神學網 Theology Etc.

In my last post on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I mentioned Jürgen Moltmann’s denial of the Virgin Birth. I thought I might elaborate on this topic a bit more here, discussing Moltmann’s Christology as set forth in The Way of Jesus Christ (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).

Full and True Humanity of Christ
Moltmann agrees with Nicene orthodoxy that the whole of humanity, and not just the soul or any truncated aspect thereof, is in need of salvation, so Christ as Savior must be fully and truly human. Moltmann states: “The whole of humanity in all its natural forms is assumed by God in order that it may be healed” (85). Moltmann explains the full humanity of Christ: “If the Son of God became wholly and entirely human, and if he assumed full humanity, then this does not merely take in human personhood; it includes human nature as well” (ibid.).

Moltmann commends the Church Fathers for resisting “Gnostic theologians who, for the sake of Christ’s divinity, allowed him only to ‘appear’ in the body, without really being there” (84).

“Messianic Spirit Christology”: Moltmann on Two-Nature Christology
Despite this affirmation of the Church Fathers, however, Moltmann proposes a “messianic Spirit Christology,” which he claims is “not levelled at the doctrine of the two natures” of Nience-Chalcedonian orthodoxy (74). However, Moltmann deems the Virgin Birth “unimportant” to the New Testament (78). Moltmann gives credit to the Early Church’s effort to resist Gnostic dualism with the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. However, “if we wished to bring out this intention of the nativity story today, we should have to stress the non-virginal character of Christ’s birth” (84).

Moltmann suggests that in order for us to understand Christ as wholly human in a contemporary sense, Christ’s birth must be a “human-natural one”: “According to today’s understanding of things, talk about Christ’s ‘virgin birth’ through Mary dangerously narrows down his humanity” (85). Moltmann thus insinuates that Christ had a biological father: “We should rather view the whole process of the human begetting, conception and birth of Jesus Christ as the work of the Holy Spirit” (ibid.). This seems to further suggest on the one hand that Christ’s full humanity rests on a non-virginal birth, and on the other hand that Christ’s full deity springs forth from the Spirit’s work throughout all human and natural-biological processes of Christ’s birth.

According to Moltmann’s scheme, the Spirit “‘engenders’ and ‘brings forth’” Jesus (86). “If the messiah is called the Son of God, then to be consistent we have to talk about the Spirit as his divine ‘mother’” (ibid.). Moltmann appeals to the Gospel of Thomas—a spurious and heretical gospel!—to claim that it is “not inappropriate” to speak of the Spirit as Christ’s “mother” (84). This obviously deviates from the Nicene understanding of God’s Trinitarian opera ad intra of eternal generation and procession.

The formulation of the “motherhood of the Holy Spirit” is related to Moltmann’s critique of orthodox patristic Christology. Moltmann takes Christ’s nature “ex Maria virgine” to imply that “it is excluded from original sin, and also from the consequence of original sin, which is death; and it is therefore immortal” (50). For Moltmann, this implies that the human Jesus would even be omnipresent (ibid.). Moltmann thus rejects a literal understanding of the Virgin Birth and the orthodox doctrine of Christ’s humanity “without sin.” For Moltmann, a Christ free from original sin and mortality has no ability to save fallen humanity from the bondage to decay (51f).

Furthermore, on the orthodox understanding, to speak of Mary as Theotokos (Bearer of God) is to say that the Person to whom Mary gave birth is the Second Person of the Godhead, and thus that Christ’s humanity has no independent hypostasis (person). For Moltmann, this is problematic because an anhypostatic (the biblical, orthodox understanding that Christ is only one Person, and that is the Second Person of the Triune God rather than a human person) or “non-personal” humanity would be “the assumption of the de-humanized, de-personalized, oppressed human being who has been degraded to mere ‘brute matter’” (51). Moltmann thus finds it inappropriate to speak of an anhypostatic union in the Person of Christ.

An Evaluation of Moltmann’s Christology
Moltmann’s critique of the Virgin Birth and the anhypostasia seems to rely on a very curious interpretation of the traditional doctrine. For orthodox Christology, the Virgin Birth does not entail that Christ’s humanity is free from original sin or mortality. Moltmann seems to have confused virginal conception with the Roman Catholic (and unbiblical) notion of Immaculate Conception. Moltmann also seems to have misunderstood the doctrine of Christ’s humanity “without sin” to imply that Christ was “without mortality, like the nature of Adam and Eve before the fall” (50).

Furthermore, Moltmann seems to have understood “anhypostatic” to mean “non-personal” in a modern sense. However, orthodox Christianity would stress that “anhypostatic” does not mean “non-personal,” but rather that the personhood or mode of existence of Christ is derived from the Second Person of the Trinity (i.e., “enhypostatic”).

Aside from Moltmann’s misinterpretations of traditional Christology, his formulation of a “Spirit-Christology” is also blatantly heretical. He claims that this formulation is not leveled against the traditional doctrine, but in fact he re-interprets the Virgin Birth to be merely a “symbolic embodiment” (83). In stressing the “non-virginal” character of Christ’s birth, Moltmann identifies not Mary but the Holy Spirit as the “divine mother” or Theotokos. Moltmann gives to Mary the Antiochene (one school of theology in the Early Church from which many heresies arose) title of “the mother of Jesus Christ” instead (one of the Antiochene views deemed heretical by the Early Church) (ibid.). Of course, Moltmann leaves these statements open to interpretation, but at one point he seems to deliberately suggest adoptionist (the heresy that Jesus Christ was not a divine Person but a human person, who was adopted by God to become divine) overtones when he denies that there should be an “antithesis between an adoptionist and a pre-existence christology,” dismissing such dichotomy as a “nineteenth-century invention” (74).

