How Classical Theism Has Shaped My Spiritual Life

I have spent the last ten years or so thinking about God. This is not to say that God held no interest for me before the early 2010s. My preoccupation, then, was more in the area of Christology, which was understood along largely Barthian lines. This is not to say that I am now uninterested in Christology—Heaven forbid! Rather, I have come to appreciate Christology’s home, which is the doctrine of God. That has led me to a deeper embrace of God, offering “to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.” (Heb 12:28b-29) Acceptable worship of God—that has been my theological focus. I write in ways that encourage acceptable worship to the one, holy, and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.I had not really paid adequate attention to where the Son comes from—the Father—and where the Son, together with the Spirit, leads, which is of course to the Father. Click To Tweet

As a younger theologian, I did not adequately consider Jesus Christ as “the way” to God. (John 14:6) I saw him more as the beginning, way, and end of the theological enterprise. This left little room for God the Father, the blessed first person of the Trinity. Just so, I happily honored Christ as the Centre—which I still do today!—but I did so in a rather lopsided way. I had not really paid adequate attention to where the Son comes from—the Father—and where the Son, together with the Spirit, leads, which is of course to the Father. My reading of Scripture was rather truncated.

With the help and discipline provided by Saint Augustine, I began to fall in love with God. Each year, I re-read his Confessions. Falling in love with God is not as quaint, however, as it may sound. The God whom Jesus calls us to love is great. His grandeur knows no bounds, his absolute goodness unending. Augustine asks in I. v(5) of the Confessions: “What are you to me? . . . Lord God, tell me what you are to me.” Not surprisingly, Augustine responds with the Psalms: “Say to my soul, I am your salvation” (Ps 34:3).

Augustine helped me to see afresh almighty God, to glimpse something of “what” God is. In his extraordinary doctrinal meditation titled The Trinity, Augustine reminds us that Scripture speaks generously about what God is; Augustine calls this the “substance-wise” register. Scripture testifies eloquently to God’s attributes as common to the Father, Son, and Spirit. Each one of the three is equally great, not three greatnesses, but one greatness.In my younger years, I do not think that I heard so well, mainly because I was conditioned to see figures like Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas as suspect because of their supposed embrace of an alien metaphysics. Click To Tweet

Father, Son, and Spirit are one, and the Father is the eternal principle of that oneness and unity. This is straightforward enough, one might think. Even so, this mystery is so precious and sacred that its articulation assumes a form of life. “Speak to me that I may hear.” (Conf I. v(5))

In my younger years, I do not think that I heard so well, mainly because I was conditioned to see figures like Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas as suspect because of their supposed embrace of an alien (that is, Greek) metaphysics. I no longer believe that now, and have not for some time. What I do believe more and more is that God, to use Hebert McCabe’s disarmingly simple words, “still matters.” God matters most. Theological metaphysics, rightly deployed, encourages such a conviction. Each day, I live with that in mind, heart, and soul. I join with Saint Thomas, as he comments on the Psalter, that “there is nothing better than God.”

My spirituality, then, has been increasingly shaped by a classical vision of God’s greatness, grandeur, as well as inestimable and simple goodness. As a result, I see things now in Scripture that I had not been able to see before. I see that Scripture’s author “is God who comprehends everything all at once in his understanding.” (ST 1.1.10) To think of God as the One who authors Scripture and comprehends its many meanings is an inexhaustibly rich insight. We live in a world charged with signs of God. The greatest sign—the written Word of God—speaks eloquently, at every juncture, of its Author. Understanding where Scripture comes from, indeed the whole natural order; taking loving notice of their source—this and more has the classical doctrine of God taught me.

Nothing has shaped my spiritual life more than God via the testimony of Scripture. I read Scripture expecting the Lord God to “tell me what you are to me.” (Conf I. v(5)) When I was younger, I read Scripture in a rather instrumental sense expecting it to lead me to God. This is, of course, well and good. Now, however, I see Scripture and all things for that matter as filled “with the whole of himself.” (Conf I. iii(3)) To see Scripture as not only authored by God but filled with the whole of his glory has renewed and deepened a sense of my vocation. My vocation as a theologian involves, at its heart, Scripture. The perennial challenge is to see God as its author, the author of all Scripture and the One comprehensive of its many meanings. I could not do this if I were unable to recognize God in myself—as his likeness—and God in the Scriptures as Scripture’s very Author.My spirituality has been increasingly shaped by a classical vision of God’s greatness, grandeur, as well as inestimable and simple goodness. Click To Tweet

I am all too aware of how easy it is to see things as, well, just things, rather than God’s gift to us. The classical theist tradition has evoked in me an ever deepening gratitude for how God blesses us with gifts that awake praise. Indeed, if I—as “a little piece of your creation”—am not joining in the angelic chorus in its praise of God, I will be unable to discern God’s authorship of Scripture. (Conf I. i(1)) I will only be able to appreciate it on a rather superficial narrative level and not as transmitting sacred mysteries.

In its various iterations, the classical tradition has encouraged me to know God as “deeply hidden and yet most intimately present” in Holy Scripture. (Conf I. iv(4)) My vocation as a theologian and my joy as a Christian is to consider that presence and pass on the fruits of that consideration to others. Such consideration, moreover, reflects a desire, namely, the desire to praise. God makes everything in such a way that it takes pleasure in praising God in a way appropriate to the kind of thing that it is. In the case of Scripture, it is a ‘thing’ inspired of and authored by God. That is what it is. Augustine, above all others, teaches me to receive things in relationship to their source, as gifts whose perfection lies in “the humanity of your Son.” (Conf I. I (1))

My spiritual life reflects what Emmanuel Durand O.P. calls a “paternal theocentrism.” That is a fancy way of saying that my life before God reflects, I hope, more and more of the order of the Trinitarian persons one to another. I see God’s beloved Son, my Saviour, as the way to the Father, our Father. I receive Jesus’ words as the Word of God and as from God. Jesus Christ is the center of my life before God. And I love him as One who mortifies and vivifies me via his glorious Spirit in accordance with my baptism. All the while, I recognize that he too will one day be subject to the Father so that “God may be all in all.” (1 Cor 15:28)Clarity with respect to God and all things in relation to God is the fruit of a God-centred intoxication. Click To Tweet

I suppose that my pilgrimage over the years has led me more deeply into Scripture, to noticing its deep patterns, and to cherishing the way it reflects the priority of the Father but ever only via his beloved Son and their Spirit. God the Father is the One to whom Christ will ultimately hand over his Kingdom. See 1 Corinthians 15:24. This clear but neglected teaching is often passed over, I think, because we have ultimately lost sight of the profoundly ascetical and devotional character of the theological enterprise. The ones who see are the saints. Unless preaching and teaching are seen as modes by which we are taught to desire “the desire of man,” they may generate interest and accolades, but they will never edify. (Conf I. i(1)) “Who will grant that you come to my heart and intoxicate it, so that I forget my evils and embrace my one and only good.” (Conf I. v(5))

To know and to love the greatness and grandeur of the triune God involves a kind of spiritual program. I would like to think that I have embarked on the program in a way that encourages others to embark too. Clarity with respect to God and all things in relation to God is the fruit of a God-centred intoxication. Without that, we are unable to answer well the question Augustine poses to God—“What are you to me?” (Conf I. v(5)) As I muddle along through middle age, I desire, more and more, to say that you—God—are my everything. I desire that God “tell me what you are to me” as I listen to the Scriptures which he authors, and speak them back to him in Christ and the Spirit with the help, especially, of the Psalter. (Conf I. v(5))