You're Included

JMF: Thanks for joining us on another edition of You’re Included – the unique interview series devoted to practical implications of Trinitarian theology. Our guest today is Elmer Colyer, Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary and an ordained United Methodist pastor and elder. Dr. Colyer edited The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T. F. Torrance, and he is author of How to Read T.F. Torrance: Understanding His Trinitarian and Scientific Theology.  Thanks again for being with us today. 

EC: It’s a joy to be with you, Mike.

JMF: It’s a pleasure to have you back. We’d like to talk about predestination. (EC: Ah, the “P” word.) What’s it all about?

EC: There is a debate that has raged through the history of the church, that’s divided theologians and churches into different camps. I’m a United Methodist, so in my Wesleyan heritage, we’ve never been very big on predestination, but I also stand with a foot on the Reformed tradition with my study of Bloesch and Torrance. The problem with predestination is that it’s mentioned in the Bible, so you have to deal with it.

Part of the problem in the whole conversation of double predestination is that oftentimes it has rested in kind of an abstract doctrine of God: a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, absolutely in control of everything. So if you have that kind of a God, and that kind of God knows the end from the beginning, in some respect you’re almost driven to a concept of providence where everything that happens, happens under the purview of God, and double predestination is only a step away from that. 

Here I find Torrance’s theology to be especially helpful, because he challenges that whole doctrine of God at the very core – asking, How do we know anything about God, about God’s power, about God’s election or predestination, apart from what God has actually revealed in Jesus Christ? And there, we find something rather difficult, that creates problems for double predestination.

At this point at least, Wesley has enough sense that when he was arguing against predestination, he finally said, “Whatever predestination means, it cannot mean that God, from all eternity wills the damnation of some. Because it’s contrary to the character of God as depicted by the whole scope and tenor of Scripture and preeminently in Jesus Christ." What Wesley was saying, in Torrance’s words, is there can be no dark, inscrutable deity, some sinister God behind the back of Jesus Christ who secretly wills the damnation of some and not the salvation of all, which is what we see actually revealed in Christ’s life, death and resurrection. So that kind of theological approach to thinking about double predestination, thinking about providence, is more  helpful than the other way of approaching it.

JMF: Now, Arminians, those who follow the teachings of Jacob Arminius (as opposed to hyper-Calvinists who follow the teachings of Calvin) had a somewhat of a solution to Calvin’s perspective on predestination. What was that?

EC: A solution not quite as bad, but almost, in the Arminian perspective (although exactly what Arminius said is a little more complicated, but we’ll talk about Arminianism as it developed). As you even find it in my Wesleyan heritage and sometimes in Wesley, grace restores an element of human freedom so that people then can choose for or against the gospel. But of course the problem with this view is the problem that we talked about in one of our previous sessions, that then, part of the chain of our salvation rests on our human faith, our human response. And then we’re thrown back against ourselves, and that undermines the integrity of grace.

Then the double predestinarians say, “See, this is the problem”: If you don’t affirm double predestination, you’re immediately thrown in one way or another into some kind of explanation of why some people are saved and some people are not, based on human experience – human response - and therefore you have an element of human self-determination in it. That becomes the weak link and creates the problem. But the problem is, this is the age or policy of false alternatives: either double pre-destination or an element of human freedom - freedom that is either innate or restored by grace that allows us the ability to say yes or no. Neither one of those are the option that Torrance presents; he presents a different option, I think a better one.

JMF: There’s also on the two sides of that, there’s the sense that on the hyper-Calvinist side there’s a sense… well, God is the Creator and author of all things; he is therefore utterly sovereign over all things; therefore nothing can happen that he did not determine ahead of time - or pre-determinism. And then on the Arminian side they try to deal with that with this idea of fore-knowledge. It’s really not that he didn’t predestine everyone to be either saved or lost, but since he knows everything, the only things that can happen are the things that he foreknows, which really winds up not helping at all, not solving the problem, because you’re still dealing with predeterminism in either case.

EC: Yes, it’s precisely correct, Mike, and that’s why in Wesley, even though he’s oftentimes lifted up by the Arminians as the great champion of this more open doctrine of God and in point of fact Wesley’s doctrine of providence was every bit as rigid as Calvin’s. Everything that happens is predetermined except that small little sphere where human beings are granted an element of freedom to either choose or to say “yes” or to say “no,” but beyond that everything else is predetermined.

