Dr. Craig Carter continues to promote the Christian Aristotelian/Thomist theologies of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the London Baptist Confession of Faith, with particular focus on their respective doctrines of God. He just tweeted the following:
If someone tells you that God has passions, remember that to say that is to go against the teaching of our reformed confessions. Presbyterians & Reformed Baptists cannot go there. “There is but one only living & true God, a most pure spirit, invisible without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things acc to the counsel of his own immutable & most righteous will, for His own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful long-suffering, abundant in goodness & truth, forgiving iniquity, transgressions, & sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him, & withal, most just, & terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, & who will by no means clear the guilty.” (Westminster Conf. of Faith 1.1) WCF is followed by the London Bap. Conf: “The Lord our God is. . .a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions” The confessions had good theological reasons for denying passions in God. Find out what they were b/c it is crucial to get the doc of God right.[1]
Let me counter: If someone tells you that God has passions, remember that to say that is to be in step with the Holy Spirit of Scripture’s inspiration. Catholic Christians across the ages have worshipped and beheld a God of Constancy; of filial and familial love; of triune relationship and feeling as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As I have written elsewhere in critique of the theology funding the Westminster Confession of Faith (and its structure):
Confessional Shape
Instead of discussing what the distinctions are, in particular, between the so called analogia fidei and analogia entis we shall focus on how these two disparate approaches play out theologically; and for our purposes, confessionally. What happens if a particular theologian, or school of theologians, follows Aquinas’ approach to articulating God, theologically; versus a more Evangelical Calvinist approach?
A brief comparative analysis of three Reformed Confessions—The Westminster Confession of Faith, The Belgic Confession of the Faith, The Scots Confession of Faith—and one Catechism—The Heidelberg Catechism—may be sufficient to illustrate how theological prolegomena can impact the tone and emphases that present themselves in the historic confession and catechism making of the Reformed church. What emerges through this analysis is the reality that while each confession has its own particular style; there can also be a shared dogmatic thread that coordinates common themes of approach per the disparate confessions and catechisms—i.e., like with a doctrine of God.[2]
And:
At first blush there might not be much apparent difference between The Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), The Belgic Confession of the Faith (BC), The Heidelberg Catechism (HC) and The Scott’s Confession 1560 (SC); but this requires further reflection. The “Westminster” tradition starts talking about God by highlighting his “attributes,” these are characteristics that are contrasted with what humans are not (analogia entis). We finally make it to God as “Father, Son, Holy Spirit,” but not before we have qualified him through “our” categories using humanity and nature (analogia entis) as our mode of thinking about “godness.” This is true for both the WCF and the BC. Jan Rohls provides a helpful insight on this when he speaks to the nature of the composition of many of the Reformed Confessions (including both the WCF and the BC):
“It is characteristic of most of the confessional writings that they begin with a general doctrine of God’s essence and properties, and only then proceed to the doctrine of the Trinity. The two pieces “On the One God” (De deo uno) and “On the Triune God” (De deo trino) are thus separated from each other. . ..
Nevertheless, this is not the case for all Reformed confessions and/or catechisms. We should consider the possibility of learning to read some confessions and catechisms together, relative to shared theological emphases.[3]
What Carter is promoting is a certain type of inherited theological methodology and hermeneutic. He, and they (those he communes with in his confessional malaise), have already, a priori decided the shape that the “biblical exegesis” will take as they impose an Aristotelian/Thomistic philosophical apparatus upon the text of Scripture. As such, as I was noting in my passages from above, they end up thinking the oneness of God from a monadic and/or philosophical wellspring that not only doesn’t cohere with the flow of their own confessions, vis-à-vis a doctrine of God, but more significantly, it doesn’t cohere with the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. They think they are protecting biblical “orthodoxy,” when in fact all they are doing is undoing the impulse of the Protestant Reformation to begin with. They are simply thrusting Protestants back into the Roman Catholic/Tridentine milieu that people like Luther, Calvin et al. were intent on extricating Christians out of.
As far as the methodology that Carter is promoting, and following, and inheriting, as noted, it artificially dissects the oneness from the threeness of God; thus, giving primacy to the oneness, and yet the oneness is distinctively funded not by biblical categories, but instead by classical philosophical categories that weren’t revealed but instead were discovered by profane and pagan minds like Aristotle’s and Plato’s. The point to focus on though is the primacy of place they give these pagans. They allow the god of the philosophers to shape how they understand the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit instead of allowing the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to shape the way they understand both God’s oneness and threeness / threeness and oneness in eternal and koinonial relationship. Carter is surely correct when he asserts: “. . . it is crucial to get the doc [sic.] of God right.” Indeed, Craig, and so you have some work to do . . . get to it!
[1] Craig Carter, Twitter Tweet, accessed 12-12-2022.
[2] Bobby Grow, “Analogia Fidei or Analogia Entis?: Either Through Christ or Nature,” eds. Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 105-06; also see Robert Allen Grow, Evangelical Calvinism’s Portrait of a Knowledge of God and a Sure Salvation (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Unpublished PhD dissertation, Concordia Academic Theology Consortium, Intl., 2022), 30-1.
[3] Ibid., 106; 31.