Since this “dissertation” and PhD by Publication isn’t going to see the light of day now, I thought I would share the introduction chapter that I presented for said dissertation. Part of it includes my contribution to the introduction to our second volume Evangelical Calvinism book that I co-wrote with Myk Habets. The part I appropriate for that, in this current iteration (as introduction to my “dissertation”), is, of course, the part I wrote. And then, much of that has been augmented by further writing, as you will see. But I think it underscores some needed orientation, particularly as “Reformed identity” is under debate by people like Craig Carter, James White, Owen Strachan et al. What I share here is a draft, and not the final product I had hoped to present to the public writ large at some point. But why let it go to waste?
CHAPTER 1
Historical Background and Introduction to an Evangelical Calvinism: What’s the Problem?
‘EVANGELICAL CALVINISM’S PROVENANCE’
Thomas F. Torrance, in his book, Scottish Theology, refers to what he calls, Evangelical Calvinism. The burden of this thesis will be to introduce people to some significant entailments of what T.F. Torrance intended by the language of ‘Evangelical Calvinism,’ theologically; and how what it signifies has substantial resource towards thinking God from the ground and grammar of God’s trinitarian life. But what in fact does Torrance himself think Evangelical Calvinism is? Here he is engaging with an older Scottish theologian named Robert Leighton, it is in this engagement that Torrance brings up the language of ‘Evangelical Calvinist’ in contrast to the hard Calvinism of the Federal (Covenantal) theologians:
. . . Leighton was certainly a Calvinist, but a mild Calvinist horrified at the obsessive attention given to predestination as a test of orthodoxy, and at the substitution in the pulpit of doctrinal diatribes for biblical exposition and the preaching of the Gospel. He was an evangelical Calvinist of whom John McLeod Campbell once said in a letter to his father, ‘I love the writings of Leighton, because they breathe so much of the spirit of an evangelist’. Leighton himself preached to his congregation in direct personal terms about repentance and conversion, and spoke of the lively belief to which he called his people as ‘experimental knowledge of God, and of his son Jesus Christ’. This was a way of believing and knowing God with an ‘inward affection towards Christ’.
The intellective knowledge of Christ, the distinct understanding, yea, the orthodox preaching of the Gospel, the maintaining of is public cause, and suffering for it, shall not then be found sufficient. Only that peculiar apprehension of Christ, those constant flames of spiritual love, that even course of holy love walking in his light, shall be those characters, whereby Christ shall own his children, and admit them into the inheritance of perfect light.
Labour, then, for a more active and practical knowledge of God and Divine truths, such as may humble and renew your souls.[1]
Torrance continues to use the language of Evangelical Calvinist, in his book, to describe Scottish Calvinist theologians like Leighton; Torrance is contrasting these Evangelical Calvinists with the Federal-Westminster classical Calvinists of the period often identified as the time of the Post Reformed orthodox development.
The intention of this thesis is to introduce and develop aspects of an Evangelical Calvinism that is unapologetically different than Federal-Westminster Calvinism of today. While Evangelical Calvinism will be seen to be distinct from contemporary iterations of Covenant and Baptistic understandings of five-point Calvinism, it will become clear that Evangelical Calvinism taps into the historically Reformed themes and impulses left by theologians like John Calvin, John Knox, the Erskine brothers, John McLeod Campbell, Thomas Torrance, Karl Barth and many others who imbibe the Reformed heritage as their own.
Unfortunately, there is static, today, when an Evangelical Calvinism is introduced as a legitimate claimant to the confessionally Reformed heritage. One of the greatest opponents of an Evangelical Calvinism is the historian, par excellence, of so-called Post Reformed Dogmatic theological history, Richard Muller. The following will be an introduction to his engagement with something like T.F. Torrance’s Evangelical Calvinism, among other like voices who believe that the history of Reformed theology is greater than Muller’s reconstruction of said history.
POST REFORMED ORTHODOXY IN CONTEST WITH AN EVANGELICAL CALVINISM
Engaging the period of Protestant history known as the ‘Reformed period’ has many and complex issues involved with it. Not least of which is how we should understand the relationship between what Richard Muller has called the ‘early’, ‘high’, and ‘late’ eras of this broader category that makes up the ‘Reformed period’. In other words, in the literature there has been reconstruction of this period, and the inter-relationship that inheres between the “three eras” just noted, that are in competition.
