Theology beacon dictionary of theology

Doctrinal principles need to be translated into personal norms of conduct—the second mean­ing of the term. In this sense, principles are needed to bring into life direction, system, and stability. To live by self-accepted moral standards is the opposite of impulse or random living. An unprincipled person has no moral guidelines, which means that he is ruthless, opportunistic, and capricious. He is without a trained con­science. In contrast the person who lives by prin­ciple is predictable. He strives to make everyday decisions compatible with his principles.

A principled person may have rules also, but principles differ from rules in that they lie back of rules as their reasons. Honesty may be with a person a basic life principle. The practice of hon­esty will therefore be his policy. To aid him in holding to his principle and practicing his policy, he may impose on himself certain rules, such as to pay bills on the first day of the month.

A mark of maturity is the ability to acquire and live by a set of clearly thought-out and biblically supportable principles.

See doctrine, morality, christian ethics, matu­rity.

For Further Reading: "Elements," "Principles," "Rudi­ments," Vine, ED; Baker's DCE, 530.

Richard S. Taylor

PRIORITY. See values.

PRISCILLIANISM. This is a movement which arose in Spain at the end of the fourth century. Named for Priscillian, bishop of Avila, its sup­posed founder, it taught a kind of Sabellianism on the doctrine of the Trinity; a Manichaean du­alism; and Docetic views.

See sabellianism, dualism, docetism.

J. Kenneth Grider

PROBABIUSM. This is the ethical theory that, since it is all right to hold a probable opinion, it is also all right to do things that are only proba­bly right. It was first taught by Bartolome Me­dina (1528-80), and was agreed to by many; but it was condemned by Pope Alexander VII (1667) and by Innocent XI (1679).

See ethics, morality, expediency

J. Kenneth Grider

PROBATION. Probation is a period or method of trial to determine one's fitness or unfitness for projected privileges. Not only is the element of testing present, but the element of training and preparation.

The fact that all of life is probation permeates the entire Bible. It begins with probation in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:15-17) and concludes in the last chapter of Revelation with the promise of rewards or punishment (Rev. 22:11-19).

Probation presupposes that man was highly created and endowed by God (Gen. 1:27; 2:7). Saints are not made by divine fiat, but through man's deliberate choices in the presence of the possibility of choosing contrary to divine law or requirements. As created, his inclinations were toward God and righteousness, for he was "cre­ated in righteousness and true holiness" (Eph. 4:24) with the added presence of the Holy Spirit. His love and loyalty to God must be tested, how­ever, and temptation in some form was a neces­sity. Man fell into sin (Rom. 5:12), and all history has been under the terms and conditions of the Fall. The Scriptures teach, however, that men are free agents (e.g., John 7:17; 5:40; Luke 15:18, 20), with moral responsibility (Eccles. 12:13-14; Acts 17:30-31; Rom. 2:16; 14:12; 2 Cor. 5:10), while at the same time God is sovereign and works "all things after the counsel of his own will" (Eph. 1:11).

Is man's probation limited by death, or is the probation of some continued beyond the grave? Some believe that 1 Pet. 3:18-20 favors this pos­sibility. Beyond this moot passage is the clear teaching of Scripture that this life is probationary (Matt. 7:24-29; Rom. 2:6-16) and is followed by divine judgment (Heb. 9:27; Rev. 20:12-13).

Probation is also used as a trial or test of suit­ability for church office or membership (1 Tim. 3:10; cf. 1 Cor. 16:3).

See temptation, freedom, free will, account­ability, future probation, destiny (eternal).

2:58. William M. Arnett

For Whitehead "the Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar." God was fashioned in the image of an all-power­ful oriental despot. God suffers not, is unaffected by time, and is absolute. Hartshorne calls this view classical theism: God is immutable, omnip­otent, a se, impassible. For process theology clas­sical theism fails to relate an unchanging God to a changing world. Therefore God's nature and relation to the world are reinterpreted through process categories. A dipolar view of God's pri­mordial and consequent natures recognizes tem­porality in God's being, with His relation to the world now defined in terms of panen theism.

During the 1970s process theologians system­atically began to explore many traditional doc­trinal themes, including Christology, theological anthropology, ecclesiology, the Trinity, and eschatology. With their roots in 19th-century lib­eralism, evolutionary thinking is emphasized, but without the old liberal identification of pro­cess with progress. Although individual differ­ences exist between these theologians, they tend to be optimistic with respect to human existence^ mnfident °f IgYg as the primary quality"ot GocL mTd_convincedot the illuminating power qfjhe Whiteheadian vision of reality tor Christian thinking.

