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Hello everyone and welcome back to the New Books Network Podcast and we host Crawford Griffin. Today, my guest is Joshua D. Shindell. Joshua is Professor of Theology at Yellowstone at Theologics Institute, which is located in Bozeman in beautiful Monta.
And we're talking to Joshua today about his great new book, The Necessity of Christ Satisfaction, a study of the reformed scholastic theologians William Twiss and John Owen. And this book has just been published by Brill in their very, very good series of studies and reform theology. Joshua, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for your time and congratulations on your book.
Thanks, Crawford. Thanks for the invitation. It's a real pleasure to be speaking with you today. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.
Or as we say here in my neck of the words to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, about this topic. To, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to. It's a, a, a, a very important book on a very, very big topic. This is your first academic monograph from Craig.
That's correct. How did you make your way into theology, make your way from a general appreciation of theology to this question, turn this question into a thesis for a PhD and then eventually to turn that project into the book we're talking about today. What's the background to the project? Well, as, as I'm sure, you know, having worked on, on much bigger projects than even this one, but even these, these little projects have probably several stories that could be told about their origin and, and development.
I suppose in terms of my own interests in general in theology, I, I grew up as the son of a, a, a pastor here in a little town in Montana, Cascade, Montana. And so from, from the early age was, was interested in theology, things of the Bible, things of church. And that kind of carried on with me throughout my, my teen years in, in my late teen years, I got very interested in reform theology. Or at least what was, what was being called reform theology or Calvinist theology at the time.
And so I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my life in my late teens, early twenties and, and over a period, just thought, you know, I'm really interested in pursuing this theology thing philosophy. And so I was actually over visiting the library there in the south of England. And, and I just happened to go at a time when one of the workers there was Stefan Lindholm, who at the, at that time was working on his PhD through the University of Stavender, I believe it was at the time under Sebastian Redmond, who as you know, had, had written his doctoral dissertation on John Owen, on John Owen's theological methodology. So I got to talking with Stefan Lindholm when I was over there, and he introduced me to the reformed Orthodox and that kind of whole period of late 16th century through 17th century, reformed writings, which I was utterly unfamiliar with.
And, and he encouraged me, he said, if you're, if you're really interested in studying theology and doing this more, go to Calvin College, as it was at the time now, Calvin University, and, and do philosophy, which I was very happy to do. So, as I say in the, in the preface of the book, it was also while I was at La Brie, I was having tea out on the lawn. And, and I overheard Stefan Lindholm talk with another worker there, who was there at the time, is no longer there, Andrew fellow. And, and they were discussing a difference, a different take on the necessity of, of Christ's satisfaction, although I don't remember if they used those terms at the time, but a difference of take between John Calvin and John Owen.
And, you know, in my understanding at the time of reform theology, reform theology was this kind of monolithic thing that went from its beginnings in John Calvin and John Owen, to Jonathan Edwards, to the Princeton theologians. You know, that was about all that I knew at the time. And so, so that, that struck me as odd and maybe even a little troubling, that there's this dispute on the atonement of Christ amongst reform theologians, and sort of blew some of my categories. So, anyways, I took that in the back of my mind as something to look into later.
So, I went off to Calvin and studied philosophy in the classics there, and then did a master's thesis at Westminster Seminary in California on John Owen and his Sicinian writings. And that's where I was first sort of introduced to John Owen's dissertation on Divine Justice, his D. Trebo. And while I was reading that, paying particular attention to his writings on Sicinianism, or from Sassianism, from some of the Sicinians, I discovered that it wasn't just Calvin with whom he disagreed, but some others like William Twiss and Sam Rutherford.
So, again, I sort of tucked that in the back of my mind. I originally began talking with my doctoral supervisor while I was still at Westminster. I began talking with him about possible projects. I should say, who would become my doctoral advisor?
He wasn't at the time. But I began talking about possible projects, and he thought I should go in the direction of writing something on Sassianism and Sicinianism, which in some of the literature on the intellectual development of the early modern period, Sicinianism got the short end of the stick, and he sort of had a sense that it was a bigger player in some of that development than the traditional story had it. So, I started looking into that, and I fairly quickly thought, after reading Sassianism in particular, and some of the English, Sicinians like John Krelius and then John Pittle and some of those folks, I quickly thought, you know, I want to write a dissertation on someone or some persons whom I can really learn from the theological trade, really learn the theological trade. And it struck me, now this is an evaluative judgment, not supposed to make these, I suppose, as a historian, but it struck me that Sassianism was not a very good thinker.
