The Doctrine of God: The Oxford Handbook of Presbyterianism Chapter 18

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1. The Oxford Handbook of Presbyterianism: Chapter 18 The Doctrine of God B y: Gary Scott Smith Reported by: Dela Cruz Ken Bryan Y. (November 2023)

2. Table of contents 01 03 02 04 Introduction A Reformed Inheritance Classical Emphases Reception and Change 05 Prospects

3. Introduction 01

4. Presbyterian’s Confession about the Doctrine of God There is one true God – The almighty Creator, sustainer, ruler, and judge of all things God is triune (God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit) God is the only source of salvation God alone is to be worshipped and serve God is incomparable God is eternally self-existing , self-sustaining and infinite God is both the giver and redeemer of life The general point of Presbyterians is, “In the relationship of creatures to God, all the debts run in one direction.”

5. A Reformed Inheritance 02

6. A Reformed Inheritance Divinity was no matter for speculation ; God was self-defining, approachable only in consequence of a condescension that had set its own terms: “You shall have no other gods besides me” (Exod. 20:3). The God of the Reformed was Israel’s lord, holy and jealous, the Living One, whose self-presentation made exclusive claims. Graven images were evil in obvious form; conceptual idolatry was subtler temptation, to which faith itself was not immune. Free projection had no place ; too much theology had appeared to forget it . The Reformed did not propose a new doctrine of God. They called upon the church to heed what God had said about God.

7. A Reformed Inheritance Faith’s sole authority was God’s self-disclosure , a matter wholly gracious, and sovereignly tailored to its recipients. Saving knowledge came in the gospel of Jesus Christ, set forth in Holy Scripture. There, the estranged, the confused, and the guilty heard that God not only formed, commanded, and judged but also loved, redeemed, and perfected; the transcendent could yet be known, and that in intimacy.

8. A Reformed Inheritance According to Reformed sensibilities, the knowledge of God was no abstract thing , but all-embracing in its consequences. It posed no detriment to knowledge of the self, no diminution of human integrity; fellowship with God meant proper human freedom, ultimate dignity as purposed by an ineffably generous maker.

9. A Reformed Inheritance Salvation was of the Lord , not creaturely endeavor ; access to God’s presence lay with God, not the rubrics of God’s would-be gatekeepers; right worship would be restored when preaching, liturgy, sacraments, and orders attested the greatness of Scripture’s God and the freedom of his grace. But unlike more radical voices in the sixteenth century and beyond, the Reformed did not argue for “Scripture alone” at the expense of creeds, councils, or confessions, and they eschewed individualistic understandings of spiritual enlightenment. All of the church’s teaching had to be judged according to the Word; the church’s historic witness to the Word was an appointed instrument of God’s rule.

10. A Reformed Inheritance Reformed theologians certainly offered refractions of their own. The caution with which Calvin and some of his associates had initially handled aspects of the early church’s language had led to accusations that they did not confess a God who was eternally triune; Calvin had endeavored to demonstrate from Scripture that he was indeed orthodox and had later offered more explicit endorsement of conciliar testimony. He also argued that the Son no less than the Father was, in his essence, autotheos , “ God of himself ”: the Son was eternally “begotten” or generated of the Father as to his person, not as to his essence.

11. A Reformed Inheritance Reformed theology was articulated in the teaching and writing of its influential leaders ; it was disseminated far more widely in the confessional and catechetical documents that came to express the shared faith of Reformed churches. Although such statements regularly bore the fingerprints of major figures, they also helped to diffuse common convictions.

12. A Reformed Inheritance Major statements of the mid-sixteenth century, such as the French or Gallican Confession (1559) , Belgic Confession (1561) , and Second Helvetic Confession (1566) , included standard affirmations of catholic orthodoxy, or, in the case of the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 , a richly pastoral treatment of the privileges of knowing the triune God of Scripture and creed. The Scots Confession of 1560 , concerned to set forth a prophetic evangelical activism, deployed largely traditional idiom on divine uniqueness, majesty, and sovereignty, reflective of contemporary emphases in Geneva in particular; it would remain the chief confessional standard of Presbyterians in Scotland until 1647 .

