SJT 70(2): 227–249 (2017)
C
Cambridge University Press 2017
Book reviews
doi:10.1017/S0036930616000600
John Webster, God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology, 2 vols.
(London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), pp. vii + 231. £65.00 (vol. 1);
vii + 192. £65.00 (vol. 2).
John Webster’s work was long-invested in showing how Christian theology
retains its theological character. In 1997, when he took the post of Lady
Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, he sketched
this investment in his inaugural lecture, ‘Theological Theology’. There he
outlined the ways in which modern theology found itself performing its tasks
indebted to habits of mind quite foreign to itself. It was no longer the case that
Christian theology’s internal logic, orienting principles and virtues of mind
were chiefly responsible for setting its course and evaluating its progress.
Theological disciplines had been ‘de-regionalized’, Webster argued, ‘pressed
to give an account of themselves in terms drawn largely from fields of
enquiry other than theology’. That lecture marked out a set of problems
towards which Webster set himself the last twenty years. Addressing those
problems took the form of constructive dogmatics: portraying the beauty
of the gospel as the outward movement of mercy and grace sourced in the
utterly sufficient and complete life of the triune God.
Webster’s style of constructive dogmatics was rarely polemical – though
he was never one to pull a punch. Rather, the form of argument was most
frequently careful description. In an essay included in this collection he wrote,
‘Theology has to describe the gospel well, and to persuade by description.
In terms of its speech before the world, therefore, theology simply speaks
the gospel and leaves the gospel to look after itself’ (vol. 2, p. 50). He calls
it elsewhere, ‘doctrinal portraiture’. Argumentation is only incidental to the
task of good dogmatics: ‘to unleash doctrines and let them run, to allow
them to explicate themselves with the assistance of a conceptual vocabulary
and a measure of systematic orientation’ (vol. 1, p. 30).
Conceptual vocabulary and systematic orientation are useful only as ‘the
instruments of spiritual apprehension’ (vol. 1, p. 27). Whatever else the
theologian might say about God’s interaction with the world (his outer
works), she must first – diligently and cheerfully – give her attention to God’s life
in himself. For Webster this was a corrective to so much that goes wrong in
Christian thought, not least of which the migration of theology away from
the praise of God. In every era, no less ours, theologians are prone to slip
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scottish journal of theology
from the doxological register into speculation. But when their attention is
trained again and again back onto God, then the distance shortens between
the work of sanctified reason and praise. ‘If Christian dogmatics wishes to
offer a corrective, it can only be by recalling itself to its proper calling,
which is the praise of God by crafting concepts to turn the mind to the
divine splendor’ (ibid.).
All this prologue is merely to accentuate the level of consistency one finds
across Webster’s career, and no less across the essays in God Without Measure:
Working Papers in Christian Theology. The essays in volume 1, God and the Works of God,
centre on God and his economy and are divided into two parts. In the first
part, ‘God in Himself’, four essays concern theology proper: the divine life in
se (aseity, processions, and two on christology). The eight essays in the second
part, ‘God’s Outer Works’, take up God’s works in creation, providence and
the history of grace. The division follows the formal definition of theology
that guides Webster from one essay to the next: theology is concerned first
with God, and then with all things in relation to God. It’s a classic definition to
be sure, but its first part, ‘God’, requires no small amount of patience. Indeed,
to dwell on the divine nature and persons, their processions and eternal
relations, requires a degree of patience that Webster argues is necessary to
ground all that follows.
The theologian’s patience is required, in part, because she is concerned
with ‘invisible things’ (vol. 1, p. 6). Even when the works of God and its
effects present themselves to her senses, she must, Webster insists, have the
patience and courage to follow them further back to the divine life itself.
‘God’s outer works are most fully understood as loving and purposive,’ he
repeatedly insists, ‘when set against the background of his utter sufficiency’ (vol. 1, p. 6;
emphasis mine). Again, ‘We do not understand the economy unless we take
time to consider God who is, though creatures might not have been’ (vol.
1, p. 86). And again, ‘The nature of God’s works ad extra cannot be grasped
without immediate reference to God’s intrinsic self-satisfaction which is their
principle or ground’ (vol. 1, p. 214).
Whereas some recent theology is impatient with first principles and
worried over conceptual abstraction, Webster appears aware but untroubled.
Like a musical theme and variation, in these essays a vision of theology’s telos
reappears time and again: the movement of the regenerate mind towards the
resplendently complete triune life. Thus, where does one go to consider the
shape of any particular Christian doctrine? To the doctrine of the Trinity,
and further in to the doctrine of the divine processions. There one finds the
backdrop against which the outer works of God are properly understood as
the actions of this God. Relations of origin among the divine persons are not
hopeless abstractions but, Webster avers, ‘a way of articulating the infinite
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Book reviews
depth within the being of God, that ocean whose tide is the missions of
the Son and the Spirit by which lost creatures are redeemed and perfected’
(vol. 1, p. 41).
