Christian Theology: Words about words about words?

How doth it appear that there is a God? The very light of nature in man, and the works of God, declare plainly that there is a God; but his word and Spirit only do sufficiently and effectually reveal him unto men for their salvation.

- The Larger Catechism, Question 1.

I think you will agree, then, that no form of natural theology has ever spoken properly of the God who is there. None of the great Greek philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, and none of the great modern philosophers, like Descartes, Kant, Hegel or Kierkegaard and others, have ever spoken of the God who is there.

- Cornelius Van Til to Francis Schaeffer, March 1969

Here’s an important question that you don’t often find discussed even in conservative and confessional Reformed circles. Namely, how can we be confident and assured that the discipline of theology, and the religion that lies behind it, has a subject-matter? How may we be confident that there is a God and Lord that our words ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ refer to? This question is never discussed, or very rarely. To use Van Til’s language, how do we know that the God who is there, is there? It is assumed that the words do have success in referring beyond themselves. This is not the question of what is true in theology, but a more basic question, How can we be sure that there is truth or falsity in theology? There are allied questions to this which are often discussed, the question of personal assurance, and the cognitive status of Scripture, for example. But not this question.

A number of factors may jointly contribute to the production of this deafening silence. I suggest three, which I place (lest you wonder) in no particular order.

Anyone who has any experience of the theological discussion that prevails in academic departments of religion and theology will be familiar with the phenomenon of theological autonomy, the sociological phenomenon, I mean. The business of theology is conducted exclusively between theologians with rules that exclude or forbid raising questions of truth and falsity. It is a game, as its practitioners will often concede. Basil Mitchell has an amusing essay ‘How to Play Theological Ping-Pong’. It is this fact that develops in the minds of non-theologians the further thought that theology is ‘not a subject’, and which is slowly but surely contributing to the demise of university departments of theology. Why should tax-payers money be spent on word games? Academia has been at the centre of the flourishing of ‘trinitarian studies’ in the last few decades? Whose model of the trinity works? Eastern or Western? One that tends to tritheism or the opposite which tends to modalism? Is the trinity a model for human community, even for politics? All of these are good questions. But they are only good questions if there is first a satisfactory answer to the question, Have we reason to think that there is a God who is triune?

Secondly, since the Second World War, an influential strand of conservative theology has been in thrall to ‘presuppositionalism’, the view that only by positing or presupposing the existence of God, or the Scriptures and their account of God, is it possible to uphold the rationality of Christian belief and to show the weakness of all positions which do not make that presupposition. Maybe that is so. But in Reformed theology ‘presuppositionalism’ is a striking novelty. Historically speaking, Reformed theology has been somewhat relaxed on the question of offering the arguments of natural theology to prove the existence of God. But presuppositionalism as an apologetic outlook is a complete novelty in the history of Reformed theology. It is strange, then, that the need to hold this outlook has come to be, for some, a test of orthodoxy, even in circles which uphold the Westminster Confession which perhaps is silent on the question but if anything appears to deny it. The project of natural theology is relegated to the theological museum, and (somewhat paradoxically) presuppositionalism shares its rejection of natural theology with Karl Barth. Extremes meet.

But in the zeitgeist that now prevails, such presuppositionalism simply becomes another form of insulation, another word game, this time a Bible word game, one practiced in the Bible-believing community. Paradoxically, presuppositionalism fits snugly into the relativistic post-modern mindset in which sociology triumphs over theology. More formally, it relies on a coherence theory of truth, not surprisingly given the Roycian background of its most notorious practitioner, Cornelius Van Til.

Suppose that those who propound presuppositionalism had paid less attention to the requirement of rationality, and more attention to the questions of the reality of Christian theology as a discipline, questions of the reality and objectivity of the faith. My guess is that the guarantees afforded by what is presupposed would look a lot less copper-bottomed than they appeared to those who were interested exclusively in rationality.

Those seeking an answer to the question; do words such as ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ actually succeed in referring to anything? will find no relief from the more recent proposals of the Vanhoozers and the Frankes. For they more or less meekly follow the academic temper of the times, being almost exclusively concerned with the in-house language of the church. In Vanhoozer’s case this shows itself in linguistic terms, the langue of speech acts and language games and theodrama, the fine tuning of the language of faith. You will look in vain for any discussion of natural theology or natural religion. In Franke’s case the terms of the debate-are sociological, the local church and its language, first-order language, with the theologians’ job being to fine turn that language giving considerable attention in doing so to the ‘context’ in which church and theologians are each situated. Christians talk to each other, confessing their faith, participating in the drama. But is there really a drama? Is anyone out there? Is there a God who occupies reality beyond the limits of the Christian village, beyond the moat and the drawbridge, and all similar enclosures?

