?”

But why should there be a counter – question of that kind to what is a perfectly straightforward question, though a difficult one? And why should one usually have that counter-question ready to hand? Politicians routinely use this ploy. Divert one question by asking another. When for whatever reason you do not wish to answer the question, ask another. There was a famous occasion when Jesus did this, but that was when evil men were straining to entangle him. No one is trying to trip Wright up, as far as I can see. Why should a noted church leader duck and weave? Why not answer the question about hell? To use the language of a past Leader of the House of Commons, why not ‘Spit it out!’?

Whatever the reason he has, here is Wright using a question to change the subject. He goes on

why is it that the most prosperous affluent nation on earth is really determined to be sure that they know precisely who is going to be frying in hell and what the temperature will be and so on. There’s something quite disturbing about that, especially when your nation and mine has done quite a lot in the last decade or two to drop bombs on people elsewhere and to make a lot of other people’s lives hell.

A question about hell becomes a question about the American national psyche, even a question about the morality of the policy of the US and the UK governments. The question is one that America is asking! No doubt we all have views on the bombing, and there is a time and place for discussion of that. But the place to do that is hardly when one is asked about a question about hell.

For what has a government’s policy to do with questions about hell? Not much, even from Dr Wright’s standpoint. For while both governments drop bombs, according to Dr Wright only the Americans (by the working of some subterranean transatlantic mechanism, perhaps) are prompted by their government’s policy to ask questions about hell. The British drop bombs but, according to Dr Wright, don’t show much interest in the reality of hell. The idea seems to be that so long as America and the UK drop bombs, questions abut the reality of hell ought not be asked. Or at least, maybe they can be asked, but please don’t expect Dr Wright to offer a straightforward answer to them.

Now note the exaggeration, and the non sequiturs. It is of course diverting to use the language of ‘frying’ and ‘what the temperature will be’, and to speak of making people’s lives hell. We smile at Wright’s language, shuffling our feet rather awkwardly, or perhaps protest. But whether we smile or or protest, and whether Wright intends such reactions to occur, by this stage in the answer we’ve lost the thread. (It wouldn’t be quite kosher, would it, to ask in turn what it is about Wright’s personal psyche that promotes this tendency to evade questions. For we all understand, don’t we, that why a person asks a question may be one thing, the question itself, another.)

Having got that off his chest, Dr Wright tells us that he is not a universalist and never has been.

the New Testament is very clear that there are people who do reject God and reject what would have been His best will for them, and God honors that decision.

But this, again, is hardly to the point of the question, as Dr Wright must realize.

Then, with respect to Rob Bell’s recent book

I do think it’s good to stir things up because so many people, as I say, particularly in American culture, really want to know the last fine-tuned details of hell.

You see the tendency of this? It’s good to stir things up by advocating universalism, but not good to ask a straight question about the reality of hell. (If Dr Wright is weary of being asked this question, then he should say so, and refer us instead to which of his books provides his views.)

And then there’s some more exaggeration.

And it seems to be part of their faith, often a central part of their faith that a certain number of people are simply going to go to hell and we know who these people are.

Yes, of course. But note the vagueness, the lack of specificity of such a charge. ‘It seems….often’. Another smoke bomb. Maybe there are the people whom Dr Wright surmises to exist, people who think that they know who is going to hell, and who spend their time gloating over this rather than worshipping at the foot of the Cross and helping the helpless. Maybe there are those who forget that there are many that are first that shall be last, and the last first. Maybe they routinely flout Paul’s rule to judge nothing before the time when the Lord will bring to light the hidden things of darkness. But why should the fact that there are such people, if in fact there are, prevent any one pressing a Christian leader for a straight answer to a straight question about the reality of hell, or prevent him answering it?

God is not a horrible ogre who is just determined to fry as many people as He can forever. God is actually incredibly generous and gracious and wonderful and loving and caring. And if you paint a picture of God which is other than that, then you’re producing a monster and that has long-lasting effects in Christian lives and in the church.

