You Can't Have Jesus Without Faith

You can't simply do historical analysis of the New Testament and expect to come to right conclusions about Jesus. And yet this is where so much of 'Evangelical' scholarship (and Christian scholarship in general) resides. You can't use analogies that start with yourself and work your way to Jesus from there, and expect to find the genuine Jesus; you'll just end up finding the Jesus who looks oh so much like yourself--the Jesus molded in your own image. So the irony of what I just asserted is that I am saying that you can't 'solely' rely on historical Jesus studies and expect to find the true Jesus, and at the same time I am asserting that we must avoid somehow importing our own historical culturally situadedness back onto the face of Jesus. So what's the answer to this dilemma? What get's us beyond this impasse of dualism between studying Jesus through historical empericism and isolated subjectivism? I mean isn't Christianity a religion based in history? Yes. But history by itself does not have the proper traction or orientation to provide humanity--embedded within history--with the proper epistemological antennae needed to penetrate the depths which gives history its right relation to the one who gave us history to begin with. Am I speaking too cryptically for you yet?

Here Thomas Torrance speaks somewhat less cryptically about how we ought to dogmatically consider the relation between history and revelation through the optic of Faith:

All this means that any christological approach that starts from the man Jesus, from the historical Jesus, and tries to pass over to God, and so to link human nature to God, is utterly impossible. In fact it is essentially a wrong act: for it runs directly counter to God's act of grace which has joined God to humanity in Christ. All Attempts to understand Jesus Christ by starting off with the historical Jesus utterly fail; they are unable to pass over from man to God and moreover to pass man to God in such a way as not to leave man behind all together, and in so doing they deny the humanity of Jesus. Thus though Ebionite christologies all seek to go from the historical Jesus to God, they can make that movement only by denying the humanity of Jesus, that is by cutting off their starting point, and so they reveal themselves as illusion, and the possibility of going from man to God is revealed as likewise illusory.

No, it is quite clear that unless we are to falsify the facts from the very start, we must face with utter and candid honesty the New Testament presentation of Christ to us, not as a purely historical figure, nor as a purely transcendental theophany, but as God and man. Only if we start from that duality in which God himself has already joined God and man, can we think God and humanity together, can we pass from man to God and from God to man, and all the time be strictly scientific in allowing ourselves to be determined by the nature of the object. [Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation, edited by Robert Walker, 10]

So Torrance's premise is that what has happened in the incarnation is totally unique, and has only been made accessible through the purview of faith. Not blind faith, but faith that takes it shape as it is given to us through the revelation of God himself in and through the vicarious humanity of Christ for us; the humanity that grounds all of humanity as the image of God (Colossians 1:15)--so faith is the eyes to see and the ears to hear with that Jesus so often challenges his audiences to employ.

What does this tell us about historical Jesus studies that seek to tell us the truth about Jesus, but then fail to do so through the mode of faith? It tells me that these approaches are trying to find a public square, a common ground through which to substantiate and situate Jesus in such a way that he has respectability amongst the world. Once this respectability has been established, and Jesus rightly reconstructed, then we can attend to the issues of faith (so there is an implicit competition, then, in this scenario, between the Jesus of Faith and History). To be clear, none of this is to reject the usage of historical tools, but it is to call attention to the need that these tools have; the need is to provide for them a prior Christian dogmatic order that will allow those tools to not chisel a Jesus into something he is not (e.g. first a man, then God added on). He is God first, who becomes man; and this is such a unique event that it in itself can only be its own analogy.

There is more to say about the TF Torrance quote above; especially about the affirmation of creation and humanity that is provided for it through the incarnation of Christ. Maybe another time, or in the comments. 

Knowledge of God for Thomas Torrance

Here is a video I did about 2 years ago (forgive my haircut, this is actually just after I finished my chemo treatments, so my hair is growing back :-). Anyway, I am interacting with Paul Molnar's book Thomas F. Torrance: The Trinitarian Theologian. I think the material covered in this video is apropos towards providing more insight into some of the issues that seem to be arising for Roger Olson as he interacts with our book. Furthermore, the material covered in this video is what I develop further in my personal chapter in our book.