The “competition” revolves around how we should understand the continuity or discontinuity between the earlier Reformers and the high and later Reformers (the latter two classifications known as the ‘post-Reformed orthodox’). The so-called older school of interpretation made up by folks like Thomas Torrance and Brian Armstrong (and even Karl Barth) are caricatured to have interpreted this issue in overly simplistic form, and through a biased dogmatic appropriation of the “history.” Muller writes,
The older scholarship, exemplified by the writings of Ernst Bizer, Walter Kickel, Brian Armstrong, Thomas Torrance, and others has typically modified the term “orthodoxy” with the pejorative terms “rigid” and “dead,” and modified references to “scholasticism” with the equally pejorative terms “dry” or “arid.” Such assessment bespeaks bias, but it also reflects a rather curious sequence of metaphors. The implied alternative to such a phenomenon as “scholastic orthodoxy” would, perhaps, be a flexible and lively methodological muddle of slightly damp heterodoxy. . ..[2]
Muller takes issue with these “older approaches,” and seeks to clarify this issue by revisiting and sharpening how the key language of “scholastic” and “orthodox” should be understood within their historical context. He believes that the “older scholarship” has too quickly and anachronistically read their respective theological agendas into the history, thus subverting the history for their own usage; in the end what they give us, according to Muller is a revisionist reconstruction of the actual history.
Carl Trueman, along the lines provided by Muller, forwards the same thesis in regard to the way this issue has been framed and interpreted by the “older” school. He believes that people like Torrance and Armstrong have co-opted the “history” to provide credibility for their own theological constructive work; he seeks to correct this paradigm,
In the last twenty-five years many scholars . . . have moved away from the traditional models whereby Protestant scholasticism was judged by the standards of later theology, whether Barthian, neo-Calvinist or whatever, to developmental models which attempt to set the movement within the context of its own times and within the ongoing Western theological tradition. . ..[3]
It is this problematic that Muller, Trueman, and company seek to “revise” through providing, what they believe is the proper way to frame and understand this oversimplified approach that the older school has bequeathed upon us.
I will seek to elucidate how Muller, specifically, seeks to reify the understanding provided by the “old school,” and what in fact he believes is the proper way for moving forward. But, before we get there we should visit, for a moment, how this “older scholarship” sought to appropriate the “history” represented by the “Reformed period.” What is it that Muller and others are protesting in regard to the ways that these elder “theologians” and “church historians” approached this salient issue?
Answering this question is really not that difficult, at least not for Muller; he holds that the oversimplification provided by the “old school” was both a definitional and methodological quagmire. That is that the “old way” of interpretation was shaped by over-simply framing the issue by a misunderstanding of what “scholasticism” actually was, and by trying to orientate all of their reconstruction around how the “post-Reformed orthodox” (the ‘high and late’ reformers) related, or not, to John Calvin. In other words, their error, according to Muller is that they tried to correlate Calvin’s theology and methodology with the ‘reformers’ who followed him; and insofar as the post-Calvin reformers failed to cohere with Calvin’s “apparent” theological approach, this became the point of departure that served to disrupt and in fact thwart the “doctrinal” focus set by the early Reformers (e.g. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, et al.). In short, Muller’s framing of this development was that the early Reformers were focused on confessional and christological concerns; while the latter Reformers became embroiled with rationalistic and speculative concerns that were not in continuity with the trajectory that was seminally set early on. Muller writes:
Scholarly perspectives on the phenomenon of post-Reformation Protestantism have altered dramatically in the last three decades. Studies of the Reformed or Calvinistic theology of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries written before 1970 or even 1975 tended to pose the Reformation against Protestant orthodoxy or, in the phraseology then common to the discussion, “Calvin against the Calvinists.” This rather radical dichotomy between the thought of the great Reformer and even his most immediate successors — notably, Theodore Beza — was constructed around a particular set of highly theologized assumptions, concerning the Reformation and Protestant orthodoxy, humanism and scholasticism, piety and dogma. At the heart of the dichotomizing argument was a contrast between the “biblical humanism” and christological piety of John Calvin and the Aristotelian scholasticism and predestinarian dogmatizing of nearly all of the later Reformed theologians, the sole exceptions being those who followed out the humanistic patterns of Calvin’s thought into fundamentally antischolastic modes of thought.[4]
Thomas Torrance, in line, somewhat, with Muller’s characterization certainly held that people like Muller (or the view that he represents) were the ones who have revised the “history” around this pivotal period; and in fact, for the same reasons that Muller says that people like Torrance tried to revise this period — viz. for theological purposes. Torrance says in the context of his “Scottish church”,
. . . It was the imposition of a rigidly logicalised federal system of thought upon Reformed theology that gave rise to many of the problems which have afflicted Scottish theology, and thereby made central doctrines of predestination, the limited or unlimited range of the atoning death of Christ, the problem of assurance, and the nature of what was called ‘the Gospel-offer’ to sinners. This meant that relatively little attention after the middle of the seventeenth century was given to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and to a trinitarian understanding of redemption and worship. Basic to this change was the conception of the nature and character of God. It is in relation to that issue that one must understand the divisions which have kept troubling the Kirk [church] after its hard-line commitment to the so-called ‘orthodox Calvinism’ of the Westminster Standards, and the damaging effect that had upon the understanding of the World of God and the message of the Gospel. . ..[5]
Torrance exemplifies exactly what Muller charges him, and others like him with; and that is the notion that Torrance believes that the “federal system of thought” (or the post-Reformed orthodox) placed the “Reformed church” on a problematic trajectory, a trajectory discontinuous with the original shape set by John Calvin.
