Growing in Christ
ST101
First Semester: Completed.
12 years ago
Sorry to be rather sparse on the posts lately. I’ve had the end of semester stuff going on, plus normal life, plus a massive blizzard, and a serious bought of post-semester laziness. But, as my wife says to me sometimes in the morning: “Get your lazy butt out of bed!” So, needless to say, I’ve got a few posts back-logged in my head. I am wanting to do blogging a little more faithfully this coming year, and am thinking of doing a regular posting of twice a week. We’re heading out on vacation tomorrow, so I’ll have some time to think it through, “count the costs” so to speak, and set a plan for fighting my sloth in this area.
Thoughts on my first semester completed.
I took Prolegomena to Theology, the introductory material for Systematic Theology. In the course we covered the grounds for theology, what it means for God to reveal himself, what it means to be creatures created in his image to engage with God, what the nature of Scripture is, and a little on the relation between Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology. Twelve lectures, lots of fun, lots of grrrrreat! stuff! (BTW, I have the audio and course material for the class if you’d like me to upload it for download. Hmm…24 hours of lectures, can’t you feel the anticipation!)
The Bible
One of the major things that I came away from the class reflecting on is how much I love the Bible. Here in the Bible itself we have the very voice of God. One of the thoughts that I was struck by in thinking through this is that when the Bible speaks, God speaks. When the Prophets and Apostles set to write scripture, they wrote the very thoughts of God. Karl Barth is dead wrong. When you read, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father” in Colossians 1:2, that is simultaneously Paul’s words and God’s words. So, here in my hands I hold the way of life – God’s voice to me. “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple,” (Psalm 19:7).
Salvation
Without scripture as our glasses, we will never see the world aright. This is something I had learned from our good friend John Calvin before, but it was very helpful to walk through it over and over again in all its implications. The knowledge of God is for humility, not for the pride of my own achievement. Apart from God’s grace in the power and work of the Holy Spirit, I would still hate God and be bound to my own vain attempts to make myself God. I would know God and hate God all in the same moment. But I see God rightly through Jesus Christ by his grace. Epistemological accuracy is a gift from God, not of our own doing, along with all the other benefits God gives us (life, joy, peace, etc.). We think rightly after God because God has been merciful.
Continuationism
We touched briefly on the subjects of spiritual gifts in the course material because the subject itself addresses the issue of the nature of revelation. We read some cessationist material, and had some course lecture on the subject, and while I can see the logic in some places, I don’t see the Scriptural backing or the theological necessity. At one point it was helpful for our professor to make the observation that there are some continuationists that he recognizes as being orthodox on the nature of revelation and Scripture, but whom he doesn’t agree with their final conclusions (i.e. Piper, Grudem, etc.). I can respect that. But in the end, the more I study the subject from various angles, the more convinced I am that the continuationist perspective is what Scripture teaches.
Family
One of the difficult things to learn how to juggle was how to incorporate a part time job (school) into a regular full time job and family life. The first month of class was difficult, but after my first assignment, I made adjustments on how I did my school work so that I made the most of my time. We got a good schedule going by the end of the semester. The main thing here is being intentional. We had to do regular date nights. We had to be proactive with friends. I had to be sure that I knew how Michelle was, what was going on with her, and in many ways, share with her what I was learning and enjoying in class.
I really loved my class. It was very informative and shaping. I know that I will reference the material for the rest of my life. I’m looking forward to the semester ahead. I’ll be taking ST113: The Doctrine of God. Very good stuff ahead in that class, very important to both knowledge of God and ministry.
God, the First Theologian
02 years ago
A small thought from class has been this simple yet profound truth: God is the first theologian. If we understand (rightly, I think) that “theology” is “words about God”, then in light of God’s trinitarian nature, God is the first theologian. God speaks his glory and his wonder before any human engagement of God. It is, as we might observe, God’s inherent nature to speak about God – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).
It is in God’s self-contained communication and enjoyment of himself that we find rest then to know God. God sees all that he is and finds it not only good, but delightful and the most worthy thing to speak about. If I might say this, that is why the Son is so massively important to God – it is God’s communication and enjoyment of himself taken on personality. That is a massive thought to me, and one that makes me pause from saying more to give it further thought (though I know it’s how Edward’s formulated the Trinity – here).
But let us dwell on this – when we think about God, when we think true thoughts about him, we are thinking God’s thoughts after him (a phrase Van Til made famous, which actually comes – in my reading – from Bavinck, though certainly it could be older). God thinks clear thoughts about himself. God sees, communicates, and receives clearly and rationally all that he is. That is fundamental to the doctrine of the Trinity; that is what it means for God to be the first theologian. God writes in himself the grandest and deepest theological volume ever – that’s right, before Calvin, Augustine, and Paul even come close to hitting the scene. (Just a thought – his book consists of actual, real time 3D people – ahem, one is reading this right now – who have a manual for understanding him. God doesn’t write fiction.)
God’s thoughts about himself are self-contained. Therefore, all my thoughts about God are an act of mercy. Thus, it is through his Word to me that I see his kindness and mercy – and assurance merely through the presence of the Bible that God wants me to know him. The Bible is itself a beacon of hope that God does not want me to stay how I am – in my sick, twisted, wreck of a life. He wants me to know him, and he loved this wicked life so much that he gave his Son to die for my sin in my place for the wrath I deserved so that I can know this wonderful God who loves and enjoys his glory, and wants me to enjoy it to.
