The Wholism of Faith
So I was thinking after a conversation I had with a friend about this topic of “holistic faith” and covenantal theology, what I am calling here, the Wholism of Faith, that is, the rule by which we follow to arrive at our idea of orthodox theology. The main premise it based on the understanding of continuity in all sections of theology, all of which are supporting the over arching crux of history.
Faith then is Historical in nature, and not primarily epistemological, that is to say, the study of God is much more concerned with the observance of his intervention in history through time more than the acquisition of knowledge gathered through reason (or otherwise). While “word” (spoke revelation) is of great value in Christian faith, with Yahweh, “the Word” is a person, therefore more than the declaration of syllables, The Word becomes a performer of action, breaking into natural history and declaring attribute through deed.
Revelation is delivered through the context of event, and to separate the two is to castrate the spoke word of it’s walked out meaning. The Exodus became the backbone of the Jewish faith for just this reason. God broke in on natural history and displayed his attributes on a national scale, and then, in the context of the greatest in-breaking of power and glory, which shook Egypt and sent the fame of Yahweh throughout the nations of the earth, God descends in the wilderness upon the mountain and there, in the context of his action, punctuates his deeds through speaking forth the revelation of his name.
Word and action are thus inseparable.
What is more, actions remain continual, that is the actions, the in-breakings of the Lord are not episodic events which remain isolated from each other and bear no commonality, they carry with them continuity, each new action better clarifying the previous and none contradicting. It is within this context which the covenantal promise is invoked. The action presenting an adequate down payment, a first fruits as it were, the Lord then evokes the covenantal promise which declares that which the Lord promises to do. Without understanding of the action, the first fruit, there can be no talk of understanding the fullness of the expected promise.
Thus the Wholism of Faith is the mode of understanding how each action (event subsequently enlightened by spoken revelation) informs each promise (spoken revelation declaring a subsequent action) and provides us a congruent understanding of the knowledge of God.
To understand how God will act in the future we look at how God has acted in the past. Instead of History being separated into multiple dispensations under which God’s responds differently from that of the previous dispensation. History is understood as a congruent unfolding of God’s interaction with his people. All in breakings of the Lord are to be seen as eschatological statements which declare the knowledge of God and foreshadow an ultimate reality which is yet to come.
All controversy in our understanding of God must be resolved through looking at the common history of the faith. We understand all that God will do by what he has said (the declaration of his divine name and promises [that is the covenants]) in the past, and we understand all he has said in the past by all he has done (his actions) in the past. The entrance into the commonwealth of Israel is in the entrance into a common history, in which, and only in which, the revelation of God can be seen most clearly. To strip the spoken revelation of the Knowledge of God from the events which accompany the giving of that revelation is to effectively reduce the knowledge of God to a list of prepositional phrases which have no way to accurately communicate the true knowledge of the Lord. The commonality of history is the only way that true knowledge of the Lord can be developed.
Yet common history is not the end, but merely the path to the real focus of the Wholism of History. The Wholism speaks of a culmination, a bringing together of things that have been long kept apart, thus it is fitting that our Wholism would point to, as the common history does, to a future event. The rule, the Wholism, is the lens through which we understand the fullness of our eschatological hope: the Day of the Lord. We look upon the regional (i.e. The Exodus) and individual (i.e. resurrection of Christ) actions of the Lord in our common history and from these in-breakings of power, these eschatological events, we understand the true eschatological event which is yet to come.
Thus the Wholism is established as the essence of Monotheism, that there is complete continuity of word, action, past, present and future in the Godhead. He who created is he who established the covenants with his people and is the one who will be manifest to the whole world through the eschaton. The study of the knowledge of God is not so much concerning the knowing of who God is “in Himself” as so many theologians have understood it to be, but instead, and much superiorly, it is the knowing of who God is “as he has revealed himself.”
The knowledge of God is not a philosophical exercises in logical thinking defining an abstract thought which cannot be directly seen, studied or apprehended, instead the study of God is the study of how God has revealed himself throughout natural history, his self-revelation being the most accurate picture of God. It is gazing into the mystery of the Lord who acts and the Lord who in the deafening silence of that action declares his name. The Lord is defined by action, it is how he defines himself, reveals himself. The Wholism of Faith is not just the continuity of the Lord in word only, but also in deed. It is action by which we know the Lord, and it is action which distinguishes him from all others. The Wholism of Faith is that he is the Lord and there is no other, and along with Isaiah we say…
From of old no one has heard
or perceived by the ear,
no eye has seen a God besides you,
who acts for those who wait for him.(Isaiah 64:4)