13. A Reformed Inheritance For Presbyterianism, the formal articulation of the doctrine of God was shaped by the orthodoxy of the mid-seventeenth century , as affected by three factors in particular: English (and to a lesser extent Scottish) Puritanism ; controversy over “Arminianism,” especially the response of the Synod of Dort (Dordrecht) in 1618–1619; and the development of covenant or federal theology in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

14. A Reformed Inheritance Each of these influences emerged from earlier Reformed thought; each was multilayered. Puritan theology was far from uniform; the judgments of Dort were a compromise between tougher and more moderate responses to Arminian arguments; covenant theology evinced various styles, and debates about law, grace and morals were affected by political as well as spiritual agendas . International Reformed consensus was something of a construct, and there were substantial enduring controversies— on polity and practice, on divine sovereignty and human responsibility, on the nature and extent of the atonement, and on the relationship between the church and civil authority.

15. A Reformed Inheritance Anti-Trinitarian belief had been a fairly significant trajectory in Reformation thought. Persistent European traditions had held that Jesus was not God the eternal Son and that the doctrines of incarnation and Trinity were a corruption of the earliest Christian piety . In the first half of the seventeenth century “ Arian ” or Unitarian views of one kind or another were widespread on the continent (in Eastern Europe above all, though also in the Netherlands) and in England. Trinitarian teaching was held to be intellectually repugnant anyhow, its critics often sharing with their opponents a desire to deliver the Bible from ecclesiastical hubris: anti-Trinitarian convictions were generally advanced in no rejection of scriptural study, but as its necessary conclusion.

16. A Reformed Inheritance Overtly anti-Trinitarian belief would have extensive support within English Presbyterianism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over time, it found natural reinforcement in the Deism that typified a great deal of early Enlightenment philosophy and political theory. Intelligently appraised, God existed at a remove from the world, a single transcendent cause or guarantor, nature’s divinity perhaps, but not a being of active engagement in history, and assuredly not the agent of incarnation, cross, and resurrection.

17. A Reformed Inheritance Within the ambit of seventeenth-century orthodoxy, by far the most significant milestone for the future of Presbyterianism was the work of the Westminster Assembly (1643–1653). The Assembly did not succeed in establishing a common Reformed standard in England and Scotland , and the influence of its chief document, the Westminster Confession, was vastly greater outside England than within it. Nevertheless, the Confession offered an exceptionally powerful systematic summary of contemporary Reformed investments and had a huge impact on global Presbyterianism.

18. A Reformed Inheritance The Westminster Confession outlined its doctrine of God in its second chapter, going on to treat God’s eternal decree, creation, providence, and other themes of divine being and action in subsequent sections. Westminster’s Catechisms presented its emphases in dialogue form, for use at home and in school as well as church; the Shorter Catechism , famed for its opening definition of “Man’s chief end” as “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever,” had immense influence as a pithy summation of what ought to be held concerning God and the “duty” God required of humans. The practical concerns of Puritan divinity in regard to vocation, personal and family life, and social ethics in the witness of a godly commonwealth were all evident. The Westminster’s Directory for the Public Worship of God, completed prior to the Confession and Catechisms, spelt out the implications for a biblically warranted liturgy and pastoral procedure.

19. Classical Emphases 03

20. Classical Emphases If Scripture was theology’s cognitive foundation, the doctrine of God was its essential foundation . God might be considered in absolute terms—as God “ on the inside ,” or God qua God —or in respect of his “ outer ” works—as creator, redeemer, and perfecter of contingent reality. The ultimate nature of God’s inner life was known to God alone, but of its primordial reality theological intelligence had to speak, for God in himself was the vital basis of all that had been enacted in God’s free self-movement toward us, the divine economy of creation and salvation. In these works “ on the outside ” ( ad extra ) or “ toward us ” ( quoad nos ), God had revealed himself to be, “ on the inside ” ( ad intra ) or “ in himself ” ( in se ), the God whose life subsisted as a triune fellowship of personal relations. In the order of creaturely knowing, outer works were the starting point ; in the order of being, God in himself had strict material primacy

21. Classical Emphases The distinction between God as One and God as Three was not intended to deny that God was always triune, or to suggest that behind God’s actions in the world lay a monistic deity whose economy was merely modal display, or to imply that God’s attributes were somehow less than trinitarian in their depth. God was triune through and through. But the broader Western tradition to which the Reformed looked back had sought to emphasize that God disclosed himself to be both the One true God, whose essence was unique and Other, unknowable by human ingenuity, and the God whose triune movement in time expressed, in freedom, an irreducibly threefold relational perfection in his eternal life.

