To the spirits in prison . . .

Here is an interesting passage, one that has come up in discussion with a few brothers in Christ, as a result of working through the Apostles’ Creed (i.e. He descended into Hell). The passage is I Peter 3:19:

. . . in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, . . .

I’ll let you look up the surrounding context, which will be necessary, of course, to come to an interpretive conclusion on this crux interpretum. Peter H. Davids provides an array of attempts to decipher this exegetical conundrum:

. . . (1) The spirits are the souls of the faithful of the OT and the “prison” is simply the place they remained awaiting Christ, who proclaims his redemption to them; (2) the spirits are the souls of those who died in Noah’s flood, who are kept in Hades, and who hear the gospel proclaimed by Christ after his death and before his resurrection (or heard the gospel in the days of Noah before being put in “prison”); (3) the spirits are the fallen angels of Gen. 6:1ff. and the prison is where they are kept bound and hear the proclamation of judgment by Christ (or a call to repent given in the days of Noah); (4) the spirits are the demons, the offspring of the fallen angels of Gen. 6:1ff., who have taken refuge or been protected (rather than been imprisoned) in the earth and the proclamation is that of Christ’s (postresurrection) invasion of their refuge; or (5) the spirits are the fallen angels, but the preacher is Enoch, who proclaimed judgment to them.

In order to decide among these alternatives, we need to examine the meaning of each term in context in the light of its linguistic background. “Spirits” in the NT always refers to nonhuman spiritual beings unless qualified (as, e.g., in Heb. 12:23; see Matt. 12:45; Mark 1:23, 26; 3:30; Luke 10:20; Acts 19:15-16; 16:16; 23:8-9; Eph. 2:2; Heb. 1:14; 12:9; 16:13,14). . . . (Peter H. Davids, “NICNT, The First Epistle of Peter,” 139-40)

So which is it? I have a preference, as, of course, does Davids. But what do you think? What alternative above fits the context best, and why do you think it does? Just give an off-the-cuff response, if you want, but at least give a little reason, why [?].

 

Worshiping God In All of His Communal Glory

With all this talk of the trinity, it has reminded me of another great theologian and pastor’s thoughts on the same issue—John Owen:

Our access in our worship is said to be “to the Father;” and this “through Christ,’ or his mediation; “by the Spirit,” or his assistance. Here is a distinction of the persons, as to their operations, but not at all as to their being the object of our worship. For the Son and the Holy Ghost are no less worshipped in our access to God than the Father himself. . . . When, by the distinct dispensation of the Trinity, and every person, we are led to worship . . . any person, we do herein worship the whole Trinity; and every person, by what name soever, of Father, Son, or Holy Ghost, we invocate him. (John Owen, “Works,” 2:269)

Here we see Owen emphasizing the oneness of God, but not apart from His threeness as revealed in the economy of salvation; more specifically in worship. Owen seems to be pressing into the “interpenetrating” (perichoresis) foci of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the basis for his statement, “. . . we do herein worship the whole Trinity.” Without the three, there is no one, and without the one there is no three.

I’m afraid much of this is lost on contemporary “Evangelical” (and even “Reformed”) Christianity. Instead we worship GOD from whom the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit “manifest” themselves at given points in salvation history. In other words, we have a “substance” which we call God’s “essence,” and then the three personages whom, in a sense, hover underneath this “singularity” or “unity” of GOD.

This conception, which I think is fitting for contemporary Christianities’ understanding, is at odds with Owen’s, and Scriptures’ description, which sees the oneness of God as defined by His threeness, and His threeness defined by His oneness through interpenetrating love. God is not a substance, He is a communal relationship, and the sooner we get this, the sooner we can begin to truly worship The Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

 

The Ineffable Splendor of The Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit is such a minimized character within the triadic unfolding of God, partly because this is His mission—to bear witness and magnify Jesus—and partly because if He has received any attention, often times it is in an abused way (i.e. pentecostalism). The Holy Spirit, historically, has been thought of as the linch-pen who subjectifies, for us, the objective work of Christ. He is the One who, eternally functions as the communal personage that completes the interpenetrating (i.e. perichoretic) stasis of Father and Son. He subjectively brings us into this communion, by uniting us with Christ through His humanity, and into His divinity. This is why Paul can say:

. . . But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. ~ I Corinthians 6:17

So much beyond the minimalist and abusive notions that accompany thinking about the Holy Spirit today, there is a richness about Him, that can only be fully appreciated within the context of Jesus’ incarnation, which He bears witness to, and the subsequent fullness of Joy He brings us into as our union with Christ becomes the occasion for knowing the Father. Once again Torrance has this insightful plus for our consideration:

Like Christ the Holy Spirit is one in being and of the same being as the Father, but unlike Christ the Holy Spirit is not one in being and of the same being as we are, for he incarnated the Son but does not incarnate himself, he utters the Word but does not utter himself. He directs us through himself to the one Word and Face of God in Jesus Christ in accordance with whom all our knowledge of God is formed in our minds, knowledge of the Spirit as well as of the Father and of the Son. This is the diaphanous self-effacing nature of the Holy Spirit who hides himself, as it were, behind the Father in the Son and behind the Son in the Father, but also the enlightening transparence of the Spirit who by throwing his eternal Light upon the Father through the Son and upon the Son in the Father, brings the radiance of God’s Glory to bear upon us. We do not know the Holy Spirit directly in his own personal Reality or Glory. We know him only in his unique spiritual mode of activity and transparent presence in virtue of which God’s self-revelation shines through to us in Christ, and we are made through the Spirit to see the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father. While the Holy Spirit thereby guards the transcendence of God who infinitely exceeds what finite minds can grasp, nevertheless through his personal presence to us he brings the ineffable Being and Reality of God out of his unapproachable Light to bear upon us, and brings us out of our distance and darkness to have communion with himself and through himself with the Father and the Son. Because through him the Word of God continues to sound forth and is heard and believed, because in his light we see light and by his creative operation we come to know the unknowable and eternal God, we know the Holy Spirit, although personally distinct from the Father and the Son, to be no less Lord God than the Father and the Son, both as he is toward us and as he is antecedently in the undivided oneness of God’s eternal being. (Thomas F. Torrance, “The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons,” 66-7)

 

Inhabitatio Scriptura as the “Spectacles” for Communing with Jesus

How important is ihabitatio scriptura, inhabiting scripture, for knowing God? When I say “inhabiting” I mean being so saturated in it that the Holy Spirit has space and opportunity to organically move in and through your being in such a way that there is a personal, “real” encounter with the Person, Jesus Christ. In other words, there is an interiorization of the gospels and epistles (and the Law, Prophets, and Psalms Lk 24) so that our approach to know Jesus isn’t in a fragmented petri dish way; but rather in an intimate marriage like relational way that is formed by a love that was first brought to us through Christ (cf. I Jn 4:19). It is through such thinking and approaching that the scriptures become central to the quest to know the Christian God, via the ordained terms that God has unfolded through the sending of His Son into time and space. Who else but T. F. Torrance gets the last and best word on this:

In seeking to interpret God’s trinitarian self-revelation through the medium of the gospels and epistles we have to do with an altogether deeper dimension in knowledge. But here it holds true that it is through personal dwelling in Christ and interiorising his Word within us that we enter into a cognitive union with him as God incarnate, and are thereby admitted to an intimate knowledge of God’s self-revelation in its intrinsic wholeness and are enabled to discern the truth of his self-revelation as we could not do otherwise. By indwelling the Scriptures of the New Testament and interiorising their message we become drawn into the circle of God’s revelation of himself through himself. Spiritually and theologically regarded, this kind of indwelling, in Christ and his Word, involves faith, devotion, meditation, prayer and worship in and through which we are given discerning access to God in his inner Communion as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Any faithful interpretation of the Scriptures operates on different levels, the linguistic and the conceptual level, but unless the interpreter participates in the movement of God’s unique self-revelation through Christ and in the Spirit which gave rise to the Scriptures and has left its imprint upon them, he or she will fail to understand them in their deep spiritual dimension and will be blind to their essential truth content. Hence if we are to interpret the Holy Scriptures we must cultivate the habit of tuning into them as a whole in order to penetrate into their centre of meaning, so that the spiritual realities and truths of divine revelation to which they testify may be allowed to govern our knowing and shape our understanding of them. It is when we interpret different passages and statements in the light of the whole that their real meaning and force become apparent. (Thomas F. Torrance, “The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons,” 3

Far from bashing critical study of the scriptures (i.e. linguistic, literary, grammatical/lexical, analyses, etc.), Torrance is underscoring the necessity for “Christian interpreters” to recognize that there is more (not less) involved in the “illuminating” process of exegeting the scriptures; and thus knowing God who is triunity. The point is that scriptures are the ordained medium for knowing Jesus in all of his plenitude as the unfolding of the triune God. Do you see the point? As we are saturated in this medium the Holy Spirit takes it as witness to The medium, Jesus Christ—not only is Jesus The medium, in His Humanity for us, but He is the Beginning in His divinity through which we are enfolded and become partakers of the divine nature and communion shared by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit—I digress! Basically, be saturated in the scriptures. That is my admonition to you (and myself).