He was not a very good theological thinker. He was humanistically trained, and somewhat of a decent Renaissance thinker, as it were, but not a very good theological thinker in my own estimation. And so I don't know that I want to write at length on Sassianism. And so I pulled out from my back pocket these questions that I had sort of developed over reading Owen's Diatriba.
And as I started looking at it to make a short story long, as I started looking at the text and then started reading more of William Twist and Sam and Rutherford, I thought, I originally had it a chapter on Sam and Rutherford, but I thought he was pretty much saying the same thing as William Twist. He'd written, what, about 15 years or something like that, after William Twist's first edition. And so I thought, well, I'll just focus on William Twist and John Owen. So that's sort of the development.
And I should add, by the way, I have a friend who's right now finishing up his PhD on Samuel Rutherford on the question of satisfaction. He assures me that Samuel Rutherford has his own kind of distinctive to add to the conversation. So I may have been mistaken on that point, but that's sort of how the project developed for me. Great Joshua.
So you take us there to the idea of Christ's Atonement as being central to this project as all about. And often I suppose when people who have anology performed theology in this period, think about questions relating to the Atonement as about its extent. Isn't it? And various positions taking that period, but you put up a much more fundamental question about its necessity.
Yeah. I think that's right. Even when you look at a lot of the literature on the Atonement, especially when it comes to reformed or Calvinist writings of the early modern period, there's a lot of secondary literature on the extent of the Atonement debates over the extent. What I discovered when I began looking into this question of the necessity of the satisfaction of Christ, and I suppose I ought to make a quick caveat comment here about, I'm sure I'll slip in between using Atonement and satisfaction in this interview.
Strictly speaking, the Reformed didn't talk about Atonement. That's just not a term that they used. So to avoid anachronism, I'll try to keep with satisfaction, but inevitably I'll slip, I'm sure. So when I started looking into this question of the necessity of satisfaction, I found that actually the Reformed debated this question extensively, if you'll excuse the pun as well.
And so it became obvious to me that these two questions were debated, the extent of the Atonement for whom did Christ die in the nature of the Atonement, or whether it is a satisfaction in the first place and that the Reformed were debating the Socinians in particular on that point, and then whether or not it's necessary. And they debated the Socinians, they debated the remonstrons, they debated the fellow Reformed theologians on that particular question. So I was actually quite surprised to see the extensiveness of the Reformed debates on this topic. It's also, I think, worth exploring further.
One could probably write a monograph, not probably one could write a monograph, on the development of the discussion, in particular, from the conversations between John Calvin and Lylia Sassinus in the late 16th century, all the way right through the 17th century, there's a development that occurs, I think, within the Reformed Orthodox response that has some doctrinal implications on the question of the necessity of the satisfaction. So that could be traced, I think, it would be really enlightening if one were to do that. But that wasn't my project, so I didn't do that. So, Joshua, you're making a distinction between satisfaction as the language of our early modern subjects, and at Atonement as one of the terms that's related to that idea of satisfaction and more recent discussion.
So just in case we're confusing any listeners, what exactly do we mean by satisfaction? That's a great question, and one that's liable to get me into trouble. Because, as you read both in the Patristics in the medieval period and in the early modern period, there are different takes on what exactly satisfaction is. So what I try to do in the book, in order not to get too bogged down, is I say, for the most part, I think it's generally true to say that because of the way the Bible speaks about the work of Christ, one of the aspects of the work of Christ is the payment of a debt, this type of language is used in scripture, and then reflected on in the participatory period, early modern period, and it's one of the ways in which all of the theologians in those periods talk about the work of Christ and what it accomplishes.
So I say without specifying what exactly the debt is or how exactly it gets paid, all that I mean by satisfaction in this book is that there is something like a debt, and Christ's work accomplishes something like a repayment of it. Atonement in the modern period and into our own day, Atonement sometimes is used to signify that, that is to say satisfaction, it's sort of a synonym of satisfaction, but Atonement can also be used in our own time as encompassing sort of the whole of salvation, so it's more akin to reconciliation with God or union, with God, reunion as it were. So that's how I try to differentiate those terms in the book, and I think if I was successful at least, I avoided the use of the term Atonement almost entirely and stuck with satisfaction, again by which I simply meant that there was a debt that sinners incurred on account of their sin, and which Christ in some way or in a manner of speaking repays as it were. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen.
