Introduction
I first became aware of Alister McGrath while teaching in the extension program for Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry. I taught theology, and the texts included his Christian Theology Reader, as well as his Christian Theology, An Introduction. One is a reader, composed of selections of major theological importance. The other is simply descriptive, an introduction to basic theological concepts. Both reveal that McGrath has read throughout the whole of the theological tradition. Neither text, however present McGrath's evangelical point of view. McGrath is a leading evangelical thinker, and therefore, I decided to read him further as I wanted to investigate the theological underpinnings of evangelicalism. For that reason, I chose his A Passion for Truth, the Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism. I had heard that this book does what it claims, sets out the basic tenets of evangelicalism in a theologically coherent manner.
In this text McGrath makes a number of important orthodox claims. He clearly believes in Jesus Christ, recognizes certain fundamentals of the Christian faith, seeks to counter theological alternatives that compromise crucial Christian beliefs, and is critical of cultural attitudes that undermine the Christian faith. I do not think, however, that he fulfills the goal of this book. He describes that goal in these words,
The essential precondition for a renewed evangelical engagement with intellectual life is confidence in its own coherence and credibility. This study therefore aims to explore the coherence of evangelicalism by bringing out the inner consistency of the evangelical approach and demonstrating the internal contradictions and vulnerabilities of its contemporary rivals.(2)
As this essay will make clear, McGrath rightly recognizes that his rivals have distorted Christian truth. He has not, however, been able to lay bare the essential "contradictions and vulnerabilities" of his contemporary rivals. This is due to his not having solved the theological issues that drove his rivals to their false solutions. Among other things, a theological solution would involve overcoming Kant's claim that God the Word cannot be known by the categories of the understanding. Since he has not resolved critical theological difficulties, he is forced to adopt aspects of the positions he rejects. Simply put, he recognizes aspects of Christian truth, but he has not theologically resolved the issues that would place that truth upon a solid theological foundation. I shall show this.
In an introductory essay, I described a fault line running through contemporary theology by means of the theological ideas described in the essay, Objective and Ecstatic. I will begin by describing the objective elements found in McGrath's theological perspective.
The Objective Element in McGrath
For McGrath, Christian revelation is particular, truthful, cognitive, and historical. By "particular," he means that Christian revelation is not based on universal truths of reason or a universal religious experience. Rather than universals, Christian faith begins with the unique and definite person Jesus Christ as normatively revealed in Scripture. As narrated in Scripture, Christ is not a universal idea, nor is he validated by any exterior claim. He is his own person, the unique revelation of God, the one who was born of Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, died and rose again. Because evangelicalism centers on the person of Jesus Christ, its particularity is derived from Christ as a definite person.
As we shall see, evangelicalism is emphatic in affirming not merely the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, but his definitiveness; however, the affirmation of the former is an important first step in the defence of the latter.(3)
The particularity of the Christian gospel and supremely the person of Jesus Christ as saviour and Lord, does not conflict in any manner with its universal scope. Indeed, the evangelical passion for truth is expressed partly in its focus on the person of Christ, in that Jesus Christ is the truth.(4)
McGrath makes the claim of particularity over against all forms of belief that begin with a prior ideological or cultural commitments that justify faith in Christ. For example, liberalism began with a claim to a universal religious experience, Nazi Christians began with assumptions about the form of Christian faith in the cultural and historical context of Germany, old style evangelicalism began with rationalistic assumptions that faith could be reduced to simple propositions of reason, and the theology of Eusebius was tied to a cultural ideal of the Christian emperor. McGrath gives these as examples, and all of them deny Christ's own authority for they affirm that Jesus Christ needs to be validated by something prior to him. Evangelicalism rejects this.
Furthermore, ideologies are embedded in and express cultural assumptions, assumptions that evolve with culture itself. Once a culture changes, past ideological commitments no longer hold. For example, in a post-modern world the idea of a universal religious experience is no longer credible, nor is it taken for granted that faith can be reduced to simple propositions. When the Christian faith ties itself to a prior ideological commitment, it inevitably digs its own grave for ideologies come and go with time and circumstance.
By contrast, evangelicalism does not begin with general ideas or a culturally determined context. It begins with the specific historical revelation of Jesus Christ. This definite revelation can achieve universal scope because God can act anywhere and at any time to reveal himself through Scripture and the preaching of the gospel. Nor does this specific revelation require any prior ideological commitments or worldview. It depends upon God, for only God can reveal God. In this way evangelicalism is able to avoid the pitfall of shackling itself to a transient ideological commitment or philosophical perspective. Here is McGrath.
The fundamental revelational axiom of the Christian faith is that only God can reveal God, just as its fundamental soteriological axiom is that only God can save.(5)
To allow our ideas and values to become controlled by anything or anyone other than the self-revelation of God in Scripture is to adopt an ideology, rather than a theology; it is to become controlled by ideas and values whose origins lie outside the Christian tradition and potentially to become enslaved to them.(6)
As the rise of Nazism and Stalinism have made abundantly clear, cultural trends need to be criticized. They cannot be allowed to be normative. And that demands that Christianity ground itself on something which transcends cultural particularities namely, the self-revelation of God.(7)
There will be those outside evangelicalism and outside Christianity who will want to make other figures, powers, principles and values of foundational importance. Evangelical Christianity, however, is unashamedly Christ centered. Jesus Christ is the gospel. However complex subsequent theological reflection of this may become, evangelicalism affirms that all must be based upon Christ, and all must be judged by Christ not seeing him simply as a source of ideas, but as the foundation of every aspect of the Christian life.(8)
Secondly, the statements of Christian revelation are true statements. Here McGrath is critical of postliberalism, especially the work of George Lindbeck, one of the more important postliberal thinkers. According to McGrath, Lindbeck allows theology to give up all claims of speaking truthfully of God. Lindbeck does this by making a distinction between first and second order language. First order language for God is the language of prayer, of worship, and of faith. It is language that relates one directly to God or reveals him in some immediate fashion. Second order statements are statements about first order statements. Lindbeck wants to restrict theology to second order statements, to regulative rules about how one uses language to talk of and to God. For him, theology deals with syntax, not semantics. As such, he doesn't want to discuss whether or not theological statements speak the truth of God. But this raises serious questions, and McGrath raises them. Do theological statements relate to God? and if so, how? In what sense if any, are they true revelations of God? Or, how does it happen that religious language can have truth claims? For McGrath, theological statements must reflect truth. They are not simply rules for using first order language. Over against Lindbeck, McGrath asks the following questions,
The critical question which arises from this approach, [that of Lindbeck] to which we shall return later in this chapter, is whether theology is simply about the grammar of faith that is to say, regulation of Christian discourse. To what does this discourse relate? Is there some reality or set of realities outside the biblical text to which the biblical narrative relates? Do theological assertions simply articulate biblical grammar, or do they relate to some objective order, irrespective of whether we recognize this relation or not? As we shall see, one central evangelical anxiety concerning the postliberal approach is that it appears to represent a purely intratextual affair, with little concern for its possible relation to an external objective reality.(9)
Against Lindbeck and postliberalism, McGrath and evangelicalism believe that both Scripture and Christian doctrine express truth. Both bring knowledge of an "external objective reality." McGrath's understanding of how this happens will be discussed shortly.