This is too simple according to Muller. Similarly, Brian Armstrong — another “historian” in Muller and Trueman’s cross-hairs — follows suit with Torrance’s conception, and in fact up until Muller came along represents the scholarship which articulated a view that placed Calvin against the later “Calvinists.” His basic thesis, and the one that Muller seeks to problematize and correct is that once Calvin went off the scene, his successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza reintroduced Aristotelian scholasticism into the “Reformed” project, at odds with Calvin the Humanist (which was a method which sought to go back to the “sources” ad fontes or scripture and the Church Fathers), and schematized Reformed theology by what has been called the centraldogma. This was the idea that we could construe God through a rigid and deductive system of thought oriented and shaped around a deterministic supralapsarianism (or double-predestination) which was incompatible with his predecessor’s (Calvin’s) own understanding. Furthermore, Armstrong believes that Beza’s orientation was motivated by his devotion to Aristotle. Here is Armstrong at length:
This brief look at Calvin’s religious thought [which Armstrong just sketched] should make it clear that his whole theological program is at odds with the orientation of scholasticism as it has been characterized above. In general we must say, however, that scholasticism, not Calvin’s theology, prevailed in Reformed Protestantism. We are not here prepared to judge why Reformed theology developed as it did but only to recognize the phenomenon itself. Men like Martyr, Zanchi, Beza, Antoine de Chandieu, and Lambert Danaeus represent this divergence from a theology which had been carefully constructed by Calvin to represent faithfully the scriptural teaching and so usually presented a certain tension or balance of doctrines. . .. Of these men it was probably Beza who was most influential, and for this reason one may lay much of the blame for scholasticism at his feet. His very influential position as professor of theology at, and unquestioned supervisor of, the Genevan Academy gave him uncommon opportunity to direct the theological program of the Reformed Church. It was he who was responsible for the return to Aristotelian philosophy as the basis of the Genevan curriculum in logic and moral philosophy. As is well known, it was Beza who refused the humanist Peter Ramus a teaching post at the Genevan Academy because of Ramus’ anti-Aristotelian program.[6]
It is clear from Armstrong’s assertion that Muller has understood both of his interlocuters correctly in regard to their view of Calvin and the Calvinists. Both Torrance and Armstrong believed that Calvin, conceptual-doctrinally, presented a different flavor and emphasis when juxtaposed with those who have come to be known as the “Calvinists.”
