John H Armstrong

Christian Identity & the Place of Trinitarian Ecumenism

Christian faith is about the alternatives of life and death rather than about abstract doctrinal and philosophical forms. This does not mean doctrine is unimportant. It simply means it is not life itself. The church is where divine life is to be lived on earth by the outpoured Spirit who creates in us the living prayer of Christ who is the Son of the eternal Father. To be a Christian is thus to participate in the life of the Trinity, not simply to give mental assent to doctrines or emotional loyalty to a form of religion. 

If this is true then faithfulness to the church is not the same as loyalty to our national or cultural identities. We are not American Christians, German Christians, Greek Christians or French Christians. We are Christians! We must not become prisoners to national, local or ethnic identities. Such identities have their place in the human reality and realm. They are not inherently evil. But the catholic identity of the body of Christ means that we love and serve the whole Christian community, not one small part of it. The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew declared in an address in 1993 at the British Museum, "It is time for us to begin to reconcile nationalism and ecumenism." Amen!

This requires, the Patriarch said, an honest engaging in historical memory, both celebrating the heritage of our past and looking at that same past with a critical eye for what needs repentance. We must never sit easy with our past or present but bring all of it under Christ's authority and into communion with all our brothers and sisters as we seek to become the public expression of the Trinity through our life together. 

Speaking at St. Peter's Basilica in 1997 Patriarch Bartholomew said we must learn how to share as Christians, not as something that we can exploit in order to reproach one another but rather as a commitment to learn how to responsibly serve each other in the body of Christ. This requires you and me to give sacrificially of ourselves to further collaboration while we continue to work for deeper expressions of unity. 

Speaking of God

We have always had a difficult time when we speak of the living God. Most people, including the most ardent believers, treat this as a non-problem. This reveals a profound lack of understanding biblically and historically. The ancient Jews did not even speak the "revealed" name of God. So how do we, living in the time of Christ who is still with us by the Spirit he poured out on us all, properly speak of God? 

I suggest that we should speak of God relationally. By this I mean that we should speak of God as the Source and energy/dynamic of relationality. In reading Genesis again during the first week of 2012 I was struck by this in the entire book. The Creator is a relational being who made us in his image. We were brought into being, that is into a relationship with God and creation, when the Source of all Being "breathed the breath of life into us" (Genesis 2:7). Trace this point throughout the entire Old Testament and you will see that it remains true. 

If God, who is the Source of all life and relationship, is perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ then he embodies this relationality in his incarnation. He is embodied, divine/human relationality. Jesus is the human expression of God ("logos") enacted among us and accommodated to a particular time, culture and context. This is why we must come to know the human/divine Jesus if we are to know God in deep friendship/relationship/relationality. 

This kind of theology helps explain why Jesus said things like "the father and I are one" (John 10:30). In the words of Peter Traben Haas, in his amazing book which I discovered on New Year's Day, The God Who is Here (2011):

If Jesus Christ is the embodied demonstration of Divine relationality enacted among us in human form, then the Spirit is the non-embodied continuation of Christ's relationality to and within us for the purpose of reawakening us to our role in embodying the reality of the Divine relationality.

Peter Haas adds that if this is true the church is a community of embodied members of the household of God living in a relationship brought about by the Holy Spirit. Jesus' demonstration of love is the real key to understanding everything he taught and thus everything we need to know in order to live relationally; e.g. John 13;34-35. By the Spirit we participate in the Divine loving presence of the Triune God. In the Bible this life is called "union" with Christ (Romans 8:9-11) and "sharing in the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). We make far too little of this when we teach Christian faith as propositions and constructs in our minds that do not actually transform us internally by the Spirit. Our propositions might be correct but we miss the point and thus name God by words that do not actually help us know God. 

By this understanding God, through Christ and by the Holy Spirit, is all in all. Amen.

Conversations with Theologians

More than twenty years ago an evangelical professor of theology at Hillsdale College, Dr. Michael Bauman (photo), decided to interview some of Europe’s leading theologians. He selected Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran, Orthodox and Catholic thinkers. He sought out eleven people because he thought they had in them the unmistakable marks of having lived a truly theological existence. The theologians included Hendrikus Berkhof, Alister McGrath, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Bishop Kallistos Ware, Sister Benedicta Ward, Thomas Torrance, Gareth Moore, John Macquarrie, Bishop Graham Leonard and Dorothee Sölle.