Of course. But the New Testament does not offer us the choice between God’s justice and his generous and gracious love in quite this way, does it? For someone who takes seriously what the New Testament teaches about the goodness and severity of God, as Dr Wright does, that’s not an answer to the question about the reality of hell, either. It simply asks that question all over again; indeed it makes the question even more pressing.

The Bible - the Book of Proverbs and the New Testament in particular - has much to say about the ‘ethics of speech’. Those who currently stress the performative, speech-act character of language, should understand this. To speak is to act and so like all our actions, our speech has a moral texture.

June

2011-05-23T15:56:00.002+01:00

In June we continue to look at Edwards’s sources in John Locke. On this occasion we shall examine the influence of one of the last chapters in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ‘Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces’. Though the provinces are distinct, they are nevertheless related.

I shall argue that on this topic too Edwards is a Lockean and that one of his aims in writing the Religious Affections is to show that the possession of holy affections falls within the province of what Locke thought was ‘reasonable’ and that it was not a case of 'enthusiasm'. We shall develop the Lockean shape of Edwards’s arguments in the Affections, and the influence of his chapter on enthusiasm on Edwards in July, God willing.

In the second of the June posts I shall have something on the relation between justification and sanctification. The question of whether or not justification causes sanctification is being currently discussed, but in my view a little more light is required. To get such light on this we need to think a bit more carefully about causes than is usual, particularly the Aristotelian approach to causation which Calvin and the Reformed Orthodox utilised, following the medievals. Some of the RO thought that Aristotle’s approach was ‘common sense', long before the advent of ‘Common Sense Realism’ and its allegedly malign influence on Reformed theology.

In the middle of the month, the latest Taking a Line is a short piece of a different kind, ‘A Twenty-Minute Bike Ride Away’.

Can This Be True?

2011-05-13T21:49:00.006+01:00

Polycarp 69-155 AD

I’ve read more than once the claim that most early Christians were universalists. And this is occasionally supported by the further opinion that several early (first six centuries) theological schools were universalist in their teaching. This seems implausible to me. However, I’m certainly not someone who is a student of the history of the early church. So what am I to do? I’m to look for evidence.

What is clear is that there is a steep, sharp decline from the theological writing of the New Testament and what one finds among early Christian writings. ‘Rabbi’ Duncan once amusingly said ‘It is a mistake to look to the Fathers as our seniors. They were our juniors. The Church has advanced wonderfully since its foundation was laid. Polycarp would have stood a bad chance in an examination by John Owen. I think I could have posed him myself.’

Still, this belief in a decline in theological quality in the immediate post-Apostolic church is rather different from the claim about universalism, which seems much more dubious.

To start with, it would seem that the opinion that most early Christians were universalists is impossible to test. Who are these Christians? Where have most of them left any traces of holding such beliefs? Is this evidence written? Do these Christians themselves make the claim? In making the claim, do they explcitly controvert the non-universalist sentiments of the NT? Is there evidence in the liturgies of the early church that they embodied or gave expression or tacit assent to universalism?

Here is some readily available evidence that points in the opposite direction, of clear particularism.

Clement of Rome

‘Let us fix our thoughts on the Blood of Christ; and reflect how precious that Blood is in God’s eyes, inasmuch as its outpouring for our salvation has opened the race of repentance to all mankind. 25-6

38 Again, God says to Him, Sit down at my right hand, until I make your enemies a cushion for your feet. Who are these enemies? Why, wicked persons who set themselves against His will. 38

Ignatius

‘Regarding the rest of mankind, you should pray for them unceasingly, for we can always hope that repentance may enable them to find their way to God’. 64

’…..how much more when a man’s subversive doctrines defile the God-given Faith for which Jesus Christ was crucified. Such a wretch in his uncleanness is bound for the unquenchable fire, and so is anyone else who gives him a hearing.’ 65

‘….the Cross which so greatly offends the unbelievers, but is salvation and eternal life to us’ 65-6

‘To profess any other name than that is to be lost to God….’72

‘Flee for your very life from these men; they are poisonous growths with a deadly fruit, and one taste of it is speedily fatal.’ 81

