Global Warming and Witch Trials

Alarmism has a long history in the climate debate.  Perhaps most chillingly, this was evident in the witch trials in medieval Europe.  After the Inquisition’s eradication of the actual heretics (like Cathars and Waldensians), most witches from the early 1400s onward were accused of creating bad weather.  The pope in 1484 recognized that witches “have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, … vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-lands, corn, wheat and all other cereals.”  As Europe descended into the Little Ice Age, more and more areas experienced crop failure, high food prices, and hunger; witches became obvious scapegoats in weakly governed areas.  As many as half a million individuals were executed between 1500 and 1700, and there was a strong correlation between low temperatures and high numbers of witchcraft trials across the European continent.  Even today, such a climate link is still prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, where extreme rainfall (both droughts and floods) is strongly linked to the killing of “witches”—in just one district in Tanzania, more than 170 women are killed each year.

 

~Bjorn Lomborg Cool It pg. 125

Global Warming Saves Lives

Bjorn Lomborg’s book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming provides some very interesting statistics. He notes the number of increased deaths due to rising temperatures, but then adds the decrease in deaths caused by cold temperatures. He writes:

Models show that heat events we now see every twenty years will become much more frequent. By the end of the century, we will have such events happening every three years. This confirms the prospect that we could be seeing many more heat deaths—a tragedy that will indeed be caused by global warming.

But cold spells will decrease just as much as heat waves increase. In areas where there is one cold spell every three years, by the end of the century such spells will only happen once every twenty years. This means fewer deaths from cold, something we rarely hear about.

Violence and Theology

One of Hans Boersma’s points against High Calvinistic forms of transactionalism (certain expressions of supralapsarianism as well as forms of the covenant of redemption) is that it makes violence an attribute of God.

Concomitant with this problem is the other problem that God becomes dependent upon the creation.  In order to prevent the affirmation of an eternally self-destructing God, divine wrath must be directed against the creation.

Thus in an ironic twist, the extreme focus on God’s predestinating will actually limits God’s control.

Simplicity and Communicatio

The doctrine of divine simplicity is a necessary description of God’s infinity. It states that all attributes of the divine nature are coextensive with that nature and indeed, they are the nature. There is nothing between the attributes and the nature. There is nothing that separates them, for that something would need to be other than divine in order to maintain the distinction. Since this is unthinkable- that is, since all the divine attributes are infinite and omni- well, omni-everything- the confession of simplicity is a proper conclusion of the via negativa.

This doctrine is very useful because it helps keep our dogmatic speech orderly and consistent. It forbids any talk of disharmony among the divine attributes, and it forbids giving primacy to any one of the attributes. It should likewise be applied in other loci of systematics to continue to preserve consistency and harmony.

My roommate recently pointed out that divine simplicity is particularly effective as a critique against the position, often espoused by Lutherans, that in the person of Christ there is a communication of attributes. This position argues that the divine gives some of its qualities to the human, and the human gives some of its qualities to the divine. This has long been criticized by Calvinists as a confusion of the natures, even tending towards Eutychianism, and I think the charge basically sticks. To go further, though, divine simplicity forbids the giving of some attributes, but not others because again, all of the attributes are equal with the essence. Therefore, it is simply not possible to affirm the communication of omnipresence, but not the communication of infinity. Ubiquity cannot be communicated without also communicating eternality, and this would be nothing more than to make the created the Creator.

And so we see how Christology affects Theology and how Theology affects Christology.

Zanchi: For It Was the Blood of God

‘When therefore the fullnesse of time was come’, wherein the promise of redemption made unto the first man was to be accomplished by the second, God, the everlasting Father, sent his onely begotten Sonne and eternal and therefore true God, of the same nature with the Father, made of a woman alone, and without the seede of a man and therefore true man, but without sine and so true Christ, made subject to the lawe and therefore circumcised, that he in most perfect obedience might fulfill that law in the name of us all, made obedient to his Father even unto death, namely for us (for he, being without sinne, deserved not to die) that he might redeeme those which were under the law and all the elect even by his obedience, by his death and bloodshedding, that is, by a sacrifice of exceeding vertue (for it was the blood of God) and a most effectual antilutro, ransome, that he might, I saie, redeeme us from sinne to the old image of God and to perfect righteousness, yeah, from death to eternal life, and from the kingdome of Satan to the kingdome of God; and that we might receive adoption of children and so in the ende bee taken into full and perfect possession of the heavenlie inheritance as sonnes and lawfull heires.  And lastile, that he might gather together all thinges in heaven and in earth under one head and ioyne them to himselfe for the glorie of God the Father.

