Ronald S Baines in “Confessing the Impassible God responds to Don Carson’s critique of some formulations of Divine Possibility by arguing that:
“The grid through which the confessional doctrine is viewed is not selected apriori asfter which the Biblical texts are viewed through this preconceived lens.”[1]
Baines objects to Carson’s suggestion that an arbitrary grid is being imposed onto the text. He goes on to say:
“The challenge is that Scripture when taken as a whole , speaks in such a way as to require viewing certain texts literalzly and certain texts metaphorically or anthreopopathically; otherwise we are left with seemingly contradictory propositions respecting the doctrine of God. Thus the clearer passages having been interpreted according to their divinely-intended sense or meaning, serve as the foundation for interpreting the less clear passages. It must be remembered that not only do individual texts have one divine sense, but so also does the whole of Scripture. A simplistic biblicism or dialectic approach portends that Scripure may have competing sense, while the interpretive model of the analogy of Scripture confesses what Scripture itself teaches, namely that properly understood, the sense of Scripture on any given doctrinal topic is not manifold but one.”[2]
Here I think is another example where the neo-classical-theist’s attempt to defend Divine Impassibility gets itself into an unnecessary mess. First it is worth noting that yes, Reformed Theology relies on the presumption that Scripture interprets Scripture so that the whole is read consistently. Whilst I don’t think that the language of clear v unclear is always helpful and whilst we want to be careful of advocating a kind of scripture within scripture, it is true that this “analogy of faith” does mean that some texts govern the meaning of others. Specifically, texts that rely on rich symbolism are understood in the light of more straight forward propositional teaching. However, this means the analogy relies on some texts carrying a more overtly literal meaning rather than a means by which we determine what is literal and what is symbolic.
In other words, when we see language that describes God as grieving, repenting and relenting against language that describes him as not relenting or changing, then Baines is still at risk of arbitrarily deciding that the one is metaphorical whilst the other is literal. He also assumes that the choice is binary between this approach to finding one meaning to doctrine and the idea that there may be any number of competing positions on any given biblical theme.
There are, I believe, two missteps here. First of all, when Baines suggests that some words and phrases can be applied literally and others metaphorically, this is to miss the crucial point. The reason why we talk about God analogically is not that some words and phrases must be taken metaphorically whilst others can be treated literally as though sometimes, we speak of God analogically and sometimes univocally.[3] The point must be that if God is transcendent and infinite then his inexhaustible otherness means that all our language about him is analogically. At the same time, his imminence and self-revelation means that we never end up speaking univocally about God, we can meaningfully apply all statements to him
Baines’ second misstep is to assume that we interpret Scripture by imposing the structure from the outside. It is still us who chose what to prioritise. A careful look at Scripture offers us an alternative. Consider for example the proverb “Do not answer a fool according to their folly.” You may recall that there is another proverb which says “answer a fool according to his folly.” Do we treat those proverbs as contradictory so that they either cancel each other out or one must take priority?
The answer is that we do not. Instead,we recognise that such contrasting statements are meant to call us to closer reading of and greater wrestling with Scripture. In that context, we don’t treat one text as taken priority and requiring us to downplay the other. After all, how do we work out which is the metaphorical and which the literal interpretation. So instead, we recognise that there was a Jewish approach, particularly with wisdom literature that would set these apparently clashing statements alongside each other. The aim was to work hard at understanding each statement in its context and then to understand in what ways and when we should answer a fool and when, how and why we should not. Similarly, we may do well rather than making arbitrary distinctions to think about how, why and when we can say that God grieves and relents and where, why and how we must not say that he does.
[1] Baines, 85.
[2] Baines, 85.
[3] There are three ways in which we can talk of another. A. Univocally where we assume that words have a direct relationship so that when we say that God is love, we confer the exact same meaning for “love” onto God’s relationship as we do onto humans. B. Equivocally where there is no connection between the two contexts. Human love gives us no clues as to what it means for God to be love and vice versa. C. Analogically where we can tease out relationships between a word’s use in one context and then in another. Here we assume that God’s love is of a different kind to human love and beyond our comprehension but we can use the word “love” meaningfully because there is a connection between the two.
Faithroots 