All these outlooks are certainly different, but they have in common what I shall call ‘theological autonomy’, the idea that (for whatever reason) theology is a distinct discipline which does not depend upon any others. That is, supposedly, its strength. It has insulated itself from intellectual attack. But may theology not be the Emperor who has no clothes rather than the Queen of the sciences?

Thankfully, there are straws in the wind that suggest that things are slowly but surely moving away from such theological autonomy, even among those with a historic confessional stance. Two publications have recently come my way which indicate this. David Vandrunen, who teaches at Westminster Seminary West, Escondido, California, has recently published Bioethics and the Christian (Crossway, 2009). Writing of the ‘common task’ of bioethics, he pleasds for recognition of the relation between Christian and secular ethics in terms of what Christian ethics has in common with the world, and of how God is revealed in his law in nature as well as in Scripture. This is in fact the latest of a series of more technical publications by Vandrunen on natural law in Reformed theology. He is also the author of A Biblical Case for Natural Law, (Grand Rapids, Mich. Acton Institute.)

The other publication is an essay ‘Natural Theology and the Westminster Confession of Faith’, by John. V. Fesko and Guy M. Richard, which may be found in The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century, III ed. Ligon Duncan, (Mentor, 2009. I have borrowed part of the letter of Van Til’s from this article.) This is an informative review of the place of natural theology and natural religion in some of the Reformers and some prominent Puritans, culminating in a study of the outlook of representative Westminster divines and of the Confession itself.

How are we to form the conviction that we may successfully refer to God, the God who is there? My general answer to this question, the age-old answer, is that grace builds on nature, it does not destroy it. I hope to follow this up in a number of Analyses that are to follow.

The Logic of Imputation

Behold him there! The risen Lamb, my perfect, sinless Righteousness, The great unchangeable I AM, the King of glory and of grace.

- Charitie Lees Bancroft

Imputation is a central feature of accounts of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The word ‘imputes’ is generally held to be equivalent to Paul’s words translated ‘counts’, in Romans 4.6, ‘count’ 4.8, and ‘counted’ 4. 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11 (These words are more often than not translated as ‘credits’ and ‘credited’ by the NIV, and I shall return to that fact later.) In Reformed thought justification occurs through the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, and sometimes these two distinct blessings are combined together. (Imputation is also applied to the relation between the Fall of Adam and his connection with the race, but I shall not be concerned with this in what follows.)


Standard statements

The following are some of the ways that Reformed theologians have standardly understood the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.

(a) ‘Those whom God effectually calleth he also freely justifieth; not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience, to them as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them’. (Westminster Confession of Faith, Ch. XI.I)

(b) ‘Therefore when we say that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us for justification, and that we are just before God through imputed righteousness and not through any righteousness inherent in us, we mean nothing else than that the obedience of Christ rendered in our name to God the Father is so given to us by God that it is reckoned to be truly ours and that it is the sole and only righteousness on account of and by the merit of which we are absolved from the guilt of our sins and obtain a right to life; and that there is in us no righteousness or good works by which we can deserve such good benefits which can bear the severe examination of the divine court’. (F. Turretin, Institutes, II. 648)

(c) ‘The imputation of Christ’s righteousness, moreover, is totally misconstrued by Bellarmine and his associates. They picture it as a fiction that is opposed to reality. Imputed righteousness, according to them, is a righteousness that exists only in the imagination, whereas infused righteousness, according to them, is the only real and true righteousness. That picture, however, is completely mistaken. Justification is as real as sanctification, and imputation is not less real than infusion. The only difference is this: in justification righteousness is granted to us in a juridical sense while in sanctification it becomes ours in an ethical sense. Both are very real and very necessary’. (H. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics. IV.213)

In the context of the Reformation there has been great concern to protect the idea that the righteousness which justifies is not transfused or translated. We see this in the quotations: the righteousness which justifies, is not inherent, it is not infused. Whatever is transfused or translated in connection with the business of being justified by faith alone (whatever that may be) is never the ground of justification. The ground of justification is what is imputed. But such imputed righteousness is not fictional, it is real.

