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| Home > Books > John Frame's Doctrine of the Christian Life |
| John Frame's Doctrine of the Christian Life | | Date Created: Dec 04, 2004, 02:10 PM |
For those of you who appreciate John Frame's works (as I do) you can download drafts of the first twenty chapters or so of his new book The Doctrine of the Christian Life here. I've learned a great deal from Frame. His books The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, The Doctrine of God, and Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of his Thought are essential reading for every ministerial student.
I just downloaded and read chapter 3 "Ethics and Divine Lordship." Frame's understanding of "Lordship" doesn't seem to have developed much since his first books. His tri-perspectival view of the "attributes" of lordship as control, authority, and personal presence is fine as far as it goes. But I do wonder if it might need some tweaking. What I'm concerned about is that it's not sufficiently nuanced by our understanding of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I would like to see John work on developing attributes of Lordship that are consistent with the personal relations between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And I believe that at the heart of being "lord"--and this holds for all three Persons--is that of service and self-denial.
The true God is not our Lord first as the one who holds power, but as the one who serves. This is what Jesus reveals about Lordship in his teaching and, of course, his life an death (see esp. Mark 10). He is the Lord in his service to us and he reveals to us perfectly the lordship of the Father in his actions as well. If you've seen the Son, you've seen the Father because he is the perfect Image of the Father.
Frame is not wrong in his tri-perspectival enumeration of the attributes, but I'm not sure he sufficiently guards against the possibility of constructing a "general" doctrine of God's lordship apart from the Trinity and Jesus. A bit less reliance on the "suzerain treaty" model and a bit more reflection on the covenantal intra-personal relations betweent Father, Son, and Holy Spirit would help.
Perhaps what is needed is an over arching acknowledgement that Father is the Lord precisely because he loves and serves his Son and therefore also us in creation and redemption. This then could function to qualify the three attributes. God is the Servant Lord as he controls all things. He controls all things by the Spirit for his Son and for us. God's authority is not simply power exercised over his creatures, but the authority that comes from his self-giving love. And his personal presence is given to serve us. Something like that. But my formulations are weak and not very elegant. Perhaps, however, you can catch my drift. |
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