This excellent small book, now available only from out-of-print sources, was titled Roundtable: Conversations with European Theologians. As I was recently going through my library to purge several thousand books I re-discovered this little book of only 142-pages. I found it so immensely interesting that I decided not to part with it quite yet.

Michael Bauman suggests that evangelicals are often extremely insular when it comes to doing theology. We are far more likely to read authors that we already know and agree with. If we do not know a writer, or think that we should not trust him/her for any reason, we generally avoid them. We do not relish listening to people who challenge our beliefs. I consider this one of the biggest marks against modern evangelical life and practice.

Bauman articulates my own thoughts well when he says, “But if we feed only on versions happening to be in favor with our own small coterie of evangelical theologians, we doubtless shall miss a great deal that would have made us better thinkers, better theologians, indeed better people” (13). Bauman sought out these eleven theologians in order to glean something from their wisdom and to gather their own pious reflections upon the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Some of the theologians he interviewed struggled for decades to bring the Christian gospel, and its manifold implications, to bear upon all that we think and do as Christians possessed with an active, inquiring mind. While Bauman’s interviews reveal answers that I do not share, at least in some instances, but they all show that the particular person being interviewed has been deeply touched by both human life and the divine.

The first theologian interviewed, at least in the order of the book itself, was Bishop Kallistos Ware. Kallistos Ware is now Metropolitan Ware, one of the world’s great Orthodox scholars and a serious ecumenist, something not overly common in the world of Orthodoxy. I have had the joy of reading a great deal of Ware’s excellent work. His two books on Orthodox theology and history are the best you can read from an English/American perspective. I have also enjoyed meeting Metropolitan Ware and hearing him speak on several different occasions.

In each of Bauman’s interviews the theologian was asked to “describe God.” Ware answered that God is above all Trinity. This is how we understand divine love, in and through Trinity. He then adds:

I deeply regret the way in which the Trinity is passed over in so much Christian thinking today. Karl Rahner [Roman Catholic] rightly observed that one could remove the references to the Trinity from most contemporary books on Christian theology and their arguments would remain unaltered. All too many Christians today are simply monotheists, not Trinitarians. One of the most important tasks of the Orthodox Church in the inter-Christian dialogue of our time is to stress the centrality of the doctrine of the Trinity, not as a piece of abstract speculation, but as an expression of practical theology that can make a huge difference to your and me personally. In all our struggles for human rights, for justice, for the abolition of oppression, we are active in the name of the Trinity (20)!

This underscores once again why ecumenism matters so profoundly. By listening to the whole church there is so much to learn that will only add strength and bulk to your own life and thought as a Christian.

God Is a Community of Persons

Perhaps the most astounding discovery of my last ten years or so has been the realization that God is a community of persons existing in an eternal relationship of love. The Father loves the Son. This is more than a source of doctrinal acknowledgement or confession. It is even more than a source of inspiration. We actually share in this community of persons because He loves each of us with that same unconditional love. This is what St. John tells us when he says, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”

To be a Christian is much more than imitating Jesus. It is certainly more than following his commandments, as important as this really is to living faith. Authentic faith leads us beyond these limits into the richness of a divine relationship. We are called to not only imitate Jesus but to live our lives in Him.

Through faith and Christian baptism we share in the glory that was his before the world began. This gift enables us to share in the interpersonal life of the Trinity. Jesus’ prayer to the Father during his Last Supper (the prayer that began to shape and change my life in the early 1990s) was “As you Father are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” In our baptism we are baptized into the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is proper to Christian baptism because we are baptized into the triune love of God.

Contemplate this mystery: “The glory I gave to him, he has now given to you (those who believe), so that you may be one in love with us and with all believers” (John 17:22).

