Reinventing Christian Doctrine

Front matter

= MAARTEN WISSE ne:

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Maarten Wisse tatclark

Chapter 1 RETRIEVING THE LAW-GOSPEL DISTINCTION FOR THE TASK OF DOGMATICS Reinventing Christian dogmatics

Dogmatics from the perspective of the Law-Gospel distinction Dogmatics as a ‘second act’

Christology as the root of dogmatics

Christology and soteriology are intertwined

Does the Law do away with the Gospel?

Overview

Chapter 2 LAW AND GOSPEL AS A HEURISTIC LENS 2.1 2.2 2.3

2.4

Law and Gospel: A working definition The history of the distinction

2.3.1 Looking back: Augustine

2.3.2 The medieval tradition: Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas

2.3.3 The key source of the distinction: Melanchthon 2.3.4 The exception: Calvin

2.3.5 The rule: Reformed scholasticism

2.3.6 The twentieth century: Barth

Towards a new understanding of Law and Gospel

Chapter 3 SCRIPTURE USE IN AUGUSTINE AND THE REFORMATION 3.1 3.2 3.3

3.4 3.5 3.6

Christocentrism

Augustine on Law and Gospel, ‘nature’ and ‘grace’ 3.3.1 Sermon 141

The Johannine prologue in the Reformation

The problem in a nutshell

Radical receptions of the Johannine prologue 3.6.1 Michael Servetus

Se ON BWR viii

3.7

Contents

3.6.2 Sebastian Franck

3.6.3 Melchior Hoffman and Menno Simons 3.6.4 Martin Bucer and John Calvin

3.6.5 Martin Luther

Conclusion

Chapter 4 CHRISTOCENTRISM IN KARL BARTH, THE GOSPEL OF JOHN AND THE POSSIBILITY OF NATURAL THEOLOGY

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9

Barth as an experimental theologian

The Barmen Declaration

A historical deconstruction of Barth’s reading of Barmen in Church Dogmatics II/1

“The Word of God as the task of theology’ (1922)

“The first commandment as theological axiom’ (1933) “Three basic patterns of theology’ (1936)

Christocentrism in the Church Dogmatics 1/2

Barth and the Johannine tradition

Chapter 5 CONTRA ET PRO SOLA SCRIPTURA What do I mean by sola scriptura?

Its dogmatics and preaching, stupid!

The sola scriptura makes theologians lazy Scripture between Law and Gospel

Pro sola scriptura

Consequences of this step

Chapter 6 IN DEFENCE OF DOUBLE PREDESTINATION 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

6.5 6.6 6.7

From Law and Gospel to predestination and the other way around Why predestination matters today

Definition of terms

Three basic options in soteriology

6.4.1 Hard universalism

6.4.2 Soft universalism

Understanding double predestination

Innovating double predestination

Predestination and assurance of faith

67 71 72 74 77

79 79 80 84

89 91 98 105 110 113

Contents

Chapter 7 ATONEMENT: SOCINUS AND OWEN IN CONVERSATION Two theses

Socinus’ critique of substitutionary atonement John Owens reply

Owen's use of the Bible

Anthropology as an argument

How Socinus and Owen share the same concern Diagnosing the Fall

God as the lord of Florence

God, Law and Gospel

Chapter 8 HOLY SUPPER: RETRIEVING ABRAHAM KUYPER

Abraham Kuyper on the Lord’s Supper Comparison and further analysis Preliminary conclusion

In search of a new paradigm

A Zwinglian point of view?

Extra calvinisticum?