Conclusion
Moltmann agrees with orthodoxy that Christology and soteriology (the Doctrines of Christ’s Person and of Salvation) are inseparable. Moltmann’s Christology corresponds to a view of the human plight that emphasises transience, mortality and bondage to decay, but not what orthodox theology, one the basis of the Bible, might call the gulf of death and judgement created by sin and guilt. As such, Moltmann does not seem to feel the need for a strong emphasis on the hypostatic union (the doctrine of the union of a divine nature and a human nature in the one Person of the Son of God) and Virgin Birth as necessary conditions for salvation. The Christian orthodoxy set forth at Nicea and Chalcedon, in contrast, has a high view of the sin of humanity and the holiness and transcendence of God, which corresponds to its insistence on the hypostatic union in Christ’s Person as the only possible Mediator in, through and with whom fallen humanity may be justified, sanctified and lifted up into divine glory without ceasing to be human.

Recently a friend mentioned to me a book on Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, with a foreword by Tim Keller. There’s no doubt that Bonhoeffer’s life and thought are more than fascinating. There’s also no doubt that Tim Keller is a good teacher of sound biblical doctrine, so the reading that he recommends should be in some ways edifying. Certainly Bonhoeffer was an important “witness” (using his own terminology) to Christ in the 20th Century. His practical writings are usually edifying. However, in this blog post I want to issue the caveat that we must exercise critical discernment when reading Bonhoeffer, especially his theological lectures and dissertations, and sometimes also his sermons, letters and practical writings.

My doctoral dissertation at Oxford happens to be on none other than Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian who drafted the Barmen Declaration and stood side-by-side with Bonhoeffer and the German Confessing Church during WWII. Barth and Bonhoeffer are not identical in their theological thinking, but they share some striking similarities. I would say that Barth in his mature years is more conservative than Bonhoeffer (conservative as in staying in line with Protestant orthodoxy, affirming the teachings of the Bible), yet even Barth in his mature years deviates significantly from the Bible and from Protestant orthodoxy, which shows that Bonhoeffer is not precisely in line with normative Evangelical convictions. While there are many good things we can learn from him, we ought to excercise critical discernment when reading him. For one thing, Bonhoeffer scholars generally agree that he died too early, and his theological thinking had not yet undergone maturation. When Barth matured, his theology became less liberal. Most scholars would speculate that if Bonhoeffer were to live ten years longer, he would probably have changed a lot of his theological viewpoints as well, which is to say that Bonhoeffer would probably have grown to disagree with the things that we are now reading from him, had he not died at such a young age. No one knows exactly what a “mature” Bonhoeffer would have been like, but what is certain is that the Bonhoeffer we have today is one who does not feel obliged to subject himself to the supreme authority of Scripture.

The liberty that Bonhoeffer takes in deviating from Scripture is not always obvious, because what is tricky about him–and also Barth for that matter–is that they use the old language and terminology of orthodox Protestantism, and they would even avow that their faith is utterly defined and confined by Scripture. Yet, they are always using old language to express new ideas. If we are unaware of how they redefine all the traditional terminologies and qualify their statements about being faithful to Scripture, we might be led into a lot of their liberal premises without being aware of it.

Below I’ve picked a few quotes from one of Bonhoeffer’s Lectures on Christology (trans. Edwin Robertson, London: Collins, 1966), to give the reader a taste of how Bonhoeffer might lead us away from a high view of Scripture. Commenting on how we gain our knowledge of Christ, Bonhoeffer writes: “The witness of Jesus Christ to himself is none other than that which the Scriptures deliver to us and which comes to us by no other way than by the Word of the Scriptures” (p. 72). So far so good. But read on: “We are first concerned with a book [Scripture] which we find in the secular sphere” (ibid.). Here Bonhoeffer and Barth are at one accord. Barth says that “The speech of God is and remains the mystery of God supremely in its secularity.” What they mean by “secular” is that the Bible is not inspired by the Holy Spirit as the Christian Church has always believed; rather, the Bible is a secular book written by human authors without divine inspiration in any proper sense, just like any other book in the world, and it errs as every other book, but its subject-matter is Jesus Christ, and God has chosen to use this book to reveal Himself to us. Bonhoeffer goes on: “It [Scripture] must be read and interpreted. It will be read with all the help possible from historical and philosophical criticism. Even the believer has to do this with care and scholarship” (ibid.). Here, “historical and philosophical criticism” and “scholarship” refer to the nineteenth-century liberal way of dealing with Scripture. Critical scholars in the Nineteenth Century no longer saw Scripture as divinely inspired and infallible. They thought that the Bible was full of contradictions; they alleged that one single book (e.g. Genesis-Deuteronomy) was not written by one author, but by many authors who held to different theological views and political motives over a long period of time; they held that the Bible was full of errors in its description of what happened in history. Bonhoeffer, like Barth, buys into these critical assumptions, even though they claim that they, unlike the 19th-century liberals, believe in the supreme authority of Scripture (and I think even if this were their intention, they fail miserably in following through with that intention). Bonhoeffer continues to write: “Occasionally we have to deal with a problematic situation [in Scripture]; perhaps we have to preach about a [biblical] text, which we know from scholarly criticism was never spoken by Jesus. In the exegesis [that is, interpretation] of Scripture we find ourselves on thin ice. One can never stand firm at one point, but must move about over the whole of the Bible… There may be some difficulties about preaching from a text whose authenticity has been destroyed by historical research. Verbal inspiration is a poor substitute for the resurrection!” Here it is clear that 1. Bonhoeffer denies the verbal inspiration of the Bible; and 2. Bonhoeffer does not believe in the full authenticity of the Bible.

