The Challenge and Promise of Reformed Theology

ESSAY:

The Challenge and Promise of Reformed Theology
By Randall C. Zachman
Associate Professor of Reformation Studies at the University of Notre Dame

Editor’s Note: The following are the fifth and sixth parts in our series of statements by some of our most distinguished living Reformed theologians on the doctrinal task of the Reformed churches today.

The current theological climate can best be characterized by the surprising collapse of God into the human community. The understandable and essential efforts of theologians to address the dignity, freedom, and equality of all human beings in the local and global community has led theologians of all stripes, from political and liberation theology to radical orthodoxy, to refer all language about God to the quest for human liberation, dignity, and justice. Even the Trinity itself is understood as providing nothing more than a model and foundation for a human community of “persons in relation,” a relation of complete equality, reciprocity and love. If God is of interest at all beyond this overarching concern for the rightly ordered human community, then God is construed to be unequivocally and essentially “for us.” God cannot be God without us, and God cannot be God against us, because God in God’s essence must be the eternal guarantor of our worth and value as human beings.

The Reformed community is well equipped to offer a serious challenge to this collapse of God into the human community, and to suggest a promising new direction for theology as we enter the new millenium, both in terms of our understanding of God, and our understanding of human dignity. To meet this challenge, though, Reformed theologians must draw on resources that current theological trends forcefully suppress and silence, resources that stand at the heart of the vision the Reformed tradition offers to the church catholic. Above all else, Reformed theology stands for the freedom and glory of God in all God’s works, and for the genuine humility of human beings called to know and worship God. The freedom of God is reflected in the doctrine of the Trinity, which reveals that God would be God even if God were not in relation to the world, and in the doctrine of election, which emphasizes the utter gratuity of God’s dealings with humanity. The glory of God is first of all manifested in all of God’s works in the universe, and then in God’s dealings with humanity, beginning not with all the nations, but only with the children of Abraham and Sarah. The Reformed tradition has rightly insisted that the glory of God should be our first and last concern, over and above the question of our inheritance of eternal life, let alone the right structuring of the human community in this life. Human beings have their greatest freedom and dignity when they are humble before and grateful to their gloriously free and gracious God.

I would like to illustrate the challenge and promise of Reformed theology by briefly developing the following six propositions rooted in the Reformed vision of God. 1.) God is God without the world. 2.) God is God in direct relationship with the entire universe. 3.) God is God in the free election of Israel. 4.) God can be for us only if we allow God to be against us. 5.) God for us is experienced as God being even more against us. 6.) Eternal life is to know God as God, not as our Savior.

The Reformed tradition has always insisted that the doctrine of the Trinity is rooted in the Biblical witness to God’s works as Creator and Redeemer, and is the Church’s interpretation of that witness. Reformed theologians such as Edwards and Barth have argued that the Trinity also testifies that the action of God in relation to the world is rooted in the eternal being of God itself. The Trinity is therefore meant to remind us that God would be free and glorious as God even if God had not freely decided to create the world and enter into covenant with Israel. The relation of God to the world is therefore a reflection of God’s free, selfless, and self-giving generosity, which stands in striking contrast to the self-love and self-seeking of humanity. Everything God is in relation to the world God is first of all in relation to Godself. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a paradigm for human community, but is rather the testimony of believers to the glorious freedom of God from the world, which makes God free for the world.

Zwingli, Calvin, and Edwards all framed their discussion of the election of humanity in the context of the work of God the Creator. The Reformed tradition has rightly insisted that God cares for everything that God has created, especially those creatures about whom humans know nothing at all, as well as those creatures that do not serve any clear human interest. Human beings were created to be spectators of the work of God in relation to the universe, which reveals the glory of God in a way not at all related to the benefit of humanity. Calvin and Edwards summoned the pious to the careful consideration of nature, from the loftiest stars to the smallest of plants, for in all these works the glory, goodness, wisdom, and care of God is manifested. Schleiermacher was right to insist that genuine Christian piety is not at all threatened, but is rather nourished and strengthened, by the scientific investigation of the universe. Our knowledge today of the vast expanse and age of the universe, and of the creatures that occupied the earth before us, fits right in with this tradition of the pious investigation and contemplation of nature. The living and vivid awareness that God cares for everything we can see with the Hubble telescope and the electron microscope reveals the vast extent of the glory of God, and humbles us with the awareness that God’s dealings with us do not even begin to exhaust the dealings of God with the universe. Such humility would also stand as a constant guide to scientific inquiry itself, which is tempted to view the world solely as an instrument of human self-interest, and which can place less value on non-human life. The ultimate goal of our contemplation of the universe is to be ravished with admiration for the astonishing glory of God manifested therein.