From one essay to the next Webster funds whatever doctrine he takes in
hand by contentedly returning to the doctrine of the Trinity and the divine
processions. For instance, the doctrine of providence must ‘begin far back
in the doctrine of God – not simply with, for example, divine power or
intelligence but with God’s complete inner life which he is from and in
himself as Father, Son, and Spirit, that is, with the eternal plenitude of the
divine processions in which consists the divine blessedness. Providence is
an aspect of the uncaused wonder of the overflow of God’s abundant life’
(vol. 1, p. 135). Then he repeats the move with soteriology, justification
and ecclesiology (chapters 10–12). In each case the move is, first, backward
to ‘God’s boundless immanent life’ (vol. 1, p. 146) and only then forward
to the material content of the doctrine and the manner in which it directs
Christian obedience.
The same method guides the essays of volume 2, Virtue and Intellect. This may
surprise, given they consider the moral and intellectual acts of creatures – how
could God’s inner life illumine the moral life? ‘Practical-moral theology has
a retrospective moment,’ Webster explains, ‘because answers to the question
“what shall we do?” draw upon an understanding of who “we” are, and
therefore upon what is said about God and God’s works.’ Moral theology
must, then, not rush to practice but ‘pause long and lovingly over God and
created moral being’ (vol. 2, p. 3). Theological intelligence gives itself first
to God and only after to everything in relation to God. The moral life of
the regenerate is in view but as it is comprehended according to the origin
and ends of creaturely life. Those origins and ends can only be properly
comprehended against the backdrop of God’s overflowing inner sufficiency.
For example, when explicating the virtue of mercy, Webster writes, ‘we need
to start very far back indeed, ultimately with teaching about the Trinity,
proximately with teaching about the incarnation of the Word’. This is no
metaphysical abstraction or unnecessary delay but ‘essential to discovering
the moral texture of the world and our own identities as agents in the world’
(vol. 2, p. 52). The same moves direct his treatment of the Christian life as
mortification and vivification (chapter 7) and his theology of the intellectual
life (chapter 9).
This approach to theological intelligence – its practices, norms and virtues
– was once normative but lost prestige. Webster’s entire project is a theology
of retrieval, which he elsewhere calls an ‘attitude of mind’, in which resources
from the past are found distinctly advantageous for the present. Throughout
these essays he traces his way from Barth back through post-Reformation
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scottish journal of theology
Protestants like Owen and Turretin, further back into the thought of Calvin,
and then into the deep reservoir of Thomas Aquinas (he appears most
frequently). And then further back still, Aquinas and the post-Reformation
scholastics form a kind of lens through which Webster appropriates
resources from the church fathers (most often Chrysostom, Hillary, and
Augustine).
Taken together the essays in God Without Measure read like a template for
a multivolume systematic theology. This was not accidental, for Webster
had for some time planned to begin one. The final essay of volume 1, ‘What
Makes Theology Theological?’, gives the impression of the author composing
himself, taking a deep breath before launching out. His death last year makes
his closing remarks in the essay all the more poignant. Commenting on
topics he was unable to address, he remarks, ‘Had we but world enough and
time . . . ’ (p. 224).
Following his death such remarks are painful to read, but not without
hope. ‘Theology’, we should remember, ‘is oriented chiefly to invisible
things, “things that are unseen” (2 Cor 4:18)’ (vol. 1, p. 6). This is as it
should be, for faith is the particular form of seeing native to the Christian
life. But it will not always be so. In glory we will stand in the presence of
God and share in his life. This was his hope. As we grieve Webster’s death,
we should praise God in the same breath that what he saw by faith he now
has by sight.
Kent Eilers
Huntington University, Huntington, IN 46750, USA
keilers@huntington.edu
doi:10.1017/S0036930616000508
Alasdair Raffe, The Culture of Controversy: Religious Arguments in Scotland 1660–1714.
Studies in Modern Religious History 28 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012),
pp. xvi + 289, index + maps. £60.00.
Alasdair Raffe’s study of Scottish religious culture across the turn of the
eighteenth century makes an important contribution to our understanding
of Scottish religious and controversial culture in this period. Based on work
originally undertaken for his doctorate, this book represents the fruits of
a decade of engagement of this critical period in Scottish church history
which saw the confirmation of Presbyterian order in the Church of Scotland
and with it the emergence of both Episcopalianism and dissenting forms
of Presbyterianism. By taking as his period the entirety of the later Stuart
monarchy, from the Restoration in 1660 to the death of Queen Anne in
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