What are the theological consequences of holding to such a view of Scripture in Bonhoeffer’s thought? There are many consequences, and I’ll name one that is significant and devastating: Bonhoeffer says that it is not important to believe in the Virgin Birth, as long as we believe that Christ is God incarnate. How Christ is God incarnate is not important–whether it is by the Virgin Birth or not–says Bonhoeffer. The first reason is that the Virgin Brith is historically (and scientifically) questionable, and the biblical report is not to be trusted here. This is what Bonhoeffer writes: “Strictly speaking we should not talk of the incarnation, but of the incarnate one. The former interest arises out of the question, ‘How?’ The question, ‘How?’, for example, underlies the hypothesis of the virgin birth. Both historically and dogmatically it can be questioned. The biblical witness is ambiguous. If the biblical witness gave clear evidence of the fact, then the dogmatic obscurity might not have been so important” (ibid., 104). Moving on, Bonhoeffer even suggests that the Virgin Birth is a bad belief to hold to, because it makes us focus on the incarnation (the “how”) rather than the God incarnate (the “who”): “The doctrine of the virgin birth is meant to express the incarnation of God, not only the fact of the incarnate one. But does it not fail at the decisive point of the incarnation, namely that in it Jesus has not become man just like us?” (ibid.). Bonhoeffer says here that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth “fails at the decisive point” of the doctrine of the incarnation (Bonhoeffer thinks that the incarnation should not have been our focus in the first place–we should focus on the incarnate One instead) namely, the God-with-us. What he means here might become clearer if we take our cue from Juergen Moltmann, a very old German theologian of our day. Moltmann denies the Virgin Birth altogether, saying that if we are to believe that Jesus is truly human and like us in all respects, then we must believe that Jesus also had a human, biological father. For the same reason, Bonhoeffer insinuates that we should jettison our belief in the Virgin Birth in order to have the faith that God is with us because Jesus really was like us in all respects, even though Bonhoeffer does not spell this out as explicitly as Moltmann.

Things like these are very subtle in the writings of Bonhoeffer (and Barth, for that matter), but they are almost everywhere, and it is usually difficult to discern them without advanced theological training. I do not deny that we have a lot of good things to learn from Bonhoeffer. However, I am not sure if it would be such a good idea to read him before one is theologically equipped enough to discern his deviances from Scripture and from the good old Christian faith, and I don’t think Tim Keller would be uncritical of Bonhoeffer either.

Recently I came across a Reformed author who asserts that God is the “author of sin” and that “God created evil” (see http://www.vincentcheung.com/books/authorsin.pdf). Without first enquiring into what the author means by these expressions, which I will do in just a moment, I would like to first point out that saying that God “causes” sin in one way or another is one thing, but calling God the “author of sin” would be a wholly different matter. The former is a statement about what God has done, and this has been revealed to us. Calling God the “author of sin,” however, is a claim about who and what God is, and not just what God has done. It is a claim of knowledge about what Luther calls the “hidden God”. We should always be extremely careful, as if treading over a minefield, when talking about who and what God is on the basis of our knowledge of God’s works. To me, the way the author describes God as the author of sin is at least an example of sloppy theological terminology, showing a serious lack of understanding of historic Reformed doctrines. I will show that the author fails to demonstrate any sound understanding of how meticulously Luther qualifies his intentionally improper statement that God “creates” evil, and why Calvin and the vast majority of his followers so emphatically reject the notion or expression that God is the “author of evil,” which Calvin himself condemns as “devious speculations”.

The author writes: “when someone alleges that my view of divine sovereignty makes God the author of sin, my first reaction tends to be, ‘So what?’ Even Christians who disagree with me stupidly chant, ‘But he makes God the author of sin, he makes God the author of sin….’ However, a description does not amount to an argument or objection, and I have never come across a half-decent explanation as to what’s wrong with God [sic.] being the author of sin in any theological or philosophical work written by anybody from any perspective.” (I wonder if the author has ever read and truly understood Calvin’s resolute refusal to call God the “author of evil”. Is our view really as stupid as he thinks?). He continues: “The truth is that, whether or not God is the author of sin, there is no biblical or rational problem with him [sic.] being the author of sin.”

One who disagree with the author might immediately think of James 1:13 (“God is not tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone”). However, the author claims that appealing to this passage is “fallacious,” because in this context “James is discussing the practical outworking of the Christian’s faith” and “is not dealing with metaphysics.” The author contends that “one must be careful not to invalidly infer a metaphysical principle from a verse of practical instruction.”