The Trinity Is Not an Abstract Doctrine

I wrote yesterday about my growing awareness of the love of God as a community of persons. I was brought into this community by faith in the Son of God and through Christian baptism. This is why I was baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Far too many Christians I’ve known over the years seem to find the Holy Trinity to be nothing more than an abstract doctrine. It is not, in their understanding and experience, a living community of persons. We think of God as pure mystery, at least in the sense of his being someone who is impossible to understand, rather than as an invitation to endless love and understanding. The fact that God is three persons in one is a mystery, a mystery so profoundly deep that it is endlessly rich. It is in this sense that St. Paul speaks of “the mystery of God.” Without this insight our life will become little more than a moral effort through which we seek to live by the law alone.

This journey begins when we seek to understand and appreciate the words of Jesus in John 17: “The world must recognize that I love the Father.” Only then will we enter into this community and movement of divine love, making our life a journey of incredible joy. Through the Holy Spirit God pours his love into our hearts.

All authentic Christian spirituality is intimately connected with the Trinity. We are called to accept, to nurture and to radiate to others the love of the Son for the Father. This love is within each of us in Christ through the power of the indwelling Spirit.

It is thus accurate to say that we are indwelt by the divine Trinity! And this indwelling is rooted in eternal love.

The Importance of T. F. Torrance

Thomas Forsyth Torrance (1913 – 2007) was one of the greatest of all 20th century Christian theologians. Torrance’s diverse writing is often dense, not the easiest to grasp by simple reading and yet tremendously important. As I work away on a book on the Trinity I find myself going back to Torrance time and time again.

Tom Torrance, as his friends called him, was born in China to Scottish missionary parents. He studied classics at Edinburgh and Oxford before he studied under the famous Karl Barth at Basel. After a brief stint in New York as a teacher at Auburn Seminary World War II broke out and Torrance became a chaplain. He later served a parish in Scotland for ten more years. His best known work came by lecturing for 27 years as Professor of Christian Dogmatics at New College in the University of Edinburgh. While he wrote many books and articles advancing his own study of theology, he also translated several hundred theological writings into English from other languages. Torrance edited the English translation of the thirteen-volume, six-million-word Church Dogmatics (Germ. Die Kirchliche Dogmatik) of celebrated Swiss theologian Karl Barth. Torrance may have understood Barth as well as any other person in the last fifty years or so. If you have not read Barth and want to get into his thought through a primer to his huge body of work then the book for you is his Dogmatics in Outline.

Torrance's work has been influential in what is called the paleo-orthodox movement, a movement which I freely admit has had a profound impact on my life and thought. He is considered one of the most important Reformed theologians of our era and his work has also influenced many other Christian theologians in a number of vitally important ways. This is especially true with regards to certain aspects of the theology of Alister McGrath, a very influential evangelical Anglican theologian.

There is so much of Torrance’s work online that it would be pointless to list it all. Check out some of the list at the end of the Wikipedia article on his life and then do a general Google search and you will find a lot more. There are audios, articles, studies of his work, etc. For those who are deeply interested you might want to check out the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship, of which I am a member. The fellowship maintains an online journal on the work of Torrance called Particpatio. It is free and really an excellent source for serious theological reflection. I spent a good bit of time reading this journal last week and found it immensely helpful.

The Trinity and Christian Unity

When I began my journey to missional-ecumenism the most important doctrine that I began to understand in a new way was the Trinity. This doctrine about the God who is revealed in Holy Scripture powerfully relates to unity among Christian believers. I was honestly unprepared for how powerfully this truth would grip my own mind and heart as I studied and wrote about the church and the missio Dei. Now that the book is done I am working on the sequel, which will actually attempt to work out how we are to live our lives to the glory of God through loving God as Trinity. If you cannot love God without knowing God then this truth has to be central since this is how God has chosen to reveal himself to us in Jesus Christ.

Multitudes of Christians seem to think the Trinity is vaguely important but they have no earthly idea why this is true. Only by recovering a practical, workable understanding of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit can we gain what we need to truly live in the Triune God. There is great mystery here for sure but it is this mystery that floods our souls with light and power. By it we can love God and one another.

The Feast of Pentecost

Today is the beginning of a new cycle in the church year, the Feast of Pentecost. Easter has ended liturgically but Pentecost reminds us that the resurrected Christ is still with us by the gift of the Spirit who makes him known to all who believe.