/ Evangelical reception of this movement is I mixed. On the one hand process theology sug-: gests the inevitability of philosophical currents in j theological work, fosters appreciation of the hu-: manity of Jesus, overcomes the modern dualistic j split between history and nature, and stresses the / reality of freedom. On the other hand, evangeli-; cal criticism is forthright on the processive inter^-! .pretation of theism, the denial ofcreatio ex nihilo, an apparent "finite God," a questionable basis for subjective immortality, and the tendency to ad­just biblical theology to fit the Whiteheadian scheme of thought.

See panentheism, immutability. attributes (di­vine), moral attributes of god.

For Further Reading: C»bb and Griffin, Process Theol­ogy: An Introductory Exposition; Cousins, ed., Process Theology: Basic Writings; Mellert, What Is Process Theol­ogy? Williams, The Spirit and the Forms of Love; Kantzer and Gundry, eds., Perspectives on Evangelical Theology, 15-42; Peterson, "Orthodox Christianity, Wesleyanism, and Process Theology," WTJ Fall, 1980, 45-58.

Herbert L. Prince

PROCESSION OF THE SPIRIT. This term refers to the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son. In the early centuries of the church considerable energy was given to a clear $nd careful definition of the Trinity. God is on^sub-stance in three Persons; Christ's humanity and deity are kept in balance; and the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit are affirmed.

The attention of the church was directed next to a clarification of the relative place of each of the three Persons. God the Son was "begotten of the Father" (eternally begotten) and bore a filial relationship with the Father as the Second Per­son of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit as the Third Person of the Trinity was "breathed out" (spi-rated). The Nicene Creed (a.d. 325) referred to the Holy Spirit "which proceedeth from the Fa­ther." This wording seemed to support a "subor­dination" of God the Son. To counter any such thought and in keeping with the total context of the Scripture (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:7), the church moved from a "single procession" to a "double procession" of the Spirit. The phrase "and of the Son" (the filioque) was added to the Nicene Creed at the Council of Toledo (a.d. 589). The Council at Aix la Chapelle (Synod of Aa­chen, a.d. 809) officially sanctioned the filioque.

The church in the West early contended for the inclusion of the filioque, while the Eastern branch of Christendom vehemently opposed it. So sig­nificant was the issue that it became a con­tributing factor in the final break (a.d. 1054) which divided Christianity into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches.

See holy spirit, trinity (the holy). For Further Reading: Neve, History of Christian Doc­trine, 1:121 ff, 177; Wiley, CT, 1:414-44.

See secularism. J. kenneth grider

Progressive revelation suggests that God's dis­closure in both Testaments is an organic whole. But in that whole there is progressive devel­opment of understanding as former revelation lays the foundation for later revelation; the law prepares the way for the prophets; "each promise fulfilled brings the sense of a larger promise" (Westcott, Epistle to the Hebrews, 482); finally the Jesus of history in the Gospels makes possible the Christ of faith in the Epistles until at last the whole of God's self-revelation is fully seen and understood. Evangelicals resist such views as C. H. Dodd's that all stages of the revelatory pro­cess except the last involved beliefs that were partly wrong (Dodd, Authority of the Bible, 255).

The "history of religion" theory about the emergence of monotheism illustrates well the concept of theological evolution. Rather than monotheism being a God-given revelation from the outset of OT history, it is assumed that Israel began with a polytheistic religion like her ancient neighbors. Only gradually did she progress from a crude patriarchal polytheism to the ethical monotheism of the prophets and of Jesus of Naz­areth.

Progressive revelation, according to liberal views, also involved literary evolution. One ex­ample is the Graf-Wellhausen documentary hy­pothesis which postulates a long and gradual de­velopment of the Pentateuch. Rather than Genesis through Deuteronomy being authen­tically the work of Moses as writer, they comprise instead many centuries of oral and literary evo­lution with various editors forming and shaping its theology as late as the Exile and placing it in the historical framework of the idealized past.

A similar literary evolution is seen in the Gos­pels. Form criticism, for example, suggests that Gospel materials first circulated orally in small, independent units of teaching. The Early Church developed and embellished the material during its many decades of oral transmission and usage. Some form critics (e.g., Dibelius and Bultmann) believe that many parables, miracle stories, and episodes attributed to Jesus are actually fictional literary creations by the Early Church as the meaning of her faith and the character of her Lord were being formulated.

