CTC 66
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| Christ the Center | |
 |
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| Episode | 66 |
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| Guest(s) | Douglas Kelly |
| Panel | Nick Batzig |
| The God Who Is | |
Length: 46:50
Date: April 24, 2009
Contents |
[edit] Description
Christ the Center invites Dr. Douglas Kelly to speak about his Systematic Theology (Volume 1): Grounded in Holy Scripture and Understood in Light of the Church. Nick Batzig caught up with Dr. Kelly at the recent Twin Lakes Fellowship near Jackson, MS for this fascinating discussion. Dr. Kelly is the author of many written works including, If God Already Knows, Why Pray?, Preachers with Power: Four Stalwarts of the South, New Life in the Wasteland, Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1-2:4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms, and The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World.
[edit] Introduction
Richard Jordan Professor of Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, and preaches regularly at Reedy Creek Presbyterian Church.
[edit] The Series
Christian Focus has published this as the first volume in what is intended to be a three volume series.
The first volume is on the Trinity, and the emphasis is grounded on scripture and understood in the light of the church.
[edit] Why Another Systematic Theology?
William MacKenzie (of Christian Focus Publications) said we need a systematic theology both from a reformed point of view but also from the whole Western Christian tradition, and speaking to the issues of the time, so Kelly decided he would do it. McKenzie asked Kelly around 1998, and this first volume was completed in 2007.
[edit] Approaches to Systematic Theologies
Nick: E.g., Dabney focuses on John Dick, the Scottish Presbyterian. Nobody else interacts with him.
What do you bring new to systematic theologies.
[edit] The Patristic Fathers
Kelly: I don't feel I'm in any way original, or creative. I kind of like what Charles Hodge said near the end of his career -- and it horrified a lot of people, but others were grateful -- that there hadn't been a new thought at Princeton in 50 years.
It's my feeling that the reformed faith, as developed in Calvin and the Puritans and what followed could be thought of as the finest flowering of Christianity. I don't say that in the book; I didn't need to say it. It will either show itself, or it won't. But it's my opinion that in the providence of the Lord-- God said the Holy Spirit would be with the Church, and He's guided the Church through these 2000 years, and I think in the Reformation there was a profound return to scripture and the Fathers. So I wanted to write a systematic theology first of all that would be based on the Holy Scriptures, which I hold to be the inspired word of God, to the fullest. And also therefore that it would interact through the Church Fathers.
With a link to the church Fathers there's a living vitality.
By the fifth century all the major philosophical and epistemological issues had more or less been dealt with in principle. New things arise, and you have to do new avenues, but the big questions had been dealt with.
We often hear about post modernism-- that's sheer medieval nominalism.
Nick: that's not really new.
Kelly: No. And so I wanted to have a systematic theology that went back to the Calvinist and Puritan attribute of looking carefully at how the fathers had exegeted the passages-- what they dealt with, how they were interacting with the pagan culture, because I find that the modern culture as we know it in the West and really the whole world, it's a melting pot, it's many different religions and non-religion and secularism with competing truth claims-- that's exactly how it was when Christianity came on the scene. The Lord Jesus Christ and then Peter and Paul and those fathers had to speak the Gospel into a pluralistic culture...
They give us a tremendous amount of insight which, to our loss, we ignore.
By the 18-19th centuries, much of the Presbyterian and Reformed traditions had lost much of the Patristic heritage.
Nick: We just talked recently with Michael Haykin about the value of studying Patristics. Very interesting. There are cautions, but we have neglected them and there is an encouragement to study the early theologians of the Church.
Kelly: I felt that was something I could offer. I believe that we wouldn't have had some of the problems we did in the past 200 years if we'd stayed with the Fathers. Not that the Fathers are final-- the Word of God, the inerrant scripture is final-- but the Fathers give us tremendous guidance on how language is related to reality, and how a finite mind can know or at least grasp the infinite. Those sorts of things were all dealt with.
Nick: And speaking more specifically on the Trinity and the person of Christ, we interviewed Carl Trueman this past year on the Trinity, and really focusing on the Cappadocian Fathers. Now, do you deal with Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzus?
Kelly: Yes, a great deal. Particularly Gregory Nazianzus, Basil the Great, and also St. Hilary of Poitiers and Cyril of Alexandria is one of my favorites. And obviously St. Augustine in the West and many others.
[edit] Beginning with the Trinity
So I think that's something that needs to be done to enrich the Church and to reappropriate a heritage we've got to have to reach out to the world in which God has placed us. And so I started with the Holy Trinity because I believe, as it has often been said, the main thing about Christianity has to offer to the world is the Trinity.
Nick: Amen.
Kelly: You can take Islam, you can take liberal secularism, which is some kind of Unitarian ... and other options... Hindu and the rest, and it is the Trinity that is the main thing we have to offer in our mission to the world, and in our own life glorifying God. It's a Triune God that we worship, and so that's where I wanted to start.
