Sam Waldron on the Doctrine of God

Friday, August 05, 2011

Sam Waldron on the Doctrine of God

In the video below, Dr. Waldron of the Midwest Center for Theological Studies offers a useful and thought provoking structure for analyzing theology and considering the doctrine of God. I'm not sure I agree with everything that is said here, but I was greatly edified by this video in the following ways:

I was encouraged to think much more deeply than I ever have before about the Being and attributes of God - His character, His acts, His ways and His glory.
I was delighted to consider how incomprehensibly magnificent our God is.
I was moved to worship our amazing God in view of the grandeur and beauty in what He has revealed of Himself.
I was challenged to be much more careful in what I affirm and deny about our holy God.
I was humbled in realizing how much I still don't know about God, and how much I have yet to learn.

What do you think of Dr. Waldron's chart for categorizing the divine attributes? I found it enlightening and full of possibilities for explaining some difficult concepts.

What do you think of Dr. Waldron's suspicion that there is no single "fundamental attribute of God," i.e. one that sums up all of God's nature? I am currently planning a series of posts for later in the year that will take a different approach. I believe there is an attribute that sums up all of God's nature, and it's not "love" or "holiness." It's one you might not readily think of. Curious? Stay tuned! In the meantime, say whether you think it's possible.

Did you catch the comment about God's promeity? That was funny.

I highly recommend this teaching as a means of deepening your thinking about the Lord of heaven and earth. But be careful, because it will blow your mind! Enjoy.

Doctrine of God | Lecture 9 from MCTS on Vimeo.

2 comments:

proof for godAugust 5, 2011 at 4:26 PM
Thanks for posting this Vid. Good stuff. I know that I have to safeguard myself from overemphasizing one attribute of God over another forasmuch as when I ponder God’s immutability, I find that all His essential attributes are immutable. One can discover similar truths regarding God’s infinity, aseity, etc. God’s simplicity is of foundational importance as is His triune nature. What a great God; a God whom man could not envision without revelation, or counterfeit as do the numerous false religions.
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THEOparadoxAugust 5, 2011 at 4:30 PM
Mike,

AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!
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Please be charitable. If you disagree, do so with grace. Keep your words positive, focused, and on-topic. We don't expect everyone to agree, but we do expect everyone to treat everyone else with respect and grace, speaking the truth in love.

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THEOparadox MISSION Statement:

~To honor God by upholding the authority, inerrancy and sufficiency of His Word, the Bible.
~To help students of the Word to interpret Biblical paradoxes in a way that faithfully reflects God's heart.
~To ignite a devotional flame that will help believers to warm up their theology and burn up their pride.
~To encourage Christian faith by resolving or explaining apparent contradictions in the Scriptures.
~To explore the nature and extent of paradoxes in historically orthodox, Reformed, Biblical theology.

~To provide Biblical resources for those who desire to know God and His Word better.

~To glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, the Friend of sinners and the Savior of the lost.

What is a PARADOX?

A tenet or proposition contrary to received opinion, or seemingly absurd, yet true in fact.

Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828 Edition

"... it is synonymous with apparent contradiction. A 'paradox' thus amounts to a set of claims which taken in conjunction appear to be logically inconsistent. Note that according to this definition, paradoxicality does not entail logical inconsistency per se, but merely the appearance of logical inconsistency."

James Anderson, Paradox in Christian Theology

Wise Words . . .

"By advocating paradox I don't want to give the impression that I'm giving a carte blanche to not think philosophically, to not think deeply, about these doctrines. Quite the opposite. . . . My position is that with each of these doctrines we reflect on them as hard as we can, we penetrate them as best we can based on the Scriptural data that we do have, but we also recognize that there are going to be limits, and that those limits are actually a positive thing and not a reflection of some inherent problem in the doctrines or in the process of theological reflection. . . . I think we can make progress, we can make

considerable progress, in understanding these doctrines and resolving some of the . . . initial difficulties that we have with them, but at the same time recognizing that we're always only going to get so far and when we bump up against the limits of our capacity to formulate them in certain ways or to resolve certain difficulties in them, we

shouldn't be too concerned about that. We certainly shouldn't say, 'Okay, we need to admit that Christians are ultimately irrationalists.' No. We don't need to say that at all. . . . It's a Biblically constrained rationality. It's a middle way between rationalism, of which I think [Gordon H.] Clark was a representative, and irrationalism, of which, to take an example I think the Neo-Orthodox - Karl Barth - would be an example, where you're saying that there are actual contradictions in there. So I think it's navigating a Biblical middle way between these two extremes: having too high a view of the human intellect, and perhaps too low a view of the intellect, of our ability to know the things

of God."

~Dr. James Anderson

Theological Paradoxes

Below I have listed some of the classic theological paradoxes (and a few interesting ironies, too) . . .

~The Trinity - God is One being revealed in three distinct persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit)
~God is transcendent (separate from His creation) yet immanent (in His creation)
~Omnipresence - God is always present everywhere, yet He sometimes speaks of Himself as "present" in a special way
~The Incarnation - God became a man
~The Virgin Birth - A Jewish virgin gave birth to the Son of God
~The Two Natures of Christ - Jesus is fully (100%) God and fully (100%) man

~The Atonement is sufficient to save every person, but efficient only for those who believe
~God is completely sovereign (in control of everything, everywhere, all the time) yet He is not the author of sin and he uses human choice to accomplish His purposes
~Inspiration of Scripture - The Bible was written by sinful human beings yet it is the inerrant and flawless Word of God
~Divine Revelation - Sinful man cannot comprehend God, yet God reveals Himself to sinful man
~Sanctification - Christians are sinners by nature, but saints by grace
~Suffering - God brings His joy and comfort into our lives through our experiences of pain, disappointment and suffering

There are many others. Paradox is everywhere when we attempt to understand God's ways in a genuinely Biblical way.

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Friday, August 05, 2011

Sam Waldron on the Doctrine of God

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