These and other liberal views of progressive revelation supposedly account for the "faulty" and "wrong" conceptions of God, man, and the world in Scripture and for the "primitive" ele­ments which embarrass the modern mind. All such concepts of progressive revelation err, how­ever, since revelation concerns not what man dis­covers but what God discloses.

Implications for Scripture Interpretation. Pro­gressive revelation, evangelically understood, implies that the Old and New Testaments are two parts of one continuum of revelation; in both parts it is God himself who is revealing His char­acter and redemptive purposes by words and deeds. But progressive revelation acknowledges a distinction between the two Testaments: the OT records an incomplete progressive revelation, while the NT records God's revelation in its full and completed form. Each part of the OT is in­complete, though not incorrect, and looks for­ward to the time of fullness and fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, progressive revelation means that to interpret Scripture accurately, one must "interpret a passage in its revelatory progress. This means that we recognize the Old Testament as always pointing toward a more full Word which came in the New Testament" (Augsburger, Principles of Biblical Interpretation, 17). This is true both theologically and ethically. Theologi­cally, for example, the sacrificial system of atone­ment in the OT was fulfilled in Jesus' once-for-all offering of himself for sin's atonement, thereby making obsolete the OT method (see Heb. 8:13—10:18). Ethically, certain OT practices such

Progressive revelation implies, therefore, that in Scripture interpretation, "the authority of cer­tain portions of the Bible may not be, in detail or application, the same for us as it was for those to whom those portions were originally addressed" (Taylor, Biblical Authority and Christian Faith, 66). Consequently, the incomplete progressive revela­tion must be interpreted and applied always in the light of the fullness of God's revelation in His Son.

See REVELATION (SPECIAL), BIBLE, BIBLICAL AUTHOR­ITY, COMPARATIVE RELIGION, HERMENEUTICS, BIBLE: THE TWO TESTAMENTS.

For Further Reading: Baker, Two Testaments: One Bi­ble, 59-87; Pache, The Inspiration and Authority of Scrip­ture, 102-10; Packer, "An Evangelical View of Progressive Revelation," Evangelical Roots, 143-58; Ramm, Special Revelation and the Word of God; Taylor, Biblical Authority and Christian Faith, 64-68, 81-83.

J. Wesley Adams

term progressive with reference to sanctification suggests that there is a process of time in which the instantaneous experience of entire sanctifica­tion is realized. This second work of grace, entire sanctification, comes in successive stages, each of which has a gradual approach and an instanta­neous consummation. Three things should be noted in this respect.

First, sanctification, in its larger meaning, is both initial and entire. In conversion the repen­tant sinner is justified, regenerated, and adopted into the family of God. But, in addition, he is ini­tially sanctified: cleansed from the acquired de­pravity which is a result of the sinner's actual sinning. But initial sanctification has not affected his inherited depravity. In a second crisis he is sanctified wholly: delivered from the presence of inbred sin or inherited depravity.

Second, sanctification is both gradual and in­stantaneous. Every act which brings God's grace to the being of man is the result of faith, and faith for entire sanctification must be preceded by a recognition of inner sin and a confession of that sin. This renunciation of sin is only possible by the convicting power of the Holy Spirit. This sense of awareness of inbred sin is progressive or gradual. But when this gradual aspect of entire sanctification brings the child of God, through the Holy Spirit, to a complete renunciation of in­bred sin, simple faith in Jesus Christ will result in an instantaneous cleansing from inbred sin.

Third, sanctification is both instantaneous and continuous. It has already been stated that while there is a gradual approach to entire sanctifica­tion, the actual cleansing from inbred sin is done in an instant. While this cleansing from inbred sin is a definite act completed in a moment, the retention of the freedom from sin is the result of a continuous cleansing by the Holy Spirit. Thus the cleansing from inbred sin which was com­pleted in an instant in answer to faith, is retained by the sanctified Christian only as he walks in the light and trusts the blood of Jesus Christ to keep him cleansed from all sin (1 John 1:7).

Sometimes "progressive sanctification" is used in reference to growth in Christlikeness and to the deepening of holy character after the crisis of entire sanctification. Great care must be exer­cised in such a use of the term, lest "progressive" be understood as a gradual cleansing from sin.

See SANCTIFICATION, ENTIRE SANCTIFICATION.

For Further Reading: Wiley, CT 2:479-86; Curtis, The Christian Faith, 373-93; GMS, 268-302, 462-507.

Norman R. Oke