Biblical Authority After Babel by Kevin J. Vanhoozer (review part 2)

Brazos Press, 2016, 269pp 

As promised, we continue with this review series by considering what Vanhoozer has to say on the relationship between sola fide and biblical authority. At the Diet of Worms Martin Luther is famously reputed to have said, 

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen

One man with his 'conscience captive to the Word of God' in defiance of the authority of the pope and centuries of Roman Catholic tradition. Who on earth did Luther think he was? His monumental arrogance spawned a terrible horde of lonely individuals who insisted that their conscientious reading of the Bible was the only authority that mattered. A recipe for theological confusion and ecclesiastical division.  As Vanhoozer puts it, "Wittenberg, we have a problem." 

But it was never the intention of Luther to assert the authority of the individual believer over and against the church. Rather, he wished to place the church back under the critical authority of Holy Scripture. Vanhoozer's purpose in this work is to bring out the correlation of the Reformation battle cry, 'Scripture alone', and the other 'alones'; 'grace alone', 'faith alone' and so on. 

Flowing from his 'mere Protestant' account of solo gratia, Vanhoozer locates the principle of authority over the church not in the believer with Bible in hand, but in the Triune Lord of the gospel. God alone has rightful power over his people. And it is only in subjection to his authority that true freedom and human flourishing are found. 

Adam sought to usurp divine authority, thinking that it was only by defying God that he could be like God. How wrong he was, Genesis 3:7. Divine authority is restored by Jesus Christ who functions as prophet, priest and king in relation to God's people. The Father has bestowed all authority upon the risen and exalted Jesus that he might act as "head over all things for the church" (Matthew 28:18, Ephesians 1:20-21). The Lord Jesus granted the apostles delegated authority over the church. They were to teach whatever he had commanded them, Matthew 28:18-20, John 16:13. As Vanhoozer summarises,

The apostles are authorized interpreters of Jesus' person and work, inscribers of the meaning of the Christ event whose written discourse is part and parcel of the triune economy of communicative action. (p. 91) 

Protestantism is not the reassertion of Adamic epistemic autonomy, "I will decide for myself what to believe". Authentic Protestantism is the product of trust in the self-authenticating witness of Scripture as it discloses what Jonathan Edwards called "the great things of the gospel". This saving trust is the result of the internal testimony of the Spirit who works by and with the Word to give the gospel its faith-compelling power. As Luther put it, the church is a "creature of the Word" because by the Spirit "the Holy Scriptures..are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus" (2 Timothy 3:15). 

Faith alone in Christ alone according to the witness of Scripture alone draws a person into the church over which Jesus rules by his Word. The church is an interpretive community that exists not to make of Scripture what it will, but to be shaped by the Bible according to God's will. Her calling is to attend to what the Holy Spirit is saying in the Scriptures concerning what is in Christ for his people. If God is our Father, the church is our mother whose role is to nurture the faithful to maturity in Christ. 

The Bible alone as God-breathed Scripture commands magisterial authority over the church, but the church as a holy nation and royal priesthood has ministerial authority to teach the Word. This involves thinking God's thoughts after him and talking God's talk after him. 'Faith alone' is not 'me and my Bible alone'. Rather it involves the community of those who have been justified by faith alone being summoned by the Spirit to "respond to the voice of the Triune God speaking in the Scriptures to present Christ." (p. 104). 

It takes the whole of the people of God even to begin to grasp the meaning of the whole Word of God as it speaks to us of what is in Christ, Ephesians 3:18-19. The church as an interpretive community does well to read Holy Scripture in the context of the catholic church, with an awareness of the way in which the Spirit has led the people of God in their journey of faith seeking understanding over the centuries.

The problem the Reformers had with the Roman Catholic Church was that she made herself the 'norming norm', usurping the authority of Jesus, and fatally compromising her place in the catholic church. Adding to what is in Christ as he comes to us clothed in Scripture leaves us with a Saviour who is less than a sufficient prophet, priest and king to his redeemed people. 

Placing biblical interpretation in the context of sola fide orientates the church towards the gospel promised by the prophets and announced by the apostles. It helps preserve the church from slavery to 'the assured results of modern scholarship', where human intellectual ability is asserted over and above the Word. It also acts as a safeguard against postmodern skepticism that despairs of finding any true meaning in the Bible. Rather than falling prey to these twin  idols, 'the tower' and 'the maze', the church is summoned to trust in the God who is there and is not silent. We recall the words of Paul, "faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." (Romans 10:17). As a royal priesthood and holy nation the people of God are called to attend to the Word with the expectant prayer, "Speak Lord, for your servants hear". To which our God responds, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear him!" 

Biblical Authority After Babel by Kevin J. Vanhoozer (review part 1)

Brazos Press, 2016, 269pp 

With 2017 marking the 500th anniversary of beginning the Protestant Reformation now is a good time to reflect on that disruptive event in church history. Many view the Reformation as nothing less than a tragedy that rent Christendom asunder, leading to the fragmentation of the church into thousand denominational pieces. That is certainly the view of Rome-friendly commentators. Even among Protestants, the Reformation is often viewed as a decidedly mixed blessing. Alister McGrath charged the Reformation with unleashing Christianity's Dangerous Idea; the right of all believers to read the Bible for themselves and decide on its meaning. Gone was the magisterial authority of the Pope of Rome to declare what Scripture teaches. Now any believer's reading was as good as another's. Cue interpretive anarchy, doctrinal confusion and ecclesiastical division. That's the 'Babel', bit in Vanhoozer's title.

The Reformation's insistence on sola Scriptura meant that all controls on how the Bible was to be read had been thrown to the wind. From those days there was no kingly magisterium in Israel; everyone saw in Scripture what was right in his own eyes. What Vanhoozer attempts to do in this work is to show that sola Scriptura - Scripture Alone was never meant to be taken alone, but understood in the light of its companion Reformation solas. Namely, sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus and soli Deo gloria. When taken together the solas place the Bible and the individual believer in the context of God's gracious action in Christ by which he draws his people into the church through faith the the gospel message revealed in Holy Scripture. 

As the subtitle suggests the author is intent on Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity.  He points out that "retrieval is not replication but a creative looking back for the sake of a faithful moving forward." (p. 37). Exploring what the Reformers meant by the solas in the context of their controversy with Rome provides the contemporary evangelical world with a valuable resource 'that encourages the church to hold fast to the gospel and to one another.' (p. 33)  By 'mere Protestant Christianity' Vanhoozer is not positing a lowest common denominator approach to evangelical belief and churchmanship. Rather, mere Protestant Christianity retrieves the solas as guidelines for faithful biblical interpretation. It also seeks to recover the royal priesthood of all believers, recognising the church as the community that is being led by the Spirit to understand and embody what is in Christ as disclosed in Holy Scripture. 