Any doctrine which proposes that justification is on the basis of what is transfused to the believer, as in Roman Catholic accounts of justification in terms of the acquiring of subjective righteousness (or later Baxterianism’s justification through evangelical righteousness, the keeping of a new law, and the like), are wholeheartedly repudiated. So Reformed theologians readily write and speak of justification by an alien or external righteousness.

My aim here is to offer some elucidation of this Reformed position by examining the logic of the idea imputing external righteousness. The word ‘logic’ need not frighten anyone. I am not attempting to argue for the truth of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness ‘by logic’, only to spell out some of its features by attempting to show what the idea of the imputation of righteousness, or reckoning or counting someone righteous, implies and does not imply.


Internal and external changes

Suppose that a person has a child, becomes a mother or a father. As a consequence someone else becomes a grandparent, a grandfather or grandmother. What sort of a change is that of becoming a grandmother? It’s a different sort of change than that which occurs when, giving birth, the wife becomes a mother; or, learning of the birth, the grandfather reaches into his pocket and buys the newborn baby a gift.

Or suppose a person comes to weigh less than his friend simply by virtue of the fact that his friend has put on weight, while his own weight has not changed. That’s a different sort of change than coming to weigh less by dieting. Without doing anything, the person has changed. We can say that the person is reckoned to be lighter in weight by virtue of something purely ‘external’ to him, to the fact that his friend has become inherently heavier. By the action of another, by a woman giving birth, and by nothing else, her father has been changed, he has become a grandfather. By the action of another, by his friend putting on weight, and by nothing else, a person has been changed, he has come to weigh less than his friend. Here we have a good guide what is an inherent change – becoming a mother, putting on weight, are good examples - and what is an ‘external’ change - becoming lighter than the friend, becoming a grandparent. Something we might say is that the ‘external’ change is ‘purely relational’. It is in virtue of someone’s relation to another person, and no other fact, that he may be said to have changed, to have become lighter, to have become a grandparent. But in the case of ‘inherent’ change – such as becoming pregnant and giving birth, putting on weight - something other than a relation.

We can, if we are careful enough, distinguish between changes in A that result solely from factors external to A , and those that are due to internal changes to A. One person really changes, and as a consequence someone else changes, but not in the same sense. for I am going to argue, as you have guessed, that the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is best thought of as an ‘external’ change in the one to whom the righteousness is imputed.


Having righteousness imputed

As a result of what Christ has done, those to whom his righteousness is imputed change. But how Christ has changed, by procuring righteousness through his life and death, is very different from how the person to whom that righteousness is imputed changes. Something is true of him that was not true of him before. But the change, the new truth, is not brought about by a change within him, but by the establishing of a new external relationship for him, and by that alone.

Of course, there is one important difference between the examples of becoming a grandparent, and becoming less heavy than, on the one hand, and becoming righteous, in the case of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. There is a third party. There are two parties, Christ and the one who receives the imputation of his righteousness, but there is a third party, the one who imputes, or reckons, or counts that righteousness to another. That’s very important for the full statement of the doctrine, but it does not affect the point that those to whom the righteousness of Christ is imputed change in rather the way that the way in which a person becomes a grandparent or a person comes to be less heavy than his friend becoming more heavy.

They don’t thereby undergo any ‘internal’ change, but enter into a new relation of a purely external kind. This new relation has immeasurable consequences, and is accompanied by other sorts of change which are most certainly ‘internal’ and acquired, the changes that are associated with the acquiring of Christian graces, and the putting off of the old man, Christian sanctification, the work of the Spirit. Justification is distinct from but inseparably connected with the internal changes that sanctify. But this fact, vitally important though it is, does not alter the fact that in justification the only thing that changes about the one who is justified is that person’s external relation to God, the imputer.


Imputing and infusing

Sometimes it is said that the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is ‘fictional’ and by that is meant that it is ‘made up’. But it is no more made up than the friend’s becoming less heavy is fictional. Is he heavier or not? In relation to his friend, he is heavier. A person who is pronounced innocent on grounds that ensure his innocence (in the case of ‘reckoned’ innocence, grounds provided by another) is not ’fictionally’ innocent, though it is certain a fiction to suppose that someone has an inherent quality that he in fact fails to have. Some accounts of imputation make it seem less arbitrary by interposing the thought that the one whom Christ thus benefits is ‘in union with’ Christ. What the Head has done is reckoned to the members. (Just as, becoming a grandfather is due to what has happened to the grandfather’s daughter, and to no other).