My immediate response is, “But why not?” True, the context is practical instruction, but is there anything preventing James from stating a metaphysical truth-claim to support his practical teachings? A similar instance is found in 1 Timothy 2:13-14, where Paul deals with the practical issue of the roles of men and women in the church. Over against the view that Paul’s teachings here are culturally conditioned and do not apply to our time because they are practical rather than metaphysical, many conservative Reformed commentators would point out that Paul appeals to a metaphysical narrative in verses 13-14 as the foundation of his practical teachings. Are we to deny that Adam was created before Eve and that Eve was tempted before Adam, simply because these verses are found in the context of practical instructions rather than metaphysical truth-claims? Such a denial is precisely the argument employed by feminist critics (e.g. Phyllis Trible) who seek to undermine the metaphysical significance of these two verses in order to sustain their claim that “Adam” in Genesis 2 refers to “humanity” in general rather than a specific male human being in history. Such a critical strategy is precisely the same one that the author applies to James 1:13! Employing such a strategy would call into question the author’s exegetical integrity, unless the author also applies the same exegetical principle to 1 Timothy 2:13-14.

The author contends that James 1:13 “just tells you that God is not the tempter, which is altogether different from saying that God is not the author of sin.” Yet, what does “to tempt” mean here? A simple lexical definition won’t help, because theologically this term can take on many meanings. John Owen draws a helpful distinction for us: “Generally speaking, temptation merely means to test, to prove, or to experiment with. In this sense, God sometimes tempts men” (Triumph Over Temptation, ed. James Houston, 137). “Specifically,” however, says Owen, “temptation means any action that leads to evil… Actively, Satan leads us into evil. In this specific sense, God tempts no man (see James 1:13)” (Ibid., 140).

Yet, Owen would not deny that God somehow, in strange and alien ways, “causes” people to sin, as shown in the case of God’s hardening Pharaoh’s heart. No Reformed Christian should deny that God in one way or another “causes,” as it were, the fall of humanity by an immutable decree from eternity and by God’s providential ruling. Yet, even Calvin, in his most voluntaristic (“voluntarism” basically means that God can will to do anything God wants, as opposed to the view which emphasises that God cannot contradict Himself) passages, would not describe God as the “author” of sin even in the sense that “God directly causes you to sin.” The author contends that “if God directly causes you to sin, it does make him the ‘author’ of sin (at least in the sense that people usually use the expression), but the ‘sinner’ or ‘wrongdoer’ is still you.”

Here is an instance in which the author expresses a more-or-less correct idea (viz., “God causes you to sin”) but employs an extremely sloppy theological term (viz., “author of sin) to describe the idea. To say that God causes humanity to fall into sin—even this statement requires careful and meticulous qualification—is to describe an act or work of God ad extra (that means, “outside of” God’s being). To call God the “author of sin,” however, is to make a statement about God’s being ad intra (that is, God’s inward, immutable nature). Put in simpler terms, to say that “God caused humanity to fall into sin” is a description of what God did; to say that “God is the author of sin” is a statement about what and who God is. Although the acts and works of God ad extra correspond perfectly to God’s being ad intra, there is always a veil, as it were, between God’s being in Himself and God’s works that are manifest to us, which Reformed theology calls the “incomprehensibility of God” (see Westminster Larger Catechism 7). Calvin scholars have pointed out that Calvin consistently employs the category of “accommodation” (that is, God accommodates to our understanding when revealing Himself to us) when speaking of God’s being, in order to avoid wrongly attributing what we subjectively perceive in God’s revealed works (e.g. the instance in 1 Kings 22:19–23) to God’s inward being (e.g. calling God the “author of sin”). That is to say, I would even grant that in one sense God “authored” evil, as long as a verb rather than a noun is used with meticulous care, but even so, immediately we have to resort to the category of divine incomprehensibility and proclaim a reverent “I don’t know,” rather than jumping to conclusions about what God is, viz., saying that God is the author of evil.

Let me  demonstrate what I mean with an inexact analogy. Suppose I told a lie. It is one thing for you to tell me, “You lied”; it means something utterly different if you thus conclude, “Alex is a liar.” To say that I lied is to describe something that I did, suppose I actually did it. However, to say that I am a liar is to make a statement about me as a person, about what I am and even who I am. “You lied” and “You are a liar” are two subtly but fundamentally different statements. There is a distinction between what I do and who or what I am, even though the two are inseparable. In a loosely similar way (but don’t push the analogy to far), there is a distinction between God’s works—especially those works that are “alien” to God’s nature—and God’s being, even if the two correspond so perfectly.

Of course, it is not inherently wrong to describe who or what God is in terms of what He did. For example, we call God the Creator because He created heaven and earth. God is not the Creator ad intra (that is, God is not the Creator in and of Himself). Yet, we can call God the Creator by virtue of His work ad extra, because all that God has created is good (see Westminster Larger Catechism 15), and the work of creation corresponds perfectly to God’s inner goodness. Good creation is a work “proper” (as Luther would call it) to God’s good nature, thus we can properly call God the Creator. To call God the Creator is, in the Christian context, a statement about God’s infinite goodness, wisdom, omnipotence and love in God’s very own Being, manifested through the proper work of creation. Similarly, we call God Saviour, Comforter, etc., because His works of salvation and comforting are proper to what and who He is. The same does not apply to God’s “authoring” evil, which is a work “alien” (in Luther’s language) to God’s immutable being and nature. Therefore, while we can properly call God the Creator of heaven and earth, we must not call Him the “author of sin”. We must always draw a distinction between God’s being proprium (proper) and our understanding of God’s work alienum (alien to God’s being and nature).