In giving careful attention to the solas, Vanhoozer is able to address some of the charges that are regularly leveled against Protestant Christianity besides interpretive individualism and ecclesiological fragmentation, were they not heinous enough theological crimes. One is that Protestantism begat secularism. Roman Catholic writer Charles Taylor alleges as much in his A Secular Age. Protest scholar Alister McGrath more or less says, 'It's a fair cop, gov' in Christianity's Dangerous Idea. Vanhoozer contests the charge that in ridding nature of its sacramental quality Protestantism was responsible for disenchanting the world, paving the way for a secular outlook. The writer responds that an important strand of Roman Catholic teaching postulated a realm of 'pure nature' that could exist autonomously and apart from the grace of God. How disenchanting is that? Another suggested that nature participates in grace and mediates grace, most especially through the sacraments. Yet if grace is pretty much intrinsic to nature, then grace has been disenchanted, the Creator/creature distinction is fatally compromised and the singularity of Jesus Christ as the Word made flesh is undermined. Once more, the secularising trajectories are obvious. 

In retrieving sola gratia, Vanhoozer develops an ontology of Triune grace that avoids fusing grace and nature. God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit was fully actualised in the free and loving communion of his own three-personed being. He had no need to create the universe in order to complete himself in any way. Creation was an act of free communication on the part of the Triune God. He did not owe the world its existence. Bringing the universe into being was an act of sheer grace on God's part, defined as, "the gift of God's beneficent presence and activity - that is, the communication of God's own light, life and love to those who have no right to them nor a claim on God...Put simply, grace is the Triune God - God sharing his Fatherly love for creation in the Son and through the Spirit". (p. 53). Nature has no autonomous existence apart from grace. Grace cannot be collapsed into nature. It is not a 'thing', but God's free and loving attitude towards that which is not God. 

Just how amazing is the grace of God is brought into sharper relief when we reflect on his grace towards fallen humanity. What sinners deserve from God is his wrath and judgement. Grace as the word is most often used in the New Testament is God's undeserved giving of himself to rebel sinners. "It is indeed wonderful to participate in being (creative grace), but it is something even more marvelous when fallen creatures participate in Christ (redemptive grace)." (p. 54). The goal of God's gracious purpose is to "unite all things in Christ" (Ephesians 1:10). To that end the Trinity acted to redeem lost human beings and restore them to communion with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Scripture reveals the economy of God's saving work in the unfolding covenant of grace. While the external actions of the Trinity are undivided, each person of the Trinity had a special role to play in the great drama of redemption. The Father sent the Son, the Son is sent into the world as man to redeem us by his blood, the Holy Spirit is given to communicate the salvation accomplished by the Son to God's new humanity. 

Sola Scriptura must be seen in the context of the drama of redemption. It is not to be understood as the right of every Christian to say what they like about the Bible. Rather, it is that God uses his written Word to communicate salvation to his people, enlightening their minds by his Spirit so that they are made wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Grace does not simply perfect the believer's natural ability to read and understand the message of the Bible. It restores the sin-darkened mind by giving light and reorients the sin-twisted heart towards Christ. This is not so much the 'right of private interpretation', as the grace of right interpretation that enables the believing reader to perceive the light of the Living Word shining through the written Word. 

This light that proceeds from the Father through the Son and by the Spirit enables the believer to read God's 'Two Books' of Nature and Scripture with delight and relish. 'Mere Protestantism' offers no 'disenchanted' nature, devoid of the divine presence, but a God-entranced vision of all things. The Christian sees the universe as the gracious work of God, in which the heavens declare his glory and the earth is filled with his goodness. As the hymn writer put it, "Something lives in every hue/Christless eyes have never seen". Moreover, bringing sola gratia to bear upon sola Scriptura, Vanhoozer is able to say,

The Spirit illumines the faithful, opening eyes and ears to see and hear the light of the world, the Word of God dazzling in the canonical fabric of the text: God's unmerited favor towards us shining in the face of the biblical Jesus. (p. 69). 

If the formal principle of Reformation theology was sola Scriptura, the material principle was the gospel of salvation through faith alone. And it is to sola fide that Vanhoozer next turns his attention. But you'll have to wait until part 2 of this review series for that, and maybe a bit more besides. 

The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision by Kevin J. Vanhoozer and Owen Strachan

The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision 

by Kevin J. Vanhoozer and Owen Strachan, Baker Academic, 2015, 221pp.

Theology is sometimes viewed as a somewhat abstruse body of knowledge, beloved of academic pointy-heads, but of little use to believers in their everyday lives. Or worse. In an episode of the classic BBC sitcom Yes Prime Minister, head of the Civil Service, Sir Humphrey advised the PM on his duties with regard to appointing a Church of England Bishop. He explained that the church was run by theologians and that 'theology's a device for helping agnostics stay within the church'. [See from 9  mins in on this episode]. That was back in the days of the Liberal ascendancy when Runcie was Archbishop of Canterbury, so perhaps the remarks had some justification. But they represent a sorry slur on theology and theologians. At its best theology is not about obfuscating unbelief, but faith seeking understanding of what is in Christ. And understanding what is in Christ and living in the light of that reality is of the essence of the Christian life.

Hence this book, co-authored by Vanhoozer and Strachan. It has long been an ambition in the former's body of work 'to make the pastoral lamb lie down with the theological lion.' (The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, WJK, 2005, xii). The central thesis of this book is that the pastor is a public intellectual; a theologian for the sake of the people of God. That point isn't widely understood, even among Evangelical churches. All too often the church has borrowed its understanding of leadership from the world. The pastor is seen as a CEO, counselor, or kindly social worker. We need to return to the biblical model of Minister as pastor-teacher, whose main role is to communicate what is in Christ to the people of God.   

This vision is rooted in the Scriptures. Strachan devotes a fascinating chapter to the differing ways in which prophets, priests and kings functioned as theologians to the Old Testament people of God. He argues that pastors now function as prophets ministering truth, priests ministering grace, and kings ministering wisdom. Of course, Christ is the great Prophet, Priest and King. In a very real sense all God's people share in these three offices under the new covenant. But Strachan sets out the lines of continuity between the key Old Testament offices and pastoral ministry as described in the New Testament. Indeed, his case may have been strengthened had he made mention of the way in which the Old Testament kings were called 'shepherds' and that pastors have been appointed to 'rule' in the church as part of the eldership team (1 Timothy 5:17, Hebrews 13:17). Strachan also traces the historical development of the pastoral office over the course of church history. 

Next Vanhoozer gets us 'In the Evangelical Mood: The Purpose of the Pastor-Theologian', giving attention to the indicatives and imperatives of the gospel that the pastor is to inhabit and minister. According to the philosopher Heidegger, human life is afflicted with a nagging sense of anxiety concerning our finite condition. The human being is a being-towards-death. But the good news of Jesus Christ transforms believers into beings-towards-resurrection.They have been delivered from the fear of death and look forward in hope to a new creation that has already begun to dawn in Christ, and through Christ, in them. The focus is not so much on ousia (being in general), as parousia (being in the light of Christ's coming). Pastors are called to minister this reality by setting out the grand indicative concerning what God has done in Christ for his people. They help the people of God to grasp what is in Christ and what they are in him by ministering the word, thus nurturing believers in biblical literacy. Being equipped with 'canon sense' will also help Christians to understand, critique and relate the gospel to the culture in meaningful ways. But the pastor's task is not limited to declaring the good news of Jesus in the indicative mood. They must also set out the imperatives that flow from participating in what is in Christ; getting wisdom, walking in love and imitating Jesus. Thus, pastors help the people of God to play their roles in the great drama of God's redeeming grace.