Chapter 9 LAW AND GOSPEL AS A KEY TO THE THEOLOGY OF THE RELIGIONS

9.1 9.2

9.3 The Law and Gospel distinction as a critical instrument in theology 9.4 Religion as truth and the nature of the Gospel as promise

Introduction Religions as sources of knowledge and truth

Bibliography Biblical Index General Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Books tend to take a long time to complete, at least for me. This book is no exception. It began to take shape during my stay in Germany from 2004 to 2006, when I was working on a monograph on Augustine’s Trinitarian theology. Along the way, I discovered that Augustine’s theology is characterized by a certain duality that I missed in contemporary theology and even in contemporary interpretations of Augustine. I increasingly noticed how important that duality really was to my own way of doing theology, and this realization led to a growing curiosity as to what that duality might be and how it could become key for doing systematic theology in the here and now. Step by step, I learned to see what this intuition offered, and it took a long time, alongside an academic career that is about so much more than just doing research, to flesh out in greater detail what it means to do theology in terms of ‘Law’ and ‘Gospel; as I gradually learned to call it.

Many people have provided crucial insights along the way, sometimes also by proposing them in ways radically different from how I have eventually come to use them. In all sorts of ways, I owe this book to my systematic-theological training at Heidelberg and Tübingen under the supervision of Christoph Schwöbel. Before this book was published, Christoph suddenly passed away. This book is dedicated to his memory. Although he hesitated to use the Law-Gospel distinction as key to systematic theology, it was never far from his Lutheran approach to theology, and so I learned from him in many more respects than I first realized. A second important intellectual environment for the writing of this book was the Faculty of Theology, now the Faculty of Religion and Theology, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. When I arrived there in 2009, I was still working on my Augustine monograph, but the deep interest of the systematic theologians there - and of Kees van der Kooi in particular - in the relationship between the use of Scripture and systematic theology guided me to a combination of reception studies and systematic theology, which is clearly visible in some of the chapters of this book. In this way, I learned to combine the hermeneutical approach of my PhD research with the systematic-theological work for my Augustine monograph. This could not have happened without the wider circle of systematic theologians at the Vrije Universiteit at that time: Gijsbert van den Brink, Martien Brinkman, Eddy van der Borght, Katja Tolstaya, Wim van Vlastuin, Fernando Enns, Henk Bakker, Teun van der Leer and others. I would also like to thank Mirjam van Veen and Jesse Spohnholz - colleagues from the Historical Theology Department - for very stimulating conversations on Reformation history and the radical Reformation in particular.

I completed work on the book at my new institution, the Protestant Theological University. While it may be housed in the same Vrije Universiteit building, it was anew intellectual environment nonetheless, with new colleagues and new things to learn

Acknowledgements xi from them. Here, I would like to express my thanks to Rinse Reeling Brouwer, Edward van ’t Slot, Wim Moehn, Klaas-Willem de Jong, Arjan Plaisier, Klaas Bom, Benno van der Toren, Heleen Zorgdrager and Rick Benjamins. A new conversation with colleagues working in the area of Christian ethics - Pieter Vos, Petruschka Schaafsma, Rob Compaijen and Theo Boer - brought to the fore fresh insights that proved relevant to the way in which the Law-Gospel distinction could be used in systematic theology.

For their comments on an earlier draft of Chapter 4, I would like to thank my former students Simon van der Linden and Marc Jongma, as well as my colleagues Rinse Reeling Brouwer, Edward van ’t Slot and Arjan Plaisier. I would also like to thank Bart Kamphuis, Hans Burger, Arnold Huijgen and other members of the BEST research group for their contributions to Chapter 5. I am indebted to Oliver Crisp, Dolf te Velde and Raymond R. Hausoul, who commented on an earlier version of Chapter 6. I also express my thanks to Kyle Dieleman, Albert Gootjes and Raymond E. Blacketer for working with me to correct my English. Writing academic English is no easy task and will always remain a fragile endeavour, but you helped me to express myself as clearly as possible in a language that is not my own.

This is also the place to thank the publishers for their permission to republish earlier papers as partial book chapters, most in an updated and expanded form. The following chapters were published earlier:

e Parts of Chapter 1 appeared in an earlier form as: ‘Retrieving the Law and Gospel Distinction for the Task of Dogmatics, Neue Zeitschrift fiir Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 61.3 (2019), 297-315.

