Craig A. Carter - Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism

Recent years have witnessed an unexpected but most welcome development within the ranks of conservative Protestant theology: the recovery of the classical doctrine of God as expressed in the early church creeds and the great confessions of the magisterial Reformation. For some generations, particularly evangelical Protestant theology has been dominated by biblical scholars who pursue the theological endeavor on the basis of biblical exegesis with little or no engagement with the theological tradition of the church. While this is perhaps understandable, given the Protestant commitment to Scripture alone as the norming norm of theology, it has also proved highly problematic in at least two ways: (1) ironically, it has served to detach evangelical Protestant thought from the orthodox Protestant tradition, and (2) it has done so because (again ironically) it has unwittingly adopted the antimetaphysical stance of the dominant Kantian trajectories of Western thought since the Enlightenment.

One example of this trend is the redemptive-historical method of interpretation that is now the default in many Reformed and evangelical circles. Building on the important truth that the Bible tells one basic soteriological story culminating in Christ, this approach has done sterling service in saving the Old Testament from both dispensationalism and a reductive moralism. But in focusing on the redemptive storyline, it has also tended to prioritize the narrative economy of Gods actions over the eternal ontology of his being and has thereby collapsed the transcendent into the immanent. It is not that the redemptive-historical approach is incorrect; rather, it is that it does not say enough and tends to ignore questions of metaphysics and ontology that (ironically) the Bibles own narrative itself raises.

This lack is often reflected in the default piety that always worships God for what he has done and rarely or never worships him for who he is. Of course, the former is vitalthe Psalms are replete with praise for Gods acts of creation, providence, and salvation. But they also contain references to his intrinsic holiness and glory. Our pietyand therefore the theology on which our piety rests and that motivates itmust also give due weight to Gods glorious, holy, praiseworthy being. It was, after all, exposure to God in his thrice holiness in the temple and not any specific act of God that drove an awestruck Isaiah to the ground in worship.

In this context, the recent renaissance of interest in the classical, creedal doctrine of God is to be welcomed. This is the teaching that has generated beautiful liturgies, fortified the church, and nurtured Christians for centuries. And yet many Christians are likely still perplexed by classical theism. They may be unfamiliar with J. P. Gabler and Adolf von Harnack, but they still share their suspicion that the abstruse and abstract language of Nicene trinitarianism and such ideas as immutability and impassibility subvert the reading of Scripture in order to buttress a doctrine of God that owes more to pagan philosophy than Gods self-revelation.

In such a context, Craig Carter is doing sterling service for the church. In his earlier volume, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition , he made a compelling case for todays church to move beyond the narrow interests of the guild of contemporary evangelical biblical scholarship and seek once again to reconnect with how the church itself has read and understood the Bible over the centuries. In the present volume, Carter builds on Interpreting Scripture but presses in a more theological and methodological direction, seeking to demonstrate how classical theism is both demanded by the Bibles teaching and a constitutive element in how we read the Bible.