The practical skills that pastors need to accomplish their work are the focus of attention in the next chapter, 'Artisans in the House of God: The Practices of the Pastor-Theologian'. They include building the church as a disciple-maker, proclaiming what is in Christ as an evangelist, teaching what is in Christ as a catechist, celebrating what is in Christ as a liturgist, and demonstrating what is in Christ as an apologist. These differing facets of the pastoral ministry are explored with a good mix of sound biblical insight and shrewd practical application. The use made of Ezra-Nehemiah in the section on building the church made for interesting reading, as I've not long completed a series of sermons on those Bible books. Vanhoozer concludes with Fifty-Five Summary Theses on the Pastor as Public Theologian. 

Interspersed between the major chapters of this book you'll find twelve 'Pastoral Perspectives', short pieces written by pastors that aim to show what it means to be a 'pastor-theologian' in the context of everyday church life. One of them is by yours truly on The Drama of Preaching. I can't really vouch for that bit, but I'd recommend that all aspiring and serving pastors give this book a thoughtful and prayerful read. If the pastor as public theologian is a lost vision, this well written and passionately argued book certainly makes a grand attempt at reclaiming it. Anything that helps pastors to minister what is in Christ more effectively must be good for us, the people whom we have been called to serve, and the world that so desperately needs to hear the life-transforming message of the gospel.  

Out now: The Pastor As Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision

This book to which I made a modest contribution, with a piece on The Drama of Preaching is out now. Download a Kindle sample to see what it's all about, here. 

Coming soon: The Pastor as Public Theologian by Kevin J. Vanhoozer & Owen Strachan (and me)

I've long been an admirer of Kevin Vanhoozer's work and look forward to the publication of this title in August. Includes a contribution by yours truly on The Drama of Preaching, see here. 

Stephen Charnock on Christ and the theodrama

I know that posting quotations isn't proper blogging, which should involve at least some original writing. It's just typing stuff out. But I couldn't resist this one, which I came across when reading A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life, by Joel Beeke and Mark Jones. Puritan divine, Stephen Charnock sounds a bit like a seventeenth century version of theodramatist-in-chief, Kevin Vanhoozer (interviewed here). Charnock places Christ at the dramatic centre of the communicative action of God,  

Christ is the stage wherein all the attributes of God act their parts. (From Charnock, The Knowledge of Christ, in Works; 4:139). 

As Vanhoozer more recently put it,

Thinking of doctrine in dramatic rather than theoretical terms provides a wonderfully engaging and in integrative model for understanding what it means to follow – with all our mind, heart, soul and strength – the way, truth and life embodied and enacted in Jesus Christ. (From Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, p. 16.)

Admittedly, for Charnock  drama is a one-off handy metaphor, rather than the key idea that shapes his theologizing, but is is interesting to note this Puritan precedent for Vanhoozer's  theodramatic proposals.

Kevin Vanhoozer's follow up to Remythologizing Theology is  Divine Action and Providence, his contribution to Zondervan's promising looking 'New Studies in Dogmatics' series. 

Remythologizing Theology by Kevin Vanhoozer - now available in paperback

Kevin Vanhoozer's contribution to the Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine series was originally published as a hardback title in 2010. At £75 a throw, its price was a little prohibitive (Cambridge University Press kindly sent me a review copy). But the good news is that Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship, is now out in paperback, at the much reduced cost of £29.99 - see  here. 

Vanhoozer's basic standpoint is that of historic Reformed theology, but with special attention to the divine communicative action. In a way that is typical of the theologian's work, he has attempted to re-orientate theology towards the theodrama of biblical revelation. As such, Remythologizing Theology makes a fresh, compelling and valuable contribution to the doctrine of God. The critical interaction with open panentheism is welcome at a time when some Evangelicals (especially "post-Evangelicals" and Emergent types) seem to find such a view of God attractive. The book deserves to be read not only by theological students and theologians, but also by pastors who aspire to being pastor-theologians in order to be of better service to the people of God. 

More info: 

Remythologizing Theology: An Interview with Kevin Vanhoozer. 

Remythologizing Theology: Review Series. 

Remythologizing Theology by Kevin Vanhoozer (Review Part 6)

 Concluding thoughts

Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship

ISBN 9780521470124 (hardback), price £75, $130.99.

by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 539pp

(Review series Part 6)

In this post I offer some concluding thoughts on Kevin Vanhoozer's  Remythologizing Theology. 

Far a start, it is interesting to see Vanhoozer's proposals on theological method as set out in The Drama of Doctrine, (WJK, 2005), put to work in  the present volume. This is a work of "first theology" i.e. the doctrine of God. By "remythologizing theology", the author seeks to configure the doctrine in terms of the communicative action of the triune God. His being is in his communicative act. It is as Author of the world rather than First Cause that God relates to his creation, especially his human image bearers. This seen above all in the mythos or dramatic plot of the drama of redemption, where we see the truine God acting to communicate salvation to lost human beings.

Vanhoozer wishes to distinguish his vision of God from classical "perfect being" theology that, at least according to him, is not sufficiently  attuned to the biblical theodrama. More seriously, he also criticizes modern "kenotic-perichoretic" theology for failing to take seriously what the Bible says concerning the Creator/creature distinction in its attempt at giving a more personalist and reciprocal account of God's relationship to the world. The God of remythologized theology is the sovereign-transcendent Creator and Redeemer, the one God who has revealed himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Only this communicating God can save us.

Vanhoozer offers an Augustinian or Calvinistic depiction of salvation, with a strong accent on the sovereign and effective grace of God. But he rightly  emphasises that God does not ride roughshod over the human personality when he saves us from sin. The Father draws people to himself by the Spirit's effective ministry of the Word of Christ, by which the sinner is set free to respond to the gospel in repentance and faith.

