I have eschewed what many call classical theism for years. Classical theism is modern nomenclature used to symbolize or capture conceptual matter about God that was developed via antiqua (or in the antique or ancient way); primarily, in the mediaeval period. The Protestant side of this equation, well the contemporary mainstream of Reformed theology side, believes that the Protestant Reformation was about re-iterating the grammar for speaking God that was developed in Nicene theology. One of these proponents recently asserted the following on Twitter: “Classical theism is Nicene theism. Classical theism is Reformed catholic theism.”[1] What this sloppily does, though, is keep people from recognizing that ‘Reformed catholicism’ is actually a species, not of Patristic theology, but Mediaeval. Late mediaveal theology was infused with Thomist or Scotist categories (mostly Thomist in the mainstream) for thinking God. This is typically what classical theism, as nomenclature, is in reference to: i.e. Thomas Aquinas’s synthesis of Catholic Christian theology with Aristotelian speculative categories about infinity, immutability, impassibility, eternality, so on and so forth. Nicene theism did not have these categories available, per se (and I mean in the Aristotelian form that Thomas did); if anything, they deployed Platonic categories and grammar for attempting to speak rightly about God and Jesus Christ. And Nicene theism worked hard at ‘evangelizing the metaphysic’ they were using, whereas Thomas’ theology ostensibly gives way to speculating and thinking discursively/philosophically about God. These so called “theisms” are not univocal realities; they are equivocal when we think more critically than the above tweet allows for.

Karl Barth, in my view, rightly grounds all knowledge of God in Jesus Christ; as anybody who reads here knows by now. Whatever aspect of God we are attempting to think into, whether that be immanently or economically, as Barth rightly emphasizes, this must be radically done from Jesus Christ. If we are going to think biblically about God, we are limited to what the canonical Scriptures disclose about God. As TF Torrance rightly notes of Barth’s approach:

Because Jesus Christ is the Way, as well as the Truth and the Life, theological thought is limited and bounded and directed by this historical reality in whom we meet the Truth of God. That prohibits theological thought from wandering at will across open country, from straying over history in general or from occupying itself with some other history, rather than this concrete history in the centre of all history. Thus theological thought is distinguished from every empty conceptual thought, from every science of pure possibility, and from every kind of merely formal thinking, by being mastered and determined by the special history of Jesus Christ.[2]

It is this approach that Nicene theism sought to honor, more so than did Mediaeval theism in my view. By time we get to Mediaeval or ‘Reformed catholicism’ theism, there have been accretions about God that have developed, not from revelation, but from the speculative philosophical tradition that the mediaeval theology was enmeshed within. Barth repudiates this sort of intertwining of thinking God from discursion, and attempts to think God, instead, only as God has revealed Himself for us in Jesus Christ. Here is how this cashes out when Barth is thinking God’s immanent frame and freedom to be God:

If the freedom of divine immanence is sought and supposedly found apart from Jesus Christ, it can signify in practice only our enslavement to a false god. For this reason Jesus Christ alone must be preached to the heathen as the immanent God, and the Church must be severely vigilant to see that it expects everything from Jesus Christ, and from Jesus Christ everything, that He is unceasingly recognised as the way, the truth, and the life (Jn. 14.6). This attitude does not imply Christian absolutism or ecclesiastical narrowmindedness, because it is precisely in Jesus Christ, but also exclusively in Him, that the abundance and plenitude of divine immanence is included and revealed. If we do not have Christ, we do not have at all, but utterly lack, the fulness of God’s presence. If we separate ourselves from Him, we are not even on the way to this richness, but are slipping back into an impoverishment in which the omnipresent God is not known. The freedom of God must be recognised as His own freedom and this means—as it consists in God and as God has exercised it. But in God it consists in His Son Jesus Christ, and it is in Him that God has exercised it. In all its possibilities and shapes it remains the freedom which consists and is exercised in Jesus Christ. If we recognise and magnify it, we cannot come from any other starting-point but Him or move any other goal.[3]

This is a great example of how, thematically, Barth attempts to think God all the way up, and back down, from Christ alone. For him, to attempt to think God under the pressures present in ‘Reformed catholic theism’ is to think of an idol rather than God. It isn’t that I think that Barth doesn’t think that these mediaeval Christians weren’t in contact with God, or that they didn’t have good intentions; or that they weren’t working with the crumbs they had to work with. It is just that, in my view, I think Barth was critiquing what ended up being materially produced by the philosophical crumbs these ancient theologians had to work with. I agree with Barth, of course. Even in Barth, though, we do see traces of an Aristotelian, or even a Thomist aspect, towards thinking God, insofar as these traces, at a methodological level were grounded in an a posteriori mode of thinking God rather than a priori. So, even in Barth, and the mediaeval tradition, there are needles that need to be picked through in order to recognize that there is oft fluidity from one period of theological development to another. Even so, Barth’s approach ends up being radically Christ concentrated in a way, that at the end of the day, is massively divergent from the mediaevals; even if there seems to be incorporations here and there, from them, in his who theological oeuvre.

I don’t think the Tweeter, from above, is right. Indeed, I think that what the spirit of Protestantism entails, is that we are slavishly tied to doing theology from the categories and impulses disclosed and borne witness to in Holy Scripture (contra the Great Tradition, when that tradition slips into speculative theology, which it does frequently). I think Jesus Christ is God without remainder for us (pro nobis). Philip Ziegler, refers to Luther for us: “such considerations which inquire into something still higher, above and beyond the revealed God, are of the devil through and through; nothing is attained through them, save that we plunge ourselves into unhappiness because they present us with an unfathomable object, namely the non-revealed God.”[4] This is the spirit Barth operates within; within the proto-Protestant’s, Luther’s. This is the spirit that I believe Reformed theology ought to operate within; not the letter we see the Tweeter operating within. As a Protestant Christian, as Barth was, I too am radically committed to following the narrative disclosure and reality of Scripture; some have called this ‘the Scripture Principle,’ but then immediately erred from that principle by allowing discursive thinking about God to displace this principle.

The aforementioned is my style of Christianity. It is how I live my daily walk as a Christian. I don’t think God by speculative means. When I look up at the stars and moon, I don’t think of an abstract Creator God; I think of the God who would be known as Father of the Son, rather than by His works (to paraphrase, Athanasius). I think the person and works of God at once in the singular person of Jesus Christ. When my mind wants to wander off into the far country, and think God from there, I meet Jesus there instead; and He brings me back home to think God from His Right Hand. Nicene theism might be ‘classical theism,’ but it isn’t ‘Reformed catholic theism’ that is its re-iteration; nein, if anything, it is the genuinely Protestant theology of Barth that stays economically grounded in the text of Holy Writ. This is the Protestant way, and I commend it to you.

[1] Anonymous Tweeter, accessed 04-14-2020 @0219.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910-1931, 196.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §28 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 64.

[4] Martin Luther, 1535 Lectures on Genesis, cited by Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (New York/Berlin: Peter Lang, 2007), 45.