Needham on Dabney at the Evangelical Library

As intimated, we had a very good time with Dr Nick Needham who gave the second of this Autumn's lunch time zoom lectures for the Evangelial Library. About 20 tuned in. It will be up on YouTube in due time. He poke about the Civil War and Dabney's very southern and today unacceptable views on slavery. Perhaps the most interesting part, however, was atthe end where he touched on three areas where Dabney and other 19th century American Calvinists questioned the 17th century scholastic Heritage of Turretin and others.

First, thhere was the doctrine of concursus, that is the view that God exerts an almost physical energy in causing sinful actions albeit without causing the sin in those actions. Dabney and the 19th century American Calvinists rejected this as a subtle distinction that created more problems than it solved. It was better, they argued, to say that God allowed rather than in any sense causing sinful actions and to leave room for n elment of mystery,

Secondly, they rejected the scholastic view of divine simplicity. The scholastics said that God's essence and his attributes were identical. Dabney and the others regarded this as an extravagantly philosophical notion with little or no biblical grounding. this view risked destroying any real or meaningful distinction between the various divine attributes, potentially making God into a sort of pantheistic essence in which all differences were dissolved

Thirdly, and perhaps most interestingly, they rejected the scholastic doctrine of God being woihtout passions. The scholastics taught that all biblical ascriptions of emotion to God shouold be understood as figures of speech. What they really described were simply pure acts of divine will. For example, if God is said to love us, this does not denote any emotional affection of loving. It is just a metaphor denoting God's act of will aimed at bestowing good upoin us. Hodge reacted especially strongly to this, arguing that it ripped the very heart out of the whole biblical revelation of God, turning him into a sort of big brain in the sky devoid of feeling. Dabney shared Hodge's view. His critique was not barely negative. he proposed a positive alternative. Although God does not have emotions in the way that we do, since our emotions are continually ebbing and flowing and continually subject to change. Yet there is in God's nature a genuine, meaningful divine equivalent or counterpart to human emotion. Dabney called these divine emotions active principles. That is not passions in the sense of fluctuations or agitations but affections of his will actively distinguishable from the cognitions of his intelligence. They are truly ooptiv (ie expressing a wish or a desire). However anthropopathic the statements made concerning God's repenting, his wrath and pity and pleasur, his love or jealousy, we should do violence to Scripture if we deny that he means to ascribe to himself active affections in some mode suitable to his nature. Allied to this Dabney also rejected the scholastic view that God can in no sense be said to react or respond to his creatures, that all God's choices, attitudes and actions flow exclusively from his unmoved will. This is simply unbiblical for Dabney, who aargued that the most that can be truthfully said is that God's creatures cannot cause him to do anything, as though he responded by sheer reflex, whether he wnted to or not. However, Dabney went on to say that if we are faithful to Scripture we must affirm that the actions of creatures can truly be said to be the occasion if not the cause of divine attitudes and

actions. Our sins really do occasion God's displeasure; our misery really does occasion God's compassion. Yet the divine displeasure and compassion are willed by God rather than extorted from him. Dabney says the Scriptures mean what they plainly say. Some seem so afraid of recognising in God any susceptibility to a passive nature that they virtually set Scripture aside and pin to God, whose activities of intelligence and will are so exclusively from himself that even the relation of objective occasion to him is made unreal and nothing is allowed except a species of coincidence or pre-established harmony. They are afraid to accept what the Bible seems so plainly to say - that God is angry because men sin.

Dabney stood very firmly in the stream of 19th century American Calvinism that was ready to weigh in the balance the scholastic Calvinism of the 17th century and find it seriously wanting in several ways. In this Dabney shows us how a 19th century reformed theologian, following the example of the 16th century reformers, could practice a critical reverence toward tradition even his own confessional tradition.