Faith seeking Faith

Themes: Faith, On Knowing God

XIV.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. (John Donne, Holy Sonnets

The first quatrain of this sonnet hangs on the wall in our lounge room, it is the most beautiful expression of a prayer that I feel I am constantly praying.
I’ve been thinking a lot about faith over the past few months, thinking about the role of faith in the knowledge of God, the relationship of faith between God and human as that which constitutes the particular nature of Christian subjectivity, the role of the ‘faith of Christ’ in Christian redemption. and on and on.

There is something in the concept of ‘faith’ that captures the heart of what it means to be human.

What does that make me then, in my faithlessness?
I can only pray that God will give me to myself, that he will batter my heart.

and this is not from ourselves; it is God’s gift

Wherever we might begin, we only continue in the knowledge of God as faith seeks faith.

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Propositional Revelation

Themes: Doctrine, On Knowing God, On Language

I remember sitting in my Dad’s car a few years ago and having a ding-dong theological argument with him over the question of propositional revelation. He was telling me about something that he had been reading which suggested that restricting God’s revelation of himself to a merely propositional form was overly reductive. I was stirred to the heights of undergraduate fervour and waded in to defend the Truth of The Gospel.
“How could there be such a thing as non-propositional revelation?” I demanded. “If it is not propositional then it is nothing, it is not intelligible, it is not a revelation.”

Interestingly, propositional revelation was the subject of our doctrine class today, and I find that I’m not completely on the same page that I used to be. Sometimes my whole life seems to be a process of working out what my Dad was talking about.

Our class today was a strong defence of the primacy of propositional revelation. In fact, I’m being generous – there were definite points at which it was claimed that there is no revelation other than propositional revelation. The discussion was heavily guided by D. B. Knox’s article entitled, Propositional Revelation, the Only Revelation. (Have a read).

It was an interesting, stimulating class. It’s always more interesting to be lectured by someone with whom you’re not sure you agree. As I sat and chewed over what we were being taught I had to conclude that I simply cannot agree with that statement, as expressed in the title of Knox’s article, if it is given its normal sense.

Put down your stones…

It turns out I’m not alone, Michael Jensen wrote a helpful blog post about the issue a couple of years ago, I wish more notice had been taken of his point.

There’s a couple of things I would add to Michael’s article.

First, the continued use of the phrase ‘propositional revelation’ with a idiomatic definition of ‘propositional’ fosters poor critique of other theories of revelation. In our class it was suggested that, ‘propositional’ in ‘propositional revelation’ should be “understood in the less rigorous sense, of truthful communication” (yes, that’s a quote). Surely, most people would agree that, on a charitable understanding, ‘truthful communication’ describes revelation per se. The addition of the adjective ‘propositional’ is intended to characterise the form of that truthful communication. If you are allowed to define your position this broadly, you can say whatever you like about competing theories, without really grappling with the questions a rival theory is trying to solve.

Someone like Pannenberg, or Brunner, would be a staunch defender of propositional revelation, if by this you simply meant, ‘truthful communication from God’. When they attack propositional revelation they are attacking a particular understanding of the form of that truthful communication. Either we hold the view they are attacking, or we do not. At least we should be clear.

Secondly, the problem we might have with Pannenberg, Brunner or others, in their attempts to understand revelation ‘non-propositionally’, is not really that they think the concept of ‘revelation’ is broader than ‘propositions’. We’ve already conceded that much. It is that they appear to be seeking a way around (or behind) the Scriptures for a kind of essential revelational bedrock.
As I understand it, Pannenberg wants to find the bedrock of revelation in the public history of Jesus, focussed upon the resurrection; Brunner, in the Divine-Human encounter.
Pannenberg and Brunner both appear to make Scripture a contingent element of revelation. Someone committed to ‘propositional revelation’ (in Knox’s sense) objects to this conclusion. The commitment to ‘propositional revelation’ is really the commitment to the essential role of the Scriptures in God’s revealing of himself.

The long and short of it is this,
I think my Dad was right, in that God’s communication of himself is not reducible to true or false statements about himself. And yet, God in his sovereign freedom communicates himself in an essential relation to the text of Scripture. I’m still working out what I think that means – intelligibly, linguistically, and?
But of this I’m pretty sure:

I believe in scriptural revelation.