‘His passion was no unreal illusion, as some sceptics aver who are all unreality themselves. The fate of those wretches will match their unbelief, for one day they will similarly become phantoms without substance themselves.’101

‘For let nobody be under any delusion; there is judgement in store even for the hosts of heaven, the very angels in glory, the visible and invisible powers themselves, if they have no faith in the blood of Christ’.102

Polycarp

‘All things in heaven and earth have been made subject to Him; everything that breathes mays Him homage; He comes to judge the living and the dead, and God will require His blood at the hands of any who refuse him allegiance’ 119

The Martydom of Polycarp

‘The other said again, “If you do not recant, I will have your burnt to death, since you think so lightly of wild beasts”. Polycarp rejoined, “The fire you threaten me with cannot go on burning for very long; after a while it goes out. But what you are unaware of are the flames of future judgement and everlasting torment which are in store for the ungodly. Why do you go on wasting time? Bring out whatever you have a mind to” ’.128

Barnabas

‘For when the Lord judges the world there is going to be no partiality; everyone will be recompensed in proportion to what he has done. If he is a good man, his righteousness will make the way smooth before him; but if he is a bad man, the wages of his wickedness will be waiting to confront him.’163

‘For the man who does this, there will be glory in the kingdom of God; but one who prefers the other Way will perish together with his works. 181-2

The Didache

‘After that, all humankind will come up for their fiery trial; multitudes of thgenm wukk stumble and perish, but such as remain steadfast in the faith will be saved by the Curse’ 198

[These extracts are from Early Christian Writings, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, revised and provided with Introductions and new editorial material by Andrew Louth. (Penguin Books, 1987)]

This looks reasonable evidence regarding the general outlook of the Apostolic Fathers. No doubt some of the expressions, taken in isolation, are consistent with universalism by way of a speculation about purgatiorial cleansing, and none of them has been formed within debates about particularism and universalism which at that time does not see m to have been an issue at all. Was this general outlook overturned in the first centuries to follow? Is there evidence for this?

The same questions can be raised about the alleged positions of the theological schools of the Patristic period. How do they treat those New Testament routinely appealed to by universalists? Isn’t it extremely odd that a controversially-minded writer such as Augustine, writing in the fifth century, did not spot any such deviancy of the theological schools of his day or of the past from what he, at least, regarded as Christian orthodoxy, particularism and a clear teaching regarding heaven and hell?

Origen’s widely-noted universalism appears to have been the thought of one individual with a few followers, and (in the words of N.T. Wright) ‘seems to have been more Platonic than biblical.’ But one swallow does not make a summer. The view was condemned by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553.

Of course none of this evidence provides a powerful argument against universalism. But it does carry a presumption about the early church, not only its writers, but also, presumably, its rank and file. In the face of such data it cannot plausibly be argued that what we may now regard as traditionalist teaching on particularism, and on heaven and hell, flies in the face of the universalist teaching or attitude of the early church. For it clearly does not.

The trouble with these claims that we have been examining, vague and insubstantial as they appear, is that once they get into print that fact alone provides credibility to the view, at least to some minds. But printer’s ink is no substitute for evidence. Another reminder of the importance of primary sources, and the danger that what may count as ‘scholarship’ may in fact be nothing other than the retailing of opinions that no-one ever takes the trouble to check.

Edwards and John Locke on Emotion

2011-05-01T05:54:00.005+01:00

John Locke (1632-1704)

I said at the end of’, 'Edwards on True Religion’ two posts ago, ‘Thank you and good night to Edwards for the time being’. But then Dr Lucas offered his correction, to which I replied, and this got me thinking a bit more about Edwards and affection. The result is, or will, be a couple more posts, at least.

Modestly, I wish to highlight things that, as far as I can see, have never been noticed before! I do this neither to praise nor to bury Edwards. The exercise is purely factual, but what it will show is that the man was much more heavily indebted to Locke in Religious Affections than (I believe) has been previously thought, or than anyone has noticed, even though the evidence for this has been available ever since his book was published.