But here’s where Torrance pushes back against this position. How do these theologians, how do any of us know what God knows, what God chooses, what God’s character is, how do we come to that kind of idea? How do we know what God’s sovereignty is, what God’s power is? Do we start with some kind of conception of power and then multiply it to the nth degree so that God is omni-powerful, God is all powerful?

JMF: And isn’t that exactly what hyper-Calvinism and Arminianism does?

EC: Yes, it’s exactly right. Torrance argues against them at this point. And you see it in the history of theology at various places… take for example Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologia – if you read Thomas’ Summa, in questions 1 through 27 Thomas first provides proofs for the existence of God and then he develops God’s basic attributes, and only  after that does he ever get around to talking about the doctrine of the Trinity - and what he says about the doctrine of the Trinity bears no relation to what he said about the one God. And the doctrine of the One God is built via what we call via negativa, the way of negation, negating those characteristics in our human conceptions that we can attribute to God and then affirming the via positiva – the attributes of God like God’s goodness, we know something about goodness, so God is all good. We know something about power, so God is all-powerful. But this is an abstract movement of thought. It’s something that we think up based on human experience, try to project across the gap unto God (and this is where Torrance’s scientific theology is so important) - it bears no relation to what God has actually revealed about who God is, about God’s goodness and God’s power in Jesus Christ and the gospel.

JMF: So Thomas' doctrine is totally made up. In other words (EC: Yes, it’s mythology), we sit down and we say, “Ok, what must God be like? Well, he must be all powerful, because otherwise, what would be the point? He must know everything...” We take whatever human attribute seem good and we say, “he must be the absolute, ultimate, in that particular thing.” We add it all up on a page and we draw a line under it and say, that equals God. Now let’s take this idea of God, and we’ll use that (EC: think out the gospel), what if we got something we came up with. And Torrance is going a totally different direction.

EC: Yes. And often times what we do is then, when we have our basic categories, and our basic ideas that are oftentimes drawn from the culture, from philosophy or whatever source, after we have those in place, then we go back and read the Bible. See, then we use the concordance method of reading the Bible, and you can find individual texts that can reinforce some of that kind of interpretation of God. But the problem is, and this is where Torrance challenges it, “How can you have a doctrine of the one God over here that operates by this set of principles, this set of attributes, and then have the Triune God over here revealed in Christ’s life, death and resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that operates by a different set of principles?

In fact, in Wesley’s theology, when he talks about providence, he only talks about it in relation to the one God, but when he talks about salvation and the church, he talks about it in relation to the Triune God. But there is no Triune God and One God that are separate – the Three Persons, the communion between the three Persons is the One being of God, and the differentiation in the communion within the one being of God is the relations between the Persons. So the One God, and the Three Persons that are averse of one another, you can’t have this kind of split in the doctrine of God. You cannot have the one doctrine of God – you know the One God doing one thing, and Trinitarian Persons doing another. This is simply scientifically untenable. Therefore Torrance says, what we have to do is we have to think out all of these questions absolutely, rigorously, scientifically, in terms of what God has actually revealed about who God is, in Jesus Christ.

God’s power becomes a kind of a power that we never would have thought upon on our own. It becomes the power of suffering love on the cross.

And then guess what? We end up with a very different understanding of what God’s power is, a very different understanding of what God’s goodness is. God’s power becomes a kind of a power that we never would have thought upon on our own. It becomes the power of suffering love on the cross. The power to enter into the midst of evil and overcome it from the inside rather than a show of brute force.

And that whole other way of thinking of God ends up being an abstract movement of thought that’s done, if you will, behind the back of Jesus Christ and bears little relation to what God has actually done.

JMF: So, you take for example a medieval concept of God. They know the Trinity on the one hand as a doctrine. But they operate out of this idea of a single God in heaven. Well, much like the movies we see, “Oh, God!” or something, where there’s one God and he’s totally in charge in however he brings that about. But if we’re going to imitate and be like God, then the king has all power to do whatever he wants, to execute his enemies, to flaunt his authority, to take advantage of everybody, all in the name of… he’s operating as God’s man on earth, and that’s how God would do it. So whatever he does, he has God’s blessing. And that kind of behavior is so completely out of kilter with the Triune God who’s revealed to us in Scripture in Jesus Christ. Whatever our view of God is affects how we deal, not only in our own lives with ourselves, but especially with other people.