Further, for evangelicalism, revelation is cognitive. This follows from what has gone before. "Cognitive" means that revelation can be understood by the mind. Since Scripture is written in words that appeal to the mind, and since it is revelation, revelation is cognitive. At the same time, however, McGrath will argue that the purely cognitive aspects of faith do not exhaust the biblical concept of revelation. More is involved than just the mind. At this point McGrath is critical of the old style evangelicalism that tended to reduce faith to propositions rather than grasping the multidimensional aspect of Christian revelation.
This is in no sense to deny or to de emphasize the cognitive aspects of Christian theology. It is merely to observe that there is more to theology than cerebralized information. A theology which touches the mind, leaving the heart unaffected, is no true Christian theology a point stressed by both Luther and Calvin.(10)
While I have argued that this approach [revelation as purely propositional] to Christian doctrine is inadequate, in that it fails to do justice to the full complexity of the biblical notions of revelation, it remains axiomatic for evangelicals that both revelation and doctrine have cognitive or informational aspects.(11)
For understandable reasons, evangelicalism has in the past chosen to focus on the propositional or cognitive element of the complex network of divine revelation an element which allowed evangelicalism to maintain its credibility and integrity during a period of rationalist assault. But the ensuring understanding of `revelation' was itself dangerous deficient, verging on the aridity and sterility which were the hallmarks of the same rationalism which evangelicalism was seeking to oppose. ... Recognizing the narrative quality of Scripture allows the fullness of biblical revelation to be recovered. In no way does this strategy involve the abandoning or weakening of an evangelical commitment to the objective cognitive truth of divine revelation. It is simply to recognize that revelation involves more than this, and to commend the wisdom of avoiding reductionist approaches to the issue.(12)
Finally, for both McGrath and evangelicalism, revelation is historical. It is not derived from timeless universal truths, but founded upon the concrete historical person of Jesus Christ as known in Scripture. For this reason, evangelicalism cannot accept the approach of scholars such as Bultmann and Tillich. These scholars claim that it is the biblical story of Jesus Christ that bears salvation rather than the actual historical person of Jesus given in Scripture. Against Tillich and Bultmann, McGrath affirms that Scripture gives accurate historical knowledge of Jesus Christ, and that this knowledge of Christ is saving knowledge.
As is well known, Tillich and Bultmann were attempting to free the message of Scripture from the corrosive insights of the biblical historical method. This method threatened to show that major portions to the New Testament were creations of the early church rather than actual historical events in the life of Christ. McGrath will accept the critical historical method, but he believes that contemporary biblical scholarship is showing that Christian faith cannot be detached from the historical Jesus.
The method [historical critical method] is to be welcomed, because it takes seriously the incarnational principle, noted earlier, that God has chosen to reveal himself not in some timeless ahistorical form, or in abstract propositions, but in particular historical contexts and through real historical people.(13)
The Christological content of the Christian proclamation is minimized in the writings of Rudolf Bultmann, Gerhard Ebeling, and especially Paul Tillich. Tillich's theology sits so loose to the figure of Jesus that he can dispense with his historical existence and personality without making any noticeable difference to his theology. Jesus illustrates a principle, which can be and is illustrated by others. ... Bultmann understood the proclamation or kerygma primarily in terms of an active and effective word, summoning its hearers to an existential decision. There was thus no informational `content' (concerning, for example, the historical figure of Jesus) to the kerygma. ... However, recent scholarship has decisively undermined the New Testament basis of this trend toward detaching Christian faith from the historical Jesus.(14)
What critical theological insight is needed if one is to say, as does McGrath, that the revelation in Jesus Christ is particular, truthful, cognitive, and historical? I would maintain that one would need an objective understanding of revelation. As God the Word takes form in the person of Jesus Christ, in the words of Scripture, and in the proclamation of the gospel, God the Word becomes particular, finite, and limited while still remaining God. In the event of God becoming objective finite, spoken, heard, touched, and seen the mind can grasp God. As this happens, revelation becomes cognitive. In actual fact, it becomes more than cognitive. The whole person including the body receives the Word. While it is God the Word that takes concrete form, it is God the Holy Spirit that enables the mind and the whole self to respond to God as revealed in the Word. This event of God taking form happens as an event. It is not a general property of created existence. It is a miracle, something that comes from without. It happens as God wills, as God acts, as God the Father sends the Son. As an event that becomes events, Christian revelation is historical. In this way one knows God, and in this event of knowing God, God the Word truthfully reveals God. The whole self, body and soul, truly knows God because the revelation is truthful. As in John's gospel, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me."
The foregoing requires a doctrine of the Trinity as well as Christology. I have discussed this throughout my writings on this website. This form of Trinitarian and Christological analysis is missing in McGrath. He belongs to a tradition that has read Scripture and read it as it is. For this reason he knows that revelation is particular, historical, cognitive and truthful. In McGrath's case, however, these objective characteristics are not placed on a secure theological foundation. He sees the surface characteristics of Christian truth, but he has not grasped their intelligibility by grounding them securely in Trinity and Christology. At no point in this book does he do this. This can now be seen in greater detail by examining his response to liberalism. As an example of liberalism, I will draw on the work of Schleiermacher, the father of liberalism.
McGrath's Response to Liberalism
First and foremost, McGrath states that liberalism "was especially hostile to any form of particularism, such as the notion of a special divine revelation."(15) Rather than a particular divine revelation, liberalism grounds faith in a universal human experience of the divine. The problem with this, according to McGrath, is that the claim of a universal religious experience cannot be sustained. Such a belief was an Enlightenment idea, a belief lacking widespread acceptance in our postmodern age. Simply put, there is no compelling evidence of a universal religious experience as postulated by liberalism. In McGrath's words, "But there are difficulties here. The most obvious is that there is actually very little empirical evidence for a `common core experience' throughout human history and culture."(16) As a result, liberalism fails because it is based on an outmoded concept of universal revelation.
Contrary to McGrath's assessment, however, liberalism does not deny the particularity of the Christian faith. Schleiermacher, for example, was a romantic, reacting to the Enlightenment claim of universal principles. As a romantic, he affirmed the particular, the organic, the historical, and the whole as more than the sum of its parts. This appears as early as his Speeches. He did affirm a universal sense of the divine. He called it the "feeling of absolute dependence," but this feeling received particular and concrete expression in the person of Jesus Christ. As Christians worship Jesus, as they study, pray, and fellowship, they are shaped into his image. Their piety, life, worship, and values take a particular concrete form given to them in the biblical story of Jesus Christ as lived in their particular cultural context.