So knowledge of God can only come through knowledge of God as it is Self-revealed and determined to be in Jesus Christ (cf. Jn. 1:18). Knowledge of God can only be regulated by his own Self-revelation, and thus other modes for providing grammar and content for knowledge of God cannot be entertained (such as using philosophical categories like appealing to Aristotle etc. appeal to).

Was Karl Barth a 'neo-Orthodox' Theologian? The Third Time ...

For anyone who was interested in that question of mine a few posts ago – e.g. whether or not Barth was actually neo-Orthodox – well, another Princeton guy I know (a bit ;-), David Congdon has offered the lineaments of a really helpful argument for why Barth was not neo-Orthodox [and he also comments on where he sees T.F. Torrance on (or not) spectrum as well]. It gives me hope, relative to my own thinking, that what David iterates jives with my earlier hunch (i.e. that natural theology is definitive for whether or not something can count as neo-Orthodox, or not). Below are the two links to the previous posts on this, and then David's clarifying comment.

1st post & 2nd post

Bobby,

I see you've posted Travis's comment. It's mostly right, but I would like to specify matters somewhat further. What neoorthodoxy did was to marshal certain ideas from Barth (mainly, divine transcendence, revelation as encounter), abstracted as static, stand-alone propositions, and use them to buttress the project of Christian orthodoxy within the modern era (hence the "new"). Neoorthodoxy is fundamentally ideological, in that it presupposes the validity of something like a Christian orthodox tradition. Having presupposed this tradition as something to be preserved and maintained, it then finds in Barth certain concepts that are useful toward that end. The reason neoorthodoxy is not dialectical theology is that the latter makes no such presupposition; it is in fact the total abolition of ecclesiastical presuppositions. Dialectical theology is a thoroughly destabilizing understanding of the gospel. Neoorthodoxy is basically a species of natural theology, in that it takes for granted something stable and given in the world -- in this case, the church. It is therefore no wonder that Barth and Brunner would fall out over that issue.

For these reasons, I demur from Travis on two points. First, existentialism as such is not a constitutive element of neoorthodoxy. It is only existentialism as it is welded to a certain kind of natural theology, as it was in Brunner's case, but emphatically not in the case of Bultmann. Second, I cannot help but see Torrance as operating within the ambit of neoorthodoxy. He did not engage in natural theology (I agree fully with Travis there), but it seems to me that he takes for granted a kind of ecclesiological givenness in the form of the orthodox tradition. That was precisely the underlying presupposition for his ecumenical work. And, conversely, it is why Barth cared so little about such ecumenical agreements: not because he did not believe in the unity of the church, but because such unity only exists in the person of Christ -- and the person of Christ is a reality that does not give itself to ecclesiastical and theological traditions. The saving event of Christ must always be an offense to those theologies that seek to sustain and prop up the tradition of the church. Orthodoxy, as Barth insisted, is only ever an eschatological reality. As such, there is no orthodox faith in history. And therefore there can be no neoorthodox theology. [David Congdon's comment, here]

To be as radical and 'critically-dialectically-realistic' as Barth, the theologian must endeavor to rub out any inkling of human mastery when it comes to knowledge of God in Christ. This is why Barth is known as a post-metaphysical theologian who works from his actualistic mode of theological endeavor.


Thanks, David.

Conclusion to my personal chapter from our book: 'Either through Christ, or through Nature'

Here is the conclusion to my personal chapter (4) from mine and Myk's recently released book (my chapter is entitled: Analogia Fidei or Analogia Entis: Either through Christ or through Nature):

The contention of this chapter has been to provide insight into the inner workings of Evangelical Calvinist prolegomenon. The procedure has been to introduce the specific way that Evangelical Calvinism understands the triune nature of God as Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit. All such thinking is diametrically opposed to the Thomistic way of construing God; namely, by use of the analogia entis. These two ways were then illustrated by means of several of the significant Reformed Confessions and a Catechism.