° A shorter version of the discussion of the Reformation in Chapter 3 was published in German as: ““... welches alle Menschen erleuchtet”? Die Krise der Europäischen Identität im Spiegel der frühmodernen Rezeption des Johannesprologs, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 55.1 (2013), 1-19.

e Chapter 5 was published as: ‘Contra et Pro Sola Scriptura, in Sola Scriptura: Biblical and Theological Perspectives on Scripture, Authority and Hermeneutics, ed. Hans Burger and Arnold Huijgen, Studies in Reformed Theology, 32 (Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2017), pp. 19-37.

e An earlier version of Chapter 7 appeared as: “The Law and Gospel Distinction as a Frame of Reference for Communicative Rationality: Socinus and Owen on Atonement, in Rationalität Im Gespräch, ed. Markus Mühling and Martin Wendte, Marburger Theologische Studien, 126 (Leipzig: Evangelischer Verlagsanstalt, 2016), pp. 267-77.

e An earlier and shorter version of Chapter 8 was published as: ‘Christ’s Presence through the Spirit in the Holy Supper: Retrieving Abraham Kuyper, in The Spirit Is Moving: New Pathways in Pneumatology, ed. Gijsbert van den Brink, Eveline van Staalduine and Maarten Wisse, Studies in Reformed Theology, 38 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 331-45.

e Chapter 9 was published in German as: ‘Das Gesetz als Kriterium der systematischen Theologie? Überlegungen zur Konzeption einer Theologie der Religionen, Zeitschrift für Dialektische Theologie 34.2 (2018), 99-113.

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Chapter 1 RETRIEVING THE LAW-GOSPEL DISTINCTION FOR THE TASK OF DOGMATICS

Modern dogmatics is deeply interested in knowledge about God. In traditional Protestant dogmatics, this interest manifested itself in the attempt to summarize what the Bible has to say about the reality of God and God’ acts in creation and redemption. As such, dogmatics is about propositions: it is about who God is, and what God’ attributes and God’s works are. In the twentieth century, this way of doing dogmatics was subjected to criticism from several different angles. Particularly well known in the Anglo-Saxon world is George Lindbeck’s critique of propositional approaches to dogmatics.’ As a pupil of Hans Frei, Lindbeck formed part of the post-war continental dogmatic tradition which was heavily influenced by the theology of Karl Barth. Barth himself had already distanced himself from dogmatics as a system derived from an idealistic philosophical principle or as a biblicist summary of the message of Scripture. In his mature theology, Barth sought to develop a dogmatics based instead on the Christological dogma (see Chapter 4). In doing so, he established a very close relationship between who God is and what God does. God’s being is in God’s acts.” Although Barth was very much concerned about the reality-depicting status of dogmatics, he still understood dogmatics to be aimed at a description of this reality of God in God’s acts. Even when we cannot speak about God as we ought, we must and do speak.’ The reality of God which is being represented in the language of faith may be a dynamicized reality, but it nevertheless remains a description of reality. In this regard, Lindbeck went one step further when he understood dogmatics as an analysis of the grammar

1. George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1984).

2. Cf. Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being Is in Becoming (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976).

3. Karl Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie’ in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1922-1925, ed. Holger Finze-Michaelsen, Karl Barth-Gesamtausgabe 19 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1990), 151.

of the community of faith. Others, including Don Cupitt in Britain! and Harry Kuitert in the Netherlands,’ went so far as to deny the reality-depicting character of theological expressions altogether. All of these proposals from the twentieth century represented reactions to the propositional character of dogmatics and of theology in general.

In contemporary systematic theology, the approach to dogmatic practice as a descriptive endeavour is nuanced. John Webster, for example, has shown a strong interest in dogmatics as the description of the reality of God: ‘Christian dogmatic language about the divine attributes explicates the nature of the triune God by offering an analytical depiction of God’s identity: This description takes the form ofa doxology and includes a profound awareness ofthe mystery ofthe Triune God that we describe, but is still motivated by a deep longing for truth and a strong bond to the way in which Scripture as revelation speaks about God and God’s acts.’