In becoming a grandfather, or coming to weigh less (in the examples given earlier) what comes to be true does so purely in virtue of a real change in one of the parties to an already existing relation. That is all, that’s the full explanation. Nothing moves, nothing transfers from one friend to another. The father of the mother is not infused with grandfatherliness, nor the friend that comes to weigh less infused with weight loss. Nothing is infused, and nothing becomes inherent than was not inherent before. So it is with the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.

In imputation is Christ’s righteousness credited?

That’s why the terms ‘imputation’ or ‘reckon’ or ‘count’ as used in the doctrine of justification, are vitally different from ‘impartation’ or ‘infusion’, or even (unless used with great care) from ‘transfer’ or ‘credit’. If something is imparted to A, then what is imparted to A becomes A’s; what is infused into A is fused with A. But what is imputed or reckoned or counted does not – in the same sense – become a part of A. A is benefited or blessed by having the righteousness of Christ reckoned, but not because he thereby receives the righteousness of Christ internally.

I suggest that the NIV’s use of ‘credits’ (Rom. 4. 4,6 – but ‘count’ in 4.8) is potentially misleading at this point. For crediting (at least in the financial sense) is not merely or purely external. If I pay your cheque to me into the bank my bank account is credited with the amount and I become better off, financially speaking. That’s not the sort of reckoning that imputation is. The pulpit illustration of imputation drawn from Philemon, ‘if he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account’ is not apt. Our sin is not charged to Christ’s account. He does not become really guilty, as Paul would have become really poorer had to had to pay up. We must therefore be careful not to let accountancy trump theology at this point. Christ’s righteousness is not credited to our account. Never. It is reckoned to be ours, something quite different. Imputation is not a relation between God and a person’s account, but between God and a person. What is imputed remains external; hence the aptness of thinking of Christ’s imputed righteousness as a covering, and clothing. ‘Blessed are they whose sins are covered’. Do I change when I put a hat on? Only in the sense that I have a different relation with the hat than before. It was on the peg, now it is on the head. Am I inherently changed by being hatted? Not a bit.

I develop an illustration I have used before when discussing Bishop Tom Wright’s views. If I am given insurance cover against accidents, do I change? Do I possess something called accident-cover, a sort of weird substance that only insurance brokers have the power to discern? Obviously not. What then do I have when I have that cover? I possess certain possibilities that I do not have without it. The possibility of claiming for the expenses incurred should I have an accident. What do I have when I am covered with Christ’s righteousness? I have the warrant to go before the judgment of God and to claim Christ’s righteousness as mine. And in view of my need, that warrant will most certainly be exercised. The believer will be accepted in the Beloved.

Dynamic Equivalence: Another Penn'orth

Some who read the last Taking A Line, on ‘Dynamic Equivalence’, raised a number of points, and kindly left links on my piece. I’m grateful to them. I thought that I would have a go at commenting on these, or at least on some of them, if only to try to clarify some of the things that I was asserting.

First, I do not think that changing the nomenclature from ‘dynamic equivalence’ to ‘functional equivalence’ or some other kind, like ’receptive equivalence’ or ‘effective equivalence’ will help us very much. For functional equivalence, though perhaps less precise than ‘dynamic equivalence’, also has its home in physical and social situations. An artificial heart may be functionally equivalent to a real heart, a President functionally equivalent to a King; in some circumstances, a knife is functionally equivalent to a screwdriver, and so on. Each does the job of opening the can of paint equally well. But what is the test of functional equivalence in the apprehension of words and sentences? Sameness of behaviour? Perhaps sameness of verbal response to the same question? These won’t work, I think. If A responds to sentence S by doing some action, and B refers to sentence T, a different sentence, by doing the same action, by going to the same place, say, how do we know that they are doing the same thing for the same reason? So – dynamic equivalence? No. Functional equivalence? No as well. Cognitive equivalence? Hmm, more like it. Two sentences have the same meaning if they have the same truth conditions.

The following point was raised: that I don’t define cognitive equivalence. But I did provide a definition, or at least a fairly clear characterisation, as follows: two expressions are cognitively equivalent if they are true together and false together. (I know that there are philosophical issues lurking here, but for present purposes I believe that they can be safely ignored.) ‘Meaning’ is of course as slippery as an eel. But in the endeavour to translate a document which offers us the revealed truth of God, providing translations that preserve truth-conditions must be the first aim. The ongoing study of each language will help this, of course, even the identification of what may seem at first sight to be merely accidental accompaniments to the use of a word. So, emphasising cognitive equivalence is no excuse for philistinism.