Muller is right to highlight the fact that the precision that folks like Torrance and Armstrong use in articulating their thoughts on this is probably too precise, and in fact comes short in doing justice to how this whole complex should be understood. Nevertheless, what I will point out, relative to Muller, is that even though he will try and argue that the issue of discontinuity that supposedly is present between Calvin and the Calvinists is simply one of different methodology and not one of conceptuality. More than that though, he wants us to believe that even though there is discontinuity between Calvin and the Calvinists on methodological concerns (e.g., Calvin being ‘confessional’ and the Calvinists being “dogmatic”); that when this issue is broadened what becomes apparent is that even method (between all of the early Reformers [not just Calvin] and the high and later Reformers) should be construed as continuous, and that the context for understanding this needs to be placed back into the late medieval period, and not simply from the ‘early Reformed era’ (as Torrance and Armstrong have done). When this is done the student begins to see a thread of methodological concern that weaves all the way through the whole period; starting with the appropriation of Aristotelian method, which is consonant with both Agricolan and Ramist place logic and dialectical methodology. What is interesting about Muller’s argument, as I have already alluded to, is that he wants to say that all of this discontinuity talk — between Calvin and the Calvinists — should be jettisoned because of what I just mentioned (that the “old school” thesis faltered because they are short-sighted in their thinking, and they believe that the issue revolves around the “apparent” conceptual and material difference that obtains between Calvin and the Calvinists). Yet, what comes later in his book After Calvin is that Muller says, in fact, by-and-large Aristotelian philosophy of some appropriation or form is present in most of the “later Reformers” who supposedly merely developed Calvin’s thinking (which of course the difference, previously, according to Muller was just a methodological one given the different historical concerns they were faced with). What this ought to alert us to is that Muller is playing fast and loose with the data. I think, and I’ll argue this below, that he is right in noting that there is more complexity and background than Torrance and/or Armstrong allowed into their interpretation of this issue; but that he is inconsistent because he actually smuggles “conceptual” stuff back into the criteria for adjudicating the question of continuity or discontinuity between Calvin and the Calvinists.
What is of significance in this portrait of things is the notion that there has always been a distinct mood within Calvinism, if we identify that with John Calvin himself (which only can be taken so far), that is greater than what Muller hopes for. Torrance, Armstrong et al. might have been better scholastics than Muller and his version of the Post Reformed orthodox Dogmatics portends.
POST REFORMED SCHOLASTICISM AND AN EVANGELICAL CALVINIST CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT
This study’s primary theological interlocutors are those academics within the classically Reformed, and/or the Post-Reformation Reformed orthodox tradition, like Richard Muller, who believe that Evangelical Calvinism is not critically attuned to the actual history of the Reformers; particularly that of John Calvin. Muller believes that any attempt to offer an alternative voice to the multi-valent reality of the Reformed faith, as previously developed, by critiquing Post-Reformation Reformed orthodoxy and Federal Calvinism, assumes the form of an argument that in the literature has been labelled “Calvin against the Calvinists.”[7] Essentially this is the idea that Calvin’s own theological emphases were discordant from what later developed into Post-Reformation Reformed orthodoxy and/or what we often refer to as classical Calvinism. Muller is right that some over-zealous thinkers in the past have reconstructed history in such a way that Calvin appears to be severely out of step with the “predestinarian” Calvinism that developed later. However, that notwithstanding, we maintain that it is still possible to critique the theological conclusions produced by the classical Calvinists, even sounding like, and agreeing with, some of the critiques of the so called “Calvin against the Calvinists” thinkers, and yet not be guilty by association with that particular argument.
A persistent and central claim of Muller’s is that critics of classical Calvinism, which includes the Evangelical Calvinism of Thomas Torrance, misunderstand and misconstrue the definition of, and relation of scholasticism to Reformed dogmatics. Muller writes (at length):
The point is simple enough—indeed, it ought to have been self evident and in need of no comment had it not been for the major confusion caused by older definitions of Protestant scholasticism, definitions that still remain in vogue in particular among the proponents of the “Calvin against the Calvinists” methodology. Several recent works, including one embodying this defective methodology, have further confused the point by misrepresenting the distinction, as if it were a denial that method has any effect on content. It therefore bears further attention here, particularly in view of the confusion of scholasticism with predestinarianism and determinism and of scholasticism with Aristotelianism, so evident in the “Calvin against the Calvinists” literature.
