In response to my post a few days ago on the “Federal Vision,” my colleague Jonathan McIntosh wonders whether the problem with traditional federal theology (more accurately, some federal theology) isn’t worse than Torrance suggests.  If Owen is right that there is no natural affection in God toward His creatures, then it’s not simply that justice is being made a more fundamental attribute than love.  Rather, love is not being treated as an attribute of God at all.  By definition, since God is simple, all his attributes are in play in everything God does.  If God can turn His love on and off, then it is not an attribute.

He also notes the differences between medieval and post-Reformation construals of nature/grace.  He raises the question of whether “the problem with historic federal theology is that it in fact inverts (perverts?) the medieval grace/nature problem. The concern with medieval theology, after all, was its increasing tendency to construe nature as a self-contained, closed system operating according to its own rules, which put it in an ambiguous relationship to the saving order of grace. But the medievals, to their credit, never really questioned divine goodness, even if they could be somewhat unclear or inconsistent on the extent to which the natural, created order, was in  need of or ordered toward that goodness. If so, I wonder if passages like the one above from Owens aren’t symptoms of an entirely new kind of theological psychosis: the specter less of a nature that is potentially indifferent to the supernatural, than of a Creator now construed as inherently indifferent to his creation, indeed, indifferent to his own creative act (and therefore to himself?).”