22. Classical Emphases As revealed, the defining features of divinity were regarded but perfections displayed. Its content was considered to be acknowledged, not apportioned, by creatures. Within the wider tradition, perfections might be classified as “ incommunicable ”— uniqueness , “ aseity ” ( self-existence ), eternity , immensity , immutability , and simplicity —or “ communicable ,” excellencies whose reality in a personal God received analogical expression in persons made in God’s image: knowledge, wisdom, power, goodness, love, mercy, and so on.

23. Classical Emphases In unpacking a confessional doctrine of God, Reformed theologians accordingly often made much of the names of God as revealed in Scripture: the lord , God , the Almighty , the Most High , and so on. These designations were seen as conveying vital insight into the unique identity of the divine subject whose essential life, glory, goodness, and blessedness were made known in, but not reduced to, their temporal enactment. Sovereignty and righteousness were certainly underscored, but so, too, were tenderness and mercy. The features of God’s life, intellect, and will were manifested not only in power, justice, or purity, but also in truth, faithfulness, and gentleness.

24. Classical Emphases On the Trinity itself, the logic of the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) was assumed to be biblically well-founded ; as Westminster illustrated, Reformed Trinitarianism followed Western preference for the Filioque as valid interpolation in the Niceno -Constantinopolitan Creed . The Holy Spirit was said to proceed eternally from the Father “and from the Son.” The Westminster Confession offered no separate chapter on the Spirit, but the Spirit’s personal nature and work as divine agent were repeatedly emphasized.

25. Classical Emphases Reformed orthodoxy’s accentuation of divine sovereignty found its most controversial expansion in the theology of predestination . “ Double predestination ,” the view that God had eternally predestined some to salvation, others to judgment , had typically been avoided by earlier Reformed confessional statements, even when it was the belief of individual contributors or was defended by them in detail elsewhere. The Westminster Confession spoke of the “foreordination” of the reprobate as well as his predestination of the elect .

26. Classical Emphases The optimal location of predestination within an overall account of theology had been a question that had exercised Calvin and others. Scholasticism typically treated it immediately after the doctrine of God, and developed detailed expositions of the divine “decrees,” reflecting on their logical sequence and relationship to the Oneness and the Threeness of God . In all this there was undoubtedly speculative expansion; sometimes (as in Westminster’s treatment) its most divisive technicalities—“ infralapsarian ” versus “ supralapsarian ” accounts of the place of election and reprobation within the mind of God relative to God’s permissive decree of humanity’s self-chosen fall— were best left ambiguous.

27. Classical Emphases Salvation was a matter of God’s freedom and undeserved favor ; damnation was the consequence of human wickedness, not divine vindictiveness or caprice . There was no reason to posit a symmetry between election and reprobation, either in motivations or in outcomes; “special prudence and care” were to be shown in handling doctrinal “high mystery.” In principle , the mercy, capacity, and constancy of God were to be key matters for Christian reflection. God was the all-sufficient agent of an unmerited deliverance for sinners; God was utterly committed to the elect—this was basis for their trust, worship, and hope.

