A Better Definition of God?
James B. Jordan in Biblical Horizons No. 82, February, 1996 (Copyright © 1996 Biblical Horizons) contends that the definition of God given in the WSC is not adequately Christian, and he proposes another of his own. Please read his essay, and then see my comment following. (Hat Tip to Alastair at 40 Bicycles for uncovering this.)
What is God?
by James B. JordanAnswer 4 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism is often taken as a magnificent answer to the question, “What is God?” It reads: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” Presbyterians are fond of praising this statement, preaching on it, and viewing it as virtually given by Divine inspiration at the Westminster Assembly.
I don’t like it.
I don’t like it because it is a good description of the god of Aristotle.
I don’t like it because it is a good description of the god of Islam.
I don’t like it because it is a good description of the god of Deism.
In short, I don’t like it because there is nothing specifically Christian about it.
To be sure, everything it says is true enough, but (a) it is not specifically Christian; (b) it is abstract; and (c) it does not isolate as fundamental the things that the Bible focuses on.
And thus, I suggest a new answer to a better question: “Who is God?: God is the Triune Creator, Ruler, Lawgiver, Empowerer, and Judge of all things in heaven and earth.”
Notice the following specific Christian elements:
First, God is triune. No other religion can say that. It means that God is a Person and also three Persons.
Second, God created heaven and earth. He did not create one realm but two (though they are destined to become one).
These two matters alone eliminate all non-Christian and philosophical notions of “god.”
The five attributes mentioned come from the covenant and from history. They affirm that history is real, and that God oversees it. They are not abstractions, but point to God’s activity. Thus:
Third, God is Creator. This affirms the Creator-creature distinction, and thereby implies everything said in the Westminster Shorter Catechism statement, but on a specifically Christian basis.
Fourth, God is Ruler. This affirms Providence, God’s lordship over all transitions in history.
Fifth, God is Lawgiver. This affirms the Word of God, the Bible, as true communication from God to mankind. No philosophy here!
Sixth, God is Empowerer. As the Spirit, God moves all that moves, and gives life to all that lives.
Finally, God is Judge. History is real, and God evaluates it all along the way, intervening at many points, and finally judging it.
I submit that this is a far more Christian description of God than what we find in the WSC.
Is this important? I think so. Historically, Calvinism has repeatedly declined into deism and gnosticism. This is because Calvinism, in spite of being the most consistent form of Christianity thus far, has treated God philosophically, and then added the idea that God is triune, a person, and an actor in history. The Oneness of God is, de facto, treated as more ultimate than His Threeness. For this reason, good Calvinists could be Freemasons and affirm that, for political reasons, the “general oneness of God” was enough. By now it is clear to thinking people that all the water has run out of that particular tub, and we need to ask why our forefathers ever got into that tub in the first place. WSC Answer 4 is one of the reasons.
The bolded portion above made me think of the fact that in my Doctrine of God class at Westminster Seminary, Dr. Oliphint told us that he was intentionally having us study the Trinity before the unity of God for much the same reason as Jordan gives above (that the reverse order works from philosophy to theology rather than using (biblical) theology as the starting point for any Christian discussion of God. This makes me wonder if Jordan might not have a point. I’m wondering what others think of his proposed definition.
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April 26th, 2005 at 5:56 pm
Hey pops. Think we could sub-out “Lawgiver” and put in “Redeemer”? Why immortalize stone tablets rather than the Christ-event? If the former was with glory, much more does the latter abound in glory.
April 26th, 2005 at 5:57 pm
Oh yeah, as an aside I am all for the project that Jordan puts foward here. I think that the next time I hear God defined as “That being greater than which cannot be conceived” I’m going to stand up and start stabbing myself in the neck with the pen from the “attendance register.”
April 26th, 2005 at 6:00 pm
Daniel, my son:
I’m good with the Redeemer sub…you’re probably aware that Jordan is a theonomist, so he kisses those stone tablets upon arising each morning
April 26th, 2005 at 6:26 pm
Hilarious, Redeemer was the first modification I thought of too, before reading the comments! I must be in good company.
In general, I like Jordan’s suggestion - I think he’s on the right track. But there’s another aspect which I think he’s missing, and that’s “Father”. So if I were going to take a stab at it, I might try something like this:
“God as Triune is Creator, Ruler, and Judge over all creation; to those who place their faith in Christ’s righteousness rather than their own, he is also Redeemer and Fatherâ€
That said, Jordan might also want to consider what he is _giving up_ by dropping the WCF verbiage (I for one want to continue to affirm those things as well).
Great post, thanks!
April 26th, 2005 at 6:32 pm
I would also want to add, for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t read the Westminster Shorter Catechism, that it does go on to affirm God as Trinity and speaks of many of the other attributes he mentions…so it isn’t really deficient in its view of God when taken on the whole. But I think Jordan’s point is that answer #4, taken for itself, is inadequate.
