“The Lord counsels us with His eyes on us— ‘I will counsel you with my eye upon you’ (Psalm 32:8). Theology, too, lives by the same promise.
The end effect of grace is joy. The penitential psalms— of which Psalm 32 is but one- begin in sorrow and end in joy, since it is penitence that accomplishes this joy.
In confessing our sin and engaging in penitential acts, we move from not only being ‘glad in the LORD’ (Ps 32:11); we move, moreover, to the more exuberant and extroverted language of shouting for joy.
Gladness ends in joy. Joy is for the ‘righteous’ and the ‘upright in heart’ (Ps 32:11). When our wills are conformed to God, we are glad, so glad that we shout for joy. This is grace, and theology may have a share in expressing, in a rather extroverted manner, the joy intrinsic to the subject matter.
The pilgrimage and battle of which we have been speaking in this book may be described, to be sure, but ultimately divine goodness must be experienced and lived. Beatitude is for the just and upright. Beatitude requires or assumes a disposition, an upright disposition, if we would have our hearts and minds conformed to God.
Theology is an act of praise, a form of praise and prayer, and without an upright heart, the theologian’s work will cease to be theology, having promoted gods of his or her own making. Prayer and praise are the ‘lens’ through which the doctrine of God must be addressed.
If theology as with praise ‘befits the upright’ (Ps 33:1), then it is possible to do theology in a mode ‘full of the steadfast love of the LORD’ (Ps 33:5).
That fullness or repleteness, as Thomas notes in an extremely perceptive comment, is more a matter of ‘spiritual goods’ rather than ‘temporal… more so since the coming of Christ’? He then cites Acts 2:4, the pouring out of the Spirit, Pentecost.
The earth is subject to an abundance of spiritual goodness that is often manifesting visibly, for example, in the rain that falls on the just and unjust. Importantly, this is not to minimize human suffering.
Rather, it is counsel for the upright. In the next life, we will not say such things, for heaven is the steadfast love of the Lord, of which there is nothing better. Heaven is the Lord himself, and all things existing- directly- in relationship to the Lord himself.
This is our hope, and it is grace; and theology, if it be theology, nurtures that hope, encourages that intimacy. Were there not grace, we would not be.
The function of theology is to assist the faithful in remaining with the Lord himself. In our strange moment, when it would seem that, existentially speaking, chaos has never been more ubiquitous, there is God, theology’s very subject matter.
Accordingly, I conclude this book with almost a rebuke to myself. Why was I so slow in treating things that theology treats— for example, the works of salvation, the whole Christ— without referring them to God? The question of the Gospels, especially of the Fourth Gospel, is ‘Where do you come from?” Jesus, of course, says that he is from the Father, from God, with whom he is one.
I suspect I was so slow in part because I did not really know how to pray, or indeed want to pray, ordained minister though I am. Just so, it is in living the doctrine of God, at whose heart is the Creator/creature distinction, that one sees why Christ, by whom we are saved, gladly and delightfully orders himself to his Father, our Father, even unto death.
We treat salvation, yes, the whole Christ, yes, these and many more things, but only so far as they are ordered to God.
It is this robust, disciplined, and spiritually motivated theocentrism that matters for unfolding the great teachings of the faith. Without God’s unity and the distinction of persons being placed front and center, which includes the procession of creatures from him, the other great teachings of the church catholic lack a home, especially in relation to the Old Testament.
The christological concentration championed today reflects something of a distortion. We must treat the whole Christ, his person and work and his members, the church, his body, but not without these themes being ordered to God and being scripturally narrated from Genesis to Revelation.
If this book has any salience for the pursuit of a scripturally rooted reception of the glories of God, I would hope that it helps revitalize attention to the importance of attending to some classical and medieval distinctions in the doctrine of God, indeed how those distinctions encourage us to cry out to God that we may be taught Him so as to love Him, world without end.”
–Christopher R. J. Holmes, The Lord is Good: Seeking the God of the Psalter, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2018), 185-187.
[HT: Scott Bielinski]
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