Having said this, however, it must be said that Schleiermacher's sense of the particular only extends to the human Jesus. It does not extend to Christ's divine nature. For Schleiermacher, the divine nature of Christ is essentially mystical. I discussed this in my essay on Schleiermacher. McGrath seems unaware of this. He simply says that liberalism denies the particular. Were he to theologically examine the matter, he might notice that liberalism proclaims the human particularity of Jesus Christ but has great difficulty in understanding how Christ's divine nature could be particular. In other words, McGrath could use the Chalcedon doctrine of two natures in one person to assess in what sense liberalism denies particularity. This would entail a theological analysis and enable a penetrating theological assessment of liberalism. The relevance of this failure will become more apparent as this essay unfolds.
Further, in his response to liberalism's claim of a universal religious experience, McGrath draws on Lindbeck. Lindbeck characterizes liberalism has a form of "experiential expressivism." By this he means that liberalism begins with an experience of the holy and then expresses that experience in words. Within this perspective lies the notion that all religions have a common experience of the divine, and that this core sense is expressed in different ways according to the various religious traditions. Against experiential expressivism, Lindbeck claims, and McGrath follows him at this point, that words don't necessarily express experience. They create religious experience. Given that, it cannot be claimed that the different religions express the same reality in different ways. As Lindbeck sees it, different religious have different languages, rites, and doctrines, and these languages create different religious experiences.
It must be noted, however, that McGrath is not making a theological argument at this point. He is simply accepting Lindbeck's conception of language, a perspective grounded in Wittgenstein rather than the biblical faith. Were McGrath to address the matter theologically and biblically, he might begin by theologically analyzing the biblical concept of Word. This might shed some light on how the experience of God is related to words. Such an analysis would be an example of his claim that evangelical theology holds to Scripture as its final authority. As it is, McGrath simply states that it cannot be empirically shown that religious language reflects religious experience, and further, that there are those who think language creates experience.
Even more telling, however, is the fact that McGrath himself claims a universal human experience. By virtue of humanity's creation in the image of God and the marring of that image by sin, all persons have a sense that something has been lost. This sense of loss is a universal human experience of religious import. McGrath refers to Plato, Augustine, and C.S. Lewis who describe an inner emptiness, restlessness, an aching longing that can never be filled until one knows God.(17) Further, in his chapter on evangelicalism and other religions, he states that all persons, by virtue of their creation in God's image, have a latent memory of God. This latent memory and the resulting search for the transcendent are a universal experience common to all humanity. It reflects a degree of convergence between the world's religions.
To use Augustine's vocabulary, the point of contact is a latent memory of God, reinforced by an encounter with his creation, which possesses the potential to point us to the source through which its sense of bitter sweet longing may be satisfied.(18)
A fundamental impulse which seems to lie behind religious experience the quest for the transcendent can be accounted for within the framework of Christian theology. ... But my basic contention is that the gospel itself enables us to understand why the various religious traditions of humanity exist, and why there might well be at least some degree of convergence among them in relation to a search for fulfillment.(19)
The question then arises, How does this latent memory, this sense of longing, this degree of convergence in search of the transcendent, differ from the feeling of absolute dependence that Schleiermacher claims belongs to all humanity? Until McGrath addresses this question, he has not really addressed the liberal form of religion.
But that brings us to a further question. Why did Schleiermacher adopt the "feeling of absolute dependence" as a fundamental category? That category takes various forms in liberalism, the encounter with the holy (Macquarrie), the experience of ecstasy (Tillich), and it lies at the core of the liberal perspective. I would submit that Schleiermacher adopted this category because he accepted Kant's dictum that God cannot be grasped by the categories of the understanding. Or, to put it in ordinary language, God cannot be known by the mind in the manner in which we conceive objects. As a result, Schleiermacher formulated a way of knowing God in which God could not be known objectively. I will come back to this. Suffice it to say, I am convinced that McGrath, if he wants to engage liberalism, will need to address Kant's denial of any objective knowledge of God.
Further, McGrath claims that liberalism cannot fully distinguish between different religious commitments. For example, what is the difference between a person who is a nominally a Christian and one who is a born again committed Christian. According to McGrath, liberalism cannot account for these differences since liberalism holds to experience, all experience, as a fundamental datum. "`Experience' is thus treated by liberalism as something which is homogeneous, common and unchanging, unaffected by alterations in religious affiliations in short, something universal, upon which theology may construct itself in the public arena.(20)
This argument fails to do justice to the liberal position. Schleiermacher was well aware of the difference between the committed and uncommitted person. In his view, the God consciousness of the uncommitted is latent but not active. For the practicing Christians, those inflamed by prayer, worship, and faith, their God consciousness is strong and vital. The whole point of Schleiermacher's Speeches, a perspective carried over into his theology, depended upon their being a difference between a latent and an active sense of the divine. Phenomenologically, he describes the difference. Without that difference, his theology simply collapses.
Further, McGrath asks, How does liberalism know if one is really experiencing God, rather than one's own thoughts, or perhaps the god of another religion? "Experience may indeed seek expression but it also demands a criterion by which it may be judged."(21) Apparently, McGrath thinks liberalism lacks such a criterion. But liberalism does have a criterion by which one can discriminate between religious experiences. Schleiermacher believed that the biblical history of Jesus Christ, made alive in worship, prayer, and study, so formed the sense of God as to distinguish the Father of Jesus Christ from other experiences of the divine. He believed this because he believed that the particular expression of the absolute dependence that arose in Jesus is the specific criterion of all religious experience.
McGrath also wonders how liberalism can emphasize the present experience of a believer if God is not there to be experienced?(22) Presumably, liberalism does not adequately address this question. Liberalism is aware of the sense of God's absence. In fact, it was critical to the whole of Schleiermacher's theology. His aim was to arouse dead souls to an awareness of the divine. Prior to the coming of the gospel, human beings experienced God as absent. With the coming of the gospel, God became alive to them. Schleiermacher and evangelicalism agree on this. If McGrath wishes to counter liberalism at this point, he would need to describe how liberalism and evangelicalism differ in regard to God's presence and absence, and from there, analyze that difference biblically and theologically.
In short, McGrath knows there is something wrong with liberalism, but he doesn't quite know what it is. He knows it has denied particularity, but he doesn't seem to understand that it affirms the human particularity of Jesus Christ while denying his divine particularity. He oversimplifies the matter when he simply says that liberalism abhors the particular. His other claims are inadequate as well. Over against liberalism's particularity, he states that it claims a universal human experience pointing toward God. He makes the same claim. He further claims that liberalism cannot distinguish between the true and the false God, that it lacks a criterion for distinguishing between particular religious expressions, or between true belief and nominal belief. But liberalism makes all these distinctions by means of the finite, particular nature of Jesus Christ. What McGrath fails to see is that liberalism does not affirm that God the Word became flesh finite, particular, and limited. This failure is the real source of the liberal heresy. As I shall show, McGrath fails in this regard as well, in spite of an admixture of orthodox elements.
Having exposed what he considers to be the weakness of liberalism, McGrath must now advance his own theological position. He begins with the claim that "Christian theology provides an interpretative framework by which human experience may be interpreted."(23) McGrath describes how this happens with these words.