Meditation
For God to be the first theologian means that all aspects of my life are ruled by theology. Why? Because all of God’s thoughts are God-centered, therefore all of my thoughts (being created in his image) are God-centered as well. And yet, I seek to deify myself and reject God as being the source and center of my being. We commonly know this practice as sin (fyi). And now the deep reality – for God to be the first theologian, and for me to be chief plagiarizing theologian, means I need a mediating theologian. I need the theology of mediation – who is the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ (John 1:14). What all of this massive reality of God as first theologian means is this: I NEED the Gospel. I therefore tremble before the Gospel, in desperate need and dependence. How often do you fall on your face before the living, majestic God after reading dense, deep, instructive, important theological works? (You should try it some time – it makes the theology make more sense.)
With God as the first theologian, David’s Psalm makes a little more sense: “in your light do we see light” (Psalm 36:9). Because God thinks about himself clearly, we can think about him clearly. That’s a helpful and deeply comforting truth to battle our relativistic, post-modern doubts. How can we know truth? We can know Truth rightly because Truth knows itself; Truth is self-conscious.
Therefore, when my emotions, depression, doubts, sin, fear all assail my soul, how can I survive? By looking to God’s theologizing about himself – the Bible; a 3D book about God.
How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent Word!
What more can He say than to you He hath said,
You, who unto Jesus for refuge have fled?
The Dependent Character of Theology
22 years ago
Last week in class we started out by doing a general overview of what we’re covering in the course, and set some basic foundations for the content. One of the best things – and main emphasis – of what we talked about was the fundamentally dependent nature of theology. Dr. Garner read the following quote to the class which I found very powerful:
In this sense we speak of a dependent character for Theology. When an absolute stranger falls into the hands of the police, which is no infrequent occurrence anywhere, and steadfastly refuses to utter a single syllable, the police face an enigma which they cannot solve. They are entirely dependent upon the will of that stranger either to reveal or not to reveal knowledge of himself. And this is true in an absolute sense of the Theologian over against his God. He cannot investigate God. There is nothing to analyze. There are no phenomena from which to draw conclusions. Only when that wondrous God will speak, can he listen. And thus the Theologian is absolutely dependent upon the pleasure of God, either to impart or not to impart knowledge of Himself. Even verification is here absolutely excluded. When a man reveals something of himself to me, I can verify this, and if necessary pass criticism upon it. But when the Theologian stands in the presence of God, and God gives him some explanation of His existence as God, every idea of testing this self-communication of God by something else is absurd; hence, in the absence of such a touchstone,. there can be no verification, and consequently no room for criticism. This dependent character, therefore, is not something accidental, but essential to Theology. As soon as this character is lost, there is no more Theology, even though an investigation of an entirely different kind still adorns itself with the theological name. In his entire Theology the Theologian must stand in the presence of God as his God, and as soon as for a single instant he looks away from the living God, in order to engage himself with an idea about God over which he will sit as judge, he is lost in phraseology, because the object of his knowledge has already vanished from his view. As you cannot kneel in prayer before your God as worshipper, in any other way except as dependent upon Him, so also as Theologian you can receive no knowledge of God when you refuse to receive your knowledge of Him in absolute dependence upon Him. (Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology, 251-52)
There are two important things to note from this passage:
Our theology, for it to be true, must be based on God revealing Himself. This is to say that we cannot postulate and speculare up into a true knowledge of God. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). We must first look for God as God over us before we can know anything further about God (his attributes, character, personality, etc.). God must speak for us to know anything about him. What Kuyper nails in this passage is that if God does not speak about himself, there is no ground for knowing anything about him. We know God because he’s gracious. We know God because he loves revealing himself. And why does he love revealing himself? Because he loves making his glory great, for “from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:36). Because God’s revelation of himself is the only way we can know him, the thought of testing that knowledge against anything else is absolutely absurd, and fundamentally a misstep of faith. Why? Because when we want to test something to see if its true, we test it against things that it is like. You test the testimony of one person on an event against another person on an event; you test the accuracy of a gun against the accuracy of another gun. So how will you test the revelation of God? Against… another god’s revelation? If God speaks, his “Word is truth” (John 17:17), and as such, there is no other truth or word to test it against. We receive – we depend on God to reveal himself, and we believe. It is a joy to know the Word of God and receive him in joy (isn’t that one of the underlying themes of Psalm 119?).
Secondly, When we deviate from looking to God to reveal himself in a dependent character, we commit idolatry. This is a point more for meditation than exposition, but consider: When we say, “God’s Word is not sufficient to know God”, what are we fundamentally doing? Among many things, we are then putting our judgment above God’s, and making an idol after our own image of what we think God should be. This is at least one of the things Paul underlines in Romans 1:18ff – When people reject God on God’s terms, they raise up themselves and an idol to worship like themselves. When we turn from receiving God, dependent on him, longing for his Word and revelation – when we turn from this view of theology, we automatically start creating an image of God that we can control, we commit idolatry.
So, in light of that, I’d encourage you to re-read Kuyper’s quote.
Meditation
What this means for my soul is that it impresses upon me the importance of prayer in theological work as in the rest of life. The Lord says, “But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2). “You have said, ‘Seek my face.’ My heart says to you, ‘Your face, Lord, do I seek’ (Psalm 27:8). The aim of God in my life is for me to seek his face, to know him in prayer and quietness. To know him for all that he is and all that subsiquently says about me – which should drive me to trembling prayer. The knowledge of God, even in an academic setting, should set me on edge, trembling for how great he is. What a severe glory – I can only know God on his terms. This underlines his sovereignty and puts his grace in Technicolor. The mouth requires the hand atop it, for there is nothing else to do here. Silence and prayer before this God whom I love to know. Does this not put new depths to Jesus saying, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63)? Let us come before this God, who in the fullness of time sent His Son that we might be reconciled from our sin and idolatry by His blood to have fellowship and knowledge of Him.
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What I’m thinking of doing is posting from week to week on what I’m learning in class – at least a part of it. If that’s something you’d like for me to do, please leave a comment, it helps me know if what I’m posting is actually helpful to people.