Evangelical Calvinism is committed to the tradition of dogmatic reflection known as the analogia fidei; that is, our grounding in the "analogy of faith" means that our epistemic root is centered in our union with Christ, and that out of this fertile ground we have a knowledge of God that necessarily understands him in terms of being eternally Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit; and then finally, we see ourselves standing within the confessional shape of the Reformed tradition as evinced by our resonance with both The Scots Confession of Faith, 1560 and The Heidelberg Catechism. [taken from: Myk Habets & Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church, (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 111]

What you should expect when reading my chapter is not an original proposal, or ground breaking work into the ongoing constructive work on the theological method known as the 'analogy of faith'. But instead, you should expect a general compare and contrast between Thomas Aquinas' and Thomas Torrance's disparate approaches to theological method (e.g. the 'analogy of being' V. the 'analogy of faith'); and then (I think) a creative application of this comparison (and its results) to the theology presupposed in Westminster Confession of Faith & The Belgic Confession of Faith V. The Scots Confession & The Heidelberg Catechism. The basic contention of my personal chapter is that, as the title suggests, we either, methodologically (theologically) approach God and knowledge of God through the ordained means by which he has freely chosen to provide for that (in his Self-revelation, Jesus Christ); or we seek to approach God (with good intentions and everything) through a preconstructed concept of what it means to be God, and then distill God into that packaging. Certainly, we can get highly technical about this whole project. But my chapter is intended to be a bit more basic than that (although I think that it requires some technical background, to some degree, to understand exactly where I am coming from in the chapter). So, it is either through Christ, or through Nature ...

A "Return" to American Evangelical Hermeneutics

For anyone who has read me for any length of time at all, it should by now be eminently clear that I have somewhat removed myself from the usual Evangelical-Fundamentalist method of biblical interpretation (not because I think I am better than, or because I no longer self-identify as an American Evangelical; because I do); or from what is known as the historical-critical or Literal, Grammatical, Historical (LGH) reading of the scriptures. It is, in fact, this method of biblical interpretation that has given rise to an idiosyncratic (and I mean this in the sense that this method is peculiar, by and large, to a certain and even large swath of American Evangelicals) expression of this kind of interpretive work; which as I have been surveying in a couple of posts (here & here) prior, is known as dispensationalism. 

I have often, again for anyone who has been reading me for any length of time, referenced how this situation, for American Evangelicals, has come to be. That is, how it is that many American Evangelicals have embraced this mode of biblical interpretation for themselves; it is really a quite ironic (and unfortunate) move, since it is this kind of rationalist, positivistic, and historist approach to biblical interpretation that these same American Evangelicals (originally known as Fundamentalists---I realize they are not the same exact thing, socio-culturally, but Evangelicalism still operates, linguistically and doctrinally from the same historical moorings that their parents, the Fundamentalists taught them) were decrying. They were fighting against the penetration of historical-criticism into the halls of what used to be 'Conservative' American Christianity (like that represented at Princeton, with B.B. Warfield & co.); and yet they chose to fight fire with fire instead of using water to put the fire out [I'd like to try fighting this historical-critical fire and its penetration into American Evangelicalism with the fresh and everlasting water of Jesus Christ ... the kind that once a person gets a drink of she/he never want anything else again]. Jens Zimmerman provides a good sketch, and helpful substantiation of my oft assertions in this very regard; Zimmerman writes,

Modernist interpretation emphasized historical-critical reading of the scriptures that modified or denied the Bible's own claim to be divine revelation and largely abandoned the biblical text as a unity. As a result, other texts gained more importance, and hermeneutics came to be conceived more broadly, comprising secular literature as well. Historical criticism is, of course, enormously important for any textual work. The historical-critical school, with its application of scientific method and positivistic approach to the biblical text, however, forces texts into the Procrustean [sic] bed of an Enlightement framework and rationalist standards, lopping off offending and bothersome textual elements and unenlightened statements with almost Puritan zeal.

Modern fundamentalists [and Evangelicals] who react against this so-called liberal theology unfortunately proceed from the same assumption as the "enemy," namely, that a text can have only one normative meaning but many possible applications, which can never become normative. Premodern interpreters by contrast possessed superior interpretive concepts, such as progressive revelation and typology, and were more keenly aware of the multiple layers of textual meanings. Their view of God's word as a vehicle of typological exegesis, the idea of sensus plenior [fuller meaning], and the analogy of faith renders fundamentalist notions of stable, unitary meanings highly problematic. Yet fundamentalist interpreters cheerfully continue to use modernist principles in their defense of theology, a highly unhelpful strategy of entrenchment, the zeal of whose practitioners does little to conceal the increasing irrelevance of their effort. [brackets our mine] [Jens Zimmerman, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2004), 22-3.]