According to this approach, experience is an explicandum, something which itself requires to be interpreted. Christian theology provides a framework by which the ambiguities of experience may be interpreted. Theology aims to interpret experience. It is like a net which we can cast over experience, in order to capture its meaning. Experience is seen as something which is to be interpreted, rather than something which is itself capable of interpreting. Christian theology thus aims to address, interpret, and transform human experience.(24)
In regard to his claim that theology addresses, interprets, and transforms experience, McGrath makes several observations. First, theology addresses experience because God transforms human beings. Here McGrath reflects aspects of the objective perspective.
As Calvin pointed out, to know God is to be changed by God; true knowledge of God leads to worship, as the believer is caught up in a transforming and renewing encounter with the living God. To know God is to be changed by God.(25)
To be a real theologian is to wrestle with none other than the living God not with ideas about God, but with God himself. And how can a sinner ever hope to deal adequately with this God?(26)
But, Luther insists, the real theologian is someone who has experienced a sense of condemnation on account of sin who reads the New Testament and realizes that its message of forgiveness is for him or her. The gospel is thus experienced as something liberating, something which transforms our situation, something which is relevant to us.(27)
Liberals could easily make the statements just quoted. Schleiermacher felt he was being true to the essence of Scripture and the Reformers. Nevertheless, liberalism reinterprets these sources in ways that deny their real substance. That is what McGrath needs to uncover at this point. He needs to show how the statements just quoted mean something very different when proclaimed by liberals. To do that, he needs doctrine. He needs to develop the doctrine of the Trinity and Christology in relation to the liberalism and the Reformers. He advances no substantive theological analysis at this point. Without doctrine, there is no real way to separate liberalism from an orthodox position.
Further, the statement that to "be a real theologian is to wrestle with none other than the living God not with ideas about God, but with God himself," gives the impression that McGrath has not really grasped how "God himself" can become "ideas about God." I will say more on this in subsequent paragraphs.
In regard to theology interpreting experience, McGrath presents the liberal idea that there is a universal experience (Plato, Augustine, and Lewis), and theology makes sense of it. This has been discussed in previous paragraphs.
Finally, McGrath notes that theology transforms experience. This was really the content of his section on theology addressing experience, but here a few new elements are added. Most significantly, McGrath draws on C.S. Lewis to make the following statement,
At its best, Christian theology shares this characteristic of poetic language ... it tries to convey to us the quality of the Christian experience of God. It attempts to point beyond itself, to rise above itself, straining at its lead as it rushes ahead, to point us to a town beyond its map town which it knows is there, but to which it cannot lead us. ... It uses a cluster of key words to try and explain what it is like to know God, by analogy with words associated with human experience.(28)
As will be seen, this quotation could well belong in the following section. It is one of many statements that show that McGrath has not grasped how God the Son can become objective as a biblical word or a theological phrase. In the end, he has a liberal understanding of how God speaks, and this will become even more apparent through an analysis of McGrath's response to Lindbeck and postliberalism. Before doing that, however, it might be helpful to say a few more words about Lindbeck.
Lindbeck and Postliberalism
Lindbeck describes three ways of understanding religious language.(29) They are experiential expressive, cognitive propositionalist, and cultural linguistic. The first is the view that religious language expresses an experience of God. That is the liberal view already discussed. In this view, language only points to God. It is symbolic because God's transcendence makes literal statements impossible. The second would hold that doctrinal statements and the language of Scripture are true statements about God or the very thoughts of God. This is the view of fundamentalism and certain forms of evangelicalism. The third is the approach of Lindbeck himself.
Of these three approaches to knowing God, the cognitive propositionalist view is, according to Lindbeck, the older view. This view was demolished by Kant, and that demolition gave rise to liberalism's formulation of the experiential expressive model. Here is Lindbeck.
The origins of this tradition [experiential expressive] in one sense go back to Kant, for he helped clear the ground for its emergence by demolishing the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of the earlier regnant cognitive propositional views. That ground clearing was later completed for most educated people by scientific developments that increased the difficulties of accepting literalistic propositional interpretations of such biblical doctrines as creation, and by historical studies that implied the time conditioned relativity of all doctrines. Kant, however, did not replace the view of religion he had undermined with a more adequate one. ... That breach was filled, beginning with Schleiermacher, with what I have called "experiential expressivism", but this comes in many varieties and can be given many names.(30)
Further, Lindbeck is critical of evangelicalism for embracing the older view, the cognitive propositionalist understanding of religious language. In Lindbeck's view, evangelicals really seem to believe that one can speak of God with the same assurance one might have in speaking of a rock, a tree, or a dog. McGrath describes Lindbeck's criticism of evangelicalism and the cognitive propositionalist approach with these words,
Lindbeck argues that this approach [cognitive propositionalist] is to be rejected as voluntarist, intellectualist and literalist, even making the suggestion that those who `perceive or experience religion in cognitivist fashion' are those who `combine unusual insecurity with naïveté'.(31)
As an evangelical, McGrath must defend himself against Lindbeck. He does so as follows.
First, at least in part, he gives way to Lindbeck. He asserts that evangelicals no longer accept the view that revelation is strongly propositional. This was the view held, for example, by Charles Hodge (1797-1858) and the Princeton School. This school claimed that words and propositions spoke directly of God, and that the mind could understand them. Modern evangelicals no longer need to believe this. This is McGrath's description of the Princeton School, a position he rejects.
Words can be known directly and immediately by the human mind, without the need for any intermediaries. To know the words of Scripture is thus to know immediately the realities to which they relate. This theory of language is of foundational importance, as it undergirds Hodge's belief that today's reader of Scripture can be `assured of encountering the very words, thoughts, and intentions of God Himself.' Yet this metaphysical idea has been borrowed along with others of equally questionable theological parentage from the Enlightenment.(32)
Secondly, in regard to Lindbeck's claim that evangelicals are naive intellectualists, McGrath responds by saying that evangelicals now have a more sophisticated understanding of language than that found in the older evangelicalism. They no longer believe that one can speak of God with the same assurance that one speaks of trees, dogs, or rocks. To validate his position, McGrath sets forth his ideas on language for God. I will quote him exhaustively at this point. I do so in order to make two points. First, as McGrath's thinking unfolds, he gives up the idea that language for God can be propositional. Language for God is much more subtle, elusive, poetical. He does, however, maintain the cognitive aspect in that the mind must be active in order to receive revelation. That is virtually a truism. Secondly, because he hasn't really come to terms with Kant, he will adopt the liberal view that religious language expresses religious experience. This will be quite obvious in what follows. Here is McGrath.
