As the family enjoyed each other in conversation, you can easily imagine the adults’ full attention was drawn away from the youngest of kids.  One of these times, I, a young toddler, rode my tricycle around the pool until I rode it into the pool without anyone noticing.  As the story goes, when my grandmother saw me face down in the pool she jumped in to save me.  The only problem was that she couldn’t swim either.  Her cry for help and the sound of the splash grabbed my father’s attention and he jumped in to save both of us.

If we rewind the story just a couple moments back to the point when my father heard the splash and cry for help, at that moment in time he had two options. One option was that he could save his mother and his son by throwing some kind of flotation device to us.  The device would give my grandmother the ability to float and swim to the side of the pool on her own.  Or he could jump into the pool so that he himself could be the swimmer and save us from death.

Let me posit this episode as a possible picture to speak about the differing views on the nature of grace. That either grace is a flotation device given from afar that enables one who cannot swim to swim, or that grace is a person jumping in to save and be depended on for everything.  This contradistinction is the Rubicon between Christian traditions formed by systematic theology and biblical theology. Systematic or scholastic traditions start with certain philosophical presumptions and categories about God and humanity. These presuppositions are supported with proof texts from the Bible.  Whereas biblical theology attempts to let the story of God’s pursuit of a people for himself shape the way we speak of God, man, sin, and grace.

In terms of grace, this distinction is best seen by beginning with Peter Lombard  (c.1096-1164). He, in his Sentences, asked, “Is the love by which we are saved a created habit of our soul, or is it the very person of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us?”(Lombard, Sentences 1.17; in Ozment, The Age of Reform, 31).   Lombard, in agreement with Augustine’s use of Romans 5:5, states that the “Holy Spirit is the love by which we love God and our neighbor.”  That grace isn’t our nature to offer charity or a new habit given to us by the Spirit, which enables us to consistently live a life of love. Rather, the gift purchased by Christ according to Augustine is “plainly the Holy Spirit who is God and the third person of the Trinity…” (Sentences, 1.14.46).  In other words, the Spirit doesn’t give us a lifesaver that enables us to swim when we can’t.  Instead Christ jumps in and unites himself to us by the Spirit, just as the Father is one with the Son by the Spirit (Sentences, 1.17.65).

Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on Lombard’s Sentences rejected the notion that the Spirit is the gift given because this would mean our love would not be in our control nor responsible for our good acts.   Also, if this were the case, according to Aquinas, it would mean that God would then have to jump into the pool of creation, which would be an absurdity when God and creation are incommensurate – that is, two natures that cannot correspond.  These conclusions aren’t based on Scripture, but are presuppositions based in Aristotle’s view of God as the unmoved mover and humanity as independent self-moved choosers. Therefore God, from a transcendent distance, throws a lifesaver, i.e. he gives the capacity to swim to people who don’t have the ability to swim.

To put it in terms of sin and righteousness, Aquinas and Aristotle assumed that the practice of righteous deeds makes one become righteous.  But here’s the problem, sin keeps me from practicing righteousness consistently long enough to form a habit of righteousness.  So God gives me the habit of righteousness by the Spirit. However, we find Jesus said that a bad tree only produces bad fruit. Not until a bad tree is made into a good tree can good fruit be produced.  Jesus assumed that being actually leads to doing, not the other way around.

Listening to Jesus’ words the Reformers rejected Aristotelian categories and sided with Lombard. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Cranmer all rejected the use of habitus as a way for God to give grace without jumping into the swimming pool.  From Luther’s commentary on The Sentences to Cranmer’s tenth article in the Forty-Two Articles of Religion, grace was the person of the Spirit pouring the love of God into our hearts, who truly unites us to Christ.

One of the countless ways this makes a difference is in our prayer life.  Often I hear and pray for God’s help, but what is meant by “help” counts for everything in the extreme.  If help is just God giving me some kind of power or ability from a distance to face the difficulties of the day, I’m back to thinking of grace as a commodity or the life jacket.  But if I mean “help” in the sense “I need you Jesus today more than ever, please help walk through the day with you because I can do nothing apart from you,” I’m relying on a person and not a flotation device.

The post Help first appeared on Cor Deo.

Dionysius, the self-professed convert of Paul, has helped shape one point of view. The true Dionysius, noted in Acts 17:34, isn’t known to us beyond his cameo Bible reference.  But a much later figure who borrowed the name and identity of Dionysius is critical to the question.  He was able to offer a version of God that still has broad credibility by using his ‘borrowed’ affiliation with Paul to speak with New-Testament-like authority.