Nick: I'm hitting you broadside a little bit, but do you deal with the issue of hypostasis/ substance/ person-- what it means?
Kelly: very much so. I have sections on all that.
[edit] Perichoresis and God as a Person
Nick: Our listeners would be interested to know your point of view on the debate that's sort of going on in our circles about whether it's right to call God a Person... I think Van Til and some of the Dutch -- Kuyper-- would call God ontologically a person and yet have the three individual persons in the Godhead-- Father, Son and Holy Spirit-- but because of that perichoresis-- the inter-penetration-- do you have any hesitations with using the term person as applied to God generally? I know a lot of theologians do in our circles.
Kelly: No. Not in the slightest. I think person is very important. Karl Barth had some questions-- I won't say that Barth was a modalist, but some things he said sounded like it; I don't think he totally went in that direction but Karl Rahner, the great, sort of liberal Roman Catholic theologian in his book on the trinity had just come out in 1970, and I had to read when I was in Edinburgh with Thomas Torrance. Torrance disagreed with Rahner on this point, although he respected Torrance and agreed with him on some things. Rahner basically gives up The Word. I deal with that in the book both with Barth and Rahner.
Nick: So God becomes an abstract...
Kelly: Exactly..
Nick: ... symbol, or whatever.
Kelly: ... why God is a person. What I think you would say is, God is three persons in one reality. But if you would speak of the three you would say The Personal God.
Nick: That's right.
Kelly: The Trinity is personal. The last word in the universe is not an empty black hole or electromagnetism/ gravity/ nuclear structure. It is a personal God who speaks worlds into existence, who interacts with it and saves us and loves us.
Nick: Amen. That's beautiful.
Kelly: yeah.
[edit] Torrance
Nick: So its sort of well-known that you've benefited from Torrance to a degree and that you're critical to a degree as well.
Kelly: Sure.
Nick: And what I've heard, and I've heard this second-hand so I'd like to ask you, is that you've really benefited from him on the Trinity. Is that true?
Kelly: I would say, certainly, two or three things. On the Trinity where he-- I think it's in his book, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church and then a later book The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons those are among two of the best of all times on the Trinity along with St. Augustine on the Trinity and Hilary of Poitiers and also Thomas Aquinas is very good. So yes, Torrance on the Trinity, also Torrance on epistemology. Realism. That is to say, we know God Himself. He comes out to us in his Word, in the flesh of Christ, and in the Holy Spirit. So actually we don't know just about God statements and things you figure out. Yes, propositional statements are true, they're necessary...
Nick: Yeah, systematic theology...
Kelly: Exactly. I Corinthians 15-- this Jesus was crucified. And so forth. But we actually know God. And I have felt over the years -- and I could be wrong in this-- this is tending towards the judgmental -- but I have sometimes felt that people in the church, even in the theological enterprise, were very uncomfortable with any concept of knowing God directly. They wanted to keep it on the theoretical level-- what I call nominalism. The words, the concepts they could maybe control and manipulate. But they were terrified of their life being open before God and God in their life, and so Torrance is very good on theological realism.
A third area where I learned from him and I appreciate his heritage is his work on the commonalities between true science-- what the scientific approach is-- and true theology. Like his great book Theological Science... oh, there are several on that. And I think that since we live in such a scientific culture, it is necessary to appropriate the good things he was doing on that in order to know how we can know anything. I mean, it's the answer to post-modernism, relativism, and so forth. And specifically how we know God, how He speaks to us. That science, one of the points is -- you distinguish what you know from your knowing of it-- you can know something outside of your head. And you have to seek to know a thing in accordance with what it is so that it can reveal itself to you. And he's written a lot on that. I think that's very important.
[edit] Trinity: Economic vs. Ontologic
Nick: That's very good, and I appreciate your sharing that with us.
A question I've had in theology. I've learned a tremendous amount from Jonathan Edwards-- some people are very critical of Edwards. I'm critical of Edwards at certain points, but I've also learned probably more theology from Jonathan Edwards than just about anyone. And Edwards is very careful-- not always with the Trinity, he's not always careful-- but he's very careful to differentiate all throughout sermons and lectures and discourses between ontological Trinity and the economic Trinity. God in His being-- Father, Son and Holy Spirit, equal in every way, no subordination, equality, everything that makes God, God. B.B. Warfield in his chapter on morphe in his book The Person and Work of Christ-- everything that makes God God is true for Father Son and Holy Spirit. (I'm saying this for our listeners. I know you know this.) In the economy of redemption, the Son is subordinate to the Father.
How this gets fleshed out in our reading of Scripture is not always easy. Statements about Jesus being subject to the Father obviously have to be categorized in some way. I'm sure you deal with this in the book. What thoughts do you have for our listeners about why this is important for Christians to know this distinction? Or do you think it's important?
