C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 77 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The course on the doctrine of God opens not with a Bible verse but with a pair of sunglasses. Everything you look at is shaped by the lenses you look through, and every person alive is wearing some set of lenses. Patton and Dyke lay out the seven basic worldviews and introduce the picture that will govern the whole course: the arch, with God alone above it and every created thing below. Listen for why creation out of nothing is the key to the entire theistic worldview.
Trinitarianism is a study of the nature, existence, and attributes of our trinitarian God, examining the biblical and historical development of the church’s understanding of the Trinity, the person of Christ, and the person of the Holy Spirit. More than any prior course in the program, this one delves into history, and its first sessions delve into philosophy: worldviews, and the arguments for the existence of God. The teachers explain why. The existence of God is assumed in the Bible rather than argued, so the opening questions must be worked partly outside the text, in the reason God gave us. And the word Trinity itself never appears in Scripture; it is a word Christians framed, after looking hard at what the text says, to describe accurately who God is. Much of that framing happened historically as challengers told the church what it believed, the church answered that this was not what it believed, and was thereby driven to think through what it actually did believe.
The course runs from worldviews to the knowability of God, asking whether finite minds and finite words can truly describe an infinite God at all, a question some traditions inside the church have answered with a firm no, citing texts like Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 about the God whom no house can contain. From there it moves to the arguments for God’s existence, two sessions on the incommunicable attributes, one on the communicable attributes, then the historical development and the biblical defense of the doctrine of the Trinity, and finally two sessions on the humanity of Christ, in history and in the Bible. The Holy Spirit is not missing; he has his own session later in the program. The course’s theme text is drawn from 1 Timothy 6: the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.
The program’s method carries over: lecture and interaction, reading, memorization, and then teaching what you have learned to someone else, because the truth is that we actually learn by teaching. The case study assignments send each student to walk a friend, coworker, neighbor, or family member through the material for an hour or two, believer or unbeliever, and the teachers commend it as a natural open door for spiritual conversation. Group discussion questions close each lesson for use around a table or at a coffee shop, and an online discussion board connects students with others taking the course around the world. The conviction underneath all of it is that theology is done in community, never alone.
The session’s subtitle asks what kind of sunglasses you wear. Put on a pair of glasses and look around the room: everything you see, without exception, is affected by the lenses. That is the illustration for a worldview, something through which you view everything, so that nothing you look at is untouched by it. The teachers survey several definitions, how one interprets reality, an ordered set of propositions about life’s most important questions, a set of presuppositions held consciously or subconsciously about the basic makeup of our world, and adopt Ronald Nash’s as the most succinct: a worldview is the sum total of a person’s answers to the most important questions in life. Like glasses worn so long you forget they are on, a worldview shapes everything you believe whether you know you have one or not, and everybody has one.
The most important questions come in families. Metaphysical questions ask why there is something rather than nothing, and whether anything is really there at all. Theological questions ask whether there is a God, who or what he is, and what his relationship to the universe is, and how one answers this affects all the rest. Epistemological questions ask what truth is, whether it can be known, and how knowledge is attained. Ethical questions ask whether there are moral laws, what their basis is, and whether they bind all people in all places at all times. Anthropological questions ask what man is, whether his actions are free or determined, whether he is good, evil, or neutral, and what happens after death. Culture gives the easiest illustrations, a handshake reads as a greeting in one land and a threat in another, a gift given with one hand rather than two offends in a culture built on humility, but a worldview is bigger than culture.
A worldview must be consistent to be reliable, and the class works the negative test hard. Consistency does not prove a worldview true, but inconsistency proves it false. The examples bite. If evolution by survival of the fittest is the whole story of what we are, then theft cannot be wrong; the one who takes and keeps is simply the fitter. Hitler pressed Darwinism to exactly that consistency in the social realm, and the horror of where it led became, the teachers argue, part of the debunking of the theory in its social form. A relativist who holds that all truth is personal cannot then declare abortion or stealing wrong for everyone. Most people, including many Christians, are inconsistent, and the most persuasive work in conversation is often simply helping a person see the implications of the worldview they claim.
The theistic worldview believes that an eternal God freely created all of existence out of nothing and continues to act within the creation. Every word carries weight: freely, because God was not coerced and created out of no necessity; out of nothing, ex nihilo, because creation is not formed from pre-existing matter; continues, because he did not wind the world up and walk away. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the major theistic religions, which is why a Christian and a Muslim share more starting ground than either shares with a pantheist. The course’s master picture is the arch. Above the arch is God alone; below the arch is everything created, man, angels, heaven itself, all of it in a time-bound eternity that had a beginning. Above the arch there is no time, no space, no matter, and no succession of moments; God sees past, present, and future in a single view. There is no literal arch; it is a philosophical picture built to help explain creation out of nothing.
By definition, God is uncreated, and everything above the arch is God. If anything else existed above the arch, pre-existing matter, pre-existing time, pre-existing souls, it would by definition share in deity, which is why nothing can be up there with him. If God experienced a succession of moments he would be bound by time, and whatever binds God would stand above him. So the textbook definition of God this course adopts is that which is above the arch: the one who created everything out of nothing, who is bound by nothing. That definition does not yet make him good, just, or loving; those attributes come later. But it is the starting point, and the teachers add a sobering corollary: no creature will ever cross the arch. You cannot be time-bound one day and timeless the next. Even the saints in heaven remain below the arch, creatures still. God’s being, his ontos, from the Greek word for being or essence, remains above the arch, though his activity and his relationship reach down into history.
