Henry God, Revelation and Authority: God Who Stands and Stays (Vol. 6)

God Who Stands and Stays: Part Two
1. Auflage 1999
ISBN: 978-1-4335-7123-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 566 Seiten

Reihe: God, Revelation, and Authority

Part 6 in a monumental six-volume set that presents an undeniable case for the revealed authority of God to a generation that has forgotten who he is and what he has done.

Carl F. H. Henry (1913-2003) was widely considered one of the foremost evangelical theologians of the twentieth century. He was the founding editor of Christianity Today, the chairman of the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin in 1966, and the program chairman for the Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy in 1970. Henry taught or lectured on America's most prestigious campuses and in countries on every continent, and penned more than twenty volumes, including Evangelicals at the Brink of Crisis (1967) and the monumental six-volume work God, Revelation and Authority (1976-1983).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Henry, Carl F. H.

Leseproben

2.
God’s Transcendence and Immanence

“IT IS NOW widely assumed,” writes G. F. Woods, “that the transcendent is beyond the limits of our possible experience . . . beyond the forms and categories [of understanding]; it is really ‘a meaningless word’ for a doctrine whose long-postponed death has come” (“The Idea of the Transcendent,” pp. 45 f.). If this is true, the consequences for Christian theology are devastating, for man would then be incapable of comprehending a transcendent revelation, no events could be confidently identified as supernatural, and the canon of Scripture would lose its power to unveil the eternal world. What remains would then be only private mystical experiences that can exert no validity-claim over against others’ contrary and contradictory views.

The Bible affirms that God is transcendent creator, redeemer and judge of the space-time universe. The Old Testament focuses on his sovereign creation of man and the world and on his divine deliverance of the Hebrews from Egyptian bondage. The New Testament emphasizes the incarnation, resurrection, exaltation, and end-time return of the divine Savior, Jesus Christ. Scripture teaches throughout that the living and eternal God is personally present and active in the universe by preserving it and by working out his sovereign purposes in and through it.

Originally the verb “to transcend” meant to climb over or across an obstacle; its related terms have since acquired many analogous uses. The religious sense of transcendence is that of God’s being “beyond” or “above” in contrast to “within.” This formulation of God’s transcendence is often caricatured by those who reject orthodox biblical theism as spatially localizing God on a cosmic map. But, as Will Hordern comments on such parody of the omnipresent Spirit, Judeo-Christian religion does not “picture the universe as a spatial box with God overflowing it or standing outside it” (Speaking of God, p. 121). According to the Bible God both transcends the created universe and is pervasively immanent in it.

To gain proper perspective on God’s transcendence and immanence has long been one of the most difficult problems facing secular religious philosophers. Sometimes, as in eighteenth-century deism, they have stressed divine transcendence to the exclusion of immanence; at other times, as in nineteenth-century pantheism, they have emphasized immanence but bypassed transcendence. One difficulty is that the conceptions of both transcendence and immanence can be elucidated in either a profoundly unbiblical or a genuinely biblical way. And to substitute oblique phrases like “the Ground” for the transcendent personal God only further complicates and confuses the situation.

The history of philosophy is full of conflicting expositions of transcendence and immanence, and often manifests a diplomatic adaptation of these important conceptions to prevailing fashions of thought. One exaggeration, whether of transcendence or of immanence, encourages another by way of reaction and counterreaction. Distorted emphasis on transcendence that erases all significance for God in the natural world is just as faulty as a radical divine immanence that erodes the distinction between the infinite and the finite. Naturalists who sought to free man from entrapment in Hegel’s Absolute did so not simply by eliminating the Absolute, but by uncritically dismissing the God of the Bible as well. When Hegel absorbed man into the Absolute he also indirectly encouraged both Kierkegaard’s exaggeration of transcendence that related God and man only in terms of inner dialectical confrontation, and Feuerbach’s repudiation of transcendent ontological being.