April 26th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
Since I can’t get along with anyone (although I’m agreeing with a good bit of the sentiment here) I’ll just say:
We can’t say everything at once. The standards were meant to be taken as a unit. If they as a unit affirm the unity and diversity in the Godhead, I’m happy. Let us all remember Calvin. (an ambiguous statement - I wonder what people will remember about him when they read it)
April 26th, 2005 at 7:07 pm
I agree with you, Jason. As I pointed out above, the Standards as a unit adequately cover what Jordan complains about. However, I do think that his point that they move from a philosophical to a biblical view of God is telling as testimony that the Standards were not (*gasp*) immune from the influences of the zeitgeist of their day. They’re really good, but they aren’t perfect.
Oops…what was that sound? Did a Reformed fundamentalist somewhere just rend his Guys With Funny Beanies t-shirt because of what I just said? I think I must be slipping away from the beloved doctrine of the inerrancy of the WCF.
And Calivn? Yeah…I remember him. He and his stuffed tiger were a real hoot!
April 26th, 2005 at 8:27 pm
This entry got me thinking about an old liberal question I haven’t fudged with in awhile.
April 26th, 2005 at 8:28 pm
Which is??
April 27th, 2005 at 6:44 am
“How many Presbyterians chasing the one brother down a slippery slope does it take to start an avalanche?” Was that it, Steve?
[Not that I think that you're on a slippery slope, Mark; it's just early, and that's the best wisecrack I can give you this morning. After all, I'm here for comic relief, not Calvinistic doctrinal dissection. ;)]
April 27th, 2005 at 7:31 am
I was pondering on the ride in to work this morning: As long as Jordan has changed the question from “What is God” to “Who is God?” how about making the answer really biblical, and work out something along the lines of: The true God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of our Redemption, the God who indwells us to make us like himself …”
I mean, as long as this thread is ending us all up in Hell anyway, why not admit that N. T. Wright had a point in New Testament and the People of God when he said that we can’t take it for granted which God we’re talking about. Let’s get specific and say that we worship the God of the Jews who has become in Christ what he always was: the God alike of Jew and Gentile. Or something like that.
April 27th, 2005 at 7:40 am
Geof: the counter to that was told to me by my friend Jason yesterday…How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb? Change? Presbyterians don’t change!
Daniel: the Jewish angle aside, Van Til (and his pupil Francis Schaeffer) said something similar…an apologetic that just proves theism is not a Christian apologetic.
And by the time we’re all done with this, the Westminster Shorter Catechism will have to drop its middle name.
April 27th, 2005 at 7:42 am
Hey!! Someone else finds Calvinism leading into Deism. Here I was thinking I might be confused in what I was seeing!
…I’m gonna quibble… Why dump Lawgiver? Jesus is the fulfiller of the Law, we’re called to take chase after His lead, so God being Lawgiver is still an important notion.
Besides, if you’re going to say Ruler and Judge, you need to say on what basis: the Law He has given.
Personally, I like the Nicene Creed. Why reinvent the wheel?
April 27th, 2005 at 7:43 am
That is an incredibly interesting piece! Open Theists have been complaining for years that the Classical conception of God was too Greek. I must say I agreed with them, (though that criticism doesn’t prop up their doctrine of God the way they think it does). I’m glad to see Calvinists using biblical categories to describe God. It was very insightful.
April 27th, 2005 at 7:51 am
AC: As a friend of ours on a certain messsage board would say, STRAW MAN!!!
Calvinism itself is not deistic. Jordan (a Calvinist) is seeking to make an imperfect, human-generated catechism more consistently calvinistic. He’s not castigating the Westminster divines, just pointing out that they, like us, were in some ways unavoidably and unconsciously affected by their times and the prevalence of medieval scholastic categories. That in no way means that there whole teaching was affected by that; Jordan’s just pointing out one instance.
I personally have no problem keeping Lawgiver (actually, I think we should) as long as Redeemer is included.
And there’s nothing wrong with the Nicaen Creed; they’re not in competition. Confessions and catechisms serve different purposes from creeds.
April 27th, 2005 at 7:53 am
Adam:
One of the things I’m hoping N.T. Wright, the NPP, and the FV will do for Reformed Christianity, whatever else may come of the whole mess, is to shake the Reformed into being more biblical and less leaning back fat and happy on the confessions, as important as the confessions are.
April 27th, 2005 at 8:02 am
I was going to say what has already been said, namely that the catechism as a whole (just like the Bible as a whole) adequately deals with Jordan’s ‘complaints’. The single question he references does not attempt to be an all encompassing definition of God. Questions 1-12 deal pretty directly with the question of ‘what is God’, and you could probably carry it on through the whole catechism, really.
NT Wright once said in a lecture once, the problem with lecturing on theology is that you can’t say everything, and someone is bound to conclude that you deny such and such and such because you didn’t explicitly affirm it. And, boy was he right.
And, all the Westminster documents are dealing with systematic theology/abstract/philosophical doctrines. Like Steve Schlissel has said, they were the right medicine for their time, but we aren’t in that time anymore. We need to grow and develop and address the needs of our time.
I think it is worth considering Jordan’s point, though. If nothing else, to keep us from abusing the Standards and using them in ways they aren’t intended to be used.