EC: Yes. Even in a more benign level, the idea of God as self-sufficient, as solitary, as in control of who God is and everything else, even in a more benign sense, I think we tend to fasten on that doctrine of God in our culture, and once again it reinforces our individualism. That’s why I said in one of our other sessions that the doctrine of the Trinity has not really had a significant impact upon Christianity in this country until relatively recently. We tended to focus far more on the doctrine of the One God, and I can’t speak about your denomination, but in my own Wesleyan heritage, if you look throughout the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century, virtually all of the theologians who are doing theology are focusing on the doctrine of the One God. And at most you’ll have a little bitty section in their dogmatic theology on the doctrine of the Trinity that bears little relation to other aspects of the Trinity.

JMF: It’s lip service: we know it’s true, but the implications of it are never explored.

EC: Right. And so it leads to this absolutely dreadful notion of God that finally began to undermine people’s faith. Let me give you a concrete example of this. I found out a couple of years ago that I have lymphoma, and for about six months it looked like it was transforming, and I thought I was going to die and probably have 14 months to live. I discovered some things about myself. As a pastor you hold the hand of people when they’re dying and when they have cancer, but you never know how you’ll respond to those things until you face them yourself. And I have to say never for a moment did it run through my mind that God is out to get me, that cancer has come to me directly from the hand of God.

And yet I know another pastor, another theologian, who found out he had prostate cancer at the same time. At least he was a consistent Calvinist - he said, “Unless you believe that your cancer comes to you directly from the hand of God, you’ll not receive the blessing that God intends for you to receive through that cancer.” Well, if I believe my lymphoma came directly from the hand of God, I mean, I would be worried. You know, if that’s the way God is, if God plays dice with our lives like that, we all ought to be worried. And we won’t even talk about it in some things as common as cancer! You know, let’s talk about it in more extreme things - you know, the child pornography, the kind of dastardly evil things, can we really say, do we really want to say that everything that happens in our world happens because it’s ultimately the will of God? You know, this is where this doctrine of God leads. And ultimately, we all ought to be scared if that’s the way God really operates, we all ought to be worried.

JMF: Well, you have diseases, epidemics that people die from daily by the tens of thousand – malaria… would God have invented malaria specifically to send it to people who have never heard of him? What is the point?

EC: Very good, Mike. Fundamentally in that question, the age-old theodicy question: “If God is all powerful and God is all good, how can there be evil?” Whenever I get that question pastorally or when I’m working with seminary students, if you allow the question to be stated that way, you can never answer it. Because the question has already shut through a certain presuppositions.

You see, we already think we know something about what goodness is and about what God’s goodness is, we already think we know something about God’s power and how it all operates, and we think we know what evil is. But the irony is that when we actually look at what God has revealed about God’s power, God’s goodness and about evil and Jesus Christ, we find that we don’t know anything about any of those three.

God’s goodness turns out to be far better than we ever would have dreamed, because God, rather than simply overcoming it by a show of brute force, enters into the middle of it. God takes our diseased and alienated sinful humanity upon himself, suffers and finally dies the death that all of us will someday experience in order to set us free for fullness of life. This is not a God who sits aloof from us outside the universe playing with our lives like a puppet on a string. This is a God who loves us to the uttermost, comes into the midst of our brokenness in order to redeem us. A God who even cries on the cross, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”— “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

In those moments in our lives when everything is darkness and we feel forsaken, even our brother Jesus, our blessed high priest, has said that [why have you forsaken me?] on our behalf on the cross. So we also learn something different about the power of God. The way God actually overcomes evil isn’t by a show of brute force, is it? It’s by suffering love. It’s by entering into the midst of it. It’s by using evil as the unintended way in which God finally overcomes sin and evil in our lives.

You know, the cross is the most dastardly evil event that ever took place in all of history. And yet that’s the very event that God uses to redeem us, therefore canceling human evil at its most frontal, powerful, potent, negative and evil expression there on the cross. Furthermore, the cross shows us that we are in a whole lot more trouble than we oftentimes want to admit – particularly in our optimistic North American culture. If nothing short of the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, if nothing short of the passion of God, if nothing short of the Father giving up the Son unto death, the Son offering himself as a sacrifice for sin through the power of the Holy Spirit, if only that can dislodge evil from our lives and set us free, it says that evil is a whole lot worse than what we thought, and our life is a whole lot more perilous than we often think

I think sometimes the reason why we want that other kind of God is that we don’t want to admit just how finely perilous our condition is apart from the gospel. But thanks be to God, there is no dark and inscrutable God behind the back of Jesus Christ, and therefore when I found out about my lymphoma, it never once crossed my mind that God might be out to get me. Rather, I found Christ near at my side carrying me through it day by day by day by day.