Kevin Vanhoozer’s work shows a similar nuance in the way in which the representative task of dogmatics is integrated with other functions. On the one hand, Vanhoozer pleads for taking the propositional aspect of faith and dogmatics most seriously. Dogmatics is not only a story or the grammar of the community of faith but refers to the reality of God and to our reality.’ At the beginning of a recent chapter on the task of dogmatics, Vanhoozer defined ‘dogmatics’ as ‘the church’s attempt to employ its own resources (e.g., Scripture, tradition) to issue binding statements concerning who God is and what God is doing.’ On the other hand, Vanhoozer is well aware of the limitations of a merely propositional account of dogmatics. This is why he uses the notion of drama." The drama of God's acts in history issues a call to us to enter this drama and to respond to it in faith: ‘Stated even more succinctly: dogmatics says what is “in Christ”. As we will see, however, saying what is in Christ cannot be abstracted from having the mind of Christ and walking in the way of Christ!!! Believers are included in the drama and must live

4. Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (New York: Crossroad, 1981).

5. Harry M. Kuitert, The Necessity of Faith: Or, Without Faith Youre as Good as Dead (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976).

6. John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics II (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 87.

7. E.g. John Webster, ‘Principles of Systematic Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology 11, no. 1 (1 January 2009): 56-71, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-240 0.2008.00423.x.

8. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 276-81.

9. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘Analytics, Poetics, and the Mission of Dogmatic Discourse; in The Task of Dogmatics: Explorations in Theological Method, ed. Oliver Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 23; original emphasis.

10. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, 63-9.

11. Vanhoozer, Analytics, Poetics, and the Mission of Dogmatic Discourse} 23; original emphasis.

in a way that fits with what God does in Jesus Christ through the Spirit. But even then, the primary function of dogmatics still is to describe the drama or, to use Vanhoozer’s metaphor, to prepare for the re-enactment of the drama of the reality of God and God’s acts in history." From this narration of the drama follows the call. Put in terms of the transcendentals, we might say: Truth has primacy. From truth follows goodness, follows ethics, as is paradigmatically the case in Barth's dogmatics.

How widespread the tendency towards a descriptive approach to dogmatics really is can be demonstrated by pointing out how even Sarah Coakley describes ‘systematic theology’ as ‘an integrated presentation of Christian truth, however perceived ... However briefly, or lengthily ... it is explicated, “systematic theology” must attempt to provide a coherent, and alluring, vision of the Christian faith. In the rest of her book, Coakley shows herself to be profoundly aware of the dangers inherent in a descriptive approach to dogmatics.'* For this reason, she proposes to embed the descriptive task of dogmatics in the practice of contemplation. That dogmatics has a descriptive aim, however, remains unquestioned.

1.2 Reinventing Christian dogmatics

In this book, I offer an alternative to the primary interest of contemporary dogmatics in its descriptive function by exploring the idea of dogmatics as a dual discourse: one verdictive and critical, the other commissive and positive. In doing so, I place myself in the twentieth-century trajectory regarding theological language as more than merely descriptive language. I was trained in this at the University of Utrecht, where every student of theology was raised in the tradition of J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words and learned that language is not just propositional but has a range of functions that must be distinguished. Vincent Briimmer’s version of Austin’s illocutionary theory of language had a lasting influence on my theological development, both consciously and unconsciously.’ Austin and Brümmer follow Wittgenstein in construing the meaning of language as its use. Modifying Austin’s proposal, Brümmer distinguishes between four basic illocutionary acts, purposes of language: ‘constatives’ (Austin’s ‘propositions’), ‘prescriptives, ‘expressives and ‘commissives. In twentieth-century

12. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, 243-7.

13. Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 41.