Vanhoozer's stated aim in The Drama of Doctrine  was to "make the pastoral lamb lie down with the theological lion" (p. xii). He emphasised that the purpose of doctrine is to enable the people of God to faithfully play their roles in the drama of redemption. However, Vanhoozer's sometimes wordy style is calculated to make many a "pastoral lamb" run a country mile. Calling your book Remythologizing Theology and using terms like "kenotic-perichoretic panentheism" is hardly calculated to appeal to many pastors, whose main concerns are to getting two sermons prepared for Sunday and finding enough time to visit the all the elderly and afflicted members of one's congregation. I know of a fellow-pastor who is no slouch when it comes to keeping up with his theological reading who has yet to finish anything that Vanhoozer has written. I wonder how many working ministers will actually pick up and read this book, which seems to have been written more theological students and professional theologians in mind? That is a shame because there are a lot things about this present work that will prove to be of great help to ministers. The section on The triune God and the people of God: a fellowship of suffering? in chapter 9 is excellent in demonstrating that you don't have to go down the road of open theism to have a pastorally sensitive theology of suffering. Indeed, Vanhoozer shows that open theism, with its talk of divine suffering offers cold comfort to a world broken by sin. What we need is not so much sympathy as salvation.

It is said that even Homer nods, meaning that the great epic poet sometimes made mistakes. The same goes for Vanhoozer the theodramatist. On page 417 he makes a Nestorian slip in describing Jesus as a "human person", only to return the Chalcedonian fold on page 425, making it clear that Jesus' personhood is "a function of the inter-Trinitarian relations". He quite correctly goes on to say that Christ's temporal experiences are not to be attributed to "an abstract human nature, nor to the divine nature, but rather to the divine person (viz. the Son) in his human mode of existence." He calls this the "third, remythologizing, way for which I am groping", as if something new were being proposed, but what he is saying here is in effect classic Chalcedonian Christology. Also, Vanhoozer seems to contradict himself when on page 433 he writes, "The reason why Jesus cannot be tempted (or God changed) is because Jesus is the truth". In the previous pages, the theologian rightly defended the impeccability of Christ, arguing that as a divine person with a human nature, our Lord could not sin. However, as Vanhoozer pointed out, this does not mean that Jesus could not be tempted (see Hebrews 2:18, 4:15), "The temptation was no sham, for it was precisely because Jesus resisted temptation that he could 'feel' its full force." (p. 432). I assume that the statement quoted on page 432 represents the theologian's view on this matter and that what he said on the next page was a mistake. At least, I find it difficult, if not impossible to reconcile the two statements.

Vanhoozer's basic standpoint is that of historic Reformed theology, but with special attention to the divine communicative action. In a way that is typical of the theologian's work, he has attempted to re-orientate theology towards the theodrama of biblical revelation. As such, Remythologizing Theology makes a fresh, compelling and valuable contribution to the doctrine of God. The critical interaction with open panentheism  is welcome at a time when some Evangelicals (especially "post-Evangelicals" and Emergent types) seem to find such a view of God attractive. The book deserves to be read not only by theological students and theologians, but also by pastors who aspire to being pastor-theologians in order to be of better service to the people of God. But I suspect that given the price tag, many will have to wait until the work is published in paperback.

*Thanks to Cambridge University Press for the complimentary review copy of this book.

Remythologizing Theology by Kevin Vanhoozer (Review Part 5)

Impassible passion?

Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship

by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 539pp

(Review series Part 5)

It's been a while since the last part of this review series, so it is about time that I got going again on this one. In this penultimate post on Vanhoozer's book we'll be looking at his proposals on the impassibility of God.

That God is vulnerable to suffering is axiomatic for what Vanhoozer calls "kenotic-perichoretic relational theology" (see Part 2). According to Jurgen Moltmann,

[God] suffers from the love which is the superabundance of and overflowing of his being. In so far he is 'pathetic'. (Quoted on p. 391).

Vanhoozer cites a claim that divine passibility has become the "new orthodoxy". (p. 392). He gives a number of reasons as to why this situation might have come about including: A democratising concern to emphasise human freedom over divine sovereignty. The problem of evil, 'How', ask the likes of Moltmann, 'can we believe in an impassible deity in the light of the Holocaust?'. A renewed focus on the centrality of of Jesus' passion that makes the cross definitive for our understanding of the very being of God. A reciprocal account of God's love for the world in terms that entails divine vulnerability to the rejection of his love and divine distress over the suffering of those whom he loves.

However, while noting these concerns, Vanhoozer endeavours to make a case for the impassibility of God. God is impassible because he is without passions. That is, he is devoid of irrational forces of feeling. He doesn't get irritable or lose his temper in a fit of pique. But does that mean that God is without emotions? Not according to Vanhoozer, if emotions are defined as "covenantal concern-based construals". In other words, God's emotions are geared towards his covenant people. In his compassion he acts to save them from sin and suffering. He is jealous of his people's undivided love and loyalty. These theodramatically expressed divine emotions are constant and true. They are not subject to change, (Malachi 3:6). Hence, God's emotions are impassible - without passion. But the impassible God feels. Loving his people with an everlasting love, he acted to redeem them from sin in Christ.  

So, we come to the cross, where the Son of God suffered for our sins. What does Calvary have to say to the question of divine impassibility? According to Cyril, "The Word suffered impassibly". In saying so he affirmed the impassibility of the divine Word and also took into account that the Word made flesh suffered for us in his humanity. This is where the communicatio idiomatum or 'communion of attributes' in the incarnate Son comes into play. We do not say that the Son in his divine nature was impassible, while his human nature suffered on the cross. Rather, that the impassible Son suffered for us in his human nature. In biblical terms it was the Son of God in his humanity who loved us and gave himself for us (Galatians 2:20). However, the Son did not suffer on the cross simply to show empathy with a world racked by pain and tragedy. The cross was not so much an act of divine identity with a suffering world, as the Son of God suffering in dying in the place of a guilty world. His cry on the cross was not, "Now I know how you feel!", but, "It is finished!".

Vanhoozer suggests that modern attempts at rendering God passible might make him seem more appealing to our "touchy-feely" postmodern world, but they fail to capture the grandeur of God's free and loving self-determination to be the the "Lord (and servant) of covenant grace". God's love for his people is  not a vulnerable love that by its very nature entails suffering pain and rejection, but  a "lordly love" that effects salvation through the substitutionary suffering of Christ and transforming power of the Spirit . As such, Calvary is the definitive revelation of God's love for sinners. In Christ God is not a "fellow-sufferer who understands" (Whitehead), but "a sovereign sufferer who withstands" (Vanhoozer). That is the impassible compassion of our God.

Remythologizing Theology by Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Review Part 4)

Divine communicative sovereignty and human freedom

Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship

by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 539pp

(Review series Part 4)

One of the big issues for Christian theology is the relationship between the sovereignty of God and human freedom. If God is indeed sovereign and everything that happens is according to his eternal purpose, how can human beings be regarded as free actors in his world? The problem is exacerbated if God is regarded primarily as the First Cause and his relationship to the creation is construed primarily in terms of cause and effect. When applied to human beings it can sound as if humans are little more than cogs in the machine of the world. This is where Vanhoozer’s communicative theism comes in. For him, God is not so much the First Cause, as the Author of creation. His relationship with the world is personal and communicative, not simply causal. He enters into a dialogical relationship with human beings. But this does not mean the God and humans are equal dialogue partners. God is the sovereign Creator and we are his creatures. He writes the script in which we live, move and have our being. Yet as those who bear the image of God, human beings are capable of entering into genuine dialogue with their Maker. As the Author of our being and life, God does not coercively override the freedom of his human image bearers. Rather, our freedom to be human is only perfected in communion with the triune Lord God. Human freedom in this context is not the freedom of self-determination, but the freedom to say “Yes” to the divine address, Psalm 27:8.