If an experience is to be articulated in words, in order to communicate or to attempt a communal envision of this experience, some form of a cognitive propositional dimension is inevitable. Yet his does not reduce the experience to words, but simply to attempt to convey it through words.(33)
Such rhetorical analyses of experience offer a means by which a cognitive account may be given of experience without in any sense reducing experience to propositional form or degenerating into `literalism' in the vague by ultimately pejorative sense of the term employed by Lindbeck.(34)
The fundamental insight here is that human words cannot adequately define experience, but may nevertheless point towards it, as signposts.(35)
Underlying the profundity of human experience and encounter lies an unresolved tension the tension between the wish to express an experience in words, and the inability of words to capture that experience in its fullness.(36)
Words can point to an experience, they can begin to sketch its outlines but the total descriptions of that experience remains beyond words. Words point beyond themselves, to something greater which eludes their grasp. Human words, and the categories which they express, are stretched to their limits as they attempt to encapsulate, to communicate, something which tantalizingly refuses to be reduced to words. It is the sheer elusiveness of human experience, its obstinate refusal to be imprisoned within a verbal matrix, which points to the need for poetry, symbolism, and doctrine alike. An impatience with precisely this elusiveness appears to underline the rejection of any cognitive component to doctrinal statements.(37)
The intimation of something further, beyond and signposted by experience, is characteristic of human experience. We live on the borderlands of something more something intimated, something ultimately lying beyond the horizons of our comprehension, yet on occasion intruding into our consciousness. Experience and language point beyond themselves, testifying that something lies beyond their borderlands, yet into which we tantalizingly cannot enter.(38)
In light of the above quotations, McGrath makes the following claims: 1. The experience of the divine cannot be reduced to words, it can only be conveyed. 2. The experience cannot be put in propositional or literal form. This would be a degeneration. 3. Words point toward the thing experienced. They do not define the experience. 4. Words cannot capture the experience in its fullness. 5. Words point to an experience, they begin to sketch its outline, but the experience is elusive. It cannot be reduced to words. 6. Poetry and symbolism are required. 7. What is glimpsed in religious language is intimated, something beyond the horizon of our comprehension, something tantalizing we cannot enter.
As one reads these statements, it becomes clear that McGrath's understanding of religious language is virtually identical to Schleiermacher's. In both cases the ineffable experience of God is expressed in words that are poetical or symbolic due to the fact that the reality to which they point lies "beyond the horizons of our comprehension." That is where Schleiermacher began, and from that starting point he inevitably made his way toward his panentheistic doctrine, a doctrine that McGrath would consider anathema. McGrath, however, does not press forward to the logical conclusion. He should conclude that whatever is beyond the "horizons of our comprehension," beyond the "borderlands" of words, something "into which we tantalizingly cannot enter," should have no real verbal content. But McGrath is not consistent on the matter. Here are two quotations from another section of McGrath's text, a section in which McGrath speaks of the objectivity of the biblical revelation.
Recognizing the narrative quality of Scripture allows the fullness of biblical revelation to be recovered. In no way does this strategy involve the abandoning or weakening of an evangelical commitment to the objective cognitive truth of divine revelation.(39)
Scripture, as we have seen, possesses a strongly objective dimension, in that it tells us about the way things are; it also possesses a subjective component, through which it offers to transform our inner lives ... As Luther put it, we read Scripture not simply to learn of the `commands of God' (mandata Dei) but to encounter the `God who commands' (Deus mandantus), and to be transformed as a result.(40)
These two statements are not theologically coordinated with the view of language McGrath uses in response to Lindbeck. One needs Trinity and Christology here. In my first essay on Objective and Ecstatic. I made the following statement, "In the objective view, theological statements can literally refer to God the Word who became objective. Theological language can also contain symbolic aspects since the Word reveals God the Father who is holy and transcendent." From this perspective, and referring to McGrath as just quoted, the "commands of God" are God the Son in objective form. The "God who commands" is the Father who sends forth his Son as the incarnation of God's commands. The event of hearing the "commands of God" leads one to the Father who commands, but the Father who command "dwells in light unapproachable," so that the commands themselves, though objective, symbolically and poetically point beyond themselves to the transcendent Father. Since McGrath has not worked the matter out theologically, he does not propose an evangelical alternative to Lindbeck, nor does he theologically ground the objectivity of the biblical revelation. Were he to do so, he would not offer a liberal response to Lindbeck. He would allow theology to follow Scripture and affirm that a critical aspect of the biblical revelation is cognitive and propositional.(41)
Further, McGrath not only accepts an experiential expressive model in regard to first order language, he does the same with second order language, that is, with doctrine. In his view, doctrine doesn't really refer to an "external objective reality" as claimed. Rather, doctrinal statements reflect the experience of the divine and only glimpse what they symbolize. Consider the following.
Underlying such attempts to achieve clarity of concepts and modes of discourse is the recognition that doctrinal affirmations are to be recognized as perceptions, not total descriptions, pointing beyond themselves toward the greater mystery of God himself.(42)
For such theologians, doctrines are reliable, yet incomplete descriptions of reality. Their power lies in what they represent rather than in what they are in themselves.(43)
Christian doctrine attempts to give shape to the Christian life by laying the foundations for the generation and subsequent interpretation of Christian experience.(44) The language of Christian theology functions under constraints similar to those affecting poetry: it is obliged to express in words things which by their very nature defy reduction to these words; nevertheless, there is a fundamental resonance between words and experience.(45) Cognitive theories of doctrine recognize that words are on the borderlands of experience, intimating and signposting the reality which they cannot capture. To apply pejorative epithets such as `intellectualist' or `literalist' to the cognitive propositionalist approach to doctrine is to fail to appreciate the power of words to evoke experience, to point beyond themselves to something inexpressible, to an experience which their author wishes to share with his or her readers. It is also, of course, to fail to do justice to the many levels at which cognitive or propositional statements operate.(46)
Theological statements simply do not operate at the same level as mathematical equations. The charge of `literalism' is vulnerable to the extent that it risks overlooking the richness of non literal language, such as metaphor, as a means of articulation, and the importance of analogy or models as a heuristic stimulus to theological reflection. It is simply a theological truism that no human language can be applied to God univocally; indeed, it is from the recognition, rather than the denial, of this point that cognitive approaches to doctrine begin.(47)
The cognitive dimension of Christian doctrine is the framework upon which Christian experience is supported, the channel through which it is conveyed. It is a skeleton which gives strength and shape to the flesh of experience.(48)
To caricature Christian doctrine, then, as mere word play or as an attempt to reduce the mystery of God to propositions is to fail to appreciate the manner in which words serve us. In order for my experience to be expressed, communicated to or aroused in another, it demands statements in cognitive forms. That these cognitive forms fail to capture such an experience in its totality is self evident, and hardly a matter for rhetorical exaggeration: it is one of the inevitable consequences of living in history and being obliged to communicate in historical forms. Schleiermacher recognized that doctrine expressed an experience constituted by the language of the Christian community, thus pointing to the delicate interplay of cognitive and experiential elements in doctrinal formulations.(49)
In regard to doctrine, we have the following: 1. Doctrines are perceptions, not total descriptions, which point toward God. 2. Doctrines only represent, in and of themselves they are not literal. 3. They interpret Christian experience, provide a foundation. 4. Doctrines "describe" something that cannot be reduced to words. Hence doctrine is like poetry. Its congruence with experience is one of "resonance." 5. Doctrine points to the inexpressible. 6. Doctrine is metaphorical, provides analogies, or metaphors for theological reflection. 7. Doctrine is a skeleton, framework, or channel for Christian experience. 8. Doctrine does not reduce the mystery of God to propositions. As in Schleiermacher, doctrines express an experience.