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Pay for by the Government of Ontario. Is that helpful? As I thought I'll show you, your book project is really exploring why there is a conversation between theologians in the 17th century and principally, but also a conversation that's set up by previous discussions, stretching back several centuries, many centuries. But it's a conversation about whether the satisfaction was necessary or not.
to talk us through why some perfectly orthodox reform thinkers might have suggested the satisfaction was not necessary. What would they have meant? You partially squirt carefully in the book, but what would they have meant when they made that kind of claim? Yeah, this was probably the place or the question by which I learned the most, actually in my readings.
Maybe I'll come to that by way of some of the discussions that take place going all the way back Augustine. You can actually trace elements of this question further back than Augustine. I've elsewhere traced them back to St. Earnay, as for example, certainly in Athanasius as well.
But Augustine was so important, as we all know, for the development of Western Latin Christianity and theology and was cited right through the Middle Ages, so the medieval scholastic tradition in particular. So Augustine in his book, Daitrune Tate, book 13, chapter 10, he offers up a sort of argument where he, in discussing the work of Christ on our behalf, he offers up an argument where God seems to be sort of on the horns of a dilemma. Either God could save fallen humanity sort of only in this way by the incarnation. It had to be by the incarnation by the suffering death of the God-man, or he could have saved fallen humanity in some other way.
Now, if you say that he could only save humanity in this way by the suffering death, the incarnation suffering death, resurrection of Christ, then you seem to be denying his omnipotence. We'll probably come back to that more in a moment, but you seem to be denying his omnipotence. If you say there were other ways of saving humanity, then by the gruesome suffering and death of his only son. Then you seem to be denying his wisdom.
I mean, surely this is not the path that wisdom would choose. If there were other paths of available. It would seem that either God is not all powerful or he is not all wise. This kind of phrasing of the question is taken up in the medieval period.
It is formalized into an argument by Anselm in his Kurdias Homa. Then it is taken up, particularly by Peter Lombard in his sentences, book three, he deals with it also in book one, and so it then gets passed into the commentorial tradition. I try to trace that in chapter three and show not so much of development, so not actually arguing a developmental thesis. I try to be clear about that in the book, but I just try to show how certain distinctions make their way into the discussion, distinctions which the medieval found helpful for trying to parse this, and that those distinctions then are taken up by the reformed Orthodox in their own discussions.
That's kind of the issue that these reformed Orthodox people are dealing with. Either God is unwise or he is not all powerful. For those who of the reformed Orthodox who say actually the question whether God could have saved humanity by some other way than by the satisfaction of Christ, those who answer that, yes, God could have saved humanity by some other way. At least as I trace it in William Twiss, what's really at stake is our view of God.
First of all, with regards to his omnipotence, can we really claim that he's powerful, and then Twiss develops several other arguments, which say if we say this is the only way that God could save fallen humanity, we're actually and probably accidentally introducing into our doctrine of God that he is able to sin. It's a really very non-intuitive, but I think a pretty powerful argument, one that owned had to contend with at great length. I could go on to that argument, but now I feel like I'm maybe outrunning the question that you originally asked. Well, Joshua, you're very healthy to consult with John Owen there, and Owen is with Twiss, one of the subjects of your book isn't he?
And as you mentioned in the book, Owen changes his view somewhat in thinking about this question. So tell us a little bit about Owen as that almost as an evolutionary figure in this conversation as a person is moving from one view to a slightly different view. Yeah, there are probably a number of things that I could say on that point. What I found interesting is Owen was not the only one to have changed his mind on this issue.
There were other influential figures that round about this same time also changed their mind. I mentioned in the book, Richard Baxter, as being one of them, who for all... Owen, Owen mentioned his name very much in this show, in the show. I can imagine.
I was about to say, for all his disputes with Owen, he seems to have followed Owen on this, even in terms of the path he takes. So it's two years after Owen's first publication of the death of death, Richard Baxter comes out with essentially the same position as Owen, which was essentially the same position as Twiss, that it was not necessary. Two years after Owen comes out with his diatriba, Baxter comes out with his own account, in which he's changed his mind. And follows Owen again.
I don't know that he would have admitted to that, but that's sort of the publication record at least. So anyways, Owen, I think was a really important figure in this. After Owen, I found that the majority of the reformed Orthodox writers that I read, both in England and also on the continent, followed, if not Owen's, argumentation, then sort of his reasoning that we better say this is the only way that God could save sinners because of the Sasinians. So that's sort of the case that Owen makes.