If this is juxtaposed with my last post on dispensationalism, it becomes clear how dispensational hermeneutics came to be; they are simply a re-telling of an centuries old American interpretive schema (with German origins) that has been employed over and over again within American biblical exegesis and exposition. Such that, the capacity for folk who have sat under the sway of this sometimes bellicose system of interpretation have become incapacitated to critically make a distinction between their system of biblical interpretation and the actual biblical narrative and its primary meaning.

Again, this post only really gestures towards the more 'Christ-conditioned' approach that I want to advocate for. Adam Nigh, an contributing author to our book has offered good development on how I would like to move forward in understanding a doctrine of scripture, an ontology of scripture (its place relative to God's own Self-testimony and speech for us); and how these two realities implicate a system of interpretation (hermeneutics) that finds its orientation intensively in its reality, Jesus Christ. Adam's chapter is entitled The Depth Dimension of Scripture: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Calvinism [Chapter 3]. Adam sometimes ;-) blogs over at Out of Bounds.

Anyway, as usual, there is more to be said; and I will try to say more as this living thing known as my blog continues to give expression to more of my flowering thoughts on such things and more (of course).   

What is the 'Analogy of Faith'? And Why classic Calvinism and Evangelical Calvinism ARE distinct

My personal chapter for our soon to be released book (this month, I venture to say) is entitled: "Analogia Fidei or Analogia Entis: Either Through Christ or Through Nature." In it, I basically provide a comparative sketch between the broader contours that inhere between two disparate methods of engaging in systematic-dogmatic theology. The form of the so called analogia fidei that I describe is of course from the mind of Thomas Torrance; I compare his 'analogy of faith' with Thomas Aquinas' and classical theism's notion of the 'analogy of being' (analogia entis) approach which is embedded within what is often called 'natural theology'. After I briefly describe the two approaches, I then creatively seek to illustrate these methods by doing a comparison of some Reformed Confessions and a Reformed Catechism (e.g. Scot's Confession, 1560 & Heidelberg Catechism V. Westminster Confession of Faith & Belgic Confession---the former two I situate within a more 'analogy of faith' mode, and the latter two in the 'analogy of being' mode ... so a rather suggestive way to re-read these confessions, and an example of how Evangelical Calvinism seeks to carve out Confessional space within the Reformed tradition). That understood, I want to provide some further thought on where someone like Torrance's 'analogy of faith' received its origin. As many of you know, it is from Torrance's teacher, Karl Barth. In light of that, let me quote Bruce McCormack (one of Barth's foremost interpreters today) on what Barth's 'analogy of faith' entailed:

The 'analogy of faith' refers most fundamentally to a relation of correspondence between an act of God and an act of a human subject; the act of divine Self-revelation and the human act of faith in which that revelation is acknowledged. More specifically, the analogy which is established in a revelation event is an analogy between God's knowledge of Himself and human knowledge of Him in and through human concepts and words. There are three aspects of this analogy which need to be highlighted. First, the analogy in question is not posited with creation. It is not an analogy between the being of the Creator and the being of the creature---which Barth refers to as an analogia entis in contrast to an analogia fidei. The focus here is not being but rather a highly concrete event: the event of revelation. Second, there is nothing in the being or knowing of the human subject which helps to bring this event about---no capacity or pre-understanding which might be seen as a necessary precondition to its occurrence. The only capacity needed for the analogy is one which God Himself graciously provides in the event itself as a gift, namely faith. In the event of revelation, human knowledge is made by grace to conform to its divine object. Thus (the reader will forgive an overused metaphor, but it is good Barthian language), the direction in which the analogy works is always 'above to below'. That is to say, God's Self-knowledge does not become analogically related to prior human knowledge of Him in revelation; rather, human knowledge is conformed to His. God's act is the analogue, ours is the analogate; His the archetype, ours the ectype. Third, the 'analogy of faith' is to be understood 'actualistically', that is, strictly as an event. The relation of correspondence which is established in the revelation-event does not become a predicate of the human subject. To put it another way, the "being" of the human subject is not altered through the experience of faith's knowledge of revelation. The analogy endures only so long as the revelation-event endures. Thus, the 'analogy of faith', once realized, does not pass over into human control. It must continue to be effected moment by moment by the sovereign action of the divine freedom if it is to be effected at all. [Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909~1936, (Barnes & Noble, Nook edition), 32]

