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Dr. Strachan here (and elsewhere) may be subtweeting Craig Carter, who has written on God not being “relational.” Dr. Strachan names the God of the Bible as both “personal and relational.” In the regular sense of relational, that is true.
For further context, here are a set of tweets by Dr. Strachan that prompted this short article.
[Read more…] about Is God Relational? On the Intra-Baptist Debates regarding the TrinityJohn Peckham calls his conception of God covenantal theism. To make the case for covenantal theism, he uses a two-fold standard. Theological concussions must be biblically warranted and systematically coherent (250). Through this biblical and systematically coherent method, Peckham aims to describe God according to Scripture.
His goal is to better understand the nature and attributes of God (1). In pursuit of this understanding, he asks key questions about God that he believes the Bible can answer. “These questions include: Does God change? Does God have emotions” Does God know everything, including the future? Is God all-powerful? Does everything occur as God wills? Is God entirely good and loving? How can God be one God and three persons?” (1).
In this sense, even though Peckham aims to discern God according to biblical warrant, he nevertheless starts with a set of questions. I say this not as a critique but a clarification of how Peckham makes his argument. That said, Peckham’s Divine Attributes is full of Bible. In the first pages, Peckham lists biblical patterns of speech about God before summarizing these patterns. He also interacts widely with other contemporary writers, even some less known but important authors like James Dolezal.
Peckham summarizes his argument economically and in more than one place. By covenantal theism, he aims to describe God as the Bible describes him. The term covenantal conveys “that God enters into real back-and-forth relationship with creatures but does so voluntarily, remaining transcendent even as he condescends to be with us (immanent)” (37). He then defines the attributes he discerns in Scripture: “In brief, covenantal theism affirms God’s aseity and self-sufficiency, qualified immutability and passibility, everlasting eternity, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence and sovereign providence, conventional action, omnibenevolence, and relational triunity” (37).
He will also talk about God being analogically temporal and in a real relation with the world through, as noted, a back-and-forth covenantal relationship (250). He elsewhere explains: “While God’s essential nature is changeless, the covenantal God of Scripture changes relationally because he voluntarily engages in back-and-forth (covenant) relationship with creatures while always remaining the same trinitarian God who was and is and is to come” (254). While he claims to hold to a qualified immutability and impassibility, such statements do not seem to match historic idioms and notions of these concepts. Of the latter, in the context of a theodicy of love, Peckham notes that “the voluntary suffering of God of the cross suffers most of all” (253). As I will argue below, this language appears in the tradition but not in the way that Peckham uses it.
He also does not affirm simplicity (241) and defines the Trinity along social trinitarian lines (244). Each person of the Trinity has “a distinct faculty of reason, will, and self-consciousness” (253). When it comes to trinitarian relations, he sees no biblical warrant for eternal relations of origin, eternal generation either (237). Again, these conclusions flow out of his method of biblical warrant and systematic coherence. With this method and Peckham’s conclusions summarized, I want to reflect on his method (he calls it canonical theology), which relies on biblical warrant and systematic coherence. [Read more…] about Divine Attributes: Knowing the Covenant God of Scripture by John C. Peckham (A Really Long Review)
Christians speak of the Son as being “the only begotten Son” (John 3:16) from all time to give words to how they can confess the oneness of God and say: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” (Rev 5:13).
If God sired the Son from all time, then the Son’s filial relationship to the Father has always described their relationship. It was an eternal begetting or an eternal generation.
Recently a number of Christians have either denied eternal generation, supplanted it, or at the very least have redefined it. The new paradigm takes the name Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission (ERAS).
At least two major obstacles stand before ERAS. First, how can one God eternally obey the one God? That implies two wills. But God is one and so has one will. So he cannot obey his own will.
Second, and what I want to focus on here, ERAS does not articulate how the Spirit can be distinguished from the Father and Son. In short, it cannot explain our worship or liturgical practice of baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
[Read more…] about ERAS Cannot Distinguish The Spirit from the Son And FatherOne of the paradoxes of our faith is that God both reveals himself to us and yet is incomprehensible. We know him in part, yet we do not know him in full (at least, not yet).
And yet: we know God in part. It’s a real knowing, a real understanding. One of the best ways to learn about God is to focus on his names or titles in the Bible.
Here is a short sketch of some names of God in the Bible that reveal God’s nature. These names reveal how the Father and Son relate to another and how God is eternally beneficent and always shares of himself.* [Read more…] about How Names of God Reveal the Nature of God
Retrieving Eternal Generation edited by Fred Sanders & Scott R. Swain. Grand Rapid: Zondervan, 2017.
One of the most beneficial pursuits is the pursuit of the past. In recent days, Christians have particularly benefited from retrieving the spirituality of the past, the wisdom that earlier generations have left for them. And rightly so. Accessing the past’s wisdom is vital to spiritual growth.
Over the centuries, believers struggled to understand their scripture and the life of faith. But the Spirit has not been inactive among the faithful. And so learning from earlier Christian exegetes and from earlier Christian theologians offers great benefit for today. After all, Christianity didn’t appear suddenly in the late second millennium within North America. We have a heritage, a spiritual ancestry.
And this is why Retrieving Eternal Generation is so important. It offers the wisdom of two thousand years of meditation on Scripture and God. [Read more…] about Review of Retrieving Eternal Generation Edited by Fred Sanders and Scott Swain