Deism believes God created the universe and has not been involved in it since, winding up the clock and letting it run. Prayer, on this view, is useless; nothing gets above the arch and God never comes below it. The teachers turn the description on the class. Christians confess theism and often live deistically: praying without expecting an answer, reading disaster and despairing of God’s involvement, treating him as up there while life runs down here. Job in his suffering talked this way for a season, asking where the judge was while the wicked prospered and moved the boundary markers. The practical test of creeping deism is simple and uncomfortable: how is your prayer life? God is involved in everything, and Scripture presents him working all things together for good, which is precisely what deism denies.
Pantheism says all is God: the universe and God are identical, so the chair, the ground, the tree, and the river are divine, and roughly a billion people, Hindus, many Buddhists, Christian Science, the philosopher Spinoza, hold some form of it. Its God is impersonal and in no sense transcendent, and the teachers name it plainly a low view of God, a god a nuclear blast could touch. Panentheism says all is in God: the universe is part of God though not all of him, like an organ in his body, so God exists both above and below the arch at once. Process theologians hold this, and open theists have been accused of drifting toward it. Its attraction is relational, the sense that a God below the arch really interacts, really responds, citing texts like Genesis 6 where God is sorry that he made man. Its cost is a changing, developing, learning God, which is not the God Scripture describes as the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Polytheism believes many gods exist; henotheism ranks one supreme god, a Zeus, above the rest. But many gods are automatically below the arch, because nothing above the arch can be multiple: above the arch there is no space, no time, no matter, and therefore no divisions, which is the doctrine later called simplicity. Plato himself argued centuries before Christ that if there are many gods there is really no God at all, and by the time of Christ polytheism had become philosophically unfashionable. A god below the arch, however mighty, is just a really powerful being, the way an ant might mistake a man for a god. Pluralism, the characteristically postmodern worldview, holds that all the worldviews are ultimately true even where they contradict, and it fails the consistency test on its face: two ways cannot each be the only way. Francis Schaeffer said such people do not actually believe what they profess; they have simply never thought it through.
Naturalism, or atheism, believes nature is the sum total of all reality: the universe is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be, existing in different forms and fluctuations. Nothing is above the arch. Karl Marx put an examined edge on it, granting the concept of God and concluding that no being in fact fits the definition. Agnostics divide in two, those who say I do not know, and those who say it cannot be known. The teachers then trace the ladder of consistency. The deist believes in God theologically and lives as if there is none. The atheist denies God yet still clings to purpose and to right and wrong, an inconsistency. The nihilist alone is consistent: no God, no purpose, utter despair, nothing-ism, and the teachers observe soberly that a culture teaching its children godless origins is raising not atheists but nihilists, the ones honest enough to follow the worldview all the way down. Even the sitcom built on being about nothing was an attempt to glamorize it.
One flowchart sorts everything. Is there a God? No: naturalism, ending in atheism or nihilism. Yes: is he one or many? Many: polytheism. One: is he immanent, transcendent, or both? Transcendent only: the distant God of deism. Immanent only: pantheism. Both immanent and transcendent, but impersonal: panentheism. Both, and personal: theism, the Christian worldview, one God, above the arch in his being, active below it in his works, and personal. The notes close with tests any worldview must face, reason, outer experience, inner experience, and practice, and with the claim that frames the rest of the course: the definition of God carries necessary attributes. That which is above the arch must be eternal and must be simple, undivided, and if you take those away, whatever you have left may be powerful, but it is not God.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all sixteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why does this course begin with philosophy rather than opening the Bible?
2. How did the doctrine of the Trinity largely develop historically, according to the teachers?
3. Which member of the Trinity seems absent from this course outline, and why?
4. What is the sunglasses illustration meant to show about a worldview?
5. Which definition of a worldview does the course adopt?
6. What is the difference between the positive and negative tests of a worldview’s consistency?
7. Why do the teachers say a thoroughgoing relativist cannot declare stealing or abortion wrong for everyone?
8. In the theistic worldview, what three words carry the weight in the statement that God freely created all of existence out of nothing and continues to act?
9. In the picture of the arch, what lies below the arch?
10. Why can no creature ever cross above the arch?
11. What is the practical test the teachers give for whether a Christian is slipping into a deistic worldview?
12. Why do the teachers call pantheism a low view of God?
13. What attracts people to panentheism, and what does it cost?
14. What was Plato’s argument about polytheism?
15. Why do the teachers say a culture teaching its children godless origins is raising nihilists rather than mere atheists?
16. In the closing flowchart, what combination of answers lands a person at theism?
All sixteen correct. Lecture 1 is complete.
The teachers admit that Christians who confess theism often live like deists, praying without expecting anything and reading the news as if God were absent. Where in your own life does your practice quietly contradict your confession, and what would consistency look like this week?
The negative test says an inconsistent worldview cannot be true. Think of a conversation you have had with someone whose stated beliefs and moral convictions did not fit together. How might gently pressing the implications of their own view serve them better than immediately presenting yours?
The course defines God as that which is above the arch before it says anything about his goodness or love. Why do you think the teachers insist on getting the definition of God settled first, and what happens to the other doctrines when that definition slips?
The course sets its theme from 1 Timothy 6: God is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion.
The lecture’s own directions for the week: work through the group discussion questions at the end of the lesson with someone, at home or over coffee, since theology is done in community and not alone; the teachers also point students to the program’s online discussion board, commend the course reading in the assigned history of doctrine, and name honors options including James White’s book on the Trinity and Robert Bowman’s study of the same doctrine. The course turns next to the knowability of God: whether finite minds can truly speak of an infinite God at all.