I won't try to do an itemized reflection on all that McCormack develops for us, but let me notice something. A very important consequent of Barth's 'analogy of faith' is that God's Self-freedom remains just that. Creation (humanity) in its pursuit to know God is not allowed to construct a prior methodological apparatus that supposes a notion of God (simpliciter) prior to meeting God in Jesus Christ, at least not in Barth's accounting. Instead, the 'analogy of faith' requires that God both confronts and contradicts any conceptions of Godself that humanity has tried to construct on their own as a prius (no, not the Toyota ... silly ;)---this would be idolatry, and the kind of theology that springs from the so called 'analogy of being' (which McCormack touches upon in his development)---the kind of theology that has its high places, like what we see constantly in Israel's history (the syncretization of worshipping God through mixture and integration with human conceptions, using creation with our own hands to ultimately gain mastery and control over the god we [or they, Israel in the OT] worship). 


So this is where Torrance appropriates his own special way of articulating the 'analogy of faith'; from his teacher, Karl Barth. It is one, obviously, that I advocate, and think that it is one that all genuinely Christian Dogmatic & Theological efforts should likewise adopt as their method for 'doing' theology, ethics, and life. 


An aside: I am often accused of, apparently, pitting classic Calvinism against Evangelical Calvinism; as if I am artificially flavoring the waters to the point of making theological kool-aid out of this continuum (of Calvinism). So people often think that I am just naïvely creating a chasm between the two instantiations of Calvinism, either because I must be naïve or just plain antagonistic (both of which may be true, but NOT in this instance!). This issue right here (the topic of this post) is where the definitive distinction and wedge come between the two approaches. When I write classic Calvinism, I am not primarily using this designation to assert that this is the historic version of Calvinism V. Evangelical Calvinism, or something. Instead I am tying this version of Calvinism ('classic') into the system of theology given its first real legs by Thomas Aquinas' synthesis of Christian theology with Aristotelian categories; his integration has become known as classical theism, which spawned the so called analogia entis or analogy of being approach to doing theology. When I use Evangelical in front of Calvinism, I also do this intentionally; and it is derivative of what I consider to be its 'Good News' message, i.e. that God is love and triune, and that he is Sovereign and Free and comes to us in Christ and we have the capacity, through Christ, to participate in his life and answer for life in the life of the eternal Word---this is the kind of positing that supplies us with the 'analogy of faith' approach.

So if you are going to presume that I am naïvely, or unfoundedly pitting classic Calvinism against Evangelical Calvinism; think again. By the way, I realize it's not en vogue for theological types like myself to be so real and impassioned about something; but I actually believe what I am writing, if I didn't, I'd quit writing! Does this kind of topic need more development? Probably, but McCormack has already gone along ways (not to mention Torrance and Barth) in providing a substantial situation from which to draw lines; and so I stand on their shoulders (with a post like this), and refer you to them if you desire a fuller accounting of everything---beyond what my meager out-letting at the blog allows for.

Knowledge of God From John Knox through Thomas Torrance

I am on a bit of a posting blitz, but here is a post I wrote quite some time ago that I really like; enjoy:

In commenting on Evangelical Calvinist, John Knox’s understanding of God; Thomas Torrance offers a profound statement of what all of this entails:

Young, Thomas Torrance

[K]nowledge of the one and only God, as far as it is true knowledge, enshrines the mystery of God, and so is confessed and acknowledged as God eternal, infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible, omniscient, invisible. This God whom we know cannot be fitted into our knowledge. God cannot be commanded by our reasons — cannot be comprehended by our minds. It is certainly to our minds that God reveals himself but only in such a way that he remains eternal, infinite, incomprehensible, etc. Knowledge of God cannot be put into precise words. God’s majesty defies definition or description — all theological language is apocalyptic in so far as it is genuine. That is true above all of the Trinity — knowledge of this God is infinitely open. Thus in faith the human reason is opened wide to the infinite and incomprehensible being and majesty of God as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. [Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell, (T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 1996), 6 -- A review copy provided graciously by T&T Clark]

