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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 TrinityIn 2016 Evangelicals debated about the best way to affirm that God is one and yet Father and Son. The old answer is: the Father begets the Son eternally; the Son is eternally begotten. Beget and begotten are old words to describe how fathers generate children. A mother births them; a father begets.
In recent years, evangelicals attempted to find a new way to talk about Father and Son. They said that the Father relates to the Son because he has paternal authority; the Son relates to the Father in a mode of submission. Authority and submission distinguish Father and Son.
For the most part, people found the new approach insufficient. It implied eternal inferiority of the Son, implied two wills, and inserted the human life of Jesus where he obeyed the Father into God. It unintentionally implied a creaturely characteristic in God since Jesus’s creaturely obedience to the Father gets imported into how God is eternally!
Recently, however, a theologian reaffirmed that the Father eternally has authority over the eternally submissive Son. Interestingly, the theologian cited Augustine and Hilary of Poitiers as proponents of his position. [Read more…] about Eternal Submission? Not Arianism, but still Wrong
A number of years ago theologians debated the nature of the trinity. Some held that the Son relates to the Father by submitting to him eternally, and the Father relates to the Son by eternally having authority over the Son.
Fair enough. Some Bible passages talk about the Son doing the will of the Father. But then why wouldn’t they? Jesus, the man Jesus Christ, always obeys the will of the Father according to his humanity since he came to live and die for our sake!
On the other hand, Christians also affirm the divinity of Christ, the Word of God. And so believers have understood Christ’s obedience to the Father according to his humanity, while confessing his equality according to his divinity. In the language of Paul in Philippians 2, Jesus took on the form of servant and became obedient to the point of death. Yet before becoming a servant, he enjoyed equality with God as a divine Person.
If equal, then the Father and Son share the same nature and thus the same power, activity, will and so on. After all, we confess that God is one.
However, in trying to work out how the one God is three persons, some evangelicals proposed that the Son eternally submits to the Father who eternally has authority over the Son. By these relations, the Father and Son might be eternally distinguished. And, some also claim, this relation of authority and submission explains why wives submit to husbands since marriage reflects the Trinity. [Read more…] about The Trinity Debate: Eternal Submission and the Spectre of Arianism
John 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)
One reason why Christians believe in the doctrine of the Trinity is because the Father, Son, and Spirit share the same power, and by this power, the three inseparably operate. In particular, God alone has the power to create–creatures do not. For this reason, since the Father, Son, and Spirit create, they share the same power. Their activities reveal a shared power, a power only applicable to God.
What I have described in brief is one way how the inseparable operations of God lead to trinitarian thinking. For that reason, Adonis Vidu’s recent work The Same God Who Works All Things describes a reason why we confess God as Triune. His subtitle reads Inseparable Operations in Trinitarian Theology. These inseparable operations refer to what I have detailed above: how the Father, Son, and Spirit—God—inseparably operate. [Read more…] about The Same God Who Works All Things by Adonis Vidu (a Review)
[Read more…] about Through Power (the Son), the Father’s activity produces works