But what happens when the dialogical relationship between God and human beings is disrupted because of sin? In the ultimate act of divine communicative action, the Author entered the theatre of the world and became a man to bring us back to himself. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God communicates his light, life and love to sinners through Jesus Christ. It is  Jesus the Son who sets us free from sin so that communion with God may be restored. However, not everyone receives the Word and accepts the salvation he accomplished, John 1:11. The Holy Spirit enables us to receive Jesus Christ by making the Holy Scriptures that testify to him internally persuasive. Again, this is not an act of coercion, but liberation.

The Author completes heroes, not be forcing them into a mold, but by releasing them so that they freely respond to the word that simultaneously constitutes them. The purpose of the gospel is to persuade, yes, but in persuasion is truth, goodness, and beauty. The Author’s word is furthermore a liberating word that sets the captive free (Gal 5:1). Accordingly, where and when the Spirit ministers this word, there will be freedom indeed: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17). (p. 366).

This involves more than the Spirit simply addressing the persuasive words of Scripture to the human mind. Due to the noetic effects of sin, the mind is closed to the truth of the gospel and heart is hardened against the Lord. Which brings us to a discussion of the effective call as an expression of the communicative action of God. The effective call is to be distinguished from the general call of the gospel. As its name suggests, this call actually effects something, namely that God calls the sinner to salvation in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, John 6:44-45. But the language of effect should not be understood as an act of causation on God's part that rides roughshod over the human personality. In the text just cited the Father draws his people to Christ by teaching them. Those who learn from the Father come to Jesus. The effective call is not an act of divine manipulation, but the effective communication of grace,

The effectual call is the Spirit’s ministering the word in such a way that hearers freely and willingly answer God by responding with faith. Remember Lydia: “The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul” (Acts 16:14). God’s calling is his restoring and reorienting those spiritual and cognitive capacities taken captive to an unclean spiritual and cognitive environment. (P. 374-375)

Those who have been effectively called to faith in Christ by the Spirit’s ministry of the Word are free to enjoy dialogical communion with God. Prayer is the human response to God’s prior word of grace and salvation. Through prayer the believer gladly consents to the will of God in which there is perfect liberty. What we pray for must be determined by the Scriptures, “In praying the Scriptures, we pray as Christ taught us, in Christ’s name, with Christ’s body, for Christ’s coming.” (p. 385). In answer to their scriptural prayers God conforms his people to the image of Christ by the communicative presence of the Holy Spirit.

In his attempt to develop an account of divine sovereignty and human freedom that is based on the communicative action of the triune God, Vanhoozer has avoided depicting human beings as mere puppets in the hand of an omnipotent deity. Neither is it the case that God is robbed of his sovereignty in order to make space for human freedom. God is indeed all-powerful and absolutely sovereign, but his power is not coercive or manipulative. He enters into a dialogical relationship with human beings in order to perfect human freedom in communion with himself. Where sin has disrupted that communion, Vanhoozer envisages salvation in thoroughly Augustinian fashion. God saves by effectively calling the sinner to union with Christ through the Spirit’s infallibly persuasive witness to the word of the gospel. Rather than the sovereignty of God compromising human freedom, according to Scripture it is only through the sovereign grace of God that sin-enslaved human beings can be truly made free. (See Westminster Confession of Faith 10:1, here).

In the final part of this review series I plan to have a look at Vanhoozer's proposals on divine impassibility and wrap the series up with some concluding thoughts on Remythologizing Theology.

Remythologizing Theology by Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Review Part 3)

The Triune God whose being is in his communicating

Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship

by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 539pp

(Review series Part 3)

So, Vanhoozer finds classical theism insufficiently attuned to biblical revelation and charges open panentheism with failing to do justice to the sovereign transcendence of the Creator (see Part 2). What does he propose in place of these two visions of God? His remythologizing project attempts articulate the metaphysics that are implicit in the biblical mythos (dramatic plot). What we say of God’s being and identity must be subject to his theodramatic action as revealed in Holy Scripture. In other words, first theology or the study of God is an exercise in biblical reasoning.

Vanhoozer sketches out what he calls a “post-Barthian Thomism”. He recognizes Karl Barth as a fellow remythologizer. According to Barth, God’s being is in his act, and God’s being in act is expressed in the event of Jesus Christ. God speaks in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word. But we are not to regard Scripture as divine speech. The Bible bears witness to God’s self-revelation in Christ, but it would be a contravention of the divine freedom to tie his speech to the words of Scripture. This is where Vanhoozer differs from Barth. He agrees that Jesus Christ is the full and final revelation of God and that the incarnate Word is the apogee of divine speech. But he protests that the incarnation only makes sense in the context of Yahweh’s speech to Israel in the Law and the Prophets,

God’s speech in Jesus Christ may be definitive, but it presupposes prior divine communicative action. The God whose nature is displayed in the history of Jesus Christ is the same as the God who declares his nature by his name in Exodus 3:14 and 34:6-7, merciful, gracious and steadfast love. (p. 215).

Remythologized theology pays careful attention to the self-revelation of God in Holy Scripture. It is the One who at various times and in various ways spoke to the fathers by the prophets, who has in these last days spoken to us by his Son (Hebrews 1:1-2).

By “post-Barthian Thomism” Vanhoozer has in mind Aquinas’s insight that being is not a static substance, but a dynamic act. Hence, God’s being is in his communicative act. He is the God who acts by speaking to create and sustain the universe and bring his human creatures into fellowship with himself. Human beings as created in the image of God are uniquely capable of having communicative relationship with their Maker. This relationship, disrupted by sin, is  restored by the redeeming work of Jesus, the Word made flesh. Vanhoozer hopes that this vision of “communicative theism affords new resources for understanding participation in Christ (union) and the life of the triune God (communion)”. (p. 240).

God’s being is in his communicating not simply in the relation he sustains to his creatures. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are communicative agents in the imminent Trinity, enjoying a blessed communion of life, light and love. In the economic Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit act to savingly communicate life, light and love to a world that lies under judgement in death, darkness and hatred. The Father sent his Son to save lost human beings from condemnation by his atoning death and resurrection. The Spirit communicates the truth and life of Jesus to the people of God.

God is love, and the redemptive love of the Father, displayed in the cross of Christ, is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. However, contrary to "Rahner’s rule", we cannot say that “the economic Trinity is the imminent Trinity”, reducing God’s being to what he does in history. Rather, as Vanhoozer puts it, “the economic Trinity communicates the imminent Trinity”. (p. 294).  The focus of drama of redemption is the communicative action of God, where the Father brings sinful human beings into union with Christ and communion with himself by the power of the Spirit.

