Sunday Oden 5: The Trinity

The previous post in this series is here.

I only got through one chapter this week, chapter 5, "Whether God is Triune."

Oden repeatedly says that theology is simply an explanation of baptism, very interesting even though I wait to be fully convinced. I continue to be bothered by the way he handles the "fathers." Bounds has indicated to me that his sense of "original meaning" is more subtle than one might at first think, that in fact the end of the first part on the Father will lay down some of his hermeneutical cards.

But in general, the early fathers were no more wired to read the New Testament or Old Testament texts in their literary and historical contexts than the New Testament authors were in their readings of the Old. We presume their trinitarian readings of Scripture were on the right theological track. But a clever student who has taken inductive Bible study will be a better contextual interpreter than any of them.

The Bible scholar in me thus chafes when Oden says silly things like, "The unique phrase 'O God, thy God" makes no sense without a triune premise" (113). I have no objection to reading this psalm and Hebrews that quotes it with trinitarian lenses. But the psalm made perfect sense against its ancient near eastern context, a place where human kings were thought of as God's sons and where the king as godlike and God's representative in no way contradicted God as God. We should see these statements as stones on a revelatory path toward trinitarianism and we can read them in the light of later trinitarianism. But this is not the same as reading them in their original contexts.

Still, this chapter is a gold mine of the biblical texts in which the earliest Christians were inspired to hear reference to the Trinity. "The triune teaching has become incrementally clarified as established teaching by passing through successive stages: preindications in the Old Testament; the central disclosure of God as Father, Son, and Spirit in the New Testament; and the full development of church teaching in the Nicene definition and its subsequent interpretations" (109-110).

In the Old Testament, he mentions the plural form of Elohim, the threefold repetition of "holy" in Isaiah. The plural form in "remember your creators." I'm not sure if Oden really thinks these things originally had anything to do with the Trinity, which is highly doubtful--it would require us to assume such things made no sense to the people they were actually written for. But they are passages in which later Christians have heard inklings of the Trinity.

He mentions that Father, Son, and Spirit in the NT all are called God. All display the attributes of God. All do the same works. All are worshipped.

Finally, he mentions 12 NT passages that include all three persons: 1) the baptismal formula of the Great Commission; 2) Jesus' baptism; 3) Paul's benediction in 2 Cor. 13:13; 4) the Ephesian formula of 2:18; 5) Jude's summary call to prayer; 6) the Johannine farewell discourses; 7) John's prologue; 8) the Johannine letters; 9) Revelation's salutation; 10) Philippian hymn; 11) Colossians 1; 12) Hebrews introduction.

On the whole, I've found all the chapters of Oden disappointing thus far. It's because he has kept his promise. He is saying nothing new. He isn't even really clarifying the old.

Sunday Oden 4: Whether God Exists

For previous posts in this series, see here.

After two chapters about God's attributes, Oden now shifts to the question of whether God exists. This order of proceding is important to him, even though he seems quite convinced that these arguments are persuasive. He does not believe God's existence can be proved beyond doubt (83).

I want to make it very clear that it is not necessary for all these arguments to work for us to believe in God. Indeed, some would argue that the proper approach is blind faith rather than "evidence that demands a verdict."

In the end, he presents five kinds of argument that have been made:

1. Arguments from order and design (teleological arguments)

The argument from order is that the order of the universe is such that it begs for us to conclude an intelligence created it with purpose, that there is an Orderer of some kind behind it. The argument from design is similar, but slightly different. It argues that the complexity of the universe argues for an intelligent designer, much as a watch would.

Many will find this argument convincing. Evolution was often thought to have dethroned it, but even the theory of evolution involves patterns of order. Why does nature behave one way and not another? I wonder if in a quantum age, the argument from design collapses into the cosmological argument.

2. Arguments from humanity

The first of these is the argument of mind--how can we have minds by chance? How could nature produce something greater than itself? Not sure this argument makes sense to me. A couple of other arguments here that have been used in the past don't make a lot of sense to me. For example, God may very well have implanted in the human mind an awareness of Him, but it would be circular to argue that this fact alone argues that He exists.

More convincing is the argument that the existence of the divine is the general consensus of human culture. It is striking that humans seem universally to have some sense of the existence of gods. There must be some very strong reality driving this indeed!

3. Arguments from change, causality, contingency, and degrees of being

These are the standard cosmological arguments and although they do not prove the existence of the Christian God, I find them very impactful arguments. What caused the universe to explode into existence? Could it be possible that everything in the universe only existed contingently? If so, then it would be possible that nothing would exist. But if nothing could exist, there could not thereafter be anything. So it does seem like there must be some Thing or things that exist necessarily.