~ Confessions of the Christian Religion XI.1

Future Retractions in the Making

Reading Oberman makes me wonder if I have not been unfairly critical of late medieval nominalism.  Of course, reading Oberman and McGrath together makes me wonder if I’ll ever get a grasp of the various distinctions.

It is also tragic that I feel the need to reread Iustitia Dei already.

Augustine on God’s Righteousness

Now, what the righteousness of God is, which is spoken of here [Rom. x.2,3], he immediately afterwards explains by adding: “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.”  This righteousness of God, therefore, lies not in the commandment of the law, which excites fear, but in the aid afforded by the grace of Christ, to which alone the fear of the law, as of a schoolmaster, usefully conducts.  Now, the man who understands this understands why he is a Christian.  For “If righteousness came by the law, then Christ is dead in vain.”  If, however, He did not die in vain, in Him only is the ungodly man justified, and to him, on believing in him who justifies the ungodly, faith is reckoned for righteousness.  For all men have sinned and come short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His blood.  But all those who do think themselves to belong to the “all who have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” have of course no need to become Christians, because “they that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick;” whence it is, that He came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

~ On Nature and Grace chap. 1

Ralph Smith on James Jordan’s Theology Proper

For Bavinck and for most Reformed theologians, Adam has transgressed the law and his punishment is a matter of strict law and justice.  Jordan’s view does not deny law or justice, but focuses on a different and most essential element.  Adam’s sin is the rejection of God’s covenant love.  God responds to the sin of man as a holy and offended covenant Lord, Father, and Husband whose love has been subject to the most egregious treachery.  It is holy jealousy, which demands the fullest penalty the law can apply, and it is God’s gracious love which intervenes to take that penalty on Himself.  What is added, however, in no way diminishes from the righteousness of God, for covenant love and law mutually involve and imply one another.  God is righteous no less than He is love; both attributes come to expression in the covenant.  The legal aspect of the covenant is seen in the structure of the relationship and in the threat of death for disobedience.  But his is not “strict justice” in contradistinction from love, it is justice fulfilled by love, for betrayed love will seek righteous revenge with jealousy.

Eternal Covenant pg. 81

If we remember that for Smith and Jordan, “covenant” is simply the way in which God relates to Himself, this definition makes a great contribution in bringing together Reformed disctinctives with classic Christian dogmatic thought.  “Covenant” is not something added to God’s relation with creation.  Covenant just is that relation because covenant is God’s own self-relation.  God’s bringing man into covenant with Himself is God bringing man into Himself in a bond of fellowship and love.  We have the forensic and the ontological held together in perfect harmony.  The same can be said for love and law.  The highest love is giving oneself for another, and thus the highest law is that of love.

HEROES

If you can make it through like the first five episodes or so, this series starts to rock.

Andrew McGowan on the Two Schools of Covenant Theology

Andrew McGowan is a Reformed theologian who gives me a lot of hope. I’ve had the privilege of meeting him and hearing him preach on two occasions, and I’ve been trying my best to read everything that he writes. He is well grounded in the Reformed tradition, but he also sees the messiness of its history and the need to push forward in its thought. In his article “In Defence of ‘Headship Theology,’” McGowan describes the two schools that have formed within Reformed theology. The one, in his opinion, is primarily committed to law, while the other is committed to grace. He begins in the 18th century:

As the federal theology developed through the seventeenth century, tensions began to develop between those whose emphasis was on law and those whose emphasis was on grace. In Scotland this came to a head in the Marrow Controversy at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The two positions that collided in this dispute may be represented by considering two of the leading protagonists, Principal James Hadow of St. Andrews University and the Revd. Thomas Boston, Church of Scotland minister in Ettrick. (pg. 183 in The God of Covenant ed. Grant and Wilson)

McGowan explains how Boston’s thought centered on the person of Christ. With the doctrine of union with Christ at the forefront, Boston was able to point all men, indiscriminately, to salvation. His opponents protested that this was a violation of limited atonement and that he should first wait to see signs of election. In other words, his opponents started with the secret decree, whereas Boston started with the revealed salvation in Christ.