Even in Romans 9 where Paul speaks of God as the “potter” of the vessels of wrath, Paul does not identify God as the author of sin. God as the “potter” created the reprobate (those whom God rejected in His predestination–the vessels of wrath); God decreed that they should continue in their state of sin and providentially causes them to remain so, as shown in the case of God’s hardening Pharaoh (verses 17-18); yet God is not described here as the “potter” of their sin (we’ll come back to the expression that God “created sin” later). Put more simply, Paul describes God as the “potter” of the vessels of wrath, but not the “potter” of their sin, even if God is described as providentially hardening Pharaoh; Paul’s terminology is so precise, that he does not confuse what God does (hardening the vessels of wrath) with what God is (the potter of both vessels of wrath and grace, yet not the potter of their sin). Additionally, there has been an ongoing exegetical debate on Romans 9 since the Synod of Dort about whether God decrees that humanity should fall into sin because God wants to make vessels of wrath and vessels of grace out of them (so-called supralapsarianism), or if God first decrees humanity to be sinners and pours His wrath upon some of them while choosing others by grace to share in His glory (so-called infralapsarianism). The latter has been the official position of the vast majority of Reformed churches, with only certain individuals holding the former minority view. (Caveat: Just because it’s a narrow view doesn’t mean it’s truer!) Both camps, however, recognise that Scripture nowhere identifies God as the “author of sin” (noun), even if in some instances it describes God as “authoring” sin (verb)—to use a rather sloppy expression. This is not a language game, but a very crucial theological distinction between God-in-Himself and our knowledge of God through His works.

Thus in a treatise entitled Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, Calvin emphatically states that God is “the cause of all happenings, yet not the author of evil” (Louisville: WJK, 1961, p. 168). Calvin stresses at the very beginning of this section that those who infer the latter (viz., “God is the author of evil”) from the former (viz., God causes all happenings) commit “devious speculations” upon a “pretext of ignorance…, [flying] off to frivolous nothings and things unworthy of God’s majesty” (ibid.). That is to say, we know that God is the cause of all things, including evil (in some strange and alien way), but this knowledge is about God’s works that are manifest to us, and we should never infer from this knowledge that God is the “author of evil,” because that would be to probe into the mystery of the hidden God—a “devious speculation” indeed.

Apparently the author has not demonstrated any serious understanding of why Calvin refuses to call God the author of evil. Moving on, the author appeals to Isaiah 45 to support his claim that God is the “author of evil”: “I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God….I am the LORD, and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things….”

I have been told that a certain Hebrew scholar supports the author’s view by explaining that the Hebrew word “disaster” here means “evil” in the same sense as Genesis 3. However, the Hebrew scholar should know better that a word can take on multiple meanings in various contexts. Lexically, the word “disaster” (or “calamity”) here can refer to “evil,” but in this context it is used in juxtaposition to “prosperity” (or “peace”), thus even if “disaster” is understood as “evil,” it is at the most a so-called “natural evil” and carries no direct moral connotations. Moreover, this passage, again, speaks of what God does rather than what or who God is. It is problematic in the first place to read this passage as saying that God authored sin (moral evil); it is seriously problematic to interpret this passage as saying that God is the author of sin and evil.

It is noteworthy that Calvin also appeals to Isaiah 45 in one of his most voluntaristic passages in the Institutes. Calvin borrows Augustine’s language of “permission” in relation to humanity’s sin, but meanwhile stresses that humanity’s works of sin are “no mere ‘permission’” on God’s part (1.18.1). Insisting on the unity and simplicity of God’s will, Calvin states that God “creates light and darkness, that he forms good and bad; that nothing evil happens that [God] himself has not done” (1.18.3). Even in Calvin’s rejection of Augustine’s compatibilism, however, Calvin condemns the frivolous inference that God is author of evil, and purposefully retains Augustine’s “permission” language and uses it extensively, even in explaining Isaiah 45:7: Calvin emphasises that evil is in a sense permitted by God, though qualifying that God “does not unwillingly permit it, but willingly; nor would [God], being good, allow evil to be done, unless being also almighty he could make good even out of evil” (ibid.). That is to say, God causes evil by willingly permitting it; it is no mere passive permission, but it is permission nonetheless.

Like Calvin, Reformed orthodoxy after the Synod of Dort has come to an overwhelming agreement between supra- and infralapsarians upon the expression of an “efficaciously permissive decree of God” in relation to the fall of humanity. To deny that God willingly decreed and providentially arranged the rise of evil would lead to dualism, the idea that there is an eternal evil force outside of God—a “second god” as it were—that contends with God. Thus later Calvinists in the Seventeenth Century, like Calvin, find it necessary to speak of humanity’s fall as having taken place by God’s “efficacious decree”. However, they at one accord believe that God’s will is immutable as is God’s being, and that God’s will and being exist in unity and simplicity, that is, God’s will and being, though distinct, are not two separate entities. Thus, simply saying that God wills or decrees evil would lead into the danger of monism, the idea that God is both good and evil in and of Himself, and both good and evil originated from God’s being. Such a view of God is self-evidently unbiblical to Reformed-orthodox theologians, supra- and infralapsarian alike. Therefore, following Calvin, they retain the category of “permission” in the term “efficaciously permissive decree of God.” This term is crafted with such meticulous care, that it avoids both the dangers of dualism (there is a second, evil god) and monism (God is both good and evil).