[edit] Athanasius -- Contra Arianus
Kelly: Sure, I think it's important. An early work that deals with it well exegetically and theologically is St. Athanasius, born in the 290's and was the champion of the Council of Nicea (320's). He takes on the Arians in his book Contra Arianus (Against the Arians)
The Arians were people in many ways like the Modernists or the Deists, who say "Of course there is a God. But He's in another realm. He can't get through to this realm. Kind of like Dualism or Deism. So Jesus Christ couldn't be God, he's the finest of all creatures, but He is not God, because God can't get through here. " And so they would take passages of scripture. In Proverbs 8 many thought that that was referring to Christ as a creation, he was my delight, daily before him Wisdom. And other places such as "The Father is greater than I". And so forth.
Sometimes Athanasius would miss the point, but in general he does an amazingly careful job in looking at what he called the scopos, the scope of a passage-- what it means, what it is saying, what it doesn't mean. And he goes through passage after passage after passage after passage showing that Christ is God. He's as much God as the Father. In fact, here's what Athansius says, that the Son is everything that God the Father is except for being father.
Nick: That's the personal property.
[edit] Gregory Nazianzus
Kelly: Yeah. And the Son is as "old" as the Father. You don't have time within God. And Gregory Nazianzus in one of his wonderful orations says that to introduce time or causation into the Trinity is to overthrow the Trinity.
[edit] Why Do We Need the Distinction Between Economic and Ontologic Trinity?
So you have the Ontologic Trinity-- Father, Son and Holy Spirit-- ever one God from all eternity.
Yet, it was planned before God created the world. As it were, the Father planned it, and the Son was in on the planning and agreed, and the Holy Spirit agreed that he would do his share, to come into this world, the Son lowering himself to become a creature without ceasing to be creator and do what He had to do and the Holy Spirit coming within the creature without losing his Godness and apply it.
So, therefore, the Scripture itself requires us to think in these terms, even though they don't use the terms ontological trinity and economical trinity.
But the reality is there, so you have to come up with some kind of terminology to collect it.
Nick: Otherwise, it seems to me that these are clear contradictions...
Kelly: Sure.
Nick: .. if you don't have that distinction. Jesus in the incarnation says 'no one knows the day or the hour-- not even the son'. Well, if the Son doesn't know as God, in ontology, He is subordinate to the Father. He's less than God, because God is omniscient.
Kelly: I like what T.F. Torrance said about that. He said any ignorance that Jesus Christ had on earth was economic ignorance, not an ontologic ignorance.
[edit] The Holy Spirit
Nick: Let's talk a little bit about the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit doesn't really seem to get the focus-- I know that Sinclair Ferguson has written a phenomenal work on the Holy Spirit ...
Kelly: I think very highly of Sinclair Ferguson.
Nick: He's a great blessing to the Church. In that book, especially, (as we encourage our listeners to read yours also).
Could you talk a little about the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer in relationship to the Father and the Son?
Kelly: Ok. One of the old Fathers said-- I can't remember which one now-- that the Holy Spirit is the modesty of God. He does not like to speak of himself. As Christ says in John, chapter 14, chapter 16, When the Holy Spirit is come, He will not speak of Himself. He will take the things of me and show them unto you. He does not like to turn the light on Himself, but rather on the Son. So that is one of the reasons that the Holy Spirit is more mysterious than the others. It's that He doesn't speak much of Himself. He gives us enough, that we can know-- He's a distinct person, He's fully God.
I think the basic work of the Holy Spirit is to represent the Lord Jesus Christ to us and to make Him real. Because when Jesus was predicting His death, resurrection, and ascension-- although the disciples didn't quite get it, at least they understood that He was saying that He would leave. And they asked Him not to leave. And He said --I'm giving you the Authorized Version, since that's what I memorized as a child-- "It's expedient for you that I go away, for if I go to the Father (in the ascension), I will come again" and that is when the Holy Spirit comes, Jesus is coming. He does not leave us orphans.
Nick: It's His Spirit.
Kelly: It's the Spirit of the Son. You know, in Romans 8 and Galatians 4 He has sent the Spirit of the Son in our hearts, causing us to cry Abba! Father! Intimate word for God our Father. So the Holy Spirit comes and brings all that Christ is, and makes it real and present for us. You could also say that in a sense the Holy Spirit is the omnipresence of God. That is to say, He is fully with the Father and the Son on the Throne, but he's also fully with the believer and with the Church. So Calvin says something this, and it's particulary quoted in Wallace's, Calvin's Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament, that the Holy Spirit evacuates the categories of space and time, so they constitute no problem.
Like when Jesus was being crucified on Calvary, in Heb 9:14 it says He through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself-- it doesn't say Holy Spirit-- yes, it's the Holy Spirit! -- but the Eternal Spirit. But why Eternal? Why that adjective? Because the Holy Spirit is there when the blood is being shed, He's there when I'm confessing my sins,