The Reformed tradition has from the very beginning rooted God’s dealings with humanity in God’s free and gratuitous election of Abraham and Sarah to be the people of God. If the works of God in relation to the universe humble human self-preoccupation, the election of Israel undermines in a salutary way the presumption that God must deal with all of us with equal regard. The Reformed tradition has insisted that the Church must read and ponder the whole history of God’s dealings with Israel, from the covenants made with Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon to the trials of the Jews under Antiochus Epiphanes, for this history reveals the identity of God in relationship to humanity, and provides the necessary context for the self-manifestation of God in Christ. The scandal of particularity—that the God of the whole universe chose this people alone as God’s own forever—is yet another essential reminder of the free election of God, which humbles us in our quest to use God to enhance our dignity. Moreover, the Reformed insistence that the whole history of Israel manifests the essential character of God provides the most promising direction out of the dead-end of supersessionist theology after the Shoah. If God’s covenants with the Jews reveal the nature and character of God, then the attempt of Jews to be faithful to these covenants should be as understandable to Christians as their own attempt to be faithful to the self-manifestation of Israel’s God in Jesus of Nazareth. The Reformed tradition’s recognition of the eternal validity of God’s election of Israel offers the most promising Christian foundation for the future of Jewish-Christian dialogue, to the mutual profit of both communities.

The Reformed tradition has insisted that the root of true humility only comes from our direct and serious awareness that we are in the wrong before God, and that God is right to be against us. This is revealed both in the history of God’s dealings with Israel, culminating in the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles, and in the history of God’s dealings with humanity in Christ, culminating in the crucifixion of Jesus and his abandonment by God. From the crisis at Mount Sinai to the devastating exiles under the Assyrians and the Babylonians, Israel learned that God could only be for them in spite of the fact that God had every reason to be against them. The crucifixion of Jesus further reveals how essential it is to acknowledge that God is in the right to be against us, for as Calvin pointed out, Christ willingly experienced in his heart and conscience the full extent of the wrath of God our sins summon forth, even though they were not his sins, but ours. We can only mirror the faithfulness of the Jews before God, and the free confession of Jesus in our place, if we also acknowledge with genuine feeling of heart and conscience that God is for us in spite of the fact that God has every reason to be against us, and can pray to God from the depth of our heart the words of the prophet Habakkuk, “In your wrath, remember mercy.”

The gracious and free election of God, and the free forgiveness of those who only deserve wrath, humble us with the awareness of who we are in relation to God. However, when God freely wills to be our God, God does this not to fulfill and endorse our own ideas of what it means to live a fulfilled human life, but rather with the sole intent of claiming the entirety of our lives for God. Once the gracious claim of God overcomes our sin and God’s wrath, we become increasingly aware that God does not want us to live securely in this world, but rather wants us to die to this world and everything in it so that we might live to God. The Reformed tradition has from the beginning insisted that the true life of humans is not this life, but eternal life with God. By making us heirs of eternal life with God, God makes us suffer the loss of all things in this life, without any regard for whether we will be given them back in the next. The suffering of the pious dramatically relativizes the importance of human flourishing in this life, to the point that the pious could be tempted to see God as the greatest threat to human happiness. After all, it was precisely when Abraham had finally received the son of the promise, and loved him, that God commanded that he take the son whom he loved and sacrifice him on the mountain God would show him. Since we can only hope for, but not see, the inheritance to which God calls us, we experience our calling to eternal life as suffering the loss of all things in this life. Such suffering brings us into deep solidarity with others who are suffering the loss of all things at the hands of others. On the other hand, the growing awareness that God will not let us rest in this world keeps us humble, and prevents us from ever conceiving God as the guarantor of our own interests, in this life or the next.

When Cardinal Sadoleto told the Genevans that their greatest concern in life was the salvation of their souls, Calvin rightly responded that Sadoleto was appealing to their self-interest in the name of God. The greatest concern of human beings in this life is the glory of God, not their own salvation. Eternal life, and hence salvation, is not to know God as our Savior, for this would still be selfish, but rather to know God in God’s glory. This glory is manifested in the freedom of God from the world, the relation of God to the entire universe, the calling of Israel to be the people of God, the mercy of God that is deeper than wrath, and the summoning of humanity from this life to live with God. To know God as God is, when we are made fully like God, is to know God as God, in the beauty of the triune life of God itself, as Edwards rightly claimed. To know God only as my Savior would still be to see God in relation to myself, and nothing is more opposed to such self-interest than the freely gracious and generous God. God appears to be against us in this life, in the suffering of his people in this life, precisely to begin to eradicate any and every notion we might have that God is to be worshipped for our own benefit.

As the Reformed tradition could once again so vividly remind us, God did not need the world to be God. God did not need humanity to be in relation to the world. God did not need to relate to the Gentiles to relate to humanity. God does not need to be for us when God has every reason to be against us. God does not need to guarantee my needs in this life to summon me to eternal life with God. If we are both astonished and humbled by the awareness of the immensity of God’s freedom and glory in this life, we can only imagine what it will be like when we are fully transformed into the likeness of God and see God as God is. Reformed theology will only be of help today if it once again reminds the world of this free and glorious God, and resists the attempt to transform this God into the guarantor of human self-interest.

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, SPRING/SUMMER 2001, VOL. 2, #2.

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