28. Classical Emphases In the second half of the sixteenth century , an elaborate doctrine of two covenants had evolved: a covenant of nature or works , and a covenant of grace . The first had a measure of affinity with medieval accounts of creation and moral order and of unfallen human nature as capable of discerning God’s law. God had established a covenant with humanity in which blessings would flow from obedience, curses from disobedience; sin had broken the covenant from the human side, bringing estrangement and death to Adam’s race. The covenant of grace was God’s undeserved extension of restoration, forgiveness, and blessing to humanity, first in the various administrations of the Old Testament’s history, then definitively in Christ, in whose work as mediator fellowship had been restored once and for all . From the mid-1640’s onward, some Reformed thinkers proposed a third covenant besides: the covenant of redemption or “ pactum salutis .” Behind the entire work of divine salvation lay an agreement between God the Father and God the Son—the Father appointed the Son as mediator; the Son willingly agreed to execute that role. The basis of redemption lay in God’s triune life before the foundation of the world.

29. Classical Emphases Though it proved difficult to dismiss a certain impression that God was related to all as judge but only to some in love, or that election might be treated in at least a measure of detachment from the redemptive will of God as enacted in time, divine mercy as both sovereign provision and summons to fellowship remained an enduring emphasis. Divine sovereignty could also be presented as strongly affirmative of creaturely freedom , not the advancement of a stifling determinism or legalism. The divine decree and providence extended toward all, and included the tiniest details in God’s universe, but confessional Presbyterianism proposed no “violence” to the will of creatures; “liberty and contingency of secondary causes is not taken away, but rather established” by God’s free and unchangeable ordination of “whatsoever comes to pass.”

30. Classical Emphases on the privileges of the grace of adoption, Westminster also stressed that those whom God took as children were enabled to address him in intimacy, recipients of great liberties and honor, “pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by him as a Father.”

31. Reception and Change 04

32. Classical Emphases The history of Presbyterian theology since the seventeenth century reflects a complex set of relationships to the themes just highlighted. The legacy of confessional orthodoxy’s doctrine of God has been affected by three vast forces: 1. The intellectual consequences of the Enlightenment 2. Debates about religious experience 3. Massive social, cultural, and political change The three have, of course, been tightly interconnected.

33. Classical Emphases In the early eighteenth century , Westminster’s doctrinal system served as a tool of ecclesiastical and political control, but its authority was already under strain. The right to dissent was vigorously asserted, in Ireland, Scotland, and America, and the terms upon which confessional subscription might be expected or enforced, particularly by civil powers, became a hugely divisive business.

34. Classical Emphases New styles of philosophy were attractive: Cartesianism ; the ideas of Gottfried Leibniz or Christian Wolff ; not all rationalist construals of God and nature meant the problems represented by Baruch Spinoza . For many Presbyterians, the emergence of a “natural” or “reasonable” religion, of a God less controlling or interfering, held strong appeal.

35. Classical Emphases In Scotland, “ Moderatism ” became a dominant force within the kirk. Its clerical advocates aspired to be friends of culture, and made major contributions to the Enlightenment’s philosophy, history, and literature . Scottish common-sense realism, which sought to show among other things that David Hume’s skepticism was not the only option for an intelligent account of knowledge , had a powerful impact in America.

36. Classical Emphases In English nonconformism , Westminster held far less sway in any case, and tolerance was a cherished virtue; independent ecclesiastical structures facilitated diversity, and there was plenty of openness to new ways of thinking . Rejection of the incarnation and the Trinity was common. The political stakes for individual teachers could be high, and some chose to temper their language rather than risk the cost (denial of the Trinity remained a penal offense until 1813).

37. Classical Emphases By the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries , “ pure ” reason was old metaphysics. Speculative projection of the nature of the being whose existence underlay the world’s reality was itself irrational. The alternative to revealed religion or even a “ natural ” proof of God’s existence was not a dogmatic exaggeration of reason’s powers, but the recognition that the mind had other work to do in configuring the practical conditions of experience in the world. Idealism after Immanuel Kant aspired to diverse completions of the moral task, but the preoccupations were necessarily immanent : whether the emphasis lay on the bounded creativity of the thinking subject, or on history itself as realization of the absolute, or on the revelatory capacity of nature, ethical questions took center stage ; if divinity still mattered, it did so in underwriting the possibilities stretched out before the human .