JMF: I remember reading in Ray Anderson’s book On Death and Dying, he’s talking about suffering and about pain and the evil that takes place and especially the passages in Scripture that (even in the New Testament) that bring down all kinds of hell and fiery torment on the evil doer, and he’s explaining that, “yes, the New Testament says those things, and yes, they’re very true and they have to be taken seriously, but they are not said in isolation. They’re said in the context of the gospel itself. This is how it would be and what is real if there were no Jesus Christ who has taken this very thing on himself and therefore, we’re delivered from it. It isn’t as though that torment has the final word. We take it seriously, and it’s true and yes, the Scripture talks about it, and yet this is precisely what Jesus has done to deliver us from.

EC: That’s a crucial insight, Mike, because I think other than in consistent Calvinism, where Christ only dies for the elect, the problem with a lot of thinking about hell is it’s double jeopardy. The church on the one hand wants to say that Christ has borne that evil, the wickedness and God’s wrath against sin, but on the other hand, it wants to say, that those who turn away are still going to get it, only more.

Well, if Christ actually already ontologically bore our sin and guilt, the wrath and judgment of God against the sin of the entire world, then hell cannot be thought as a place where that’s going to occur again. That’s why I think that we need to re-think the doctrine of hell and relate it to the love of God and not simply to the wrath of God. This is also part of the problem of double predestination that separates the love and wrath of God. In that view, the wrath of God is against the reprobate, and the love of God is for the elect.

But if you think about hell and begin to relate it to the love of God, I think it could become a preachable doctrine again. In other words, if Christ is the reprobate, the one who has finally taken our sin, our guilt, our alienation, our death and suffered in our place, then hell (whatever it is) can never be more than a testimony to what Christ has done. It cannot be a repetition or prolongation of what he has accomplished on the cross. It can only point – kind of like John the Baptist’s finger on the famous painting – it only points to the crucified.

What if hell is not simply a product of God’s wrath, what if it’s a product of God’s love? What do you deal, what do we do with the sin-sick bewildered person who finally comes face-to-face with the living, loving God and Jesus Christ and turns the other way? That’s the unthinkable. This is finally what Torrance calls the mystery of iniquity. Not simply that God predetermines from all eternity who are going to go to hell, but why would anyone coming to know the love of God and Christ ever turn away? Well, you can’t give a reason for it. And the more you try to give a reason for evil, the more you end up explaining it away as something other than the utterly evil that it is. What if hell is a place of refuge for the sin-sick sinner who turns the other way. Listen to this quotation from an infidel on his death bed: “My principles have poisoned my friends. My extravagance has beggared my son. My unkindness has murdered my wife. And is there a hell, oh most gracious and Holy God? Hell is a refuge if it hide me from your frown.”

What if hell is a product of God’s love for those who reject Christ where they’re shielded from the unmediated presence of God in heaven as a place of refuge for them so that God even has a place for those who finally reject. Now, I’m not giving this to you as a dogma, all I’m saying in this and I have not a lot of energy about this interpretation about similar to C.S. Lewis’ in some respect, but what I am saying is that hell cannot be the same punishment that Christ endures. So I completely agree with Ray Anderson on this point. And second of all, hell cannot be left unrelated to the love of God in Christ. It cannot be left unrelated to the love of God in Christ. If there are people in hell, it isn’t because God damns them there, simply. It’s because God loves them even while God has a place for them other than heaven. This is a different way to begin to think about hell.

JMF: Robert Capon describes hell as a place where… in terms of God… invites everyone to the wedding banquet. He wants everyone in the party but there are those who in coming in mess it up for others, everybody else. And they can’t be allowed to stay there and mess it up for everybody else, so they are thrown out. It’s a protection for everyone. I love C.S. Lewis’ depictions of that both in the Great Divorce where you have the option of taking the bus to heaven anytime you want. And some actually decide to stay even though they’re wispy ghosts and everything is very hard in heaven and it takes some getting used to, but some do stay most prefer it… to go back on the bus ride back to hell. But especially his depiction in the Last Battle, Narnia Chronicles of those dwarfs who come through the stabled door like all the rest of creation into Aslan’s country, metaphor for heaven… but they don’t see it as heaven. They don’t see it as Aslan’s country, they still think they’re inside that dirty stable. They’re still fighting over scraps of food and poking each other, sitting in a circle blind, as it were, in the dark even though there’s a banquet in front of them and a beautiful country around them. Their own state of mind refuses to let them see the reality of what they’re actually in. They can’t experience it because of their black hearts.