Perhaps I should have added that cognitive equivalence embraces anything with cognitive content. Commands and questions, which strictly speaking do not have a truth value, have cognitive value, obviously. Is ‘Pass the salt’ cognitively equivalent to ‘Close the window’? Obviously not. Is ‘Is it raining?’ cognitively equivalent to ‘Is it snowing?’ Obviously not. Is ‘Close the window’ cognitively equivalent to ‘Fermez la fenêtre’? Yes it is, in that the thought expressed by the one is the same thought as that expressed by the other. They have the same propositional content, they express the same thought.

In this connection I do not think it is helpful to talk of emotional meaning as opposed to intellectual meaning. No doubt certain expressions are intended to produce particular emotional responses, but only by believing the sentence. Effects produced by alliteration, say, or repetition, or by an onset of indigestion as we read the text, will usually be non-cognitive. Though if we were sure that the repetition was for emphasis then it would be plausible to suppose that ‘Boil the water, boil the water’ was cognitively equivalent to ‘It is important to boil the water’ or to 'Boil the water' uttered in a partiuclar tone of voice or to 'You must boil the water'. Other than such cases of linguistic convention, the emotional, literary, personal and other accidental associations that a word or sentence may have are not part of its cognitive meaning, however valued they may be by those who utter the word or the sentence. Nevertheless, as I've already said, the language to be translated ought to be studied hard in order to decide whether or not some of its associations may be intrinsic to the expression in the way that linguistic conventions of a language may be, and so be part of its meaning, or not.

It is not a question of assuming that cognitive equivalence is possible. For as I explained, if cognitive equivalence is never achievable, then we cannot have, in the words of the synoptic gospels, a faithful account of the words of Jesus in the Aramaic, and all theological reflection and preaching and communicating the account of things found in the Bible would necessarily be a distortion of the original. And if the primary function of special revelation is to disclose the plight of man and the power of God, by telling us the truth about each, then we are only in possession of a distorted version of the truth. (There may be enough of the original conveyed in the Greek still to do the trick, of course. But that's not quite the point. Remember the man who was converted at the theatre by reading the words 'To the Pit'.) The further we move from cognitive equivalence in our translating, the further away we move from a satisfactory translation of the original.

It was also said that I did not define a paraphrase. What is a paraphrase? The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says ‘An expression in other words of the sense of any passage or text: a free rendering or amplification of a passage’ . Two definitions for the price of one, there, it seems to me. According to the first, any good translation is a paraphrase. But a paraphrase is also ‘free’, containing ‘amplification’. It’s this second, the free, amplified sense, that needs watching . The exact line between literalness and paraphrase may be hard to draw, but there are clear examples of paraphrastic translations of the Bible, or parts of it: Good News for Modern Man, The Message, Letters to Young Churches, and so on. Some of them are very good. But a paraphrase is not a translation, that's all.

Any efforts that render a biblical text into colloquial and readily understandable prose by a free rendition, amplifying the sense of the original, is going to be more than a translation, even though such a thing may be a part of a very good sermon. The use of words in addition to those in the original is not necessarily to provide a paraphrase if it preserves the cognitive meaning of the original. That’s the test. To repeat, we shall not decide whether or not translations are accurate by word counts, but by endeavouring to answer the question: when the original language sentence T can be true, would the translated sentence L also be true? If it were false, would the translated sentence also be false? (The sentence ‘Fermez la fenêtre. s’il vous plait’ has more words in it than its cognitive equivalent ‘Close the window, please’, just as ‘John loves Janet’ has fewer words than the cognitive equivalent ‘Janet is loved by John’. What usually makes something a paraphrase, and not an expression of the meaning of the original, is the use of additional words drawn from colloquial, everyday speech, with the aim of achieving immediate comprehension; the downside is that there is a good chance that such immediate comprehension is usually a comprehension of ideas and expressions not present in the original.

What about words that, in the original, look unintelligible? Shall we not try to find a form of words that renders them intelligible? Of course. But by sticking as closely to the original as possible. May there not be passages in the original that are ambiguous? Yes. So we must find some device, such as producing the less preferred translation as a footnote, or providing a marginal note, for conveying and preserving that ambiguity. Are some things not hard to be understood? Yes, and so their translations ought to be hard to understand as well, and for the very same reasons.