McGowan finds a similar dichotomy in the 20th century with the figures of John Murray and Meredith Kline. Of this he writes:

In the middle of the twentieth century no-one espoused the gracious federal theology of Thomas Boston more clearly than the late Professor John Murray of Westminster Theological Seminary. He was opposed, however, by his pupil (and later, his colleague), Meredith Kline, who wanted to emphasize the starkness of the contrast between law and grace. This debate has rumbled on below the surface since Murray died but has come to a head more recently with one of Kline’s disciples, Mark Karlberg, claiming that Westminster Theological Seminary, in following Murray, Norman Shepherd and Richard Gaffin, has abandoned the legacy of Clavinistic theology and has become Barthian! (185-186)

Now it is true that Karlberg is one of the more radical of Kline’s disciples. Kline has a few radical disciples though, and so we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Karlberg as a representative. My OPC friends in California remember Lee Irons, and they tell me that a consistent outworking of Kline’s ethical formulation leads to some rather undesirable results. We can also take note of T. David Gordon’s willingness to refer to John Murray as the drunk uncle of Reformed theology.

Of course we do not have to merely point out slippery slopes within Kline’s legacy. McGowan maintains that the key issue is law and grace, and I believe that he is correct. McGowan quotes from Kline’s By Oath Consigned to show the priority which Kline gives to law over grace. He quotes Kline saying:

Historical priority belongs incontestably to law covenant since pre-redemptive covenant administration was of course strictly law administration without the element of guaranteed, inevitable blessings. By the same token promise covenant is disqualified from the outset as a systematic definition of covenant because it is obviously not comprehensive enough to embrace the pre-redemptive covenanted revelation. It remains, however, to show that law constitutes the ground structure of redemptive covenant administration and thus that a definition of covenant as generically law covenant would be applicable over the whole range of history as is necessary in a systematic theology of the covenant. (187)

So Kline says that law has a historical priority, and he plans on explaining how it constitutes “the ground structure” of redemptive history. Not too long ago, Michael Horton wrote that humans are “wired for law” and that law was our original state of being.

This also works its way into (or perhaps it works its way out of?) theology proper. Kline says that God the Father and God the Son exist in a suzerain-vassal treaty. This is how he understands the covenant of redemption, which is a covenant of works within the Godhead. Peter Leithart has explored how Cal Beisner and Fowler White work this concept out here. I am told that he also has an essay on this in A Faith That is Never Alone which I plan to get very soon.

And so this makes sense of the statement, that we recently heard, which said that God cannot forgive without impugning His justice. In order to solve this dilemma, the Father sends the Son to merit for the Elect, and thus He can then forgive the Elect without violating the law. This is a very different concept that Murray’s legacy. Following in that legacy is Andrew McGowan. He wants to preserve the graciousness of grace. He even says that we should not speak of law prior to the fall. While I have some disagreements with McGowan on why we should not do this, I am in fundamental agreement with his point. I think it is very Pauline, for the law was added because of transgressions (Romans 5:20; Galatians 3:19). The works-principle system would need to say the exact opposite. For them, grace was added.

I think that McGowan is also right about the two schools of theology that are competing in these disputes. I would perhaps want to take it further than even he does, seeing Boston as a transition figure, pulled in two directions. I think we need to do more with theology proper, and we must understand that grace is simply what God is. The patristics understood this, especially in their formulation of creation ex nihlio. Nature could not even exist if it were not for the constant preservation of grace. Ultimately Jesus Christ is the grace Who comes and fully unites to nature.

I sometimes make bold statements about the current debate in the Reformed Churches, however, I also try very hard to stress that the debate is actually much bigger than any of the parties might realize. “The gospel” probably is at stake, and indeed, so is our continuity with the larger catholic Christian tradition. Of course, one side is quite clear that such a connection is an undesirable thing. They view such a connection as compromise.

I view it as historical self-consciousness.

I’ll take my stand with men like McGowan. In doing so, I believe I’m taking my stand with the Church.