The Virtue of Theological Temperance: Gisle as a Mediating Figure

In First Timothy, the Apostle Paul considers the qualifications for elders, listing several qualities he feels are sine qua non for those in vocational ministry: "An overseer, then, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money" (1 Tim. 3:2-3). The word reading this list, there are some qualities that might stand out more immediately: obviously, we would think that an elder should not have an inordinate love of money, nor should he be prone to fist-fights! But some of the others are more difficult to discern, the fruit of long-determined spiritual discipline and maturity. One of these is temperance. The word in the original Greek is nephalion, from the root nepho, 'to be restrained' or 'sober.' The Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament notes that the sense is, "one who always has a halter on himself." This is a quality of someone who is moderate, who does not go to extremes in his personality—or, more precisely, if he does, he knows how to curb it through a lifetime of experience with it. Ideologically, this is someone who has the intellectual and theological maturity to not swing to one extreme or another in their positions, who is able to weigh the value of various positions, sorting the good from the bad, and avoiding the fallacy of mutual exclusion. To put it another way: sometimes those we disagree with make good point, and those we agree with make bad points, and the temperate teacher is able to weigh these arguments, beliefs, and ideas with discernment. Abraham Calov, in his Pædia Theologica, notes the qualities by which mature theological study should proceed:

Long-suffering, readiness to forgive and bear with all things, which do not but bring the divine honor (2 Cor. 5:11), and with zeal for the glory and truth of God; and by modesty, temperance, caution, etc. for which the soul must be prepared early, that we may escape from the other vices, and adorn the doctrine of the Savior God in all things (Tit. 2:10).

Gisle Johnson exhibits the virtue of temperance, not only in his careful handling of individual theological topics and controversies, but also in his life-long theological project of the Pistik and subsequent Dogmatik. Indeed, although some later accounts viewed Gisle as a rather hard-nosed orthodox dogmatician—an article in the 1903 Expository Times lamented “Gisle Johnson, was a great personality in Norway, with magnificent power, but he had riveted on his students a cast-iron orthodoxy…”—nonetheless, he was remembered by a student, Niels Hertzberg, as being a Pietist, one who had a "religious heavy-mindedness" about him, while, at the same time, being "strongly moved" by his faith on an emotional level. As such, Gisle's theology is both a structured, ordered, and even scientific work of dogmatics, defining it as "essentially a Christian faith-science [Troesvidenskab] or faith-doctrine [Troeslære]: the scientific knowledge of the Christian faith," while at the same time considering that, by necessity, this “includes the knowledge of the moral life, in which it is active and bears its fruit" (§1).

This is seen particularly in Gisle's own estimation of the theological task in the section on pietism and orthodoxy, found in sections 60 of the Norwegian edition and 33 of the Swedish, both of which constitute the final section in his Pistik. There, it is clear that Gisle viewed his own theological endeavor as a sort of mediating position between orthodoxy and pietism, placed at the crux of the work's transition from matters of faith to matters of dogmatics. In the Grundrids, Gisle emphasizes what he calls “the organic unity of faith,” which must not be disrupted by an unbalanced emphasis on one element or the other. For him, “the essence of faith as conviction” is tied both to “truth-knowledge,” as well as its organic product in “the feeling and the will.” Christianity cannot be “exclusively a matter of knowledge,” which would result in a mere “Christianity of reason” (Forstands-Christendom), using various terms including rationalism (Rationalisme), Deism in the Swedish edition, and, in the Norwegian, the phrase “død Rettroenhet”—dead orthodoxy. Yet there is also an opposite extreme, which “one-sidedly places the emphasis on the will of men,” where “the fruit will be a works-Christianity, a pietism.” According to Gisle, this places so much emphasis on works that it becomes a “Pharisaic nomism,” or a “barren moralism”—in other words, legalism. Here he warns against “an Christianity of emotion” (Følelses-Christianity), which can result in a “mysticism, whose ultimate consequence is again a pantheism.” So for Gisle, the answer comes in the holistic theology of faith on its basic, foundational anthropological level; as he says in the Swedish edition,

A true and healthy life of faith is only possible where faith encompasses the whole heart, simultaneously in understanding, will, and feeling. The exclusion or abolition of one or the other of these aspects of the personal life leads to disruption of the faith-life and, consistently carried out, to spiritual death.