P. S. I said Torrance would get the last word, and in an inclusiastic way he is (I am trying to point you to his “best word” bracketed by my fumbling commentary ).

 

The Exclusivity of the Christian God through Revelation

By its very nature divine revelation is what Karl Barth called ‘a self-contained’ novum’, for it has its reality and truth wholly and in every respect within itself, and so can be known only through itself and out of itself, on its own ground and through the power of its own self-evidence and self-authentication. It is as such that revelation proceeds from God to man, breaking sovereignly into human life and thought, calling into question what people claim to know, and directing their thinking beyond themselves altogether. It creatively evokes an entirely new mode of consciousness, in faith and understanding, conditioned by a new relation to God initiated and set up, not from man’s side at all, but from the other side of the boundary between man and God. The knowledge of God given in this way through divine revelation is not from the known to the unknown, but from the hitherto unknown to the known. It is a mystery so utterly strange and so radically different that it cannot be apprehended and substantiated except out of itself, and even then it infinitely exceeds what we are ever able to conceive or spell out. Far less may it be assimilated into man’s familiar world of meaning and be brought into line with the framework of its commonly accepted truths, for the radically new conception of God proclaimed in the Gospel calls for a complete transformation of man’s outlook in terms of a new divine order which cannot be derived from or inferred from anything conceived by man before. In point of fact it actually conflicts sharply with generally accepted beliefs and established ideas in human culture and initiates a seismic reconstruction not only of religious and intellectual belief but of the very foundations of human life and knowledge. (T. F. Torrance, “The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons,” 19)

If what Torrance is saying is true, and it is , then this is the death knell of the via negativa, negative theology, speculative theology. Christ indeed is the Alpha and Omega!

You know this is my fourth book I’ve read by Thomas Forsyth Torrance, in about six months, and this is the best of the best thus far. In fact I would go so far to say, that I place this book just under the Bible on my desk when done reading for the evening . . . seriously. If Protestants had Popes (which some functionally do, btw), my vote would be for Torrance in absentia. What a gift to the body of Christ, I wish I had been exposed to him early in my studies at school, I probably would have done my Master’s thesis on him—without a doubt. I want to highly, vehemently recommend that you all, who read here, get your hands on this book: The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons by Thomas F. Torrance; you will not be sorry you did—in fact the only reason you might be sorry, is if you don’t get this book, and you get to heaven and realize you should’ve . Halden originally recommended this one for me, and I’m glad he did!

 

Torrance and Trinity: Knowledge of God as Redeemer

The Christian doctrine of God is to be understood from within the unique, definitive and final self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ his only begotten Son, that is, from within the self-revelation of God as God become man for us and our salvation, in accordance with its proclamation in the Gospel and it actualisation through the Holy Spirit in the apostolic foundation of the Church. It is in the Lord Jesus, the very Word and Mind of God incarnate in our humanity, that the eternal God ‘defines’ and identifies himself for us as he really is. Only in Christ is God’s self-revelation identical with himself, and only in Christ, God for us, does he communicate his self-revelation identical with Himself, and only in Christ, God for us, does he communicate his self-revelation to us in such a way that authentic knowledge of God is embodied in our humanity, and thus in such a way that it may be communicated to us and understood by us. Jesus Christ is at once the complete revelation of God to man, and the perfect correspondence on man’s part to that revelation required by it for the fulfilment [sic] of its own revealing movement. As the faithful answer to God’s self-revelation Jesus Christ yields from out of our human existence and life the fulfilled reception and faithful embodiment which belongs to the content of God’s self-revelation is identical with himself that we may rightly apprehend it and really know God as he is in himself, in the oneness and differentiation of God within his own eternal Being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for what God is toward us in his historical self-manifestation to us in the Gospel as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he is revealed to be inherently and eternally in himself. It is thus in and through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit that the distinctively Christian doctrine of God in his transcendent triunity is mediated to us. (T. F. Torrance, “The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons,” 1)

So without Jesus, and Knowledge of Him as Redeemer there would be no knowledge of God as trinity. According to Torrance, the economic trinity is univocal with the so called immanent or ontological trinity. In other words there isn’t another God ‘behind the back of Jesus.’ Who we see in Him, we will see in eternity . . . there won’t be any surprises. The Lord you worship in Jesus now, is the same Lord you will worship later. So His disclosure and the subsequent trinitarian shape of God revealed by Jesus (cf. Jn 1:1 is who God is in His very form and being.