As a preliminary issue, it needs to emphasized that the definitions of scholasticism as primarily a matter of method, specifically, of academic method, rather than a reference to content and particular conclusions whether philosophical or theological—very much like the definitions of humanism as a matter of method, specifically, of philological method, rather than a reference to content and particularly conclusions—were not definitions devised by a revisionist scholarship for the sake of refuting the “Calvinist against the Calvinists” understanding of Protestant scholasticism. Rather, they are definitions held in common by several generations of medieval and Renaissance historians, definitions well in place prior to the dogmatic recasting of the notion of scholasticism by the “Calvin against the Calvinists” school of thought, definitions characteristically ignored by that school in its presentations of the thought of Calvin and later Reformed theologians. In other words, identification of scholasticism as primarily referencing method places the reappraisal of Protestant scholasticism and orthodoxy firmly in an established trajectory of intellectual history, while the content-laden definitions of the “Calvin against the Calvinists” school have been formulated in a historical vacuum filled with the doctrinal agendas of contemporary theologians. This problem is particularly evident in the more recent versions of the “Calvin against the Calvinists” claim, inasmuch as they cite the revisionist literature on the issue of Protestant scholasticism rather selectively and fail to engage the significant body of scholarship on the issue of nature scholasticism [sic], indeed, of the nature of humanism as well, as has been consistently referenced as an element in the formulation of a revised perspective on early modern Protestant thought, and in addition, fail to engage the sources that have been analyzed in the process of reappraising the scholasticism of early modern Protestantism.
In brief, the “Calvin against the Calvinists” definition assumed that the intrusion of scholasticism into Protestant theology brought with it forms of “deductive racionation . . . invariably based upon Aristotelian philosophic commitment” and implying “a pronounced interest in metaphysical matters, in abstract speculative thought, particularly with reference to the doctrine of God,” with the “distinctive Protestant position” being “made to rest on a speculative formulation of the will of God. . . .”[8]
Evangelical Calvinists do not disagree with Muller, insofar as he accurately appraises the so called “Calvin against the Calvinists” argument, but Muller’s critique begs a question: what in fact is scholasticism? Even though some of the Calvin against the Calvinists thinkers may have been too strident in their construction of some of the history, that does not also mean that their material theological critiques are totally awry simply because some of their more formal methodological parameters may have been out of calibration. Even so, what if we take Muller’s view of scholasticism to heart—and for the most part, Evangelical Calvinists do—what if being “scholastic” in form ends up agreeing with many of the “Calvin against the Calvinists” theological critiques, while at the same time agreeing with Muller that some of the formal historical reconstruction of the “Calvin against the Calvinists” was aloof? An Evangelical Calvinism believes it has found the center-ground by affirming the need for sober appropriation of what it means to be scholastic in mode, but as a result an Evangelical Calvinism ends up disagreeing with Muller and others in regard to what kind of theological conclusions are produced when following through with a truly scholastic project and mode. But again, what are the actual entailments of scholasticism?
In Scholasticism Reformed: Essays in Honor of Willem J. van Asselt, Martijn Bac and Theo Pleizier offer a chapter entitled “Teaching Reformed Scholasticism in the Contemporary Classroom.” Bac and Pleizer outline how scholasticism should be taught today in theological classrooms and they develop how scholastics of the past retrieved authoritative voices for their own material and theological purposes. More than simply reconstructing the history of ideas and theological development, proper scholastic method was concerned to engage the concepts of prior voices from the tradition by appropriating themes and motifs that fit broader theological concerns, and all in order to forward the cause of theological truth. In other words, the greater concern was to organically move within the trajectory and mood set out by the past in order to constructively engage the present and future by developing the ideas of these past voices by placing them within the burgeoning and developing movement of Reformed theology. What Bac and Pleizer highlight is that the scholastic mode of retrieval is very much like Evangelical Calvinism’s method; which ironically runs counter to the typical critique of Evangelical Calvinism as illustrated by Muller. Here is what Bac and Pleizer write in regard to the scholastic method, and what was called “reverential exposition”:
Reformed theologians did not read their sources of Scripture and tradition in a historical sense, i.e., as part of an ongoing tradition, but rather as ‘authorities’ of truth. Until the breakdown of scholasticism and the historical revolution, sources were not quoted in a historical way, be they the Bible, Aristotle, Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas. A quotation did not indicate a correct historical understanding of what its original author had meant, but was read systematically as bearer of truth. From this it follows that contradictions among authorities were solved logically rather than hermeneutically.[9]
An Evangelical Calvinism finds it ironic that people like Muller and others would critique Evangelical Calvinism for imbibing the “spirit” of even the Post Reformation Reformed orthodox faith (methodologically) more than their apparent heirs (Muller and others). If there are themes and motifs present in Calvin (such as his doctrine of unio Christi) then such themes and doctrines can legitimately be appropriated, critiqued, and developed from within a Reformed trajectory.
A final example of how Bac and Pleizier develop the idea of reverent exposition will suffice.
