I have some simple questions, but I think they require a little background, so please bear with the quotation.
Richard Muller, Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, I, 229
Now in Letham's book on the Trinity, one of the things that crops up more than once is the idea that certain relations between the persons being covenantal in nature would be a form of modalism, inasmuch as God would then be different in essence from what He is in His revelation. I do not have the book at hand, but one such statement can be found in the preface, the first time he mentions B.B. Warfield.
So it seems to me that Letham (who professes admiration for Torrance on the Trinity) has accepted an idea which, according to Muller, is not in keeping with Calvin or Reformed Orthodoxy.
Am I drawing a connection where none exists, or drawing the wrong connection?
Is Muller right?
If Muller is right, then does Calvin's view or Torrance's have greater dogmatic merit?
Richard Muller, Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, I, 229
Thus the theology of the Reformation recognized not only that God is distinct from his revelation and that the one who reveals cannot be fully comprehended in the revelation[24], but also that the revelation, given in a finite and understandable form, must truly rest on the eternal truth of God: this is the fundamental message and intention of the distinction between archetypal and ectypal theology.
[24]This is certainly the point at which the Reformed tradition parts company with the Barthian reading of Calvin, particularly as popularized by Torrance -- which declares that the "Being" of God and the revelatory "Act" of God are identical or argues "the identity of God's self-revelation with God himself"; see T.F. Torrance, "Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy," in Scottish Journal of Theology, 39 (1986), pp. 462-463, 472, 478; idem, "The Legacy of Karl Barth (1886-1986)," in Scottish Journal of Theology, 39 (1986), pp. 294, 299, 301, 303-304; idem, "The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition," in Reformed Review, 54/1 (Autumn 2000), p. 6. Torrance's approach, whatever its dogmatic merits, entirely lacks historical foundation: his reading of the materials is inimical to the thought-world of Calvin and of the Reformed tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries in general; cf. my comments in "The Barth Legacy: New Athanasius or Origen Redivivus? A Response to T.F. Torrance," in The Thomist, 54/4 (October 1990), pp. 673-704.
Now in Letham's book on the Trinity, one of the things that crops up more than once is the idea that certain relations between the persons being covenantal in nature would be a form of modalism, inasmuch as God would then be different in essence from what He is in His revelation. I do not have the book at hand, but one such statement can be found in the preface, the first time he mentions B.B. Warfield.
So it seems to me that Letham (who professes admiration for Torrance on the Trinity) has accepted an idea which, according to Muller, is not in keeping with Calvin or Reformed Orthodoxy.
Am I drawing a connection where none exists, or drawing the wrong connection?
Is Muller right?
If Muller is right, then does Calvin's view or Torrance's have greater dogmatic merit?
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