Vanhoozer is to be commended for his attempt to make biblical revelation definitive for developing a metaphysical account of the identity, being, and ways of God. In doing so, he has avoided the pitfalls of open theism, which fails to do justice to the Creator/creature distinction, and “perfect being theology” that gives too much weight to human ideas about God at the expense of scriptural reasoning. A distinctly Christian metaphysics is a work of faith seeking understanding of the Triune God whose being in communicative act is revealed in the mythos of the biblical theodrama.

The theologian's thoroughgoing trinitarianism is  most welcome. In many works on the doctrine of God, consideration of the doctrine of the Trinity is tacked onto the end, almost as an afterthought. For example, in John M. Frame’s massive 864 page, The Doctrine of God, (P&R, 2002), discussion of the Trinity is reserved until the sixth and final part of the book, following extensive coverage of the being, attributes and lordship of God. Not so Vanhoozer, where his communicative theism is explicitly trinitarian from beginning to end.

In the next post in this review series I hope to give attention Vahoozer's attempt to probe the relationship between the commutative sovereignty of the Triune God and human freedom.

Remythologizing Theology by Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Review Part 2)

Panentheism, or God (not) Transcendent

Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship

by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 539pp

(Review series Part 2)

Vanhoozer does not reject classical theism out of hand. He wishes to retool the tradition to make it more attentive to the biblical theodrama. But there are some contemporary understandings of God that he finds altogether more problematic. He gives a thoughtful critique of open theism, or “open panentheism” as he calls it. Panentheism attempts to offer a more personal account of God’s relationship to the world, but it robs God of his sovereign lordship and fails to do justice to the Creator/creature distinction. Also, in the thinking of panentheists such as Jurgren Moltmann, the imminent Trinity (God as he is in himself) is collapsed into the economic Trinity (God as he is for us).

In classic orthodox theology, perichoresis denotes the mutual indwelling of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the godhead. Moltmann makes perichoresis a model of how God relates to the world in a state of mutual action and interaction. The self-emptying of Christ at the incarnation, where the divine Son took a human nature becomes a model of God’s kenotic relationship with the world. Accordingly, creation entailed an act of divine self-emptying in which God limited his infinite knowledge and power in order to make space for the autonomy of the creature. God’s very being is determined by his relationship to the world. His love for the world made him vulnerable to suffering when human beings rejected a lovingly reciprocal relationship with their Maker.

As Vanhoozer points out, panentheism surrenders the transcendence of God and places illegitimate limits on his sovereign freedom. Neither perichoresis or kenosis may be used as models of how God relates to the world in general terms. The former is unique to the imminent Trinity and the latter is unique to the incarnation of Christ. God is the transcendent Lord, totally sovereign in all his works and ways. God's love for the world cannot be depicted in reciprocal, perichoretic language. Such a construction forgets that God is independent of his creatures and that he loves this fallen world in self-giving freedom. His is a love that effects salvation and consummates communion, rather than a love that helplessly suffers rejection and disappointment. In so far as human beings share in the perichoretic fellowship of the Trinity, they do so, not simply as creatures, but as saved sinners, (John 14:10, 20-21). The biblical idea of kenosis (Philippians 2:5-8) is a singularity that belongs solely to the incarnation of the Son, who took a human nature to save the world from sin and death. Kenosis cannot be broadened out and used as a key to understanding God’s relationship to his creation as an act of divine self-emptying.

Ironically, in reducing God to his relationship to the world in the name of a more personalist account of Creator/creature engagement, panentheism has succeeded in compromising the divine personhood. Persons cannot be reduced to their relationships with others. Relationships do not constitute persons, rather persons have relationships. God's personhood is not constituted by his relationship to the creation. His triune personhood existed and found its full expression in the perichoretic communion between Father, Son and Holy Spirit before ever the world was made.

The panentheism found in writers such as Moltmann is haunted by Feurbach’s ghost. Panentheists have re-imagined God in terms better suited to the spirit of the age, with its profound dislike of authority and control. They have succeeded in making a god in their own image, stressing interdependence over transcendence and the autonomy of the creature over the sovereignty of God.

Vanhoozer has exposed some of the fundamental flaws in open theism and panentheism. At a time when such views of God are attracting support amongst Evangelicals (like Clark Pinnock and Steve Chalke), we should pay careful attention to his quietly devastating critique of kenotic-perichoretic relational theology.

The subject of Vanhoozer's remythologized theology is not the product of human projection, but divine self-revelation. He is the Lord God Almighty, one true and living God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The triune God whose being is in his communicating is the focus of the next section of this remarkable work.

Remythologizing Theology by Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Review Part 1)

What is Remythologizing Theology?

Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship

by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 539pp
(Review series Part 1)

To date most of Kevin Vanhoozer’s published theological work has been in the area of method. In his The Drama of Doctrine, (WJK, 2005), he proposed a “canonical linguistic approach to Christian theology”. Theology, he argued is not first and foremost about systematising the data of biblical revelation. The aim of theology is to enable the people of God to play their roles in the great drama of redemption. His focus was not simply on the words of Holy Scripture, but the communicative action of God who acts by speaking to accomplish his purposes in the world.

The present work sees Vanhoozer put his methodological proposals into practice in this full-length study on the doctrine of God. The book’s title immediately calls for explanation. What exactly does the author mean by, “Remythologizing Theology”? Bultmann endeavoured to demythologise the Bible. He regarded the supernatural and miraculous content of Scripture as mythological. Who, he asked, in the age of the electric light bulb, could believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, or rose from the dead? The Bible had to be stripped of these "myths" in order to get to the core spiritual and ethical message of the Christian faith.

The trouble with Bultmann’s demythologising project was that he rejected the possibility that God intervenes in the phenomenal world of space and time. His actions take place in the noumenal world of the human consciousness. This Kantian depiction of God’s action robs revelation of its objective character and places the focus on subjective human awareness of the divine. The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach took his one step further, arguing that god is simply the projection of human consciousness. The demythologising of theology is the high road to atheism.

By remythologizing Vanhoozer is not suggesting that we need to put the miraculous “myths” back into the Bible. What he has in mind in “remythologizing” is not “myth”, meaning a sacred story with little relation to the real world, but “mythos”, meaning “dramatic plot”. He offers this definition of remythologizing theology,

It is a way of viewing God, Scripture and hermeneutics in terms of their mutual implications, all coordinated by the notion of communicative action: the triune God is the ultimate communicative agent of Scripture; Scripture is an element in the triune God’s communicative action; interpretation is the way the church demonstrates her understanding of what God is saying and doing in and through Scripture by right theodramatic participation. (p. 30).

By remythologizing theology, Vanhoozer puts the accent on God's own self-projection, the communicative action of the triune God as revealed in the dramatic plot of biblical revelation. “Communicative action” are the key words here. The writer wishes to reconfigure God’s relationship to the world in terms of divine communicative action rather than the causal account of God’s interaction with the world favoured by classical theism.

