Robert Strimple stands out as quite likely the finest dogmatic theologian to have served the OPC in training men for pastoral ministry. As a teenager in Wilmington, Delaware, he was planning on going to trade school until a high school guidance counselor encouraged his parents to send him to college.

The first member of his family to attend college, he graduated as valedictorian from the University of Delaware in 1956. The previous year he had married Alice Simon, whom he met at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He then attended Westminster Theological Seminary, where his chief influences were John Murray and Cornelius Van Til. They helped him to embrace an exegetically rigorous approach to systematic theology, appreciate the deep structures of theological systems, and, in time, migrate into firm convictions regarding paedobaptism.

After earning his PhD at the University of Toronto, Strimple taught at the Toronto Bible College before accepting a position at Westminster Theological Seminary. For the next thirty-one years at Westminster (1970–1980) and Westminster Seminary in California (1980–2001), he faithfully taught hundreds of aspiring OPC ministers. He also gave himself to service in the presbyteries of Philadelphia and Southern California and was elected as moderator of the Fifty-Third (1986) General Assembly.

His classroom teaching on the image of God in traditional Roman Catholic theology and the theology of Karl Barth in his course entitled God’s Created Image[1] supplies just one example to support the contention that he remains the most insightful yet underappreciated dogmatic theologian in OPC history.

In a tour de force survey, Strimple argued that traditional Roman Catholic theology and modern Barthian theology share striking similarities in their doctrinal conceptions of the image of God and in their theologies of participation in the being of God. For Roman Catholic theology, Adam, as the image of God, came from God with an inherent defect that required the infusion of supernatural grace that would reproportion and elevate him above his created nature to participate in the essence of God. For modern Barthian theology, Adam (a symbol for every man) came from God as inherently sinful and in need of participation in Jesus’s own participation in the being of God in the reconciling grace of the Christ-Event in Geschichte (a supratemporal time dimension inaccessible from calendar time historie).

The Image of God in Traditional Roman Catholic Conception

Strimple in his class expounds the Roman Catholic doctrine of the natural image of God and its teaching regarding the supernatural gift of the grace (donum superadditum) that Adam needed before the fall to enable him to desire and to attain his supernatural end of intellective participation in the essence of God. Roman Catholic theology teaches “the bestowal of the donum superadditum” by which Adam’s created nature as the image of God would be, in the words of the counter-reformation Roman Catholic theologian Bellarmine, “exalted above human nature and made participant in the nature of God.” Bellarmine followed Aquinas who taught the same doctrine–that grace was added to Adam’s nature so that he might attain an unmediated intellective participation in the essence of God in the beatific vision.

Strimple also makes explicit that the need for the supernatural gift of the donum superadditum in Roman Catholic theology rests in an inherent ethical defect in Adam’s created nature. Apart from the infusion of supernatural grace, Adam possessed a “languor” that “needed a remedy” entirely apart from sin. It was “difficult” for Adam to “do good” on account of an inherent propensity to sin—what Bellarmine termed concupiscence, the propensity to gratify lower carnal desires instead of higher intellectual desires. The donum superadditum therefore also served as an ethical supplement to make Adam desire properly his supernatural end of intellective participation in the essence of God.

The Image of God in Modern Barthian Conception

As penetrating as his analysis of Roman Catholic theology might be on its own terms, the true brilliance of Strimple’s teaching on the image of God emerges in his presentation of the view of Barth, whose dialectical conception of the image of God shares stunning similarities to the Roman Catholic conception. For Barth, Jesus Christ, the true image of God, participates in God’s being in the Christ-Event, a supratemporal event where God and man participate in the “third time” of “God’s time for us.” The humanity of Jesus participates in the being of God in the redemptive event of reconciliation between God and man. Barth calls this the “Christ-Event”—the event where divine and human being are submerged in and conditioned by a common time and a mutual becoming. God’s decision in the covenant of grace generates in Jesus’s humanity that which is “distinct from himself ordained for salvation, for perfect being, for participation in his own being.”[2] Barth insisted that the humanity of Jesus participates in “God’s time for us,” a shared transcendent sphere in which the Creator and the creature are mutually interdependent.

But when it comes to “Adam” in historie (or calendar time), the situation is different. Strimple reminds that “Barth does not view the fall as an historical event, by which man passed from a status integritatits, a state of integrity, to a status corruptionis, a state of corruption of fall and depravity. Barth doesn’t view the fall as an historical event that marked, historically, that kind of a transition—to man as originally created righteous and holy and good and upright and now depraved.” Strimple then cites Barth (Church Dogmatics, vol. 4.1) to demonstrate this observation:

In the matter of human disobedience and depravity there is no “earlier” [time] in which man was not yet a transgressor and as such innocent. . . . [Human history] constantly re-enacts the little scene in the garden of Eden. There never was a golden age. There is no point in looking back to one. The first man was immediately the first sinner. . . . It is the Word of God which forbids us to dream of any golden age in the past or any real progress within Adamic mankind and history or any future state of historical perfection.

Thus, from the outset, Adam and Eve (and “every man”) in historie needed the reconciling grace of God in the Christ-Event. Barth’s view of Adam as “immediately the first sinner” radicalizes the Roman Catholic doctrine of concupiscence. Adam (or every man in historie) not only has a propensity to sin as a creature but by virtue of creation is “immediately” the first sinner so that “there never was a golden age” of original righteousness for Adam in historie.

Yet, according to Barth, Adam and Eve participated in the Christ-Event even before they knew of Jesus or were called to belong to his church. Strimple cites Barth,

When man and woman beget and bear children by the divine permission and promise. . . . male and female necessarily point beyond themselves in this activity . . . in realizing this sign they participate in that to which they themselves point—in Jesus Christ and His Church, in the being of this man corresponding to His creation [e.g., with reference to Jesus in Geschichte as true image bearing man]—even before they know him, even before they believe in Jesus Christ, even before they are called to His Church.[3]

Here Strimple observes that Barth is “very clear. You just have to read it.” Strimple amplifies, “They are participating in Jesus Christ, even before they know him, even before they believe in Jesus Christ, even before they are called to his church.” When we put Barth’s argument together, Jesus participates in the being of God and Adam and Eve participate in the Christ-Event without even knowing him, which leads Strimple to note Barth’s inevitable trajectory toward universalism.

The parallels that Strimple’s work unveils prove astonishing. For Roman Catholic theology, Adam as the created image of God stood in need of grace (donum superadditum). For Barth, humanity, as created in historie, is fallen flesh and stands in need of reconciling grace (Christ-Event). For Roman Catholic theology, the supernatural gift of grace initiates an ascending participation in the essence of God. For Barth, God gives grace in a shared transcendent event in which both God and man participate in Jesus Christ, whose humanity by grace is the humanity of all men.

Strimple’s work has at least two helpful implications. First, it reminds us that recent attempts to retrieve Roman Catholic theology in the development of Reformed theology carry within them a theological alliance with Barth on the foundational doctrines of nature and grace that touch on every locus in a theological system. Second, Strimple’s insights enable us to understand, in contrast to Roman Catholic and Barthian errors, the Reformed doctrine of the image of God—the truth and beauty of what Vos termed the “deeper Protestant conception” of the image of God and the covenant of works.

Endnotes

[1] All quotations from Strimple derive from my transcription of his 2000 course.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4.1 (Hendrickson, 2010), 9.

[3] Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 3.1 (T & T Clark, 1958), 190–191.

The author is pastor of Trinity OPC in Easton, PA, and a fellow at Reformed Forum. New Horizons, October 2022.