14. Ibid., chapter 1.

15. Vincent Brümmer, Theology and Philosophical Inquiry (London: Macmillan, 1981), chapter 2. My first academic publication was based on my master’s thesis and discussed the meaning of the authority of the Bible in terms of Brümmer’s account of illocutionary theory, combining it with Joseph M. Bocheniski’s logical analysis of authority: Maarten Wisse, “Ihe Meaning of the Authority of the Bible, Religious Studies 36 (2000): 473-87.

philosophical theology, most of the discussion surrounding the implications of illocutionary theory for theological language has centred around the role of constatives/propositions versus expressives. If we were to describe the above developments in twentieth-century dogmatics using Austin’s theory of illocutions, we could say that traditional dogmatics is primarily interested in accounts of faith as propositions, liberal dogmatics in expressives and the newer dogmatics in a richer understanding of propositions, qualified by the broader context of doxology (expressives) or drama (propositions in narratives).

1.3 Dogmatics from the perspective of the Law-Gospel distinction

Over the years, I learned to think about the duality of theological discourse in new ways. Being trained not only in Anglo-Saxon philosophical theology but also in the history of ideas, the history of Reformed scholasticism, the early Church and modern systematic theology, I came to view this duality as a postmodern version of the classical Reformational Law-Gospel distinction, although I initially discovered it in the theology of Augustine (see Chapter 2). Historically, the Law- Gospel distinction goes back to Luther, and many still see it as a particularly Lutheran distinction. During the past several decades, and especially in the United States, scholars have rightly argued for its appropriate place within the Reformed tradition as well.'* As I said, however, it goes as far back as Augustine and even beyond him to the theology of Paul.

By rethinking theological discourse in terms of the Law-Gospel distinction, I aim to shift the attention from propositions and expressives to the role of prescriptives (Law) and commissives (Gospel). As such, I do not want to deny the role of propositions and expressives in religious discourse, but I do want to find a new place for them and thus shift the attention of theologians away from the question of realism to ‘new’ and at the same time ‘old’ functions of religious language. In doing so, I hope to overcome the downside to the influence of Enlightenment thought on Christian theology. Modernity, characterized as it is by an epistemological interest in the reliability of knowledge claims, tends to reduce theological discourse to a source of knowledge. As I have illustrated above, it is true that this reduction of theological discourse to propositions was subjected to various kinds of criticism in the twentieth century. However, much theology remains determined by this epistemological paradigm, even when postmodern

16. R. Scott Clark, ‘Law and Gospel in Early Reformed Orthodoxy: Hermeneutical Conservatism in Olevianus Commentary on Romans, in Church and School in Early Modern Protestantism: Studies in Honor of Richard A. Muller on the Maturation of a Theological Tradition, ed. Jordan J. Ballor, David S. Sytsma and Jason Zuidema, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 170 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 307-20; Michael S. Horton, ‘Calvin and the Law-Gospel Hermeneutic, Pro Ecclesia 6, no. 1 (2002): 27-42; I. John Hesselink, Calvins Concept of the Law (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1992).

theologies deny the possibility of epistemological access to God and the world. For, in denying this access, they nevertheless remain determined by the modern reduction."

In this book, I propose to look at the entire task of dogmatics from the perspective of Law and Gospel in a more encompassing and conscious way than the Christian tradition has commonly done. Of course, I would like to do so in a new context, informed in various ways by influences from the Enlightenment and postmodernity.

