Who is God…From a western mind. Cambridge Part 3
July 20, 2011 Leave a comment
Now you have been suitably introduced in the pre-amble notes on the doctrine of God, looking at:
an introduction into how we start to go about thinking about God and then onto how we share in the eternal fellowship of the Father and the Son and a further follow-up article into how we share in the fellowship of the trinity by a classmate of mine on his own blog
I will go on to begin to share with you what we learned and discussed surrounding how the church has approached the study of who God is has throughout it’s 2000 years history both east and west!
- England’s gr…red and pleasant land
Patristic & modern western approaches to the doctrine of God
By ‘Western’ we are referring to the modern western understanding of the doctrine of God.
By ‘Patristic’ we are not referring to a place but to a period - the first 5 ‘ish’ centuries of Christian history – that period being the early church both east and west.
“We are not simply to be, homo sapiens (the thinking man), homo faber (the making man) but homo adorans (the worshipping man)” – Don
“The purpose of theology is for us to stand back & look at God and think, wow!” - Don
In our natural western outlook we have the urge to jump in and think, ‘what do I do?’.
The (modern) western approach to theology has been one of a systematic nature. This can be traced back to Peter Lombard who wrote the first ‘systematic theology’ in the 1100s and also back to the greatest systematic theologian – Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s.
The classic example of following this framework of yes/no is when we look at limited atonement and how we answer that question.
Our modern way of ‘doing theology’ is based on this format. Our framework for understanding questions is the same.
- Random expensive clock by the side of Corpus Christi College
The Western approach to the doctrine of God
We are looking for a complete picture of who God is, we say God is He who possess all these (specific) attributes.
In the western model the thought process is
1. This is God
2. How do I know him/how do we relate to him
So we look at sin, his work & our response.
Looking now at the Protestant confessions we are using mentioned in the first post
These confessions were written in a context, they were written with a lot of presumed assumptions. They left a lot of things unsaid since they assumed the reader was fully aware of the ‘things they left unsaid’. The things that they held as true from all church history were not necessary to be said, these documents were written to distinguish the reformed faith that was emerging out of a corrupted church. The problem is that the things they and their readers assumed – we have forgotten!
…and so there is often a danger of paying so much attention to what they say that we forget what was assumed i.e. the agreed “catholic” things that had been held from early Christianity.
Is conversion, all these wonderful doctrines that they recovered, all the things we hold dear from the Reformation grounded and thought of in light of the Doctrine of God (John 13 – 17)?
Do we concentrate on certain issues and lose all proportion. In addition do we emphasise the less weighty things at cost of the less weighty?
- Sidney Sussex – A Bastion of Cambridge’s Puritan Heritage
Back to the confessions
It is not just important what you say but the order in which you say it.
An example would be to look and see where the doctrine of election comes in the different confessions, whether it is post-fall or whether it is in the discussion of conversion. In the Westminster Confession it is in the discussion of the doctrine of God.
So we see that the modern western approach to the doctrine of God has grown out of the medieval approach of being based on a set of questions (yes/no) developed by people like Thomas Aquinas and with him was introduced a sort of Christian Aristotelianism.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle saw a bottom up approach, where thinking was based on humanity and so the “Christianised Aristotelianism” which Aquinas developed was to think of “a God of this world” rather than “a world of this God”; meaning a bottom-up approach as opposed to a top-down approach when thinking about God and creation.
In this model God was viewed based on humanity, based on down here, rather than everything being based on who God himself is.
- The Round Church. At over 800 years old it is Cambridge’s 2nd oldest building!
Strengths of the Western approach to the doctrine of God
Thorough grounding in scripture
Since the Protestant Reformation there has been a clear dividing line (in theory) of Scripture and Tradition, where Scripture has the first place and tradition is based on the scriptures, there is one source of authority not two.
It is very rigorous (logically consistent)
A clear distinction between God and everything(one) else.
Weaknesses of the Western approach to the doctrine of God
The western approach has the danger of diminishing the individual persons of God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).
We see the out working of this in the Augsberg and Belgic confessions. They talk of the ‘essence’ of God. This way of thinking of just an ‘essence’ can cause us to fix our minds on the oneness of God and thereby neglect the three-ness of God.
Another weakness is that there is a risk of being more philosophical than biblical.
Examples are seen when we speak of God as a being of different attributes such as ‘omnipotence’ and ‘omnipresence’ – such words have been taken from Greek philosophy and then we have looked into scripture to justify them. God is all-powerful and is present but we must define what these actually mean biblically.
We say God is omnipotent – all-powerful, that he can do anything. But we must define this correctly biblically. God is able to do anything that is consistent with His power. If you are asked: ‘Can God make a rock that is heavier than He is?’, then you have failed to communicate his ‘all-powerfulness’ correctly.
We must seek to address, ‘How does the Bible describe the ‘all-powerful’ nature of the Lord’
We see in the Bible that where the people need a miracle God provides, we see that His power is demonstrated in doing the seemingly impossible.
- Along the river Cam
When talking about God, stay close to scripture and how the Bible talks of God as there is a danger of sliding into a philosophical/abstract God!
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