An open letter to the Presbyterian Church (USA) Helen Dekker's anti-Trinitarian beliefs By Loren J. Golden Overland Park, Kansas Monday, December 2, 2002 I must take issue with the letters penned by the Rev. Bryan Bass-Riley and Richard Wendler that defended Helen Dekker's anti-Trinitarian theology against those who decried her beliefs as heretical. Specifically, when she was asked point-blank, "Is Jesus God?" she replied, "No. He was filled with the spirit of God." This is the ancient heresy of Arius as resurrected early in the 19th century by Friedrich Schleiermacher, who likewise denied that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of the ontological Son of God when he made the similar statement that Jesus of Nazareth was the one in whom the "God-consciousness" was most fully realized. This is the very essence of theological liberalism that Karl Barth argued forcefully against in the last century, and it is not even Christian, let alone Reformed. Reformed Theology teaches that Jesus Christ died on Calvary's cross to atone for all the sins of all of God's elect and rose again bodily from the grave, thereby securing for the elect the certain promise of the resurrection of body and soul unto eternal life (Book of Confessions 4.037-045, 6.046-047). Enlightenment philosophy, which served as the backdrop for Schleiermacher's heresy, has a problem with the Biblical, Christian and Reformed doctrines of the Fall and atonement because the Enlightenment philosophers (here I refer specifically to the teachings of Gottfried Leibniz) argued that the universal condition of man cannot be predicated upon a contingent event in history. The reason for this, they argue, is that for all the events of history, we can imagine that they could have turned out differently given different choices made on the parts of free agents. For example, how could the crucifixion have occurred if Judas had chosen not to betray Jesus? Yet, Scripture teaches that Jesus was delivered up according to the definite purpose and foreknowledge of God (Acts 2.23). God is eternal and omnipresent, transcending both time and space, and He is absolutely sovereign, for all things are under His omnipotent control. Science fiction authors have devised all sorts of scenarios of how someone with knowledge of the present and the past might travel back in time and change an event in the past, thereby radically altering the subsequent course of history and the circumstances of the present. Likewise, prominent physicists have theorized ways in which time travel might be possible. Yet, God has unalterably ordained all the events of history, and has even intervened sovereignly in the course of human affairs to bring His purposes to pass. God knows the thoughts and motivations of every human heart (John 2.24-25), and He knows how to certainly influence the will of the creature without causing violence to the will of the creature (Book of Confessions 6.014). Moreover, God has intervened in very specific times and places to impart His Word to His people through His prophets and apostles. This Word comes to us today in the form of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Rarely did God do this by direct dictation (though He did use this method with the transmission of the Ten Commandments, and most probably also with the entire Old Testament Law), but through "various ways" through the prophets, and "has in these last days spoken to us by His Son." (Heb. 1.1-2) The Enlightenment philosophers, especially David Hume and Immanuel Kant, denied that the absolute could communicate meaningfully with the finite. A certain and concrete knowledge of God cannot be found through reason or observation, they argued. Therefore, He cannot be known as a person, He cannot deliver any message to us in terms we would understand, and He certainly cannot enter into the finite realm, for to do so would cause Him to no longer be absolute, or no longer be God. This is, of course, godless wisdom seeking to impose its own terms on what God can or cannot do on the basis of human reason and observation. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher took this philosophy seriously and claimed that God seeks to reach us through our religious consciousness, and we respond by seeking Him with our religious feeling, by which he means to intuitively deduce God's presence in our lives through our subjective consciousness. On this basis, he set about the work of recasting the historic Christian doctrines in a form compatible with Enlightenment philosophy. The Fall and the Resurrection, he claimed, were not historical events, but metaphors for the experience that is found in the history of every person. Thus, through our personal "Fall" we lose our "God-consciousness" and move further away from God. Our personal "Resurrection" occurs when our "God-consciousness" awakens within us and we begin feeling for the presence of God already in our lives. The Church, Schleiermacher argued, is the people of God in the here-and-now. It is the community in which we bring our ideas of God together and express them without fear of being right or wrong. The theology of the Church is the consensus of these opinions as they are now. They are not the same as they were yesterday, and tomorrow they might be something entirely different. The New Testament Scriptures should be listened to as an expert witness should be listened to in a court of law, and especially the teachings of Jesus, in whom the "God-consciousness" was most fully awakened. But we do not "need" to believe in a historical Fall or Resurrection, as the Church in the past has done. All of this is found in the statements Helen Dekker made that were reported in The Layman Online, as well as in Rev. Bass-Riley's and Mr. Wendler's letters. The problem with this theology is that it is nothing more than a vacuous theism devoid of specific Christian content. As H. Richard Niebuhr put it, it teaches that, "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross." One of the members of the PNC that recruited Dekker stated, "She teaches us to find the Spirit in ourselves." The Lord said, "Search from the book of the LORD, and read." (Is. 34.16) The Bereans "searched the Scriptures daily" to test the words of Paul and Silas. "Therefore many of them believed." (Acts 17.11-12) And in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, when the rich man begged Abraham to send Lazarus to his father's house to testify to his brothers, Abraham replied, "They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. … If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead." (Luke 16.27-31) If the Spirit is indeed within us, He will bear witness to the veracity of the Scriptures. Therefore, to find the Spirit of the Living God, we must not turn inward, where we shall find only our own futile opinions, but to the Scriptures. For if our hearts, doors and minds are not open to the Scriptures, they are likewise closed to God.

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