The word pentecost (from the Greek pentekoste hemera, meaning “fiftieth day”) was originally a Hellenistic term for the Jewish Feast of Weeks. For the early Christians Pentecost, eventually celebrated seven weeks after Easter, or fifty days after the Easter Vigil, commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples when they were empowered to preach the gospel. It marks the beginning of the church, at least as we know it in this present age (Acts 2:1-13). Pentecost was actually the third major Jewish feast. It initially celebrated the harvest of grain and later the giving of the Law to Moses on Sinai.

On the first Pentecost Peter preached to people and pilgrims in Jerusalem. Around three thousand believed his message and were baptized on that day. This is a staggering beginning to a new age that dawned in that ancient city. We are thus quite right to refer to this time in history as “the age of the Spirit,” or the season of Pentecost. Theologian J. I. Packer writes:

The New Testament proclaims the gift of the personal Holy Spirit to indwell all believers (Acts 2:18; Rom. 8:9; Gal. 3:2) as the seal, guarantee, means and first fruits (Rom. 8:23; 2 Cor. 1:22; Eph. 1:13-14) of their eternal life of fellowship with the Father and the Son (John 17:3; 1 John 1:3). The Spirit, now revealed as a distinct agent who speaks, shows, witnesses, helps, intercedes, and can be grieved and lied to (John 16:13-15; Rom. 8:16, 26; Eph. 4:30; Acts 5:3), mediates the presence of Christ (John 14:16-18; Eph. 3:16-17), unites us to him (Eph. 4:3-4), regenerates (John 3:5, 8; 2 Cor. 3:6; Tit. 3:5), illuminates (1 Cor. 2:13-16; Eph. 1:17), and transforms us (2 Cor. 3:18; Gal. 5:22-23), testifies to our adoption, thus altering our self-knowledge (Rom. 8:16), sustains our praying (Gal. 4:6; Eph. 6:18; Jude 20), and gives us all gifts for service (1 Cor. 12:4-11).

The full new covenant ministry of Jesus presupposed his return to glory to be with the Father and thus did not begin until Pentecost (Acts 2) which is the fulfillment of the pre-ascension promise of Spirit baptism (Acts 1:5: 11:16).

On this day we are all called to remember that this story shows that the gift of the Spirit animates Christ’s people, transforms them, emboldens them and brings divine ability to each of them to be fruitful in ministry.

In my own celebration of Pentecost this year I was reminded that the Spirit is the Spirit of peace. He has come to unite us in Christ as “joint-heirs” and to teach us how to live together in the bonds of peace. Our discipleship has too often lacked credibility precisely because we have not pursued the peace and unity of the catholic church. My particular prayer for today began in my worship last evening:

“Forgive me Lord for all the times that I have been aggressive in my attitude toward others and help me to develop the kind of self-control that will check all rising temptation to needlessly cause more pain in the church of Christ.”

Naming God: Does It Matter What We Call Him?

Naming God is an extremely important matter that too few of us take as seriously as we should. This issue gets pushed forward now and then when various progressive readings of Scripture are promoted in the church. Sometimes these progressive tendencies come from radical feminism. Sometimes they just come from careless non-Trinitarian concepts of God.

In February of 2008 the Vatican issued an eighty word document that produced the following newspaper headline: “Vatican Says Baptisms Using Wrong Words Are Not Valid, Must Be Redone.” The document said, “Anyone baptized in the name of the Creator, and of the Redeemer, and of the Sanctifier” or in the name of “the Creator, the Liberator and the Sustainer” didn’t really get baptized with Christian baptism. I happen to agree with this statement of the Vatican and I think many conservative evangelicals would be puzzled by such agreement.

Following the Vatican’s statement in May of 2008 Christianity Today reported that a Methodist minister “howled about the Vatican’s liturgical fundamentalism that values human language over divine grace.” What is wrong with this statement? A great deal actually but the fundamental problem (no pun intended) is that human language is itself a matter of divine revelation and grace. The church uses a Trinitarian formula for one primary reason—it gives expression to the statement of the Nicene Creed that Jesus is “very God of very God.” Further, it clearly expresses the truth of the Great Commission that we are commanded to baptize in the Triune name according to Matthew 28:18-20.