It is thus not without reason that Calvin and his seventeenth-century followers retain the category of “permission” and consistently reject the expression that God is the “author of sin,” even in passages where they assert quite extreme views of God’s sovereignty (e.g. Calvin’s Institutes 1.18.1-3, as shown above). Apparently the author demonstrates little sense of the intricacies in the language of historic Calvinism. He uses a very sloppy term that makes him sound cool, but in so doing he unwittingly leads himself into the danger of monism.

After having asserted that God is the “author of evil,” the author goes on to contend that “God created evil” in a chapter entitled “Why God Created Evil.” Again the author immediately manifests his insensibility towards historic theological terminology. He writes: “To say ‘create’ or ‘cause’ would be just about the same thing in our context, and both words are applicable, so I think both are fine.” That is, God “created” evil in the sense that God “caused” evil.

However, in the context of Reformed theology, if not also the broader Christian tradition, “to create” and “to cause” are utterly different concepts. God caused the existence of the universe by the work of creation. God caused humanity to fall into sin by an efficaciously permissive decree and by His work of providence. Yet, in so causing humanity’s sin, God does not “create” sin. The Westminster Standards give a precise definition of creation as the work “wherein God did in the beginning, by the word of his power, make of nothing the world, and all things therein, for himself, within the space of six days, and all very good” (Larger Catechism 15, emphasis mine).

To be sure, the author does qualify that “we are not using the word ‘create’ in the same sense as God’s original creation out of nothing, but we are referring to God’s control over things that he has already created.” So why use the word “creation” instead of “providence”? What the author means to express is “providence” rather than “creation,” and to confuse the two terms shows at least a very sloppy usage of theological language, unless one has the extraordinary theological mind of a Martin Luther. Even saying that God “creates” evil in the sense of creatio continua (the notion that God continues to create after His first creation) is wrong. It is thus not without reason that Reformed orthodoxy distinguishes between “creation” and “providence,” and unless one can come up with a convincing reason to use the two terms interchangeably, one should not deviate from these conventions and cause confusions, to say the least. To me, the author does not seem to have given any convincing reason to confuse “creation” with “providence”.

To be sure, the author backs up his position by appealing to Luther: “It is true that a person sins according to his evil nature, but as Luther writes, it is God who ‘creates’ this evil nature in each newly conceived person after the pattern of fallen Adam, whose fall God also caused. And then, God must actively cause this evil nature to function and the person to act according to it. Luther writes that God never allows this evil nature to be idle in Satan and in ungodly people, but he continuously causes it to function by his power.”

Here the author again shows himself to be a sloppy historical theologian in appealing to Luther’s Bondage of the Will, a mature work that must be understood in terms of Luther’s theology of the cross. When Luther in his typically exaggerated fashion says that God “creates” evil, we have to understand it in the broader context of his meticulously crafted “theology of the cross,” which the author completely ignores.

But first, let us note that it is not unusual for Luther to use bold and exaggerated expressions that are intentionally improper, and we must not understand these expressions too literally and out-of-context. For example, Luther’s famous and infamous proclamation, “sin boldly,” must be understood in the context of the simul justus et peccator (the notion that we are both righteous/justified in reality and status, and still sinful by nature) and Luther’s emphasis of the importance of mortifying real sin rather than imaginary sin. Another instance is Luther’s shocking comment that God has only two attributes—love and wrath. This comment must not be understood as a denial of the formulation of divine attributes in classical theism; it only serves to underscore in Luther’s typically exaggerated and intentionally improper fashion that God-in-Himself cannot be known apart from the crucified Christ (the fundamental tenet of Luther’s theology of the cross), who manifests to believers God’s love and wrath.

Likewise, when we read Luther’s strange statement that God “creates” evil, we must not forget everything else that Luther has said so carefully and so meticulously to qualify this intentionally improper expression. Such exaggerated expressions are meant to achieve certain rhetorical impacts, and only a genius like Luther should ever employ them. Even Calvin—certainly not a lesser mind than Luther—chooses to refrain from using this kind of rhetorical devices.

Now, let us consider Luther’s theology of the cross. Luther states in his “proof” for the Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 16: “an action which is alien to God’s nature results in a deed belonging to his very nature: he makes a person a sinner so that he may make him righteous.” Alister McGrath explains: “The opus alienum is a means to the end of the opus proprium. The significance of suffering, whether this is understood as passiones Christi or human Anfechtung, is that it represents the opus alienum through which God works out his opus proprium… God assaults man in order to break him down and thus to justify him. Similarly, studies on Luther’s understanding of the role of the Devil in the Christian life have demonstrated that he regarded the Devil as God’s instrument, who performs the opus alienum Dei on his behalf in order that the opus proprium may be realised” (Luther’s Theology of the Cross, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, p. 150).