38. Classical Emphases The perceived terms of progress beyond the restrictions of classical religion bore many forms (and costs), and only in time would it be acknowledged that human autonomy in a world rid of divinity was an assertion of will as much as a conclusion of intellect. In the second half of the nineteenth century , German philosophy and theology had immense impact. There was the influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s huge endeavor to move theology’s focus away from an account of the objectivity of God in himself and onto the corporate experience of redemption in Christ ; piety’s consciousness of sin and grace, not speculation about the Godhead, determined the scope of doctrinal claims.

39. Classical Emphases There was the appeal of Hegelian idealism , evident in arguments for the significance of history and nature as a whole, and for religion in general as expression of human consciousness and inspiration to social and cultural action. There was the extensive legacy of Albrecht Ritschl’s emphasis on the centrality of ethics and the coming of God’s kingdom, an undogmatic faith that followed Jesus’s example and idealized virtue inspired by love.

40. Classical Emphases There were the claims of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German and British “kenotic” theologies , divinity needed, to be scaled down to be thought of as participant in history—but not scaled down in lovingness, goodness or purity, for ultimate reality deserved to be conceived in moral more than metaphysical terms. The challenges posed by the modern sciences, natural and historical; the impact of biblical criticism; and, especially, the quest for the “historical” Jesus were all ingredients in the mix. In rapidly changing intellectual contexts, consciously modern Presbyterians in the British Isles or North America found many ways of arguing for something other than the God of revelation as confessed by their traditions. Presbyterian theology endeavored to resist the forces of modernity; it also furthered or sought to mediate them.

41. Prospects 05

42. Prospects In a great many mainstream churches, confessional authority has been loosened considerably ; standards such as Westminster may retain formal status, but the nature of subscription is treated loosely in practice , or the Confession itself stands as one alongside other historic confessional resources. Efforts have sometimes been made to establish new formulas, especially in contexts of union with other Reformed denominations, but have often been unsuccessful ; resolution of tensions in practice has proved elusive, and vagueness has frequently been preferred.

43. Prospects In more liberal circles, there have been calls for the abandonment of classical notions of God as variously embedded in static “substance metaphysics,” or “perfect being” theology, or in projections of power and control that have been used to license oppression. Patriarchy, exploitation, the restriction of freedom, abuse of the vulnerable, mistreatment of nonhuman creatures, and exploitation of the planet itself have all been blamed on traditional doctrine

44. Prospects Presbyterians of different sensibilities have continued to see rich resources in their tradition and its location within the wider story of catholic Christianity. The majesty, sovereignty, and plenitude of God remain, for them, vital claims of the Christian gospel. Rightly articulated, these themes pose no threat to creaturely dignity, freedom, or hope: they are their only sure foundation.

45. Prospects Presbyterian doctrines of God have benefited from all this, and there have been notable yields in contemporary work. For a number of theologians, it is important that Reformed dogmatics demonstrate its contemporary distinctiveness as well as its roots, not least its distinctiveness from some of the styles of “economic Trinitarianism” proposed in the later twentieth century. According to the gospel, God’s revelation most certainly occurs in time, but Reformed theology has large assets with which to make a further point: that material primacy in theology necessarily lies with the triune God’s “essential” life in himself––eternally free, realized, and complete, and as such the boundless Giver of every gift that creatures ever know. God ought not to be conceived merely in relation to the world, or as in some way constituted by or for his engagement with it; creation, providence, salvation, and eschaton are as great as they are because it is so.

46. Prospects Presbyterians ignore their inheritance at their peril. It is, of course, also the case that Presbyterian theology can never be reduced to the formal teaching of its preachers and leaders, or to the summaries set forth by official bodies, however influential or faithful. If its sole authority is the gospel, the Word that calls the church into being, Presbyterianism’s doctrine of God also exists as the faith of “ordinary” believers, within the endless density of their social histories . Insofar as they are taught by the gospel, these ordinary Presbyterians, in all their diversity, are fundamental to their tradition’s theological story. Today, as ever, the cultural status of their convictions may be mixed indeed. If, however, they have been right in their most basic claims, their history of confessing—which embraces all of their living, not merely their intellectual efforts, or their formal acts of worship—is enacted in the presence of the God who lives, and who is committed immeasurably to their blessing. In that lies all the encouragement they need.

47. Thank You!