Locke and Edwards on the self

Take the editor of the Yale Edition of Religious Affections, the late John E Smith. In his lengthy Introduction to the work, he briefly (52) mentions Locke once, taking two lines, in connection with the new spiritual sense, the ‘new simple idea’. Others have embellished this connection, myself included. Regeneration is the imparting of a new spiritual or supernatural sense, and the terminology is clearly Locke’s, though very similar language can be found in many a Puritan, in John Owen for example. So is the influence of Locke on Edwards (as regards the Religious Affections) terminological and nothing more? I once thought so. But the answer is ‘not exactly’.

To begin with, in Part I there are references to the human self which are decidedly Lockean, particularly Edwards’s stress on the unity of the self, which indicates his dismissal of the faculty psychology of his mediaeval and Reformed Orthodox antecedents. According to this revised view, there are two ‘faculties’, understanding and will, and the affections are not essentially distinct from the will, and so are not a distinct third faculty. This follows Locke in his chapter ‘Of Power’: ‘the ordinary way of speaking is that the understanding and will are two faculties of the mind: a word proper enough, it is be used, as all words should be, so as not to breed any confusion in men’s thoughts, by being supposed (as I suspect it has been) to stand for some real beings in the soul that performed those actions of understanding and volition’. (196) (All page references to Locke in this post are to volume 1 of the two-volume Everyman Library edition of Locke’s Essay, ed. John W. Yolton (1961))

Edwards makes similar remarks in Part I of the Affections: ‘God has indued the soul with two faculties: one is that by which it is capable to perception and speculation, or by which it discerns views and judges of things, which is called the understanding. The other faculty by which the soul….but is some way inclined with respect to the things in views or considers…This faculty….is sometimes called the inclination….’ (96). ‘The will, and the affections of the soul, are not two faculties; the affections are not essentially distinct from the will….’ (97) What Locke and Edwards now call faculties refer to modes of the self rather than essential divisions within the self.

Edwards does not quote Locke at this point, or anywhere else in the Affections. I suppose that it would hardly have done to let on to his New England audience that he was endorsing the words and ideas of a Broad Church English Arminian Anglican in defence of his take on the Revivals.

As we noted in an earlier post, Edwards is explicit in his references to and borrowings from Locke in work intended for a wider readership, one that he hoped would include the ‘enlightened’ thinkers of America and Europe. For instance in The Freedom of the Will Edwards makes explicit use of Locke’s great chapter ‘Of Power’, Book II Chapter XXI of his Essay, again in defence of the unity of the self, modifying the Lockean doctrine as he saw fit.

Locke and Edwards on emotion

Now as it happens, before Locke’s long chapter ‘Of Power’, which is concerned with the human will and freedom, there is a shorter chapter, ‘Of Modes of Pleasure and Pain’. This is a brief discussion of affection, or emotion as Locke calls it. If anything, Edwards here follows the contours of Locke’s thought even more exactly.

To make this clear, here are four or so direct similarities between what Locke says in four pages and what Edwards says in thirty or so. Some of these are substantive, others are matters of detail. I don’t think that they are exhaustive.

One,

Locke: ‘Pleasure and pain and that which causes them, good and evil, are the hinges on which our passions turn’. (190)

Edwards: ‘And in every degree of the act of the will, wherein the soul approves of something present, there is a degree of pleasedness; and that pleasedness, if it be in a considerable degree, is the very same with the affection of joy or delight. And if the will disapproves of what is present, the soul is in some degree displeased, and if that displeasedness be great, ‘tis the very same with the affection of grief and sorrow.’ (97)

So Locke and Edwards agree on what we might call, crudely, the mechanisms of the will and of the affections. The will, and the affections which are generated, is determined by beliefs we have about pleasure and pain, and Edwards pretty much uses Lockean terminology. There are some differences: ‘emotion’ (Locke) becomes ‘affection’ (Edwards), and Edwards is emphatic (as part of the overall thesis of the book), that in ordinary speech we reserve (and he will reserve) the term ‘affection’ for the ‘raised’ or ‘higher’ exercises of the will. ‘In every act of the will for, or towards something not present, the soul is in some degree inclined to that thing; and that inclination, if in a considerable degree, is the very same with the affection of desire….and that pleasedness, if it be in a considerable degree, is the very same with affection of desire.’(97)