Luther thus employs the term opus alienum Dei (work of God alien to God’s nature) to emphasise that humanity’s fall and the evils of the world are all God’s work—opus Dei—but at the same time Luther insists that these works are alien to God’s nature. The crux of Luther’s theology of the cross is that it is in the crucified Christ that sin and evil are revealed to be God’s own work as a means towards a good end. God uses the evil deeds of sinners as an instrument to crucify His own Son, in order to accomplish the opus proprium (work of God proper to God’s nature) of atonement.

Since God providentially arranges occurences of evil willingly in accordance with His purpose of the opus proprium, Luther would boldly use the expression that God “creates” evil. Yet, Luther is very careful to stress that this “creation”—improperly so-called—of evil is an opus alienum Dei (i.e., it is alien to God’s being and nature). Luther does not jump to the conclusion that God is the Creator of evil in the sense that evil is proper to God’s being. Like Calvin who stresses God’s “accommodation” and the Calvinists who emphasise God’s incomprehensibility, Luther says that in the opus alienum God remains hidden (Deus absconditus), thus we should not probe into what or who God is on the basis of the “alien” work that He has done.

That is to say, we must carefully distinguish between God’s opus (work) and God’s immutable being in Himself. The opus proprium reveals God’s nature to us, thus we can call God the Creator of heaven and earth. However, the opus alienum hides God’s being and nature from us. In the opus proprium God is Deus revelatus (God revealed); in the opus alienum God is Deus absconditus (God hidden). Thus we cannot say that God is the Creator of evil, even when employing the bold and intentionally improper expression that God “creates” evil.

Only in the context of these meticulous distinctions does Luther dare to use such bold and admittedly improper expressions. The author, on the other hand, demonstrates no familiarity or sense of the intricacies in Luther’s terminologies and notions. He uses a Lutheran term and makes himself sound cool, but he fails to follow Luther in emphasising that God’s “creation” of evil—improperly so called even in Luther’s opinion (it’s not proprium but alienum!)—has nothing to do with God’s being.

As seen above, both the Lutheran term “opus alienum Dei” and the Reformed term “efficaciously permissive decree” serve to avoid the pitfalls of both dualism and monism. I might add that if one rejects the categories of “permission” or the “alienum,” one not only falls prey to the temptation of monism, rendering evil proper to God’s being, but also, if one subscribes, as the author does, to an Augustinian/Lutheran/Calvinist notion of God’s “causing evil in order to bring good out of evil,” one cannot avoid the metaphysical implication that God’s being is a process. The reason is as follows. First, on this view, the decree of evil is not only proper to God’s will, but also proper to God’s being and nature, because the categories of “permission” and the “alienum” have been rejected, that is, the veil between God’s revealed works and God’s transcendent being has been unduly (and unwittingly?) lifted and abolished. However, this decree of evil that is unwittingly described on this view as proper to God’s being and nature is only temporary and subservient to a higher divine purpose in bringing good out of evil. This would mean that there is an element proper to God’s being and nature that is in the process of being sublated–to borrow a Hegelian term–and thus not immutable. A “shadow of change” is thus attributed to God’s being. The immutability of God is compromised, and the temptation of process theology creeps in. The holiness of God becomes a process! This is the result of not taking special care to distinguish between God’s opus alienum and opus proprium, or the Deus absconditus (God hidden) and the Deus revelatus (God revealed). Such sloppiness leads to a very dangerous analytical rationalism that seeks to probe into God’s incomprehensible being through God’s opus alienum—Calvin calls it “devious speculations” (as we have seen).

In short, the author’s theological understandings represent a minority view within Calvinism since the Synod of Dort, though they are not completely out of lines with Reformed orthodoxy. His position is not hyper-Calvinism in the strictest sense, but it shares many points of similarities—formal as well as material—with the hyper-Calvinism of John Jill et al. My main critique of his two chapters on God as the author of sin and God’s creation of evil is his irresponsible and sloppy employment of improper theological terms based on his cursory exegesis, which unwittingly but easily lead into the temptations of monism and process theology. The author proudly claims that he has “never come across a half-decent explanation as to what’s wrong with God being the author of sin in any theological or philosophical work written by anybody from any perspective.” However, the fact is that Luther, Calvin and Reformed orthodoxy already saw the dangers in using such sloppy terminology, and have consistently avoided it or qualified it with meticulous care. The author, on the other hand, demonstrates no understanding of the intricate reasons underlying their refusal or hesitance to call God the “author of evil” and say that God “creates sin”.

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More Information and Some Afterthoughts:

Someone asked me whether Vincent Cheung’s article on predestination is also problematic (see http://www.vincentcheung.com/other/chosen.pdf). First let me say that it does not present the view of Calvin, Reformed orthodoxy, or the majority of Calvinists today, and I find it very inappropriate for a pastor to ask a congregation to read it as if it were a good representation of the Reformed view. (For one thing, Cheung explicitly opposes J. I. Packer–using some very abusive language by the way–to name but one example; he also opposes the views of predestination as taught by R. C. Sproul and Wayne Grudem, among others).