At this point, McGrath has essentially adopted the liberal understanding of doctrine in that doctrine expresses the experience of a God who is beyond language. As such, doctrines about God are not really theological statements that directly express truth. At the same time, McGrath intimates that doctrine has certain second order functions. They provide a foundation for subsequent experience, their use of metaphors and analogies are a heuristic stimulus for theological reflection, and they are a skeleton for the flesh and blood of Christian experience.
Let me return to my essay on Barth's understanding of Anselm. According to Barth, Anselm began with Scripture, seeking the intelligibility of Scripture as received in faith. In that sense, the theologian begins with the first order statements of Scripture but continues with efforts to seek Scripture's underlying intelligibility. When that intelligibility is received, it is given in statements, propositions, doctrinal phrases that illumine Scripture. But the receiving of doctrine, the illumination of the intelligibility of Scripture, is also an act of God. It is a Word from God. It is God speaking. When Anselm received the Name, "that which nothing greater can be conceived," he recognized it as a revelation. This revelation does not have the same status as the biblical revelation. Scripture is prior, the fundamental authority. Theology is derivative, beholden to Scripture. Even so, Anselm believed that God took form as a Latin phrase spoken to his understanding. This phrase was God the Word in Latin form and Anselm could understand it. He reflected upon it, using the categories of thought that one applies to objects, propositions, to things that make sense. He could do this because the revelation was propositional even as it pointed to the transcendent God who dwells in light unapproachable.
What is needed at this point, in addition to Trinity and Incarnation, are the theological doctrines of appropriation and the communicatio idiomatum. By appropriation, language applied to Jesus Christ is objective, describing events, actions, objects, things given to our understanding. He was born of the Virgin Mary, he ate, drank, spoke, acted, and was visibly crucified under Pontius Pilate. Specific concrete things can be said about him, using language that is objective, the same language we use for other visible and audible objects. By the communicatio idiomatum, this language used of objects also applies to his divine nature, so that it is appropriate to say that God the Word was born, that the divine Word lived, spoke, acted, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. In this way language applied to God the Word, as known in Jesus Christ, is the objective language of ordinary life, and therefore, it can be said that the words, deeds, and appearances of God can be literally known by the mind. At the same time, however, Jesus Christ reveals the Father, the transcendent Father, the God who "dwells in light unapproachable," (1 Tim. 6:16). For that reason, the objective language of Scripture, objective by appropriation to the Son, is symbolic in reference to the Father, the God who creates out of nothing, whose ways are not our ways, whose inexpressible glory is revealed by the Son. To my mind, a good way to understand this is to think of Thomas, commanded by Jesus to put his finger in the print of the nails and to place his hand in Christ's side. As Thomas heard Christ's words, saw the wound, touched the prints of the nails, objective events received by the senses, known by the mind, expressed in objective language, he encountered something that transcended his understanding, something ex nihilo, "My Lord and my God" (John 20:28).
In Anselm, Barth found the key to overcoming Kant. Prior to Anselm, Barth had accepted Kant's belief that God could not be understood by the categories of the understanding. After Anselm, and only after Anselm, was Barth able to overcome Schleiermacher and write his Church Dogmatics.
McGrath has not responded to Lindbeck because he hasn't really come to terms with Kant, with the core of liberal theology, nor with a sound understanding of Chalcedon. In light of his purpose in this text, he has not demonstrated the "internal contradictions and vulnerabilities" of liberalism and postliberalism, nor has he made plain the "coherence of evangelicalism by bringing out the inner consistency of the evangelical approach."
McGrath on Scripture
Consider the following, taken from opening sections on the uniqueness of Christ and the authority of Scripture.
For Christians, Jesus is the embodiment and self revelation of God. At the heart of the Christian faith stands a living person, not a book.(50)
Despite its high view of Scripture, evangelicalism has resisted the temptation to identify the text of Scripture with revelation. Scripture is regarded as a channel through which God's self revelation in Jesus Christ is encountered. Although it is a bearer of that self revelation in Christ, it is not to be identified directly with that self revelation. Scripture is not Jesus Christ. Yet as Kuyper so aptly put it, we cannot encounter Christ in any form other than that which we find in Scripture. . . . There is a strongly Trinitarian dimension to the evangelical understanding of revelation, which is particularly evident in its affirmation of the distinctive role of the Holy Spirit.(51)
For evangelicals, there is something real which lies beyond the text of Scripture, which is nonetheless rendered and mediated by that text that is, the Christian experience of being redeemed in Christ. The emphasis on intratextuality tends to obscure the fact that the person of Jesus Christ stands at the centre of the Christian faith and did so before the texts of the New Testament were written down.(52)
Without a sound understanding of God's speech, Word, or act, thought usually oscillates between two poles. On the one hand, there are those who believe that Scripture is the literal Word of God. They hold that its phrases, words, and deeds give the very thoughts and deeds of God so that by reading them one immediately knows God. This is fundamentalism as well as the Princeton School. McGrath rejects this approach. The other alternative is to believe that God is transcendent in such a way that God cannot be identified with the biblical text but is something beyond it. This is the position that McGrath accepts. That is why he will say that "Scripture is not Jesus Christ," that Scripture is a "channel" that biblical tests cannot be "identified directly" with revelation, and that redemption in Christ is "something real which lies beyond the text of Scripture, which is nonetheless rendered and mediated by that text," and that the "person of Jesus Christ existed before the texts of the New Testament were written down," as if the texts were quite different from the person. In critical respects, when it comes to Scripture, McGrath is a liberal.
This is not the place to enter into a lengthy description of how Scripture was formed and why it is God's Word written. I am doing that elsewhere. What can be said here, however, is that God the Word became incarnate in Jesus Christ so that the words and deeds of Jesus Christ were the words and deeds of God. Further, from a biblical point of view, the words and deeds of a person, when narrated or written down by others, are the original person in another form. For example, Paul didn't just preach about Christ, he preached Christ. His apostolic gospel was Jesus Christ in preached form. Similarly when the biblical witness concerning Jesus Christ was written down, it was and is Christ the Word in written form. From that perspective, the Bible as a whole is not simply about God the Word, it is God the Word in written form. In the Anglican ordination service, ordinands "do solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God." They do not say that the Scriptures are a "channel", or that they "mediate" the Word of God. Similarly, in regard to the bread and wine of communion, Jesus did not say, "this is a channel of my body," or "this cannot be identified with my body," or "this mediates my body," but "this is my body."
In regard to incarnation, it is appropriate to say that a finite reality is God because God the Word became incarnate, and by the communicatio idiomatum, that finite reality Christ's body, his blood, his words, and his deeds are God. When these words and deeds are set forth in writing as Scripture, or as bread and wine in communion, they are Jesus Christ in another form. Therefore, Scripture is not a channel, nor is it true that "Scripture is not Jesus Christ," nor must we say that we cannot "identify the text of Scripture with revelation," or that the text "mediates" the Redeemer. Scripture is Jesus Christ, the Word of God written, and the Word of God is God, so that Scripture is God in written form. The words of Scripture are God's Word/words. If this be not true, we do not have God in Scripture. Only under the power of the Spirit does this become apparent.