Before I introduce the overall argument of this book and make a concise case for its central thesis, I would like to quote the description of the Law-Gospel distinction from the Dutch seventeenth-century theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) in order to give an impression of what that distinction amounts to:

The Gospel in the strict sense, however, insofar as it is distinguished from the law, does not directly and in itself prescribe to us our plight, nor what we have to do, saying, ‘Do this; or, ‘Believe this, or, ‘Have faith’ ... But it refers to, witnesses of, and signifies to us what Christ has done for us, what God promises to us in Christ, what he wants to do, and what he will do.'®

While Chapter 2 will be devoted in its entirety to an account of the history and significance of the Law-Gospel distinction, here it suffices to note that Voetius distinguishes very sharply between the two main discourses in theology. Although he certainly acknowledges that commands and promises are present in both the Old and the New Testament, he nevertheless distinguishes between them as the two fundamental ways in which God communicates with us. The distinction aims to safeguard both the commands and the promises. As a follower of the Puritans in the Dutch context, Voetius certainly would not want to do away with the Law. Nevertheless, he is equally concerned to ensure that the Gospel, in the strict sense of the term, remains free from any prescriptive element. The Gospel does not even demand faith from us. This shows the depth of Voetius concern to keep the Gospel free as God’s promise, neither dependent on nor bound to our human response.

From the perspective of the Law-Gospel distinction, an objection obtains here against the way in which dogmatics is often practiced, namely as a description of the reality of God and God's acts (see above). If dogmatics is primarily interested

17. For a more extensive account of this point, see Maarten Wisse, Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation: Augustines de Trinitate and Contemporary Theology, T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology 11 (London: T&T Clark International, 2011), chapter 1.

18. Gisbertus Voetius, Selectae disputationes theologicae (Ultrajecti: Johannes a Waesberge, 1648-69), IV, 26: Tam vero Evangelium stricte dictum, ut a lege distinguitur, directe & per se non praescribit nobis officium nostrum, aut quid nos facere debeamus, dicendo, hoc fac, aut crede, aut confide; ... Sed refert, nuntiat, significat nobis, quid Christus pro nobis fecerit, quidque Deus in Christo promittat, quid facere velit, & facturus sit?

in the description of God’s being and acts, the implication is that it is first of all a description of God’s saving acts towards us. The way in which dogmatics speaks about God and God’s acts in history is determined by the Gospel and the Gospel alone. Precisely as a description of the Triune God’s acts, it takes its point of departure in the Gospel.

That this is indeed the effect of seeing dogmatics primarily as a description of God's being and acts can be illustrated from the way in which modern dogmatics typically views God’s saving acts towards Israel. Usually, they are understood as a foreshadowing of God's saving acts in Jesus Christ. What God does in God’s covenant with Israel is now fundamentally of the same kind as what God does in Jesus Christ. This can be demonstrated with the examples of Barth, for whom Israel is fundamentally a parallel to God’s covenant in Jesus Christ, or Hendrikus Berkhof,” or Abraham van de Beek and his theology of Israel.” In their work, the basic Law-Gospel distinction has disappeared, partly consciously, partly unconsciously.

With the disappearance of this distinction, however, a conflict emerges between the Gospel as a claim to the truth about God and about God’s acts in history on the one hand, and the nature of the Gospel as a promise and invitation on the other. This conflict becomes clear when the classical Law-Gospel distinction is translated into illocutionary terms. According to Vincent Briimmer, every ‘constative’ hides an implicit, secondary prescriptive illocution: every time we confront a conversation partner with a knowledge claim, it involves a latent call to accept the claim as true.” And so, if the primary task of dogmatics is the representation of the Gospel and God’s acts in Israel and the nations, this has the important consequence that we are invited and, given good grounds, also intellectually obliged to accept this representation as true and as corresponding to the reality of God and God's acts. Many dogmatic controversies seem to revolve around this dynamic; they are about the question of whether that which is being claimed is true. The same applies to many debates between believers and non-believers, namely whether or not that which Christians claim to know about God on the basis of revelation is true or not. And if it is true, and you do not accept it, you are either intellectually substandard or discredited. From the perspective of the Law-Gospel distinction, this turns the Gospel into a Law. If the content of the Gospel is a representation of the reality of God and God's acts in the world, then it is not primarily good news, but first of all a claim to truth that is not as such available to all, but only to those who accept a certain revelation as true.

19. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans. Geoffrey William Bromiley and Thomas F Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), H/2 and II/1.