Therefore, these texts had to be explained with reverence (exponere reverenter), that is, not in historical conformity with a tradition or with the author’s expressed intention but in conformity with truth, i.e., reverently denoted in correspondence with established theological and philosophical truth. This method of reverent exposition involved a hermeneutical procedure that went back to the patristic period. To be sure, there was room for some exegesis but, as de Rijk has noted, the scholastics used the hermeneutical norm of objective truth (of the debated subjects: veritas rerum) in addition to a kind of philological exegesis employing semantic criteria for interpretation. This resulted in an incorporation of the authoritative text into one’s own conceptual framework.[10][11]
Scholastic methodology was not about repristinating and absolutizing a period as the norming norm, but felt the freedom to fluidly engage with the past in a way that had relevance for the present; and in a way that organically built from the trajectory provided for in the past. Or, as Barth would argue in his book, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions,[12] to operate within the “spirit” of the Reformed faith (subordinate to Scripture and thus always reforming), and not the “letter,” which is to appeal to a sort of repristinated procrustean bed of perceived static truth that can simply be inherited but not developed in any kind of new or meaningful way.
In summary, it is suggested that an Evangelical Calvinism is actually imbibing the spirit of the Reformed faith. An Evangelical Calvinist mode is to primarily engage the past constructively with the goal of engaging the truth which transcends, but does not elide, the historical situatedness of particular people; but at the same time doing so in a way that seeks dialogical engagement with the past in order to provoke the present with themes that most magnify the name of Jesus. If Muller and company want to critique Evangelical Calvinism (and those of like mind), then they will need to be truly “scholastic” in form, and not just presume that being historians (which has its rightful place) is what this is all about. Instead, it is about resourcing the past to magnify Jesus in Christianly dogmatic and robust ways which the author of this thesis believes the mood of Evangelical Calvinism offers by elevating theological themes, from history, that do just that.
THE PROMISE OF AN EVANGELICAL CALVINISM
If an Evangelical Calvinism, as has been suggested, has lineage that goes back, at least as far as John Calvin, and some Scottish Reformed theologians following; and if an Evangelical Calvinism can lay critical claim to the notion that it has a potentially better and constructive line on the Reformed scholastic mode as a way of mining the catholic past of the Church for ‘true’ ideas about God; then it leads us to considering what in fact an Evangelical Calvinism might look like in regard to at least two important theological loci. 1) If knowing who God is, is the most basic aspect of what it means to have a right or ‘orthodox’ theology, then understanding how an Evangelical Calvinist like T.F. Torrance develops that will be of interest toward painting a portrait of and illustrating an Evangelical Calvinist theology that fits Torrance’s vision, among others, in regard to a kerygmatic and personalist, and thus triunely and Christ concentrated way of knowing God. 2) As a corollary, once the Evangelical Calvinist comes to know God the next turn is to develop a doctrine of salvation that is grounded in the grammar of God’s triune life for the world in Jesus Christ.
In chapter 2 this study will engage with a consideration of T.F. Torrance’s understanding of what he understood to be, after Barth, an analogy of faith (analogia fidei), in contrast to the Post Reformed analogy of being (analogia entis) towards a theory for knowing God. The Reformed and confessional nature of Torrance’s way of knowing God will continue to be developed in chapter 2, and the ‘Evangelical’ character of his type of Calvinism will be elevated once again as a viable, and historic way to express an iteration of what it means to be a Reformed Christian.
Chapter 3 will continue to focus on the themes this study is developing as portraits of what an Evangelical Calvinism entails. Just as chapter 2, focused on developing a confessionally framed knowledge of God, chapter 3 will continue this emphasis, except this time it will expand its “Evangelical Calvinist” theologians to involve not just T.F. Torrance, but John Calvin and Karl Barth in constructive convergence. What will be seen is that an Evangelical Calvinism offers a genuinely relational and trinitarian soteriological ground wherein the Christian can find assurance and solace in the reality that knowing God as Son of the Father offers.
Chapter 4 will bring these themes together in a constructive way such that, in contrast to Post Reformed orthodox theology, the way Evangelical Calvinists think and rest in God’s sure salvation in Christ will hopefully point a way forward for Christians who for far too long have labored under the weighty conditions set forth by the Post Reformed orthodox notion of God and salvation, as propounded by Richard Muller et al. This study will leave on a doxological note, rather than polemical, by re-iterating the positive themes we have already visited throughout their development in this study. A way forward will be suggested for further focus in regard to developing other doctrinal entailments of an Evangelical Calvinism that might provide a promise for the future of Protestant Reformed theological development in the main.
