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On Helm’s Review of Oliphint (Nate Shannon)

Editor’s note: On the Credo Magazine blog we like to have a mix of lay-level posts as well as more advanced academic posts. We also like to have good interaction and thoughtful debate between thinkers. Paul Helm recently wrote a piece called, “Eternal God and God in Time,” in which he gave a critique of Oliphint’s book, God With Us: Divine Condescension and the Attributes of God. Today we would like to point you to an interaction with Helm by Nate Shannon, PhD candidate in at the Free University of Amsterdam, over at “Philosophy and Theism.” While Helm will likely have more to come, here is the introduction to Shannon’s response to Helm’s initial critique:

Paul Helm has interacted with Scott Oliphint’s God with Us. Helm raises several worthwhile questions concerning the views expressed in Oliphint’s text, but he does so without addressing the distinguishing thesis of Oliphint’s book. This discussion is worth having, and, in my view, Oliphint’s proposal is a biblically guided, confessionally sound attempt to ‘reform’ our understanding of God’s relationship to creation. If we can appreciate his approach somewhat more substantively, I think the conversation will be more fruitful. So instead of attempting to address specifically each or some of Helm’s concerns, what I offer here is clarification of the singular thesis of God with Us, in comparison with the Thomism Helm prefers, and which, to be sure, features so prominently in historical theology proper.

Oliphint’s Chalcedonian Method for Theology Proper

I have called Oliphint’s proposal a Christo-logic theology proper. Oliphint calls it a Chalcedonian theology proper. Helm says that Oliphint’s proposal leaves us with a choice between two Gods; he targets what he calls “a strong tendency to think of God ‘dualistically’.” In light of God with Us, the response is ready-made: we must choose between two Gods only insofar as we must choose between the two natures of Christ.

The issue Oliphint wishes to address in God with Us is the nature of God’s interaction with creation and that interaction as the cardinal test-case for one’s theological method and the biblical defensibility of one’s theology proper. It is important to keep the discussion focused on this specific question: how we are to understand God’s interaction with creation. Since God’s relationship with creation is redemptively and epistemically focused in Scripture, biblical theology and hermeneutics are central. Oliphint categorizes approaches to the question of creator-creature interaction in terms of ‘free will’ theism on the one hand and Thomism on the other. Examples of the former are Arminianism and Open Theism, and of the latter the metaphysical-simplicity theism of Thomas Aquinas, such as that defended by James Dolezal in his God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of Absoluteness (Helm wrote the forward).

Oliphint’s claim is simple: the authoritative teaching of Scripture gives us the a se God active in history. From Genesis through Revelation, Scripture presents an authoritative and trustworthy, progressive and organic, revelation of God and his interaction with creation. This revelation itself directs our attention toward Christ as its culminating statement, point of completion, and central interpretive key. Scripture gives us, as our hermeneutical and theologico-methodological starting point, the incarnate Son, two natures in one person. Jesus stands upon the earth, in the flesh, and claims to be the I AM. He and the Father are one. He is the full radiance of the Glory of God. And there he stood, like us in every way but without sin, our Lord and our God.

Chalcedon represents the fact that one must not choose between natures; affirmation of the unmixed and unconfused union of two natures in one person is a non-negotiable test of orthodoxy. Who is Christ? Two natures in one person, the holy one of God, the logos incarnate. There is not a lot of wiggle room here; orthodox Christology stands on the tip of a needle. Those who picked up stones in John 8:59 and the councils of the early church all knew that the stakes were high. Oliphint’s project is to take orthodox Christology as the hermeneutical rule for understanding what Scripture says about God.

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