And indeed, this is the key point. We are apt to miss the lesson of the Old Testament’s many warnings against idolatry by chuckling at the benighted folly of those who needed some physical image with which to worship God. Indeed, some American evangelicals can be quite loud in their denunciation of more liturgical churches that use images or physical gestures in their services. Now is not the place to debate the merit of such denunciations. But what should be clear to us from the witness of Scripture is that what fundamentally concerns God is our tendency to worship the creature rather than the Creator—and this includes worshipping the Creator as a creature.

“INTRODUCTION” IN GOD OF OUR FATHERS: CLASSICAL THEISM FOR THE CONTEMPORARY CHURCH, ED. BRAD LITTLE JOHN, LOC. 223.

In his bombshell recent book All That is in God, James Dolezal has identified these trends, comprising a new theology of “theistic mutualism,” as pervasive among leading Reformed and evangelical theologians and biblical commentators of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. “In an effort to portray God as more relatable,” Dolezal summarizes, “theistic mutualists insist that God is involved in a genuine give-and-take relationship with His creatures.”[3]

At the same time, a radical revision of Trinitarian theology has been underway for several decades, with the fierce traditional insistence on divine unity replaced by a “social trinitarianism” in which a community of three persons—redefined as no longer the mysterious Greek hypostases, but in the modern English sense of individual subjects characterized by personality—either flow in and out of one another in a radical egalitarian dance (if you are socially and politically liberal) or exist in carefully-regulated structures of authority and submission (if you are socially and politically conservative). Such formulations are simply inconceivable from the standpoint of historical Christian orthodoxy, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant. Equally inconceivable is the fashionable modern talk of “the Father turning his back on the Son,” of the “Trinity being broken” at Christ’s crucifixion, language that originated in Jurgen Moltmann’s radical theological revisionism of the 1960s and 1970s and took only a couple of decades to become domesticated into conservative evangelical orthodoxy.

We could identify many causes for the current chaos—from widespread historical illiteracy, to the appearance of new philosophical challenges or at least intellectual fashions (often Kantian and Hegelian in origin), to methodological biblicism or Christocentricism. At the more popular level, though, I think that much of what drives our theological revisionism is what has always lain behind the human heart’s penchant for idolatry: a hunger for a God who is like me, a God who can relate to me, and meet me where I am, a God who is real enough to be there beside me in the midst of suffering. Whether it’s the anguished search by modern theologians for a God who could make sense out of Auschwitz or the infinitely superficial spirituality of the evangelical condolence card remembering that God will help us “mount up with wings as eagles,” the fundamental drive—emotivist and anthropocentric—is the same.

“Introduction” in GOD OF OUR FATHERS: CLASSICAL THEISM FOR THE CONTEMPORARY CHURCH, ED. BRAD LITTLE JOHN, loc. 241.

The creeds exist to serve and advance a clear apprehension of the scriptural testimony.

“ARID SCHOLARS” VS. THE BIBLE? A THEOLOGICAL AND EXEGETICAL CRITIQUE OF THE ETERNAL SUBORDINATION OF THE SON BY ALASTAIR ROBERTS IN GOD OF OUR FATHERS: CLASSICAL THEISM FOR THE CONTEMPORARY CHURCH, ED. BRAD LITTLE JOHN, 121.

The creeds exist to serve and advance a clear apprehension of the scriptural testimony. In contrast to the extreme position advanced by Ware, the Son is not performing a mission graciously “delegated” to Him by a higher authority, but is the authoritative God Himself come in the flesh. The Son’s being sent and His coming are of one piece; the authority of the Father and the authority of the Son are the same single, undivided divine authority. In recognizing this, the true wonder of the incarnation is discovered.

“ARID SCHOLARS” VS. THE BIBLE? A THEOLOGICAL AND EXEGETICAL CRITIQUE OF THE ETERNAL SUBORDINATION OF THE SON BY ALASTAIR ROBERTS IN GOD OF OUR FATHERS: CLASSICAL THEISM FOR THE CONTEMPORARY CHURCH, ED. BRAD LITTLE JOHN, 122.

Attempts to ground our vision of society upon our doctrine of the Trinity depend upon the analogy between the personhood of the Triune persons and human personhood, upon the assumption that “the triune persons are very like us, in their personhood at least, so their perfect relations might be a model for our attempts to imagine what well-lived relationships might look like.”[273] More troubling, this analogy allows for traffic in both directions. As Holmes observes, both Volf and Boff airbrush the inconvenient asymmetry of divine taxis—something which Zizioulas accents—in their doctrine of the Trinity, as it disrupts the egalitarian picture that they desire.[274]

“ARID SCHOLARS” VS. THE BIBLE? A THEOLOGICAL AND EXEGETICAL CRITIQUE OF THE ETERNAL SUBORDINATION OF THE SON by Alastair Roberts in GOD OF OUR FATHERS: CLASSICAL THEISM FOR THE CONTEMPORARY CHURCH, ED. BRAD LITTLE JOHN, 108.

Natural Theology is not the claim that all the truths of Christianity can be proved via human reasoning, without the aid of divinely inspired scriptures. Rather, Natural Theology, properly understood, does not venture to say anything about that which can be known only through divine revelation, such as, that Jesus was born of a virgin, that Jesus is God, that God is Triune, etc. Having made these distinctions, we are now in position to ask if Natural Theology, understood as that which can be known about God via rational human observations of our Universe (including ourselves), is a necessary part of protestant orthodoxy.

NATURAL THEOLOGY AND PROTESTANT ORTHODOXY” BY DAVID HAINES IN GOD OF OUR FATHERS: CLASSICAL THEISM FOR THE CONTEMPORARY CHURCH, ED. BRAD LITTLE JOHN, 59.

Natural Theology, broadly defined, is that part of philosophy which explores that which man can know about God (his existence, divine nature, etc.) from nature via His divinely bestowed faculty of reason, and this, unaided by any divinely inspired written revelation from any religion, and this, without presupposing the truth of any one religion.

“NATURAL THEOLOGY AND PROTESTANT ORTHODOXY” by David Haines in God of our Fathers: Classical Theism for the Contemporary Church, Ed. Brad Little John, 57.

Hold fast the tradition that you received from the apostles, and repent of your indifference.

Andrew of Caesarea: Commentary on the Apocalypse (3:3)