The Heresies of Meredith Kline
In his book God, Heaven and Har Magedon (2006) Meredith Kline propounded views on the Holy Trinity which are a denial of the teachings of the ancient Catholic Church. Firstly, he argues that the Holy Spirit became “incarnate”:
As an epiphany the Glory that constitutes heaven is identifiable with God. At the same time, this Glory epiphany is a created phenomenon. The account of the creation of heaven in Gen 1:1 is the record of the origin of the Glory epiphany, the creational investiture of Deity with majestic splendor (Ps. 104: 1,2). The heavenly Glory then is a created embodiment of Deity. It is, morover, a permanent embodiment…This Glory-manifestation of the Spirit and the Incarnation of the Son are alike in that each is a permanent embodiment of a person of the Godhead in a created entity, the epiphanic glory and human nature respectively. p. 13
He then goes on to argue that the Holy Spirit, not God the Son, is really the second person in the Holy Trinity:
A reverse ordering of these two persons of the Trinity [i.e. the Son and the Spirit--my own editorial comment] obtains when they are viewed in terms of the eternal generating of the Son-proper account being taken of what we have been observing about the Endoxation of the Spirit and its relation to the Incarnation of the Son. It is not simply that in this economic relationship there is a temporal priority of the Endoxation of the Spirit to the Incarnation of the Son, but that the edoxate Spirit performs a fathering function with respect to the incarnate Son. It is by the Holy Spirit that Jesus was conceived, the Glory-Spirit, the Power of the Most High, coming upon Mary and overshadowing her (Luke 1:35). The Father begets the Son through the Spirit. In this process the Spirit is the second person and the Son the third. And as in the spiration of the Spirit so in the begetting of the Sonthe economic relations of the divine persons are to be seen as analogues of their eternal immanent relations. The fathering of the incarnate Son by the edoxate Spirit warrants inclusion of the Spirit along with the Father as a sunject in the eternal divine begetting, the generating process of which the Son is the object. It is a desiteratum, therefore, that a reference to the Holy Spirit, corresponding to the filioque phrase in the creedal account of the spiration of the Spirit find a place in our confessional formulation of the eternal filiation of the Son. p. 16
Despite his heretical depatures from the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, Dr. Kline’s disciple R. Scott Clark thinks that “he should get credit for being willing to stick his neck out re theonomy when most everyone else in Reformed academia was unwilling even to read Bahnsen, much less engage him seriously.” As if Theonomy were anywhere near as serious a matter as Trinitarian orthodoxy; but such is the hatred of cloister Calvinists for Theonomy that they would prefer people to have heretical views of the Trinity rather than have them submit to Biblical Law – this is absurd. However, to see how “seriously” Meredith Kline engaged Greg Bahnsen, see Dr. Bahnsen’s response to him here.
The above quotations were checked by a serving minister in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America., who happens to be a friend of mine. He too believes them to be heretical. These views may not be damnable heresy, but they are extremely dangerous.