Classical theism tends to view God as the supreme and perfect being and the metaphysical First Cause of the universe. For Vanhoozer, God’s being is in his communicative act. He is not so much the One to whom limitless perfection might be attributed by human beings, as the God of Abhraham, Isaac and Jacob, who is revealed in his word-acts as disclosed in Holy Scripture. He is better described as the Author rather than First Cause of creation. This emphasis on divine self-revelation safeguards theology from Feuerbach’s suggestion that God is the projection of human ideas of infinite perfection. In addition, in shifting the focus from God’s causal relation to the world to his communicative action, Vanhoozer hopes to provide a more deeply personal account of how God interacts with his human creatures.

A footnote on Justification and Sanctification

I'm currently reading and enjoying Kevin Vanhoozer's latest, Remythologising Theology. The book has proper footnotes rather than endnotes. Endnotes are a bit of a pain as it means having to flick back to the end of the book to look up the note. Life's too short for that.

I would be an exaggeration to say that some of the best material in the book may be found in the footnotes, but they are always worth a glance to the bottom of the page. Here is a choice note on justification and sanctification, where Vanhoozer elaborates on this point,

Participation in the triune God - otherwise known as salvation or eternal life - ultimately hinges on the nature of one's communion with Christ. Subsequent doctrines - justification, sanctification, ecclesiology, to name a few - all work further variations on the essential evangelical communicative act that is God's being "for us."122 (p. 279)

Footnote 122 then reads,

Justification and sanctification have to do with the way in which God "communicates" his righteousness and holiness to the ungodly. God declares those those who place their faith in Christ forgiven and directs and enables them to live accordingly by having the Spirit minister the gospel to them. In this way the forgiving word of Christ "dwells richly" in them (Col. 3:16). By means of word and Spirit, then, God calls or gathers a community of the word, a company of communicants (the church). In each case - declaring righteous, enabling holiness, summoning fellowship - we see that Christian doctrine is essentially a schema of triune communicative action, a description of what God is doing in, with, and through is Word.

Vanhoozer's emphasis is reminiscent of Calvin's insight that on union with Christ the believer receives the "double benefit" of justification and sanctification. The two aspects of salvation are distinct. Justification is a declarative act of God, while sanctification is a transformative act of God. But they are inseparable because union with Christ is union with the complete and undivided Saviour,

These benefits [justification and sanctification] are joined together by an everlasting and indissoluble bond, so that those whom he illumines by his wisdom he redeems; those whom he redeems, he justifies; those whom he justifies, he sanctifies.....Although we may distinguish them, Christ contains both of them inseparably in himself. Do you wish, then, to attain righteousness in Christ? You must first possess Christ; but you cannot possess him without being made partaker of his sanctification, because he cannot be divided into pieces [I Cor. 1:13]. (Inst. III.16.1)

Wheaton's Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright now online

Lectures from the Wheaton Theology College Conference, 'Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright' are now online in MP3 & Flash video formats here. As yet I've only seen Kevin Vanhoozer's contribution, 'Wrighting the Wrongs of the Reformation? The State of the Union with Christ in St. Paul and in Protestant Soteriology', a spirited attempt to intergrate the classic Reformed teaching on justification with the 'new perspective' insights of N. T. Wright. Vanhoozer makes some telling critical points regarding Wright's reworking of justification. He proposes that a renewed focus on union with Christ and the doctrine of adoption might be the way forward in bringing old and new perspectives on Paul closer together. Interesting. HT Mike Bird of Euangelion.

Remythologizing Theology: An interview with Kevin Vanhoozer

GD: Hello Kevin Vanhoozer and welcome back to Exiled Preacher.

KV: Seems like I was just here. I like what you’ve done with the place.

GD: Thanks. Your new book is entitled Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2010, 560pp, UK here, US here). In personal correspondence you described Remythologizing Theology as your first real work of theology. What does that say about your earlier writings?

KV: It says that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with questions pertaining to theological method and hermeneutics. While it may have been necessary, that work was merely a warm-up: an overture to the real opera. I don’t want to exaggerate. I have written “real” theology here and there, though this is my first book to talk primarily about God rather than about talk of God.

GD: What is your main aim in this book?

KV: For years I’ve felt that the doctrine of God was a relatively weak spot in evangelical theology. Then open theism happened and my suspicions were confirmed. One major aim, then, is to provide a retooling of classical theism that takes into account the concerns of open theists – in particular, the integrity of God’s loving relationship to the world – while simultaneously maintaining what I take to be the correct Reformed emphasis on divine sovereignty. Another aim is to scrutinize the oft-heard claim in contemporary theology that God’s love entails divine suffering.

GD: What do you mean by "remythologizing theology"?’

KV: I don’t mean “mythologizing again”! “Remythologizing” pertains first and foremost not to myth but “mythos,” Aristotle’s term for dramatic plot. I’m using “remythologizing” as a contrast term to Bultmann’s demythologizing. Where Bultmann fails to take seriously either the Bible’s depictions of God’s acts or the Bible as the product of God’s authorship, remythologizing starts: with God as one who speaks and acts, the latter often by way of speaking.

Remythologizing is a proposal for “first theology,” a way of thinking God and Scripture together. Specifically, it views God’s being on the basis of God’s acts, especially his communicative acts. God is as God does, and God does as God says. Remythologizing theology is all about speaking well of God on the basis of God’s own speech. To remythologize theology is to set forth the ontology of the one who speaks in Scripture, the one whom Scripture is also about.

GD: What is the status of Holy Scripture in "remythologized" theology?

KV: My doctrine of Scripture remains much as it has been: the Bible is triune discourse, a product of divine authorship and hence a form of divine action. What sets remythologizing apart from some other approaches is that it seeks to take into account the significance of the Bible’s literary forms, each of which is a distinct form of God’s communicative action.

Think of remythologizing as a form of biblical reasoning, a way of thinking about the subject matter of Scripture along the grain of the various forms of biblical discourse that present it. This means attending not only to the content, but also to the way in which the divine author employs a number of different human voices and forms of discourse to communicate it.

GD: In some treatments of the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the Trinity is tagged onto the end after extensive discussion of the divine being and attributes. What place does the doctrine of the Trinity have in the present work?

KV: The central place, both literally and symbolically. Chapter five is right in the middle of the book and is entitled “God in three persons: the one who lights and lives in love.” I argue that God is everywhere and at all times fully himself. The triune life – communicative activity oriented to communion – is fully realized in the immanent Trinity before it is actualized in the economic Trinity. God in time corresponds to who God is in eternity. I’m not, of course, the first to argue this. However, what is new is the focus on the Father, Son, and Spirit as distinct communicative agents who nevertheless share a common communicative agency.

GD: Barth famously taught that God's being is in his act. Here you set out the elements of a new "theodramatic metaphysic" where God's being is in his communicative act. Please explain.