You will quickly notice which direction Torrance believes knowledge of God comes from; not from our epistemological schemas, but from God to us through Christ and into the Triune life of God himself. This approach to knowing God runs against the construing God from thinking of him through his works in creation or something. Or trying to find analogies in creation, or in humanity that in latent ways allow us to think and speak about God. No! Knowledge of God for Torrance, and as he would contend, John Knox, is a gift from God in Christ for us through the Spirit. There is never one-to-one correspondence between our theological language and God’s being. Instead, theological language is something that is constantly given to us anew as God continues to break in on our world, on our conceptions; and re-orders and re-orientates our grammar in a way that puts to death anything we had conceived of prior to this encounter in Christ. He provides a ground for knowing him that is completely out of this world (but decidedly and concretely in this world); the God-Man. He presents us with concepts that breaks up and re-orders our imaginations in ways that place us upon the precipice of heaven’s throne; Ezekiel knows what I’m talking about.
Just a little reflection . . .

Thinking Like a Christian: Obedience Unto Death

Here is Alan Torrance (nephew of Thomas Torrance and son of James Torrance) developing Barth's understanding, basically, of what Thomas Torrance has called Theological Science (which is developed further by Torrance in his so called 'epistemological inversion'); which has to do with how we know things or persons (in brief). Here is Alan Torrance:

[T]his requires a reassessment of the question of truthfulness such that it is conceived neither in terms of successful, objective reference projecting across the gulf between the human and the divine (i.e. in terms of a 'correspondence theory of truth'), nor in terms of internal consistency within a system of propositions or ideas (i.e. in terms of a 'coherence theory of truth'), but in terms of what is customarily assumed to be a quite foreign category, one that is subjective and ethical, namely obedience --- the obedience of thought and of mind. Theological truthfulness is a form of intellectual obedience before the Reality of God. Here, Barth comes close to interpreting truth in 'performative' terms. However, the truth-performance connection here is not bound up with any autonomous human performance, but with the divine speech-act performed in and through the ambiguous event of God's Self-veiling/unveiling in the human context. Truthfulness is ultimately to be found, therefore, in and through the divine event of Self-communication in the Church, where the obedience of the human hearer is included within the divine speech-act and where God is 'heard', and therefore conceived, in a creative divine act of the reconciliation of the human mind to himself. [Alan Torrance, Persons In Communion: Trinitarian Description And Human Participation, 14]

Obedience Unto Death

Once again, as I have frequently noted here, the engagement of the reality of God (coram Deo) cannot be detached from God's own Self-givenness in his Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. This calls for a certain posture and attitude toward the reality of God that is participatory, personal, and present in and from the life of God mediated to and for us in the humanity of Christ (I Timothy 2:5,6). The reality of God is outside of us, and comes apocalyptically to us in the person of Christ (along with the Holy Spirit). We only hear from God, moment by moment, through his Word for us; and this then becomes the 'place' wherein dogmatic knowledge and formulation comes to the fore. That is, through a loving intimate relationship with God in Christ by the Spirit. We are not Lord, he is; and this must shape the way we speak and act theologically. Here is how A. Torrance follows his development of Barth here, by quoting from Barth's Church Dogmatics:

... what is under debate in dogmatics is the Church's fundamental relation of obedience to its Lord in respect of its proclamation ... A dogmatics which it (the Church) might  not pursue, in whose enquiry it did not wholly participate as in the enquiry about its whole existence, a dogmatics which might let itself be crowded into the corner of religious intellectuals or the intellectually religious, could only be a poor, useless and tedious dogmatics which it would be better not to pursue at all. We pursue dogmatics because, unconstrained by the fact of the Bible, we cannot shake off the question of the obedience of Church proclamation. The question of its obedience includes that of its truth. But the question of its truth can be put only as the question of its obedience. As the question of its obedience it is the question of its dogma. [Karl Barth, CD 1.1, 274-5 cited by Alan Torrance, Persons In Communion: Trinitarian Description And Human Participation, 15]

Thomas Torrance calls this approach 'repentant thinking'; the point is that unlike most of propositionally-philosophically-analytically derived approaches to 'knowing' (and knowing God), this paradigm believes that Christian truth, in particular, only comes as we are conditioned and put 'under' and brought into the environs of truth as it is opened up in Jesus Christ. We don't first construct a matrix and then try to fit God into that matrix; instead we are the ones placed into the matrix of God in Jesus Christ. This requires, at least, an analogy of faith (V. an analogy of being), or analogy of relation; or as A. Torrance will develop in this book an 'analogy of communion'. So we obey because God first loved us that we might love him.