Yes, even that article on predestination is very misleading and very problematic at some crucial points, though overall it takes the shape of a Reformed doctrine. First of all, Cheung’s discussion of free will is again very sloppy, just as in the other work that I critiqued in this blog post. He does not take into account Calvin’s qualification of Luther’s extreme expression or view (sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Luther intentionally exaggerates something or he means it literally) of free will. Calvin emphasises in line with Luther that our will is indeed NOT free–it is in the bondage of sin. Yet, Calvin qualifies that a “bound will” is NOT a “coerced will,” that is to say, when we make our choices, these are genuinely our choices; God in no way forces (coerces) our minds to make these choices, though all our choices are indeed under God’s control. It is strange that Cheung, who calls himself Reformed (Calvinist), keeps appealing to Luther and ignores Calvin’s correctives of Luther’s views or expressions. It is also strange that Cheung does not critique Calvin himself, and yet he critiques J. I. Packer for expressing basically the same view that Calvin has expressed.

Now, when Cheung critiques Packer’s idea of antinomy or what others might call “paradox” or “mystery,” we have to know where he is coming from. Cheung is admittedly a follower of the presuppositionalist philosopher Gordon Clark, who stood sharply at odds with the other Reformed presuppositionalist of his day, Cornelius Van Til. (Yes, I am a Van Tillian and a student of Packer, and proudly so!). One of Van Til’s most fundamental critiques of Clark was what Van Til saw as Clark’s subtle rationalism in the latter’s seemingly exclusive appeal to Scripture. Clark deviated from the classical-Reformed understanding of divine incomprehensibility so much, that Clark refuses to acknowledge that there are things about God stated in the Bible that appear paradoxical or self-contradictory to our reason. Clark would not even allow us to hold that although the things of God as revealed in Scripture are completely consistent and harmonious in and of themselves, our reason is so fallen that these things appear contradictory to us. It seems that for Clark, our reason is capable of making perfect sense out of Scripture’s teachings on God’s works and God’s being, and our reason should not even perceive seeming contradictions in the things of God stated in Scripture. To Van Til, Clark’s view not only undermines the transcendence of God, pulling God down into the realm of the logic of fallen human reason, but also it undermines the fallenness of human reason, thinking that on the basis of Scripture our reason is capable of probing into the mysteries of the incomprehensible God. Contra Clark, Van Til stresses that “all the truths of the Christian religion have of necessity the appearance of being contradictory” (Common Grace and the Gospel, 165). The reason is as follows: ”our knowledge is rational because God is ultimately rational. At the same time, God is incomprehensible to us because he is ultimately rational. It is not because God is irrational, and in the nature of the case, ultimately rational, that we cannot comprehend him” (Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 33). Thus Van Til would say: “Now since God is not fully comprehensible to us we are bound to come into what seems to be contradictions in all our knowledge. Our knowledge is analogical [that is, we don't know God directly as He is in and of himself, but only through our knowledge of His self-revelatory works in the realm of creation] and therefore must be paradoxical” (Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 44). This is a position that Clark firmly denies. He claims that admitting perceived paradoxes in Scripture “destroys both revelation and theology and leaves us in complete ignorance” (Gordon Clark, The Philosophy of Gordon Clark, ed. R. Nash, 78). Clearly, Clark thinks that the reverence of the Reformers and the vast majority of their followers towards the mysteries of the Deus absconditus (Hidden God) is “complete ignorance”!

Cheung’s reliance on Clark is manifest in his critique of Packer’s view that divine control and human responsibility stand in an antinomy (by which Packer refers to something that is not self-contradictory in itself, but appears self-contradictory to our limited and fallen reason). What I consider to be Clark’s scripturalist-analytical-rationalism also shows forth in Cheung’s expression that God is the “author of sin” in the other work to which I referred in the blog post. Cheung does not resort to the category of divine incomprehensibility when perceiving God’s work of causing evil (I should add, Cheung fails to follow Calvin in qualifying that God causes evil permissively). Rather, when he perceives that God “causes” evil in His works, Cheung immediately jumps to the conclusion that God is the author of evil, abolishing the veil between what God does and what God is, the contradiction between God’s work alienum and the perfectly holy nature of God’s being. As I have shown in my blog post, this is a far cry not only from Luther’s theology of the cross, but also from Calvin, who calls such an analytical rationalism “devious speculations”.

I might add that this basically-Clarkian theological approach that Cheung has taken is unacceptable to the position of Westminster Theological Seminary–which might not be so important to some of you but it might be of great importance to the rest of you. In any case, I have shown in the response on my website that Cheung, who follows Clark, has deviated from Calvin and Reformed orthodoxy in some significant ways, and fails to properly interpret Luther either, even though he claims to be following Luther (on points where Calvin and the vast majority of Calvinists would correct Luther!). Most importantly, however, is that Cheung’s interpretation of Scripture is very problematic, which I have also shown in my blog post. And one last minor point: we might wonder whether Cheung’s abusive language such as “morons” or “stupid” really has nothing to do with the content of his theology at all. As one anonymous author comments, “a fair bit of Cheung’s posted work strikes me as disturbing, both in content and in style. I am dismayed when I consider that young or otherwise impressionable Christians, mistaking Cheung’s boldness for soundness, might be tempted to imitate his style, and disseminate his arguments as sturdy apologetic fare” (http://www.proginosko.com/aquascum/cheung.htm). I would thus be wary of any pastor who recommends Cheung’s writings to young people in our churches.