KV: Theodramatic metaphysics is the attempt to formulate a comprehensive set of categories (i.e., metaphysics) for understanding what God has said and done (i.e., theodrama) to create and renew all things in Christ through the Spirit. Because God is real and not merely a story, biblical interpreters who would speak well of God must go beyond exegesis to ontology. If we are to understand who, and what, we are talking about when we use the term “God,” we have to say something about God’s being. For God is a real being. What is real makes a difference in the world because it can act on its own. Only God can act on his own for only God has life in himself; everything else depends upon God’s sustaining word and breath to remain in existence.

Remythologizing speaks of God on the basis of God’s own speech and action, the stuff of theodrama. What we can, and must, say of God is that he is the one who creates, commands, consoles, etc. by speaking. God makes himself known and shares his life largely through speech acts like promising, instructing, forgiving, and exhorting, as well as through his corporeal discourse – the Word made flesh – Jesus Christ. If we let Scripture guide our thinking, then we must say that God’s triune being is in his communicative activity. We derive our understanding of the divine attributes not by analyzing the idea of infinite perfection but by describing and detailing the predicates and perfections of God’s communicative activity.

GD: Traditional theism has often described God's relationship to the world in terms of causality, with God as the First Cause or the Unmoved Mover. However, you propose that God's interaction with the world is best understood in terms of divine communicative action. Why the shift in emphasis?

KV: At this point in our time and culture, modern science has pretty much co-opted the language of causality. Consequently, even theologians who should know better sometimes speak of God’s causality as if it were on the same level as other creaturely causes. This is not how Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, or others in the tradition would have understood it. Nevertheless, open theists and panentheists have used this confusion to their advantage to attack classical theism. How, they wonder, can God be in a genuine loving relationship with creatures if he causes all things, including the motions of people’s hearts? Further, if God causes all things, must he not be responsible for evil as well as good?

I use the term “communicate” in a very broad sense, not merely in the sense “to transmit information,” but “to make common” or “share.” The most important thing that God communicates is himself: his light (truth), life (energy), and love (relationship). Whereas the end of causation is coercion, the end of communication is communion. The category of communicative action opens up new possibilities for theism and adheres more closely to the categories of Scripture itself.

GD: Where does your theodramatic approach leave the oft discussed relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom?

KV: Von Balthasar depicts theodrama as the interaction of infinite and finite freedom. My contribution is to think through this interaction in communicative terms. God is not like other communicative agents, of course. For God is the “Author” of the world who retains his authorial rights even as he enters into the story as a character. God’s sovereign interventions are in fact often interjections – calls, for example – that are efficacious but nor coercive. Here the paradigm is Calvin’s notion of the effectual call: God does not manipulate but sovereignly – which is to say, authorially – consummates his characters without manipulating them. On the contrary, the divine Author works according to our natures, via word and Spirit.

God authors answerable agents. Divine authorship thus names an asymmetrical communicative relation: a dialogical (i.e., covenantal) unity within an even greater dialogical difference (i.e., creation ex nihilo). I devote an important section to reworking the doctrine of providence, and Austin Farrer’s idea of the “causal joint,” in properly communicative terms. God’s speech is efficacious and brings about change in the world precisely by non-coercively bringing about understandings in human hearts and minds. What happened to Lydia is paradigmatic: “The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul” (Acts 16:14).

GD: What do the words of the subtitle, Divine Action, Passion and Authorship, say about your attitude towards the impassibility of God? Isn't he a being "without body, parts or passions"?

KV: The sub-title alone does not make a statement but announces a theme. The question of God’s suffering – that is, his ability to be affected by human creatures – is a red thread that runs throughout the book. If Nicholas Wolterstorff is right in comparing classical theism to a seamless garment where one loose thread spells the unraveling of the whole, then divine impassibility makes for an excellent case study.

Remytholgizing Theology is a minority opposition report on the “new orthodoxy” of divine suffering. While I want to take the biblical depictions of God’s dialogical interaction with human beings seriously, I don’t want to pull God down to the creaturely level. The challenge, then, is to specify to what the biblical descriptions of God’s emotions actually refer. There is not much on the meaning of divine emotions in the history of theology. Classical theists tend to take this language as anthropomorphic; open theists tend to take it literally. I had to resist the temptation simply to choose one side rather than the other. The prior question is: what is a divine emotion? I do provide an answer, but the water in that pool is a bit too deep to dive into here.

GD: In The Drama of Doctrine, you suggest that the task of the theologian is to act as a "dramaturge" who will help pastors to faithfully interpret and teach the biblical script to the people of God. How might pastors benefit from Remythologizing Theology?

KV: The first responsibility of pastors and theologians is to speak well of God. This means, minimally, avoiding idolatry. It also means speaking in a way that corresponds to Scripture and yields understanding, including understanding about God’s being, identity, and reality. My book helps answer the all-important question question: what must God be if God speaks and acts as the Bible depicts him as doing?

To understand God as a triune communicative agent has implications for understanding oneself, the Christian life, and the church as well. God calls us into being and communicates his light, life, and love so that we can communicate them to others. The pastor is a minister of God’s word – which means the whole panoply of God’s communicative acts – thereby helping the church to become answerable to God, able to communicate in all that we say and do what the Father is saying and doing in the Son through the Spirit. Theology assists pastors to know God so that they in turn may communicate the light, life, and love of God poured out for the world in Jesus Christ.

GD: Remythologizing Theology is published by Cambridge University Press and is currently only available in hardback. When will a more affordable paperback edition be published?

KV: I’m very sorry a paperback edition was not printed simultaneously. I did ask (and complain)! If all goes well – by which I mean, if enough people save their pennies and purchase the hardback – a paperback should appear in eighteen months, sometime in the summer of 2011. If I have indeed spoken well of God, it should still be worth reading even then.

GD: Thanks for dropping by for this conversation. I'm still saving my pennies!

What price Remythologizing Theology, Dr. Vanhoozer?

Kevin Vanhoozer's latest title, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship is out now. It's been a long time coming since he mentioned that he was working on the book in an interview on this blog in September 2007 - here. Looks like it will be worth the wait. The only problem is the price tag. At £75 from the publisher, Cambridge University Press and £52.25 from Amazon, the book is a little on the pricey side. I'll have to start saving my pennies.

From the Amazon product description:

"The rise of modern science and the proclaimed ‘death’ of God in the nineteenth century led to a radical questioning of divine action and authorship – Bultmann’s celebrated ‘demythologizing’. Remythologizing Theology moves in another direction that begins by taking seriously the biblical accounts of God’s speaking. It establishes divine communicative action as the formal and material principle of theology, and suggests that interpersonal dialogue, rather than impersonal causality, is the keystone of God’s relationship with the world. This original contribution to the theology of divine action and authorship develops a new vision of Christian theism. It also revisits several long-standing controversies such as the relations of God’s sovereignty to human freedom, time to eternity, and suffering to love. Groundbreaking and thought-provoking, it brings theology into fruitful dialogue with philosophy, literary theory, and biblical studies."