Extremely vague depictions of a universal divine presence and providence in nature and history characterized both secular prechristian and post-Enlightenment views. By his ill-conceived alternative of radical divine immanence Hegel sought to overcome this imprecision at great cost to biblical representations. Unless Christian scholars now lay bare these metaphysical illusions they will accommodate the formulation of theological doctrine on false premises and in improper ways and accommodate also the current “fatigue of reason” that when confronting metaphysical problems simply pleads the cause of mystery, myth or private decision. In the absence of revelational considerations secular and nonbiblical characterizations of divine transcendence often seem merely a matter of “paying metaphysical compliments” to deity. Unfortunately the self-revealed role of the divine creator, redeemer and judge has been routinely obscured except among proponents of revelational theology. But it is folly to speculatively storm the secrets of God’s working if the self-revealing God of the Bible is known only on the ground of his own intelligible activity and representations.

Biblical characterizations of divine transcendence are in no sense vague or conjectural, but clearly and concretely depict God’s activity and relationships as creator, preserver and governor of the cosmos and man. In both Old and New Testaments God is seen as “above” the world in that he is its self-disclosed creator (Acts 4:24, 17:24), preserver (2 Pet. 3:5–7) and ruler (Rev. 10:6). No exposition of divine transcendence and immanence is therefore to proceed on the basis of data sealed within nature and man, for its decisive content must issue from what God discloses about himself, about his own character and deeds.

The self-revealing God is creator ex nihilo of the cosmic process, the ultimate cause of all that is. He is ontologically other than the created universe. All things continuously owe their being to his power; if heaven is God’s throne, earth is his footstool (Matt. 5:34 f.; Acts 7:49; cf. Isa. 66:1 f.). He also transcends the universe epistemologically and morally in that he is the stipulator and source of truth and good. In general or universal revelation the Creator declares his transcendent glory (Ps. 19:1–4) and his eternal power and divinity (Rom. 1:19–20); the scriptural representations characterize his nature and work even more comprehensively (Rom. 15:4). God’s transcendent activity is in the forefront of the apocalyptic writings which speak not only of God’s dramatic end-time consummation of human history but also of his purposeful activity in the present. The Bible not only affirms transcendent divine creation but warns of transcendent divine judgment as well. And it declares transcendent divine redemption, together with man’s personal decision in respect to salvation in Christ, to be crucial for human destiny.

Emphasis on divine authority, on Christ’s authority, on the authority of the Bible, on the authority of the Christian religion, on authority truly objective and external to man himself, is in the last analysis a consequence and corollary of divine transcendence. As the absolute transcendent Being, God is independent of all compulsory relations to anything and anyone outside himself; he is the ultimate source of all reality and of all authority, the creator and preserver of the finite universe. “I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isa. 45:6b, 7). God is the God of covenant: “For the Lord hath chosen Jacob unto himself, and Israel for his peculiar treasure” (Ps. 135:4). God is the God of history and of judgment: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2). As the living and eternal center of the moral order, God is the source of the ethical monotheism proclaimed by Moses and the ancient Jewish prophets. Prophecy and miracles, the inspiration of the Bible, the incarnation of the Logos all presuppose divine transcendence. “God, Who . . . spake . . . by the prophets, hath . . . spoken . . . by his Son . . .” (Heb. 1:1, 2). “All Scripture is God-breathed . . .” (2 Tim. 3:16, NIV). “The Word became flesh . . .” (John 1:14, RSV). All the great theological creeds of the church unequivocally affirm the transcendent God’s creative and redemptive initiative. If it is anything, the Christian life is a life under transcendent divine authority; its new spiritual reality is made possible by Christ’s atonement for our sins and by the Holy Spirit’s renewing of a renegade humanity.

Modern philosophy progressively stifled the biblical doctrine of divine transcendence and all but strangled it. First it obscured special revelation and detached discussion of divine transcendence from God’s incarnation in Christ and from any significant doctrine of divine creation. The reality of the transcendent had already been weakened by the dilution of revealed theology into natural theology, for on the basis of natural theology God could be known only as an inference from the not-God, and not in terms of his own self-disclosure. Well-meaning efforts to make the idea of transcendence intelligible by an appeal to only analogical arguments from supposed similarities between the known and the unknown confused rather than clarified the matter of divine transcendence. To project from what human beings experience in order to establish the factuality of what their experience does not itself incorporate, that is, divine transcendence, cannot decisively confirm the existence and nature of such transcendence. The more one means by the transcendent, the one and only God, the more analogies lose their usefulness.

Gordiano Bruno (1548–1600) considered a free, transcendent creator to be irreconcilable with the order of nature and with the evidence of our knowing powers. His philosophical successors diminished...