Two,

‘For whatever good is proposed, if its absence carries no displeasure nor pain with it, if a man be easy and content without it, there is no desire of it nor endeavour after it;’ (Locke, 190-1)

Edwards: ‘These affections we see to be the springs that set men agoing, in all the affairs of life, and engage them in all their pursuits: these are the things that put men forward, and carry ‘em along, all their worldly business; and especially are men excited and animated by these, in all affairs, wherein they are earnestly engaged, and which they pursue with vigor’. (101)

So both agree that it is the recognition of something as a good, together with its absence, that generates human activity. Locke puts the point negatively and tersely. Edwards is more sermonic; after all, the Affections started life as sermons preached to Edwards’s congregation.

Three,

Locke: ‘The passions too have most of them, in most persons, operations on the body, and cause various changes in it; which, not being always sensible, do not make a necessary part of the idea of each passion.’ (192)

Edwards: ‘Such seems to be our nature, and such the laws of the union of soul and body, that there never is any case whatsoever, any lively and vigorous exercise of the will or inclination of the soul, without some effect upon the body, in some alteration of the motion of its fluids, and especially of the animal spirits’. (98)

Each sees a connection between the bodily effects of the passion. Locke, an English gentleman, is more reserved on this than Edwards, excited as he was by the phenomena of the revivals. Locke: emotions usually have bodily effects which we don’t notice most of the time. Edwards: affections do have noticeable (‘sensible’) bodily effects.

And fourthly, an interesting incidental correspondence:

‘there is no more but a bare velleity, the term used to signify the lowest degree of desire and that which is next to none at all, when there is so little uneasiness in the absence of anything that it carries a man no further than some faint wish for it, without any more effectual or vigorous use of the means to attain it.’ (Locke, 191)

And Edwards: ‘That religion which God requires, and will accept, does not consist in weak, dull and lifeless wouldings, raising us but a little above a state of indifference’.

So Locke’s ‘velleity’ becomes Edwards’s ‘woulding’, each marking a degree or so above the absolute indifference of the mind. As the editor of the Yale edition notes, ‘woulding’ is a made up word. (99) But Edwards need not have gone to this trouble. He could have used Locke’s ‘velleity’, which Locke did not make up. But using that term might have foxed some of his congregation, and some visitor from Yale or Boston might have rumbled the Locke connection.

Finally, in the case of the emotions or affections themselves, each has a similar list, including joy, hope among those that are emotions or approving or liking, and fear, anger, the emotions of disliking. And as Locke points out that envy and anger have to do not with pain or pleasure along, but ‘some mixed considerations of ourselves and others’, (191) so Edwards refers to ‘mixed affections’: ‘there are some affections wherein there is a composition of each of the aforementioned kinds of actings of the will [viz. positive or negative] as in the affection of pity…..And so in zeal’. (99)

So what?

So what are we to make of this? Briefly, I draw two morals. Edwards was a thorough-going Lockean when it came to the will and the affections. He took John Locke with him when he climbed the steps of the Northampton pulpit to preach about the affections in the context of the revivals. His enthusiasm for Locke was not a mere adolescent infatuation. Edwards made a big point of the fact that the term ‘affection’ was reserved for strong exercises of the will, something that Locke did not stress. In doing this in Part I he was preparing the ground for the development of the major theme of the Affections, that true religion consists much ‘in the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclinations and will of the soul’.(96) He preferred ‘affection’ to ‘emotion’, and ‘woulding’ to ‘velleity’. But otherwise the two were singing from the same hymn-sheet.

The second point is: there is no substitute for consulting primary sources.

In the next post on Locke and Edwards I shall offer more results of such consultings.

[For those interested in even more of Locke and Edwards, see Paul Helm. 'The Human Self and the Divine Trinity', in Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary, Essays in Honor of Sang Hyun Lee, ed. Don Schweitzer (New York, Peter Lang, 2010)]