Today this figure is known as Pseudo-Dionysius.  He was, in fact, a 6^th century philosopher who did much to import Neo-Platonism into Christianity.  His actual inspiration wasn’t Paul but Proclus (410-485) who relied, in turn, on Plotinus (205-270)—both of whom were not Christians.

This is tedious stuff for non-historians, I’m sure, but the question of what God is like is important.  And Pseudo-Dionysius plays a larger role in our modern conception of God than most of us know.  This, in turn, calls for a bit of patient curiosity, so please track with me as we note three other important figures.

A Greek Orthodox leader in the 7^th century, Maximus the Confessor (580-662), was quickly convinced that Pseudo-Dionysius was the actual New Testament convert of Paul.  He, in turn, did much to shape today’s Orthodox liturgy—of worship-as-ascent—based on what he took from Pseudo-Dionysius.

Another convert was the Brit, Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c.815-c.877), who carried Dionysian views into Latin-speaking realms.  His efforts helped develop Roman Catholic mysticism that, like Orthodoxy had already done, followed the Dionysian call to a three-step ascent into God.  This was the pathway of purgation, illumination, and union: an approach to spirituality that is gaining momentum today.

A third major convert to Ps. Dionysius calls for special notice: Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).  Aquinas is important because he offered the most elaborate and compelling blend of Greek classical theology/philosophy—with Aristotle as a guiding light—and medieval Christian faith.

A number of recent scholars—promoters of Post-Reformation Protestant Scholasticism—have shown that today’s Reformed theology is a slightly enhanced reprise of what Thomas once taught.  And they’re right.  For many—but not all—in the Reformed tradition today it’s as if the early Reformation never occurred.  Thomistic themes still reign in defining faith.

To be clear, the evidence is compelling that Martin Luther and John Calvin were repelled by the Thomistic package and meant to overthrow it—and many Puritans, including Richard Sibbes, agreed with these reformers—but that’s another story.

What we want to note here is that Thomas relied heavily on Aristotle for his methodology and his ethical framing of salvation, but many of his most significant assumptions about who God is came from Pseudo-Dionysius.  A formal historical study by Fran O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas, charts this.

For the sake of space let’s take up just one feature: the question of where our assumptions about God begin.  Where did Aquinas start—as do many Christians today—in thinking about God?  He followed Ps. Dionysius by portraying God as utterly different from the creation. So much so that God is ultimately beyond reach.  Here is Aquinas speaking in the Summa Contra Gentiles (as offered in O’Rourke, 54-55):

“. . . he [God] is super-eminent over other things and set apart from all.  And this is the ultimate and most perfect limit of our knowledge in this life, as Dionysius says in the Mystical Theology, ‘We are united with God as the unknown.’  Indeed, this is the situation, for, while we know of God what he is not, what he is remains wholly unknown.”

Aquinas, with Dionysius, adopts an incommensurability of knowing: a complete resignation about ever knowing God as he really is.  Instead we are left knowing him only “through his effects” as the One who causes all that is, but exists outside all that is.

What kind of God emerges from this starting point?  One very different from the God who offers himself in the Bible!

Let’s spurn philosophical speculations about the nature of being and essential divinity for a moment and ask what God reveals about himself at the beginning of Scriptures.  If we allow God the privilege of disclosing whatever he/she/it may want to disclose of [him]self we find a startling reality: “Us”.

As in the one God saying in Genesis 1, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And then, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

What we can start with is a single God who exists in a wondrous communion as “Us” and that this “Us” generated another “us”—that is, humanity, including the readers of the Bible.  And the fact that God birthed us out of his own communion tells us of his priority to engage us in some sort of commensurate bond of knowing and sharing.  And his name is Jesus who now reveals his Father by the ministry of his Spirit.

There’s much more to say, of course, but let’s be sure we start where we’re meant to start.  With a God whom the Elder disciple was speaking of when he twice said in 1 John 4 that, “God is love.”  This love is the bond in the originating Us who now shares it with any of us who receive his love and respond.

If only Thomas had started with the Son—who offers real Love as an ultimate starting point—in place of Ps. Dionysian and Neo-Platonic speculations about the unknowable One, many might have a more satisfying and winsome faith today.

Thankfully it’s not too late to reconsider: to enjoy the God who is known as a Triune Us and who tells us he loves us.

The post Where Should We Start? first appeared on Cor Deo.