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Reading with Zwingli

Themes: On Knowing God, On Pity, Reading, Reading Scripture

I know for certain that God teaches me, because I have experienced it: and to prevent misunderstanding, this is what I mean when I say that I know for certain that God teaches me. When I was younger, I gave myself overmuch to human teaching, like others of my day, and when about seven or eight years ago I undertook to devote myself entirely to the Scriptures I was always prevented by philosophy and theology. But eventually I came to the point where led by the Word and Spirit of God I saw the need to set aside all these things and to learn the doctrine of God direct from his own word. Then I began to ask God for light and the Scriptures became far clearer to me… than if I had studied many commentators and expositors. Note that it is always a sure sign of God’s leading, for I could never have reached that point by my own feeble understanding. (H. Zwingli, On the Clarity and Certainty or Power of the Word of God)

I’ve been reading Holy Scripture by John Webster with a few guys, in a book group, at College. It is a cracking read.
This quote from Zwingli came in the middle of a chapter entitled ‘Reading in the economy of grace’. The chapter is a theological analysis of how a Christian reads Scripture.
It’s a bombshell – throughout the book Webster essentially denies one of the central presuppositions that undergirds critical Biblical scholarship – and ultimately Modernity itself: that knowledge is, in principle, equally open to any knower.
Crudely put, one of the central philosophical assumptions of our society is that it doesn’t matter who you are, a Fact is a Fact. Certainly there have been endless critiques of this assumption through Post-Modern philosophy, yet they all seem to end with a collapse into solipsism – the knower can only know him or her self. Obviously, this is less than satisfying when applied to a theory of reading Scripture. Indeed, it is downright idolatrous.

Webster manages to dismiss the Modernist assumption while avoiding the barrenness of a Post-Modern alternative.
Starting with any of these notions, according to him, will get your theology all bent out of shape, because, when it comes to knowing God, it really does matter who you are.
I’ve got plenty of questions for Webster – big, meaty ones. I’m suspicious that his answers are just too simple. But I’ve got to love a guy that, today, moved me to want to quit Theological College, and just read the Bible.

For Zwingli, then, the real nature of the interpretative situation is best described as as struggle to replace mastery by teachableness. (Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch, John Webster)

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Colwell’s Rule

Themes: On Knowing God, The Trinity

So we’re into the second week back at College, and my eyes are already nearly worn out from reading.
I’m continuing on with Hebrew and Greek, but now our Old Testament and New Testament classes are conducted as studies of the text in the original languages.
For Greek, that currently means reading and studying through the Gospel of John. Our year is divided into 3 classes, I’m studying under David Peterson, who has just come back to Moore from being the Principal of the Oak Hill College in England.

Here is a [ridiculously long] quote from our lecture notes today. Don’t expect it to make sense – it does, just not in normal Ingerlish.
The context is John 1:1

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.

καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος ought to be translated ‘the word was God’ (not ‘a god’ or ‘divine’). One noun is the subject and one is a predicate nominative.
[Our Greek Grammar] Wallace, 42, says the subject is the known entity and is distinguished in three ways: it can be a pronoun, have an article, or be a proper name. Here the subject has the article. ‘Colwell’s Rule’, has often been applied to John 1.1 to demonstrate that the verse is teaching the divinity of Jesus. Wallace, 256-70, argues that Colwell’s rule has been misunderstood and therefore misapplied. Colwell’s rule states that ‘definite predicate nouns that precede the verb usually lack the article’ While this means that predicate nouns without an article that appear before the verb might be definite, Wallace says that this rule was understood to say that they will definitely be definite. Wallace goes on to suggest that a general rule about pre-verbal anarthrous (no article) nouns is that they are normally qualitative, sometimes definite and only rarely indefinite. Qualitative means the noun refers to the quality or ‘kind’ of thing that is being referred to. What are the implications for John 1.1? The translation could be ‘a god’ (indefinite); the God/God (definite); or divine (qualitative). He points out that if it is indefinite then it would be the only example in the Fourth Gospel. Moreover, contextually, the fact that the Word existed in the beginning makes the translation ‘a god’ unlikely. Wallace suggest that a definite understanding means that the Word = God, which is a form of Sabellianism. He suggests that a qualitative meaning is best (‘divine’), a translation that preserves the thought that the essence of the Word and God is identical (‘Jesus shared the essence of the Father, though they differed in person’, Wallace, 269). However, the translation ‘the Word was divine’ might be misleading in English because we can apply the adjective to angels. NEB ‘what God was, the word was’ captures the thought well: the Word had all the attributes and qualities that God had.
(David Peterson, Lecture Notes)

This is very cool. Particulourously, as I had a good long chat with a Jehovah’s Witness in a Cafe on Friday. It was a very civil conversation about all sorts of things, but about 40mins into it she could resist dropping this:
[JW]“You know we don’t believe in the Trinity”
[DA]“I had heard that, actually…”
[JW]“Oh”
[DA]“I think you’re wrong on that”
[JW]“…”
[DA]“…”
[JW]“…”

Well, I wasn’t going to break out Colwell’s rule on her was I? It turns out I’d have been wrong anyway.
Still, it is an absolute tragedy not to believe in the Trinity.