April 27th, 2005 at 8:10 am
Good points all around, Richard.
April 27th, 2005 at 8:14 am
Well… let me back off the perceived universality of my statement that Calvinists are deists. That’s not what I meant. I meant that from the number of Calvinists I’ve met, I see a unwitting theological tendency towards a form of deism. It’s something I’ve only really started to perceive and think about lately and am not wholly confident in my assessment. But the idea has merit and is not a Straw Man - if it is a Straw Man, then please tear it down: how are the ideas in deism not in Calvinism. As far as I can tell, Jordan confirms that I’m not exactly off base here even if we might have different reasons.
But I’ve yet to see anyone actually take the task of saying “okay, I see why this looks like deism. lets address that because it shouldn’t be so.” I think, in part, that’s what Jordan sees and is trying to do. That’s all I’m asking for as well.
April 27th, 2005 at 8:29 am
Wow, Mark … you desperately need threaded comments, don’t you?
As for that joke, the one about Methodists talks about having a Charge Conference to bless a committee to deal with it while the Trustees sit there and say, “That’s our job,” and SPRC threatens to go to the DS …
:cricket:
Okay, back to work …
April 27th, 2005 at 9:00 am
Another Coward:
If you want to take chase after the lead of Jesus as “law fulfiller” (Matthew’s gospel) you’re going to find yourself coming up out of the land of Egypt, having babies slaughtered at your birth, being born of a virgin, and riding two donkeys into Jerusalem (how Jesus “fulfills” the law & prophets in Matthew). You might want to rethink.
Do you think that if I oiled my hobbyhorse it wouldn’t squeak so much?
April 27th, 2005 at 9:22 am
Why is “That being greater than which cannot be conceived†so problematic. I can hardly think of a better description of a being who is both Three and One and who, though the transcendent Creator, is incarnate among his creatures. Jordan’s project is to explain what we mean when we say that God is “That being greater than which cannot be conceived.â€
Now, if the Catechism definition is where one stopped, that would certainly be a problem. But the definition is the result of and presupposes centuries of reflection on the question of the being of God, reflection that was very often explicitly Trinitarian, Incarnational, and Creationist.
For instance, Thomas Aquinas understood and explicates the infinite, eternal, unchangeable wisdom of God in terms of the eternal procession of the Son in the Spirit, for it is in the Son, through the Spirit, that the Father is perfectly expressed and all of creation as well.
If modern Calvinists tends toward Deism then that likely has to do with the breakdown of classical Christian ontologies in the face of late medieval philosophy and the rise of an incipient modernism in which the traditional categories no longer signify in the same they once did. Thus some sorts of Calvinism get pushed in a decidedly Deistic direction.
In the face of that, by all means we need to re-think, re-express, and re-biblicize our theology proper, as folks such as Torrance, Barth, von Balthasar, and others have tried to do in the 20th century. But it seems to me utter foolishness if we think we can do that without also re-trieving and re-appropriating the classical Christian traditions of the Fathers and medievals.
April 27th, 2005 at 9:51 am
I think I’m missing whatever point you’re trying to make, Daniel.
I’m not saying that we are to be Jesus… I’m saying we are to be as if Jesus truly, wholly Lord-ed us - or, another way of looking at it, to be as if Jesus is our source of motivation to such an extent that His purpose moved us to action in all things. Thus we would find ourselves following Jesus’s lead in fulfilling the Law. I don’t understand how you can separate following Jesus on the one hand and fulfilling the Law on the other. Perhaps this question will show any ignorance I may have: did Jesus stop fulfilling the Law after His death and resurrection?
April 27th, 2005 at 10:12 am
Joel: Maybe.
AC: The undercurrent of my statement is such that I probably shouldn’t have made it (years of pondering), but it goes something like: based on what Matthew means when it uses the word pleroo, and based on what the word “Law” means in almost the entire NT, saying “We should fulfill the Law like Jesus did who, as he said, came to fulfill it,” invloves us in equivocation on the meanings of both “fulfill” and “law”.
April 27th, 2005 at 11:00 am
Daniel: Wrong answer. Die, heretic scum!
April 27th, 2005 at 11:21 am
This is why I still prefer the Nicene Creed’s to the Westminster Standards’ definition of God.
Gotta love historic confessions.
To echo Daniel on Matthew: “fulfillment” (plerow/plerome) there isn’t simply like the OT predicted something, and what Jesus does fulfills the prediction. It is that…sort of…, but it’s also bigger, different, more like “filling up.” E.g. “fulfilling the Law”–the Law wasn’t “predicting” something that needed fulfillment…or was it? Somehow Torah by its very existence anticipates a filling up, embodiment, etc., which all occur in Christ.
April 29th, 2005 at 7:34 am
[...]
What is God?
Wednesday April 27th 20050905
Filed under: Theology
Mark Traphagen posted something worth pondering
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April 29th, 2005 at 11:38 am
“Die, heretic scum!” !?!
Why Joel! I didn’t know you had it in you!
April 29th, 2005 at 6:59 pm
By day a mild mannered philosophy professor…