Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society,
Gonzalez Convention Center Room 222, San Antonio, Texas
This piece is not appropriate for formal publication, but may be of interest to people interested in things Chinese or in cross-cultural communication of the Christian faith. So I decided to make it publicly available at frame-poythress.org. It is presented with copyright CC BY-SA 4.0.
I appreciate the invitation to address the Chinese Fellowship Meeting. I am presenting highlights concerning the following works produced in 2022-2023.
- Redeeming Our Thinking about History: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022)
- Truth, Theology, and Perspective: An Approach to Understanding Biblical Doctrine (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022)
- Redeeming Reason: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023)
- “Assessing Analogies for Free Agency,” ETS paper, 2023 November 14, 2:50 pm, Gonzalez Convention Center Room 301A, San Antonio, Texas.
- “Analogies for the Trinity (Verstigia),” ETS paper, 2023 November 16, 2:40 pm, Gonzalez Convention Center Room 221B, San Antonio, Texas.
None of these works explicitly address Chinese civilization and culture. But all of them are pertinent to the topic of the relation of Christianity to Chinese civilization and culture. They are pertinent primarily through their use of multiple perspectives, which invite fruitful use of meanings in application to multiple cultures.
1. Redeeming Our Thinking about History: A God-Centered Approach (Crossway, 2022).
This book is a part of a series of contributions to refounding academic disciplines on an explicitly Christian Trinitarian basis. It considers the analysis of history through several triads of perspectives. The triads subtly reflect the Trinity. The principal ones are (1) meanings, events, and people; (2) normative, situational, and existential perspectives on ethics; (3) unity, diversity, and harmony; (4) divine planning, accomplishment, and application (purpose). The triads can be seen as further differentiated in six complementary perspectives on historical research and writing: (a) attention to religion; (b) analysis with a Christian worldview; (c) moral lessons; (d) use for apologetics; (e) providentialism; and (f) technical history with focus on critical weighing of claims about events. The principle of diversity of possible perspectives within a Christian approach can affirm the diversity of interests and writings in Chinese history writing, all subject to the norms of a Christian worldview.
2. Truth, Theology, and Perspective: An Approach to Understanding Biblical Doctrine (Crossway, 2022).
This book shows the coherence of Christian doctrine and the harmony among many subtopics of doctrine by using the theme of truth as an overall perspective. Truth itself is Trinitarian. God the Father speaks the Truth (John 14:6), who is the Word, the Son, by the breath of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit conveys the truth to us. Truth also displays the attributes of God. The fall of man is a fall away from the truth. Redemption consists in restoration of the truth and walking in it. According to Proverbs, the penalty for folly is death. So rescue from death by Christ’s substitutionary death is an aspect of the impartation of wisdom.
Chinese civilization prizes wisdom, which is an expression of truth. So the perspective of truth can be used to organize the whole of systematic theology in a structural unity that coherently addresses a core concern of Chinese civilization and culture.
3. Redeeming Reason: A God-Centered Approach (Crossway, 2023).
This book also is part of the series that refounds academic disciplines on an explicitly Christian Trinitarian basis. The academic discipline in focus in this case is the study of human rationality. This book builds on another, earlier book in the series: Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought. It considers the essential role of analogy in all human reasoning, analogy based on the pattern of the image of God. By doing so, it can aid us in addressing Chinese civilization in a way that is not confined to the choice of perspectives in the Western developments of logic from Plato and Aristotle onwards. Human reason is richer than Aristotelian syllogisms, and can find expression in the multiple cultural contexts.
4. “Assessing Analogies for Free Agency.”
Multiple analogies are of use in trying to understand free agency: mechanical cause, author, translation, Jesus Christ in his human nature. The most ultimate analogy is the analogy with the freedom of the three persons in the Trinity. By offering multiple, flexible analogies, the paper promotes the flexibility that is important in conveying ideas across cultural differences, including the differences between Chinese civilization and Western civilization. Traditional Chinese civilization values harmony, while the West values freedom. In biblical teaching, freedom is freedom in the authority of divine supremacy (1C), in the power of divine dynamicity of action (4C), in the presence of the harmony of the three persons (5C). These three form a perspectival triad. They relate themselves subtly three prime values in Chinese civilization. Supremacy is tied to honor (above all, honor God as supreme, but also those whom he has appointed in authority), power in action to wisdom (which guides action), and divine harmony to human harmony.
Abstract for “Assessing Analogies for Free Agency”
How do we assess the strengths and weaknesses of various analogies used to try to define free agency and to understand it? And what is free agency? We want to focus on the use of various analogies, rather than directly on free agency in itself. So for our purposes we can put forward a minimalist definition of free agency: free agency is the power to exercise morally responsible choice in making decisions.
One of the primary analogies is the analogy of physical causation. Is a decision of a free agent caused by prior conditions or not? If a decision is physically determined by prior causes, can it still be free? The use of the analogy of physical causation can lead to a dilemma. If a decision is determined by prior physical causes, it seems intuitively that it is not responsible. If, on the other hand, it is totally undetermined, it seems intuitively that it is random, and again not responsible.
There is therefore value in considering insights that might derive from other analogies. We evaluate the following analogies for their strengths and weaknesses: the analogy of multi-level causes (Job 1-2 shows events that involve simultaneously divine, demonic, human, and physical causes); sonship (decisions made in the context of the constraint of family love); translation (decisions constrained by language); writing a novel (with two levels, the level of the author and the level of the characters); divine necessity and freedom as analogous to human necessity and freedom; and necessity and freedom of the second person of the Trinity in relation to the first person. The last two of these are the most foundational. But the existence of mystery with respect to the Trinity suggests that mystery will also remain with respect to human necessity and freedom. Human necessity and freedom reflect on the level of the creature divine necessity and freedom.
5. “Analogies for the Trinity.”
The paper summarizes ongoing exploration of multiple analogies for the relations among persons of the Trinity. It starts with three analogies prominent in the Bible itself: the analogy with communication, the analogy with a family, and the analogy with reflections. Each of these analogies is itself internally Trinitarian, and the three together form a perspectival triad reflecting analogically the persons of the Trinity. These triads are themselves analogically related to a host of other perspectival triads that reflect the Trinity (see Knowing and the Trinity). As in the previous paper, the use of analogies provides flexibility that enables the use of perspectives cross-culturally, including applications to Chinese culture. Communication (2C), family (5C), and reflections (4C) can be seen as relating subtly to the triad of wisdom, harmony, and honor as core values in Chinese civilization.
Abstract for “Analogies for the Trinity”
Several triads of perspectives show an analogy to the Trinity. In considering these triads, the basic task is not to find a model that helps understanding the Trinity, but rather to move from the doctrine of the Trinity, as a doctrine established from the Bible, to displays and manifestations that reflect the Trinity in the context of creation and redemption. The Bible itself has analogies that offer us a starting point. John Frame, Kenneth L. Pike, and Dorothy Sayers all found a biblical basis for thinking that various triads of perspectives reflected the Trinity. In their writings we find the triad for lordship (authority, control, and presence), the triad for ethics (normative, situational, and existential perspectives), Pike’s triad of perspectives on theories, and Sayers’s triad for creative art.
We may add to these the analogy with a family (father, son, and the gift of love), the analogy with communication (speaker, speech, and breath; or speaker, speech, and recipient), the analogy with reflections (original pattern, image, and shared features), and the action analogy (planning, execution, and application). From these triads can be derived still other triads.