These are the opening words of Robert Jenson’s, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel.

It need not be argued that the Western church now little uses or understands Christianity’s heritage of trinitarian reflection and language. So long as Christianity was the established religion of the West, the Western church could just barely survive this debility. The doctrine of the Trinity comprises, as we shall see, the Christian faith’s repertoire of ways of identifying its God, to say which of the many candidates for godhead we mean when we say, for example, “God is loving” or “Dear God, please….” So long as we could suppose it obvious which putative god would truly be God if there were any, Western Christians could shut their eyes to the disuse of these means. We no longer have that luxury.

Know your God.
Get educated about the Trinity.

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Worship – John 4:21

Themes: On Knowing God, Prayer, Reading Scripture, Scripture, Sunday

Where can God be found?

“Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, yet you |Jews| say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.”
Jesus told her, “Believe Me, woman, an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will explain everything to us.”” (John 4:20-25 HCSB)

The question about where to worship is crucial to the Old Testament. Yet with these words Jesus renders the question irrelevant.

It’s no longer to be about place: God the Father desires worshippers who will worship in spirit and truth. The Father desires worship that is appropriate to his nature. What good is worship that by its form betrays ignorance of the one being worshipped?

We might reveal in the praises of people who don’t know us, knowing full well that if the details of our lives and failures were to become public, the praise would be quickly diminished. But the more we come to know God the more capable we are of worshipping him fully. He is good all the way through.

The worshipper in ‘spirit and truth’ approaches God in a manner that demonstrates the he or she really knows God.
It’s the kind of worship that is only possible once the Father has been revealed to the worshipper by the Son.

God is Spirit, as such, he is not bound by location. This was recognised by Solomon in his dedication of the Temple.

“But will God indeed live on earth? Even heaven, the highest heaven, cannot contain You, much less this temple I have built.” (1 Kgs 8:27 HCSB)

Yet it was in the temple that God chose to meet with his people and accept their worship.
The Jesus we meet through John’s Gospel is in a continual tension, almost rivalry with the temple. Early in the narrative we are told that the Christ understood his own body to be the replacement for the temple,

“Therefore the Jews said, “This sanctuary took 46 years to build, and will You raise it up in three days?”
But He was speaking about the sanctuary of His body. So when He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this. And they believed the Scripture and the statement Jesus had made.” (John 2:20-22 HCSB)

The place where God chooses to meet with his people is now in the person of his Son.

“The Word became flesh and took up residence among us. We observed His glory, the glory as the One and Only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14 HCSB)

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Knowledge and Fellowship: Privileged Information

Themes: On Knowing God

I know God when he speaks…

…which is to say, I know God through his own voluntary self-disclosure.

If, for the sake of argument, I was to take a chainsaw to your skull and open you up like a hard boiled egg,

…it would make a very big mess.

…But that’s not really the point…
Even if I was to engage in gruesome dissections, or any form of more mundane observation – no matter how minute, I would not be able to know anything significant about you as a person other than through your self-disclosure.
I would venture to argue that this would hold even if I had the technology to ‘wiretap’ your brain. Even with electrodes reading your thoughts I would still not know anything about you as a person other than what you chose to reveal.
[I could be wrong about this, if I can get a volunteer and a research grant, I'd be willing to find out...]

Self-Disclosure is not a form of knowledge that is open to all people at all times.
It is privileged information.
It presupposes some transaction between the person knowing and the person being known.
Self Disclosure is a form of double-edged trust between the people involved. I trust that you will listen, understand, and love me when I reveal myself to you. You trust that what I am telling you about myself is true.
There is no self-disclosure between strangers.
Revelation is a form of knowledge peculiar to fellowships.

Knowledge of God cannot be obtained anywhere other than in fellowship with God.

“For who among men knows the concerns of a man except the spirit of the man that is in him? In the same way, no one knows the concerns of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, in order to know what has been freely given to us by God.” (1Cor 2:11-12 HCSB)

And it is at this point we begin to see acquiring Knowledge of God is not simply or primarily a methodological problem.
That is, gaining knowledge of God cannot ultimately be a matter of rationality, or having the right tools, or being in the right observation point.

Knowledge of God can only be gained by those who are in fellowship with God.
[There can be no theologians who are not also Christians.]

The decisive issues that we must resolve therefore, if we are to have Knowledge of God, are not methodological but relational and moral.

Which is why we need to deal with ‘Judgement’ – that strange term that is equally at home in epistemological and moral discourse.

Judgement is how our knowledge of God got broken, and how it was (and will be) mended.

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