This can be said in another way. Word and Sacrament belong to the second article of the Creed, not to the third. They are the Incarnation in another form, in the form of writing and bread and wine. God is there as real presence, as specific words, as bread, as wine. Hearing the written Word and receiving the Sacrament belong to the third article of the Creed, to the work of the Holy Spirit. Even in Jesus' day, there were those who did not hear his words as the Word of God. They are those who blasphemed against the Holy Spirit. But their failure to hear the Incarnate Word did not mean that God the Word was not incarnate in Jesus Christ. God was and is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is Word and Sacrament in written and material form.
The position advocated here differs from fundamentalism in several ways. I do not believe that the biblical witness to Christ is exactly what one would find if one followed Jesus with a video camera. This is due to the fact that decisive knowledge of Jesus Christ was only available after the resurrection and Pentecost. Only then was it possible to place Jesus' words and deeds in their proper context as a saving act of God. As a result, the apostles, led by the Spirit, preserved, summarized, theologically organized, and worked out the implications of Jesus' words and deeds in order to set forth their original saving significance. That apostolic witness is the center of Scripture. Further, the biblical witness sets forth the whole of Jesus' ministry, and the whole cannot be rendered by simply repeating a few of the original pieces. Secondly, the words and deeds of Jesus, and the biblical witness as well, point beyond themselves to God in his transcendent nature. As a result, the biblical language is both literal and symbolic. Thirdly, simply having the biblical words does not guarantee that one has God. One must be obedient to the work of the Spirit which makes the biblical words subjectively real as God's speech. I have discussed these matters elsewhere.(53)
In the end, it is not exactly clear what theology lies behind McGrath understanding of Jesus Christ in relation to Scripture. I do get the sense, however, that two realities stand at the forefront of his thought. These are the "living person" of Jesus Christ as something other than the words of Scripture, together with the evangelical recognition that Scripture presents itself as the particular and concrete word of God. I do not think he has theologically coordinated these two perspectives. He doesn't make sense of his claims that, on the one hand, Scripture is the "word of God," that both "revelation and doctrine have cognitive or informational aspects," and on the other hand that Christ is "rendered" and "mediated," that "Scripture is not Jesus Christ," and that Scripture is not to be "directly identified" with revelation.
Consider the following statement.
Negatively, some evangelicals have argued that all critics are influenced by their own cultural, philosophical, and theological presuppositions, and that much of the criticism that has seemed to undermine the authority of Scripture has reflected a deep rooted prejudice against the miraculous, which rests upon rationalist rather than Christian presuppositions. Even scholars whose work has been on other ways especially illuminating have sometimes found it hard to come to terms with biblical miracles and prophecy. Evangelicals rightly reject criticism based on such prejudice as, in the first place un-Christian, and in the second as based upon a flawed methodology, in which a secular worldview is imposed upon the biblical material.(54)
Apparently, evangelicals believe in the biblical miracles. But that raises an important question: What is the significance of the biblical miracles? Before Hume, Kant, and the Enlightenment, the claim was made that miracles validated the truth of revelation. That is still true, but more needs to be said. The Word became flesh to redeem the whole person including the flesh. For this reason, the gospels devote as much space to Jesus' healings and exorcisms as it does to his teaching and preaching. In fact, the two are intimately related, the one validating the other. If evangelicals believe in the biblical miracles, they then need to do what the New Testament so clearly claims that disciples of the risen Lord Jesus did: preach, teach, heal, cast out demons, and more. A theologian that takes Scripture seriously will be involved in these things, and speak for a church that does these things. But McGrath does not make these clear and obvious claims. Here is his description of Christ's present work.
[Evangelicalism proclaims] An emphasis upon conversion or a `new birth' as a life changing religious experience.(55)
Christian theology cannot remain faithful to its subject matter if it regards itself as purely propositional or cognitive in nature. The Christ encounter with God is transformative. As Calvin pointed out, to know God is to be changed by God; true knowledge of God leads to worship, as the believer is caught up in a transforming and renewing encounter with the living God.(56)
A theology which touches the mind, leaving the heart unaffected, is no true Christian theology a point stressed by both Luther and Calvin.(57)
The gospel is thus experienced as something liberating, something which transforms our situation, something which is relevant to us.(58)
Through faith, the believer is caught up in a new outlook on life, a new structure of existence, embodied paradigmatically in Jesus Christ, and both in their proclamation and person, believers reveal this story of Jesus Christ.(59)
Scripture, we have seen, possesses a strongly objective dimension, in that it tells us about the way things are; it also possesses a subjective component, through which it offers to transform our inner lives an offer which, in the evangelical experience, is more than justified, and leads to an emphasis upon evangelism as the means by which others might share in the same `transforming friendship' (James Houston).(60)
We need to purge rationalism from within evangelicalism. And that means recovering the relational, emotional, and imaginative aspects of biblical spirituality, which the Enlightenment declared to be improper. As Martin Luther constantly insisted, Christianity is concerned with totus homo, the `entire human person', and not just the human mind.(61)
... evangelism is about the proclamation of an objective truth with the expectation that this will give rise to a subjective response that is to say, a response which involves the heart, mind and total being of those who hear it. The Enlightenment notions of `truth' and `knowledge', as critics such as Kierkegaard pointed out with such vigour, fail to engage with human nature in all its fullness, and focus instead on a purely cerebral `faith', devoid of emotion and transformation.(62)
As a result of the foregoing, evangelicals believe that the gospel affects the heart, the emotions, the entire self, the inner life, relationships, and the imagination. It entails a transformation, a new structure of existence, a transforming friendship. The general impression is that the message of the gospel is more existential than incarnate, transforming the soul but not the body. In fact, these phrases have a rather spectral quality in comparison to the biblical revelation. According to Scripture, Jesus not only preached and taught (something Evangelicals do), but he also fed the five thousand, cast out demons, healed the blind, the sick, and the lame, confronted the Pharisees, and much, much more. I haven't seen many evangelicals doing these things. Jesus does them, and an obedient church will do them in his name. I have included examples on this website but you will not find them in McGrath. There are several reasons for this. Historically, evangelicals have not emphasized the healing power of Jesus. One can, for example, see this in Calvin. There are other reasons as well. In the opening pages of this text, McGrath states,
Evangelicalism has long since got past the stage where it needs to feel defensive about anything, and is perfectly capable of mounting a sustained bid both for a justified presence within the academic community, and for intellectual respectability as a serious option of thinking people in today's world.(63)
I do not believe, and I have fourteen years of graduate study as background, that it is possible to maintain one's academic respectability and affirm and act upon the full gamut of Jesus' words and deeds as living options today. Or conversely, if one achieves academic respectability, it is only possible because one has failed to practice the biblical acts of the Lord Jesus, to associate with those who do, and to make this a constitutive aspect of one's theological enterprise. There are doubtless exceptions to these generalizations, but not many.