I'm not sure how helpful the arguments from motion and degrees of being are. In our world, I think the argument from motion collapses into the argument from cause. The degrees of being argument is that there must be a highest degree of being if we can conceive of lower ones. Not sure this makes any sense today.

Here again is where I respect the fathers but know way more about the world than they did. That makes this chapter seem really off to me at points.

4. Arguments from conscience, beauty, pragmatic results and congruity

I do not find these particular arguments very compelling myself. For example, the moral argument goes something like this: "The existence of absolute moral obligation establishes the existence of God as the cause of the moral order" (94). The problem is that the existence of absolute moral obligation is not at all obvious in the world, even though I believe in it.

Similarly, Kant's arguments for freedom, immortality, and God were based on certain things that seemed obvious to him about the world. Cultural anthropology far from vindicates his sense that everybody experiences such things the way he did. The arguments from conscience and beauty again seem far removed from the universal sense of those in this messed up world. The pragmatic argument is a reason why it might be advantageous to believe but it is not really an argument for the truth of such belief.

5. argument from the idea of perfect being

We end with the ontological argument. Oden clearly thinks he has hit pay dirt here, and there was a time when I tried to meditate on it to grasp its profundity. In the end, I find myself unable to say whether it has any truth to it or not. On one level it is logically incoherent. But there may be a subtle truth to it that I have not fully grasped.

The argument basically is that we could not conceive of God unless God actually existed, that the very idea of God implies within it the existence of God. The logical problem with the argument is that it mixes apples and oranges. The conception of God is a matter of our thoughts. The existence of God is a matter of the reality outside our mind. The argument as classically presented by Anselm and Descartes crosses this boundary between conception and world.

Certainly the greatest possible Being can exist in my conception. But if that fact in itself implies God exists in the real world, I have not yet been able to discern why.

So I find this chapter disappointing. Oden seems to treat all the classic arguments as if they are still fully convincing. Most of them to me, however, seem based on a pre-Cartesian view of the world. Nevertheless, God will continue to exist just fine with or without any of them. :-)

Sunday Oden 3: Nature and Character of God

Not Sunday, but alas...

Oden divides the attributes of God into three categories. Chapter 2 is about God's intrinsic attributes and His relational attributes. Chapter 3 is about His personal attributes, those similar to human character. Parentheses are Oden, brackets are me talking...

Intrinsic Attributes (incommunicable, primary, essential attributes)

• God is before time. [understandably, we can't quite be sure what this means]
• God is self-sufficient (aseity). [I think I disagree with where Oden will take this, namely, when he claims that God's self-sufficiency does not imply He could have been as happy without the creation. I personally think God was just fine without it. Maybe I misunderstand Oden]
• God is one.
• God is not composed of parts (simplicity). [I never understood this one--I suspect it is a pre-modern left-over that has more to do with the way God looks to us within the creation rather than the mysterious ineffable of God beyond the creation]
• God is infinite.
• God is immeasurable.
• God is eternal.
• God has no impulse to suicide. :-)
• God is incomparibly alive.

Relational Attributes

• omnipresent
• omniscient (Oden claims that the Arminian position on foreknowledge is the consensual one, and thus that Augustine and Calvin are the exception rather than the rule)
• omnipotence (God can do anything consistent with who He is; He allows for secondary causes and thus does not directly cause everything that happens; He is transcendent)

Personal Attributes (chapter 3)

• Scripture represents God with personal characteristics [although we always have to be careful about anthropomorphism] God can say "I."
• God has a name.
• Impersonal terms inadequate
• God is Spirit.
• God has a free will. [classically, His freedom is connected to His nature, meaning that in a very real sense, God is not free to tell someone to murder their child... oops. I am slightly unorthodox here in that I see God's freedom as more extensive than what we think of as His nature]
• "God deals with human beings not coersively but persuasively" (61).
• Among God's chief moral characteristics are holiness and love, where Oden defines holiness as perfect goodness [I personally don't think that this is the primary meaning of holiness in the Old Testament. I think it imposes a much later understanding of goodness on an Ancient Near Eastern world]
• God is love--1 John defines God most succinctly [technically not a definition but a metonymy where something associated with something else is metaphorically used to describe it. The standard distinction between types of loves is also an overreading, although we can probably see a distinction between eros and agape far more than between agape and filos]

Divine happiness brings together all His attributes.

Sunday Oden 2: Name of God

Each Sunday, I am trying to summarize a chapter of Tom Oden's Classic Christianity. For some thoughts on the Preface, see here.

First there is the Introduction to Book One: "The Living God" (3-11). Oden expresses ambivalence at the personal pronouns "he" and "she," since God is not literally a particular gender. Indeed, part of the scandal of particularity is the specificity with which Christ had to come to earth. So he was a Jew and not a Greek. He was a man and not a woman. "It" doesn't adequately convey God's personhood.