20. Hendrikus Berkhof, Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Study of the Faith (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999), sec. 30.

21. Abraham van de Beek, De kring om de Messias: Israél als volk van de lijdende Heer: Spreken over God 1,2 (Zoetermeer: Meinema, 2002).

22. Brümmer, Theology and Philosophical Inquiry, 26-33.

This is one of the reasons why I would like to propose to learn to speak twice in dogmatics. The task of dogmatics is not primarily to describe the reality of God and his acts. Quite the contrary, it intends to protect the mystery of this reality by moving back and forth, maintaining a balance, between the prescriptives (or rather, verdictives) of the Law and the commissives of the Gospel.

This back-and-forth movement between the commissives of the Gospel and the verdictives of the Law includes references to reality or, perhaps more accurately, is concerned with the reality of the mystery of God and God’s acts. In this sense, I try to overcome the divide between a propositional and a non-propositional understanding of dogmatics. My proposal can be elucidated once again in terms of the theory of illocutions as understood by Briimmer. Every commissive, so Briimmer argues, always includes one or more implicit constatives.” I cannot believe someone who offers me one hundred dollars for nothing, if I do not believe that this person actually has one hundred dollars. Nevertheless, this person’s intention is not to claim that he has one hundred dollars. The speaker’s intention is to communicate to me his sincere intention to give me those one hundred dollars, provided that I am willing to accept them. It is indeed true that every commissive implies the need for a response from the conversation partner, but this response does not take the form of an obligation.” It is an invitation to which the conversation partner is free to respond.

1.4 Dogmatics as a ‘second act’

In light of the above, we can raise the question of the proper place for dogmatics, its locus vis-a-vis the community of faith. If the Gospel is about a promise, the question arises as to the extent to which dogmatics is called to proclaim this promise, or, if the Law is about verdictives, the extent to which dogmatics is called to proclaim those verdictives. Contrary to recent claims, it is not obvious that dogmatics as a discipline belongs to the community of faith and that it should join this community in a confession of faith or an affirmation of its truth claims. As far as I can see, dogmatics is not primarily intended as a witness to God’s promises (cf. below). In this regard, I would like to distinguish the task of dogmatics from the task of the proclamation of the Gospel within the community of faith.

23. Ibid.

24. It is now increasingly common in ‘theologies of the gift’ to emphasize that there is no gift without a response. However, this does not undo the fact that these responses can be of different kinds. Even a gift which is refused remains a gift on the part of the giver. Cf. e.g. Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan (Collegeville, MI: Liturgical, 1995), 108; Risto Saarinen, God and the Gift: An Ecumenical Theology of Giving (Collegeville, MI: Liturgical, 2005), 9, 106; John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), chapter 1.

In my understanding, the task of dogmatics is to bring the witness to the reality of God’s coming into the world for our salvation critically into a balance with the verdictives of the Law. Although the Law does command, insofar as it commands regarding speech about God and his acts, it primarily speaks negatively, verdictively, as ‘thou shall not make any Gods before me? This is why, from an illocutionary point of view, the Law does not so much contain prescriptives as verdictives. But then, in a complex relationship with these verdictives, it links up the verdictives with prescriptives that concretely and positively aim at appropriate human behaviour towards other humans, requiring the performance of righteousness.

This point may be deserving of further explanation, since the verdictive nature of the Law has ramifications for the task of dogmatics. If the proprium of the Gospel is promise, these promises witness to the reality of God and God’s acts in history, not primarily in order to claim them to be true but in order to invite us to entrust ourselves to them for our salvation. Dogmatic inquiry into the truth of the Gospel, however, is not so much an inquiry into the truth about God and God's acts themselves but is rather a balancing out of these truths in the face of the verdictives of the Law. The Law does not prescribe or claim that much, precisely because it is composed of verdictives rather than prescriptives. Rather, it delimits the possible implications that we may draw from the promises of the Gospel by saying: Do not act like this.