To complete this study, we will turn to an Excursus which will engage with another critic of an Evangelical Calvinism; namely, Kevin J. Vanhoozer. Here a series a riposte will be provided wherein the author of this study engaged personally with Vanhoozer, both personally online, and through reading Vanhoozer’s published critique of an Evangelical Calvinism in the literature. These ripostes will help illustrate the challenges that yet remain for an Evangelical Calvinist theological program, among her other Reformed cousins. And beyond that, they will help to set the table for the way an Evangelical Calvinist might respond to its most prolific critics. The excursus will dovetail with what is laid out in chapter 4 with reference to the promise that an Evangelical Calvinism holds out for future catholic and theological developments for the Church writ large.
EVANGELICAL CALVINISM IN NUCE, AS A TURN TO THE STUDY
In this introductory chapter the intention has been to alert the reader to what an Evangelical Calvinism means by its usage of the word Evangelical. That it has an adjectival force that finds referent in a theological frame rather than its normal frame of reference which is socio-cultural. The way an Evangelical Calvinism uses ‘Evangelical,’ more to the point, and materially so, has to do with the ‘for whom’ God in Christ died; it has to do with the range and reach of the atonement. This sets the Evangelical Calvinist apart from its cousins, the classical or Federal Calvinists, who Limit or Particularize the atonement/redemption, to certain elect individuals whom God arbitrarily chose in absolute decree (decretum absolutum). The Evangelical Calvinist thinks this represents an anti-Evangelical Calvinism in the sense that when the Gospel is proclaimed to the masses it actually only has hypothetical value; viz. there is a disingenuous nature to the proclamation, at an ontological/metaphysical level, given the character of the Federally construed Calvinist gospel. Disingenuous, if you haven’t seen the logic yet, because the in-concrete reality of the Gospel is only actually and effectually available for some and not the whole of creation; it is delimited and sublimated by a decree of God that is abstract from the person of God in the assumptio carnis, in the incarnation. In contrast to this, T.F. Torrance, as this study has been asserting thus far, the Evangelical Calvinist par excellence, summarizes the Gospel and its hopeful proclamation this way:
God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.[13]
For Torrance, for the Evangelical Calvinist, the Gospel reality, the work of salvation is not separated from the person of God in Christ; instead, it is grounded directly in his person, and his work reposes therein, without remainder. There is no absolute decree rupturing God’s person from God’s work; the limit of salvation for the Evangelical Calvinist is God’s Triune life externalized in the concrete person, the eternal Son of God, Jesus Christ. As such the Gospel is necessarily universal, just as God’s reach is necessarily universal in his assumption of the only humanity available—the one he created and recreated—in the man from Nazareth.
So, the Evangelical in Evangelical Calvinism symbolizes the genuine range of the Gospel, and it is grounded in the reality that God is the personalizing personal God whose oneness (De Deo uno) is constituted by his threeness (De Deo trino) in perichoretic wholeness and interpenetrative love. Because this God freely elected to become Creator, because this God freely elected to become human in Christ, because this God has eschatological purpose shaping his protological action forming his gracious creational act, all of humanity, just as all of creation (Rom. 8; Col. 1) is included in the first fruits of his life in Christ. Because Federal or classical Calvinists can’t affirm this, because they delimit the Gospel by separating God’s person in Christ from his works in Christ through an ad hoc decree, they cannot genuinely offer the Gospel to the whole of creation; they can only hypothetically or disingenuously do this. This is what makes Evangelical Calvinism, Evangelical; it’s what puts the Evangel into our ical.
To these matters this study now turns.
[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell, 163.
[2] Richard A. Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition, 25.
[3] Carl R. Trueman and R. S. Clark, Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment, xviii.
[4] Richard A. Muller, After Calvin, 3.
[5] Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell, x-xi).
[6] Brian Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy, 37-8 [Brackets and emphasis mine].
[7] Muller, After Calvin, 3.
[8] Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition, 24–25
[9] Bac and Pleizier, “Teaching Reformed Scholasticism In The Contemporary Classroom,” 39.
[10] Ibid., 40.
[11] A prime example of someone who adopted this form of theological retrieval is Thomas F. Torrance. For a defense and illustration of his method, see Habets, “The Essence of Evangelical Theology.”
[12] Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions.
[13] T. F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 94.