Essentially, he says in his, I think it's to the reader of his diatriba that he had at one point, taken up the position of Twiss and denied that there was any kind of necessity that God saved fallen humanity by the work of Christ. But he says, I've had some time to consider it. And especially with the rise of the problem of Sasinianism in the early 1650s, he says we don't want to establish a sort of halfway house between reformed Orthodoxy and the Sasinians, which is what he thought, William Twiss and Sam Rotherford and others were doing. So he changes his mind.
He doesn't say too much more about the change of his mind, but he does say that much. And then after Owen, it seems like his argumentation and his reasons for wanting to affirm that this was the only way are taken up in the reformed Orthodox. So again, I think one could probably write on that kind of development. There definitely seems to be a shift.
So Owen's really important for that reason. His diatriba has such an interesting work. I should say, if you look at my sort of table of contents and then look at the way that Owen's writings are organized, you'll see quite a bit of a difference. And one of the reasons for that is, as I know it in the book, Owen approaches his subject with a different emphasis, I think, in a different style than someone like William Twiss.
So maybe I'll make a quick comment about that. William Twiss is much more scholastic, both in his training, but also then in his writings, it comes out. He organizes his material in a very scholastic fashion. Now it's been noted, of course, that Owen does the same, particularly with his earlier writings, probably when he was closer to his school days, he organizes them in a more scholastic fashion.
By the time he gets to writing the diatriba, I think Carl Truman has mentioned this too, his style is a little bit more in the Renaissance strain of things, Renaissance humanism. And so he organizes his material for the diatriba very differently than does Twiss. So one of the things that I didn't want to do in this work was simply give a summary of William Twiss and John Owen. Part of the reason for that was because I thought if I give Twiss's four principal arguments and go into detail about what he means by them, and then follow with a summary of Owen's diatriba, it'd be very easy to miss the way in which Owen actually responds to Twiss.
So I thought a real comparison of the two required a little bit more of an analytic approach on my part, where I was sort of taking Owen apart and trying to reconfigure his writings in a way that made explicit his response to Twiss, because I do think he actually gets around to responding to William Twiss. He does it in sort of roundabout ways. I remember a comment by Paul Helm. He made it originally in one of his blog posts on Helm's Deep, I think it was blog call, but I think it worked its way into his book on Kellogg's ideas maybe.
Anyways, I'm forgetting the exact reference, but Helm says one of the problems with Owen's diatriba is that it ties the death of a thousand qualifications as it were. So I tried to organize it just a little bit differently so you could compare the responses. I think that's one of the great things with the book, Joshua, is the way in which you show Owen responding both to an agenda set by it's sinism. And by earlier formulations reform theology and relation to people like Twiss, Rutherford and others, it's a sort of book.
It's incredibly learned. You deal with sources in multiple languages. You build together a conversation that stretches back centuries in a very straightforward way. It's very accessible.
And yet it's dealing with such deep and significant issues. And as you explain the book in conversation as well, issues require a huge amount of nuance and careful thought as to how to avoid the horns of that dilemma that Augustine sets up all those centuries earlier. Well, Joshua, congratulations on the book, necessity of Christ's satisfaction, a study of the Reforms' classic theologian's volume twist and John One published by Brill. What could we hope to read from you next?
Thank you. Thanks for the congratulations. This position that I hold at Yellowstone Theological Institute has kept me pretty busy with teaching. So I have it in mind to continue work on William Twiss.
I think he's a figure that more study could be done on. And so I sort of have that in mind. I've been working towards a bigger project on William Twiss. In the meantime, I have written a couple of smaller pieces and article that's under review right now on nature and grace issues in early modern Reformed theology that if accepted will come out later this spring, a piece on Reformed Scholasticism for Matthew Barrett's A Little Online Publication Cradle, which will come out I think here fairly soon.
And then an entry for the reception of, what is it, the Encyclopedia of Biblical Reception on Paradise in the Reformation period. So that was kind of a fun one to do. I'm not sure when that's going to come out. That's what I've been working on of recent.
Well, that's fantastic. Who doesn't love Reinde about Paradise? That's right. You just have to look out the window and describe it.
It's been great having you in the show today, Joshua. It's a great book and encourage anyone interested in it. Or indeed, Reformed Scholastic Theology and the Spirit to Take a look at it. The necessity of Christ's satisfaction a study of the Reformed Scholastic The Williams William Twist and John