At one point in his treatment of Scripture McGrath observes that "recent scholarship has decisively undermined the New Testament basis of this trend toward detaching Christian faith from the historical Jesus."(64) Oddly enough, in a text heavily laced with footnotes, this statement has no footnote by which to corroborate this claim. The Christian faith cannot be detached from the historical Jesus because the risen Lord Jesus does today what Scripture proclaims he did then. McGrath needs to make that claim, and he needs to be blunt about it. The New Testament is very clear: the disciples just didn't preach and teach as do evangelicals, they also healed, cast out demons, had visions, spoke in tongues, and associated with the ignorant, the socially despised, and those who were not intellectually respectable. There are sectors of the church who do this, Pentecostals among others, and a vast literature on this subject. None of this appears in McGrath. Should he speak of these things? Does he have the right to leave out major portions of the New Testament revelation? If he does, is he really letting God be God? Here is McGrath.
Evangelicalism is determined to `let God be God', and to receive, honour and conceive him as he chooses to be known, rather than as we would have him be. At its heart, evangelicalism represents a relentless and serious attempt to bring all our conceptions of God and ourselves to criticism in the light of how and what God wishes to be known.(65)
A Theological Possibility
Finally, I would like to offer a theological possibility, one that would appear to be congruent with the theological perspective implicit in McGrath's A Passion for Truth. Suppose revelation is composed of two factors, Word and Spirit. This is orthodoxy, God is revealed by Word and Spirit. Suppose further that the human nature of Jesus Christ was "particular, truthful, cognitive, and historical," while the divine nature, the Word that became incarnate in Christ, was a mystical, sublime reality beyond finite comprehension. In other words, follow Schleiermacher. Suppose also that God the Spirit is miraculous and that Scripture is the final and definitive authority for Christian faith. What consequences would follow from these theological assumptions?
If the foregoing be true, God the Spirit would miraculously break in upon human knowing to reveal the mystical Word through the concrete particulars of the biblical revelation to Jesus Christ. Since the Word is mystical, it would have certain ineffable characteristics as revealed by the Spirit. For example, to quote McGrath, the words of revelation would be concrete and particular, but they would refer or point to something "lying beyond the horizons of our comprehension," reflecting the "sheer elusiveness of human experience." This something could not be "imprisoned within a verbal matrix," or "identified directly" with revelation. It would require "poetry" and "symbolism," sophisticated linguistic forms that hint of something "which we tantalizingly cannot enter." Since Christ would be mystical and Scripture particular and concrete, "Scripture would not be Jesus Christ," nor would the "living person" of Christ be "a book." As a result, the words of Scripture would not literally refer to the divine Word. They would be "signposts" which would "point towards" the elusive and mystical Word. As we read Scripture, we would "resonate" to this Word, but never grasp it conceptually.
This understanding of God would be Trinitarian and Christological. The Father would send the mystical Word while the Spirit would make the Word real to human knowing. The pinnacle of this divine revelation would be Jesus Christ as known in Scripture. In his particular, historical human nature, his divine nature would be active, healing, teaching, and revealing the glory of God in ways that ultimately defy understanding in spite of their tantalizing yet profound effects. The incomprehensible would begin with his virgin birth and reach its highest expression in his cross and resurrection. In the cross and resurrection believers would recognize that from "henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more." (2 Cor. 5:16) In other words, the cross would mean the end of ordinary human knowing, knowing God as we do other objects. A new form of knowing would emerge, given in the resurrection where the ineffable and consuming nature of God would be revealed through the glorified body of the Lord. Given the ecstatic nature of this experience, the disciples could only express it in the broken yet ecstatic speech of the New Testament resurrection narratives.
This Trinitarian and Christological picture of God is consistent with the understanding of God found throughout McGrath's book. The human nature of Jesus Christ, as well as the language of Scripture, would be affirmed as "particular, truthful, cognitive, and historical." The divine nature of Jesus Christ would be seen as "something ultimately lying beyond the horizons of our comprehension." This vision misses the mark for it fails to affirm that the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ come together to form one person. By virtue of that personal union, it is appropriate, even necessary, to attribute human properties to the divine nature and divine properties to the human nature. This is the communicatio idiomatum. It implies that the divine nature must have the properties of the human. This is only true of Incarnation, and not of other created realities. As a result, the divine Word must be "particular, truthful, cognitive, and historical." It cannot be mystical and ineffable, although the Word points to the mystery of God's transcendence. This is what McGrath does not fully grasp, and for that reason, his theology is flawed.
In conclusion, it must be said that McGrath has presented elements of an orthodox understanding of God, but failed to coherently organize those elements into doctrinal formulations that place them upon a firm theological foundation. As a result, at critical junctures, he has adopted the liberal perspective he professes to refute.
Endnotes
1. McGrath, Alister. A Passion for Truth. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996. 2. McGrath, pp. 23-4. 3. McGrath, p. 25. 4. McGrath, p. 27. 5. McGrath, p. 40. 6. McGrath, p. 63. 7. McGrath, p. 71. 8. McGrath, p. 49. 9. McGrath, p. 135. 10. McGrath, p. 79. 11. McGrath, p. 137. 12. McGrath, p. 107. 13. McGrath, p. 99. 14. McGrath, pp. 47-8. 15. McGrath, p. 122. 16. McGrath, p. 73. 17. McGrath, pp. 80-1. 18. McGrath, p. 222. 19. McGrath, p. 222. 20. McGrath, p. 76. 21. McGrath, p. 77. 22. McGrath., p. 78. 23. McGrath, p. 72. 24. McGrath, pp. 78-9. 25. McGrath, p. 79. 26. McGrath, p. 79. 27. McGrath, p. 80. 28. McGrath, p. 86 7. 29. George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984, pp. 16f. 30. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, pp. 20-1. 31. McGrath, p. 137. 32. McGrath, p. 169. 33. McGrath, p. 139. 34. McGrath, p. 141. 35. McGrath, p. 142. 36. McGrath, p. 142. 37. McGrath, p. 142 3. 38. McGrath, p. 143. 39. McGrath, p. 107. 40. McGrath, p. 102. 41. The term "proposition" has connotations of logical or mathematical truth, and Scripture is not of that form. But God does use language that one can understand when he speaks. 42. McGrath, pp. 138-9. 43. McGrath, p. 139. 44. McGrath, p. 142. 45. McGrath, p. 144. 46. McGrath, p. 140. 47. McGrath, p. 140. 48. McGrath, p. 145. 49. McGrath, pp. 144-5. 50. McGrath, p. 37. 51. McGrath, p. 54. 52. McGrath, p. 156. 53. See Johnston's Jesus. 54. McGrath, pp. 99-100. 55. McGrath, p. 22. 56. McGrath, p. 79. 57. McGrath, p. 79. 58. McGrath, p. 80. 59. McGrath, p. 44. 60. McGrath, p. 102. 61. McGrath, p. 175. 62. McGrath, p. 178. 63. McGrath, p. 9. 64. McGrath, p. 48. 65. McGrath, pp. 37-8.
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
June, 2002