The intro distinguishes "natural" and "revealed" theology, a distinction most will know.

Chapter 1 is called "The Name of God" (15-37). "Christian revelation refers to the disclosure of God in the person and work of Christ" (18). This is a crucial point. To speak in general of a divine Being is not to speak of God in a Christian way. Christ is the focal point of talking about God for Christians historically. "The Christian study of God is faith seeking understanding" (21).

Here is Oden's understanding of the "consensual" definition of God: "God is the uncreated source and end of all things; one; incomparibly alive; insurmountable in presence, knowledge, and power; personal, eternal spirit, who in holy love freely creates, sustains, and governs all things" (23).

Oden mentions five ways of knowing God's character:

1. revelation
2. inferred through causality
3. what God is not (via negativa)
4. God as greater than (say of heightening characteristics--via eminentiae)
5. a priori sense of God, inferred from the very idea of God

He then sets us up for the next two chapters, which deal with attributes of God. Attributes first, then he will look at arguments for God's existence.

One thought that struck me is a potential critique in the making with regard to Oden's "consensual approach." It comes from the fact that almost all his sources are pre-modern, pre-Cartesian. The pre-modern way of looking at the world is essentially reflexive. It reads an order to the world out there that is possibly subject to Feuerbach's claim that God is simply a projection of the best collective traits of humanity. When we say God is the greatest possible Being, for example, are we setting up a portrait of God that is unthinkingly based on our perspective of the world?

I would thus modify Oden's list in this way:

1. God has revealed a nature in relation to this universe. We have no point of reference to say much of what God is outside this universe.

The consensual tradition is pre-Cartesian and so was unable to think in these terms. The order it read "out there" was largely a reflection of an order within its own understanding, not an order that would really correspond to a universe created out of nothing. Its picture of God was thus in many respects simply an extension of this universe rather than the other way around, as it must be.

In this respect, I suspect the consensual tradition must be translated in a post-Cartesian world. Oden's fundamental enterprise--not to say anything new--thus potentially consigns his theology to the pre-modern domain. To continue to view the world in this way is to hobble theology from the very start. The fathers and mothers are crucial, but we have an immensely better understanding of the world than they did and this does matter.

2. inferred through causality
This remains a key way to think about God, and we can do it much better than the consensual tradition could because of our immensely improved understanding of creation. Certainly we may be way off still.

3-4. via negativa and via eminentia
Again, these seem to work well in relation to this universe. I am unsure what if anything they might tell us about God outside this universe, but I look forward to reading on.

5. Being itself
I am less confident that we can know much of God through this path. I suspect in our modern paradigm, this collapses into #2.

These are musings, not claims. I have mused over them for years. Charles Taylor has helped me conceptualize them a further step.

Sunday Oden: Preface

This is the first of what I hope will be about three months of Sundays working through Thomas Oden's Classic Christianity.

Preface (xiii-xxvi)
I haven't known whether to smile or get annoyed when Oden proudly announces that he aims "to make no new contribution to theology" (xiv) and that the "only promise I intend to make... is that of unoriginality" (xv). Oden's systematic theology is about the consensus of Christendom, the beliefs that all Christians hold together in common. He mentions Vincent of Lerins sense of the core as "that which has always, everywhere, and by all Christians been believed about God's self-disclosure" (xv).

He gives the ecumenical Doctors of the Church in the east as 1) Athanasius, 2) Basil, 3) Gregory of Nazianzus, and 4) Chrysostum, and the Church in the west as 1) Ambrose, 2) Augustine, 3) Jerome, and 4) Gregory the Great. Meanwhile, consensual documents are more important than individuals (xvi).

Of course all of these are secondary for Oden to Scripture. He is interested in the common understanding of faith these individuals and other consensual documents have as they have interpreted Scripture. Oden makes it clear that he does not, however, have a fundamentalist understanding of Scripture. xxiv-xxv lay out 10 ways in which his approach differs from fundamentalism.

For example, the consensual approach focuses on the meaning of the resurrection while fundamentalism focuses on the historicity of the resurrection. (To be sure, Oden believes in the historicity of the resurrection too). Another is that the consensual tradition recognizes metaphor and varieties of expression of inspired doctrine in Scripture, while fundamentalism focuses on a single legitimate interpretation of each text.

Gregory of Nyssa put it this way: "Those who handle the text in too literal a manner have a veil cast over their eyes, whereas those who contemplate the God of whom the Scriptures speak receive the revelation of divine glory which lies behind the letter of the text" (xxv).

For next Sunday, d.v. the introduction to The Living God and chapter 1, "The Name of God."