All of this is important because God has chosen to reveal himself to us in the Bible. If he had not revealed himself then we would not know who he really is. Jesus refers to himself as the Son and he also speaks of his Father as God. But doesn’t he use other metaphors for the Godhead? The answer is obvious but the name that most designates God in the teaching of Jesus is Father. And in relationship to God, Jesus is always the Son. And the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God the Father. (He is also the Spirit of Jesus in a different sense.)  It is not without accident that the words of Matthew 28 say clearly that we are to baptize “in the name of the Father . . .” Note—Jesus says we are to baptize in the name of.

God’s name seems to always clearly reveal God’s character in Scripture. And God’s name reveals his communal nature (“perichoresis”) as well as his desire for a personal relationship with his people, a people who also have a name.

The problem with all of these radical attempts to rename God, especially in our hymns and liturgies, is that they replace the personal name of God with words that denote function, not personality. If we depersonalize God it will not be long until we miss this vital biblical emphasis entirely. Some have thus correctly noted that “Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier” encourages modalism, the heresy that says that Trinity is about God’s modes of operation rather than about something intrinsic to his essential being. The biblical doctrine says that all three persons are involved in creation, redemption and sanctification so these are not biblical ways to properly name the Triune God.

Other triads include: Creator, Savior and Sanctifier or Mother, Child and Womb (perhaps the worst of all given its almost total lack of biblical support).

Robert Jenson, one of the champions of Trinitarian theology in our time and one of my favorite writers on this subject, says that all of these kinds of ideas suggest we already know the Triune God thus we merely seek to find the right words to address him with. The facts are the other way around says Jenson. “The phrase Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is historically specific and can be what liturgy and devotion—and, at its base, all theology—must have, a proper name of God.”

God revealed his name to us in Jesus Christ. He is our Father. Jesus is his eternal Son and the eternal Spirit proceeds from the Father and is given by the Son. “God is serious about his name—which is why he took the trouble to reveal it to us in Christ. To create an alternative according to our cultural sensibilities is at best parody and at worst idolatry, even if it is constructed from the good metaphors God has given us. Most idols, after all, are created from God’s good gifts” (Christianity Today, May, 2008, page 21).

Ben Witherington on The Shack

One of the very best, if not the absolute best, theological, social and political blog spots on the Internet is that of Ben Witherington, III. Witherington is a highly-esteemed New Testament professor at Asbury Seminary (Wilmore, Kentucky) and the author of numerous academic and popular books that are always of superb quality. I only read a few blogs regularly, mostly because of my personal time constraints. This is one blog that I try to get to as often as possible. After I wrote my simple critique of The Shack last week I was linked to  Witherington's blog (go to the archives and then go to July 22 and there you will find the review), by a friend. He asked me to comment on Dr. Witherington's review of The Shack. I told him that Witherington's review is a thorough and extremely helpful critique. For all the hyper-conservative rant about this book, this particular blog offered a serious reflection with some helpful theological insights that I hope Young will pay attention to if he ever edits his best-selling book.

The basic purpose and story of The Shack remain extremely useful, so far as I am concerned. While some fine-tuning is truly needed, the huge over-reaction to this book is another expression of "left brain" thought dominating "right brain" creativity. The other superb review that I have read of The Shack appeared in Christianity Today. If you go to the site you can type in The Shack and several reviews and blogs will appear. They are all quite helpful.

The review that appeared in World Magazine, however, left a great deal to be desired. I found it predictably unhelpful. World sometimes hits a home run, but more often than not they hit foul balls and just do not advance runners in genuinely creative and fruitful ways. Their ideology rarely allows them to interact with divergent ideas. Instead it seems to obligate them to politicize issues within evangelicalism that will appeal to very strong conservatives, who also appear to be their target audience. I read an issue of World last week and several articles were brilliant; e.g. Marvin Olasky reviewing the gritty and dark HBO series, The Wire, a superb review, to cite one very positive example. World's reviews are very uneven so you are never quite sure what you will get.