EC: I think that’s very helpful, Mike. And one thing I want to say about Torrance, he’s been accused repeatedly of being a universalist because of his emphasis that Christ’s death is for all and that it’s objective and real and that Christ has conquered evil and that we will never suffer the same judgment that Christ has suffered and so they make… they jump to a logical conclusion, say, therefore all must be saved or we fall back into the problem again of human being contributing to it. And that’s really not Torrance’s position. What Torrance says is Scripture seems to bear witness to the fact that some will not ultimately be saved. But, this what he calls the mystery of iniquity and this is where he will not allow a logical explanation. Because a logical explanation would be to undo the absolutely irrational, heinously evil character of evil. And so he simply will not allow that to be sort of put in a logical form in a way that would therefore undermine the radically tragic character of evil. So he is not a universalist. Although I think he is a universalist of sort of hope – you know, that we would wish that all people would finally become persons of faith. But why some don’t, he uses in fact the mystery of iniquity. And you can’t say more than that but… He says every good theologian has to know when to stutter and that’s when the theologian has to stutter at the mystery of iniquity.

JMF: There is that picture in Revelation with regard to the Church at Laodecia where “I stand at the door and knock…” and presumably they’re not answering the door. And yet he stands at the door and knocks. “If anyone will open, I’ll come in and sup with him.” But the question is will they open the door? He’s wanting them to open the door, he doesn’t force them to open it or not to open it. And yet, his redemption is such that it is available and present to them.

Timer 34:43 – 34:49  G   A   P     I think Torrance speaks of what he calls the Latin Heresy and it gets into the idea that (of what you were talking about before) that Christ did not take on himself, the sinful, broken humanity only some kind of pre-sin-Adam-perfect-human thing which would mean that the only thing that he redeemed was that. As opposed to taking and up in himself and redeeming the brokenness.

EC: Yes, that’s the fundamental problem and in all due respect to our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, this is one of the places where you see the role of the saints and the Roman Catholic Church. Because in certain elements of traditional Roman Catholic theology Christ assumes a neutral humanity that’s why Mary is immaculately conceived, it’s not Christ that’s immaculately conceived, it’s Mary that’s immaculately conceived so Christ isn’t tainted by the contagium of sin. But Christ ends up with the neutral humanity. Well, can Christ really be tempted in the same way we are if his humanity is different than ours – if it’s not our sinful and diseased humanity? And so what happens is the saints then end up playing the role of the vicarious humanity of Christ. And we see this quite regularly in a little advertiser in Dubuque where Roman Catholic lay persons have prayed to a particular saint and got a certain prayer answered and so they put a little prayer, thank you to a particular saint. But this is really rooted in a problematic theology – what you call, what Torrance calls this Latin Heresy where Christ assumes a neutral humanity and then all of the transaction that takes place on the cross ends up being extrinsic to his person. He becomes the sinless victim and God takes our sin and guilt and places it on Christ who dies on the cross in our place, frees us from the guilt of sin, from the debt of sin but not from the power of sin. And where when you understand this in terms of Christ’s vicarious humanity coming into our actual disease and alienated humanity, not only is our sin and guilt dealt with but the power of sin is dealt with as well.

JMF: Torrance talks about our Christ’s healing not only our past and our sins and so on, but our minds which are the source of our sins though our minds have to be healed as well and that’s exactly what he does.

EC: It took me a long time to realize that Torrance means that in absolutely literal concrete terms. He thinks the one true theology is in fact the human mind of Christ, the man Jesus. And therefore what we see taking place in the early narratives in Luke where Jesus is at the temple in Jerusalem, you know his parents come there for the Passover and they leave and he stays afterwards and he’s asking questions of the Jewish leaders and baffling them with his answers and his questions, this is in fact part of the man, the boy Jesus our Lord and Savior assuming our minds and realizing real knowledge of the Triune God in our very human minds. So Torrance thinks the mind of Christ is something to be taken quite literally. The human mind of Christ that is not only throughout Christ’s earthly life, death and resurrection but also ascended… the man Jesus with his human mind and his perfect theology is still in union and communion with the Triune God and from that flows all good and true theology. And of course it gets embodied in the apostolic mind through the nucleus of relations that Jesus establishes with the apostolic community particularly the 12 apostles – mediated to us through the New Testament. So that’s why we have access to the mind of Christ only through the biblical document.

JMF: Well, thanks again for being with us, we’re out of time already, we’ve barely got started and it’s over.

EC: Well, thank you again, Mike, it’s a delight to be with you.

JMF: We’ve been talking with Dr. Elmer Colyer, Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary.  Thanks for being with us. I’m Mike Feazell for You’re Included.