Furthermore, because Jesus assumed humanity, our humanity, we have been brought into the union of divine life. This means that there truly is an epistemological possibility for knowledge of God, for man. And that possibility is rooted within the reality of Christ’s humanity enfleshed in history. Without this bridge all we would be left with is a god who is out there against us, and not for us. The incarnation and trinitarian shape of God, is indeed distinctly the Christian God, the only God who can sympathize with our weakness, and yet remain without sin.

 

The Primacy of the Pope, and Church Unity

If I am a Protestant, which I am, and have not bowed the knee to the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, can I be truly saved? Not according to Bull Unam Sanctum:

Furthermore We declare, state and define that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of all men that they submit to the Roman Pontiff. (Bull Unam Sanctum of Pope Boniface VIII, 1302. The Teaching of the Catholic Church, by Neuner and Roos, S. J., p. 204, No. 342)

If this is true, and still stands today, this really does not bode well for ecumenicism, unless of course by ecumenicism we mean that Protestants go back to Rome, and her Pope.

There is more, the Pope for Catholics is the embodiment of St. Peter, and thus he holds the keys to the kingdom. He alone decides orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and heresy. Note how high he is placed by Vatican Council I:

Hence We teach and declare that by the appointment of our Lord the Roman Church possesses a superiority of ordinary power over all other Churches, and that this power of jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff, which is truly Episcopal, is immediate, to which all, of whatever rite or dignity, both pastors and faithful, both individually and collectively, are bound by their duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience, to submit, not only in matters that pertain to faith and morals, but also in those that pertain to discipline and government of the Church throughout the world. (Vatican Council, pp. 224-225, No. 379)

I realize that Vatican II (1960’s) tried to “soften” the blow of such dogmatic statements, but if in fact we are going to be consistent and hold to continuity with the teaching of the Roman Pontiff’s; I don’t see how the above can be truly “softened.” If the above is true, again, any form of Ecumenicism, between Protestants and Catholics is going to have to be “one-sided.” In the sense that the Protestant side will necessarily have to recognize the “Supreme Authority” of the Pope’s office.

Any “bishop’s” authority, even Apostle’s authority, is subsidiary to his fidelity to the Gospel Message; insofar as the “Apostle” diverges from the simple Gospel message, then his “authority” is called into suspect. Of course this was the reason for the Protestant Reformation, wasn’t it? Furthermore, there is a whole complex related to the issue of assigning the label “Apostle” to anyone, post first century (i.e. those who actually saw the Resurrected Jesus). If we are to hold to an “Apostolic Succession,” of the kind that provides the basis and framework for the Pope and the Roman curia; then apart from just assuming a genetic continuum of sorts, there needs to be substantiation beyond an ad hoc self-proclamation—i.e. of the kind that Rome assumes.

 

Hebrews 6, Don’t Go Back!

Hebrews 6, you know that infamous crux interpretum, the one that Arminians and Calvinists essentially agree upon. Here is just a bit of that passage:

4. For in the case of those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit, 5. and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, 6. and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame. ~ Hebrews 6:4-6

• The Calvinist says that this is referring to someone who was never really “saved” to begin with.
• The Arminian says that this is talking about a person who lost their salvation.

And I think both of these views are defunct. I think, contrarily that this passage is talking to “real believers,” and that it is not referring to a “real believer who lost salvation,” since once this happened it would be impossible for that person to be “re-justified” against the Arminian approach. I think there is a better way with this passage. I think the better way requires that we keep a few things in mind:

• That this epistle is written to Hebrew Believers
• The occasion is dealing with Jewish believers tempted with falling away to “Old Covenant Judaism”
• That the informing theology of this epistle is squarely couched within contrasting and comparing Old Covenant/New Covenant
• That biblical theology should take precedence over dogmatic theology when dealing with the categories of this epistle

With the above in mind, I think this passage is talking to believers, and that the author is not warning them of losing their salvation; rather that if they return to the “Old Covenant” Levitic system there will be no space for repentance. Why? Because, the theme of the epistle, the Old Covenant, for Yahweh has become obsolete, i.e. it has no more “power.” In other words they will be operating in a “system” that is passe’, it is no more, it has been displaced by the “New and better Covenant.” It would be like a butter-fly going back to her cocoon, with the goal of going back to the “cocoon-life,” this just wouldn’t work—same goes for the Old Covenant, it just doesn’t “work” in light of Christ and the New Covenant. The author encapsulates the point I am getting at with this verse:

. . . And where these have been forgiven, there is no longer any sacrifice for sin. ~ Hebrews 10:18

In other words, the Old Covenant is a place that has no power over sin, only Christ’s sacrifice has the power-filled effect that all humanity is in need of. The author is arguing if they want to go back to the “Old way” then they will be placing themselves in an empty arena. I think this is the broader context we should approach our Hebrews 6 passage through. The author is developing the theme of the now defunct nature of the Old Covenant. Truly if they go back there, there is no room for “repentance” to take place, because now that can only happen within the realm of the New Covenant instituted through the blood of Christ. So he is saying, “don’t go back, move forward with your High Priest, Christ!”

This is really under-developed, but hopefully you get the sense for what I am trying to argue.

 

Tongues Gobbledy Goop . . . Blah, Blah, Blah . . . Wah, Wah, Wah

Can someone explain how tongues ended up being a “language” that is un-intelligible versus intelligible? As far as I can see in scripture, tongues in the books: Acts, I Corinthians, and Romans are of the “intelligible” species. Even if tongues can correlate literally to the tongues of Angels, the only examples we have of Angel talk in the scriptures, again, are intelligible. The only passage that might be able to construe tongues as “un-intelligible,” legitimately is I Corinthians 14; where Paul says (paraphrase): “if the unconverted come in and hear the church speaking in tongues, they might think they are crazy,” but this still does not demonstrate that tongues are of the “un-intelligible” kind. For example, in Acts 2 and Pentecost (the tongues of fire), many of the “unconverted” believed the saints (new and old) to be “drunk,” or crazy-talking—this case of tongues, as all examples, as far as I can see, are intelligible languages. Anyway, I could try to argue some more, but the question still stands, . . . can someone explain how tongues ended up being a “language” that is un-intelligible versus intelligible?

 

Patristics and the Holy Spirit, Theology is Messy

Okay, so maybe the last post wasn’t all that exciting . . . sorry . This post might not be either, but it has to do with the Holy Spirit, just not the sensational stuff yet. What this post will be highlighting, briefly, is how the doctrine of the Holy Spirit (as God) developed within the Patristic churches’ expression. In this case I will be quoting J. N. D. Kelly on the keynote role that Gregory of Nyssa had in the development of the best way of thinking of the Holy Spirit. I.e. was He God? A creation of God? A force or energy? These were some of the questions the early church was facing, and the following description is how one of the Cappadocians worked it out for the Eastern church:

. . . It was Gregory of Nyssa, however, who provided what was to prove to be the definitive statement. The Spirit, he teaches, is out of God and is of Christ; He proceeds out of the Father and receives from the Son; He cannot be separated from the Word. From this it is a short step to the idea of the twofold procession of the Spirit. According to him, the three Persons are to be distinguished by Their origin, the Father being cause . . . and the other two caused . . . . The two Persons Who are caused may be further distinguished, for one of Them is directly . . . produced by the Father, while the other proceeds from the Father through an intermediary. Viewed in this light, the Son alone can claim the title Only-begotten, and the Spirit’s relation to the Father is in no way prejudiced by the fact that He derives His being from Him through the Son. Elsewhere Gregory speaks of the Son as related to the Spirit as cause to effect, and uses the analogy of a torch imparting its light first to another torch and then through it to a third in order to illustrate the relation of the three Persons. (J. N. D. Kelly, “Early Christian Doctrines,” 262)

Later on this would become an issue of contention between the Western and Eastern branches of the church (the filioque and the Great Schism 1054 A.D.), i.e. how the Spirit proceeds, or from whom, but that goes beyond the intent of this post, at the moment. What do you think of Gregory of Nyssa’s articulation, as represented by Kelly, is it acceptable to you? He is trying to honor the homoousion (the deity or substance or person of the Holy Spirit as God) of the Spirit, along with Christ, and the Father; while at the same time also trying not to fall prey to subordinating the Holy Spirit to a level that makes Him less than God. I think Gregory does a good job at that, but maybe you still think the language used above sounds a little questionable or “ify.” Let me know what you think!

Oh yeah, one more point, I also wanted this post to illustrate the fact that the way we have received our theology today was not always as nice, neat, and simple as we think it might be. In other words, the early church had to wrangle with things, and work through stuff (stuff that today we either consider “orthodox” or “heretical” because of them), fundamental stuff that we all to often, I think, don’t appreciate the right way. Theology, good theology, is messy, heart-wrenching stuff . . . because it is a relational thing, not necessarily an mathematical equation.