There are many contemporary applications of this for the American (Western) Evangelical church, but I will have to put this off for another time.

The Great Hijacking: Christ the Abstraction and Not The Center

The Westminster Confession of Faith in its first article (chapter II) on a doctrine of God starts with God, simpliciter. There is a long history of this method for thinking of God in the Christian Tradition. Peter Lombard in his Sentences employed this methodology for ordering his thinking about God; indeed, John Calvin himself---in his late Medieval situation---orders his Institute in similar fashion. I have heard it argued from folk who follow this classic methodology that this really isn't a stretch at all; in fact, this (they argue) is the order that God himself has provided in his own disclosure in Scripture (starting in Genesis through Revelation). Here is the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF):

I. There is but one only, living, and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, 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 according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him; and withal, most just, and terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty. (see full citation, here)

It is not until article III of this same chapter that the WCF speaks of God as triune. And this is my short critique of this methodology; even if it had started with God as triune---which would have been laudable---where a doctrine of God ought to start---for the Christian---is with Christ. This is not to go outside of Scripture's order, but to follow it in the way that it re-interprets everything through its fulfillment in Christ. John 1:1 is a primary example of this kind of re-interpretation (or as one of my favorites, Irenaeus of Lyons, has named it, recapitulation); the theologian, The Apostle John Writes:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1

This, as many commentators have noted throughout the history of biblical interpretation, is a Christian re-reading and direct allusion to Genesis 1:1 ('In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth'). And this helps illustrate what I am after relative to articulating a proper order to constructing a genuinely Christian theology. The WCF does not start with Christ. Indeed, it doesn't even start with God as Trinity; instead it appeals to classic Greek philosophical categories for its understanding of what God must be like. But this is not Christian; it does not honor the New Testament's mode of reinterpreting the Old Testament promises in light of their fulfillment in Jesus Christ. No, the WCF, and the whole classical theistic tradition (of which it is a part) can only, logically, think of Christ as an abstraction; as an addition to its concept of Godness; only to be spoken of later, like a dangling participle. So we end up, if we follow the WCF (and classical Christianity), with, at best, a theocentric ('god-centred') religion; but not a christocentric ('Christ-centred') belief structure, that is genuinely Christian. Donald Bloesch emphasizes the importance of following a Christ-centred methodology as the starting point for beginning our theological studies (even our Theology Proper/Doctrine of God):

[C]hristology constitutes the heart of theology, since it focuses on God's work of salvation in the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth and the bearing that this has on the history of humankind. To know the nature of God we must see his face in Jesus Christ. To know the plan of God for the world we must see this plan realized in the cross of Christ and fulfilled in his resurrection and second advent. Whereas philosophy ponders the nature of God in the abstract, theology reflects on the divine-human encounter in history as we find this in Jesus Christ. The way to knowledge of God is through knowledge of Christ, and the way to knowledge of Christ is by faith in his promises as revealed in the Bible. Donald G. Bloesch, "Jesus Christ: Lord & Savior," 16-7. 

This is quite radical! Being a Christian ought to be radical. So you have a choice; are you going to be a classical or radical Christian? The former means you will be entrenched in philosophical abstraction seeking a way to integrate Christianity into that mould; the latter means that you will start with Jesus Christ as God's Self-revelation, and it will be here that knowledge of God as triune will become the touchstone upon which a Christian theology can genuinely move forward as, Christian. 

I grow weary of the great hijacking of the Christian faith, and the implications this has for regular Christian folk who sit in the pew. To be sure, most Evangelicals in America aren't even getting theology or doctrine anymore; if they are though, it is steeped in the heritage that something like the WCF hath bequeathed upon us---viz. the god of the philosophers, not the God known to us in and through, Jesus Christ! What a tragedy  . . .