No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. –John 1:18

For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. –Galatians 1:12

The aforementioned passages point up an important reality in regard to the Christian’s capacity to know God. The ground for a Christian knowledge of God isn’t something internal to the person, rather it is an extra nos (outside of us) reality that is based in God’s free choice to be for and with us in Jesus Christ. Both the Apostles John and Paul knew, and experienced this as they were confronted by the living God robed in the humanity of the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. But this isn’t the way the classical tradition for knowledge of God has primarily developed within the Latin tradition of the Western church. Instead, we get something like Thomas Aquinas’ Prima Pars and his five proofs for God’s existence. The typical qualification here is that: Aquinas still situated his proofs of God in tandem with God’s Revelation, it’s just that his proofs become an exercise meeting his prior axiom of ‘grace perfecting nature’; i.e. there is a complimentary relationship between both grace and nature (‘two books of revelation’ as it were). But the above passages militate against this. They assert that knowledge of the Christian God is solely rooted in God’s Word for us, as He speaks that and lives that for us in Jesus Christ. That is, for the Apostles, there was no speculative frame for thinking God; it was purely grounded in the Hebraic concept of the God of Israel revealing Himself now in these last days through the Son.

There are other components involved in all of this; primary of which is engaging with a theological anthropology, and the noetic effects the Fall has had upon the human heart (the heart being the center of all that it means to be human before God, coram Deo). But for our purposes I simply want to refer us to a sketch of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thinking contra what has been called the analogia entis (analogy of being). I have written on this in published form, with some reference to Aquinas. But in this instance, we get a more modern treatment of this locus as 20^th century Roman Catholic theologian, Erich Przywara, comes into view. Thus Przywara’s development of the analogy of being is the version that Bonhoeffer (along with Barth) had in mind as he presented his critique against it. If you are unaware of what the analogia entis entails you should get a feel for it as you read the following quote from Matthew Puffer. Here Puffer explains how and why Bonhoeffer repudiated Przywara’s version of the analogy of being in particular, and the analogia more generally. He writes:

In his Habilitationsschrift, Bonhoeffer writes, “There are in theology no ontological categories that are primarily based in creation and divorced from those latter concepts [sin and grace, “Adam” and Christ]’ (DBWE 2:32). The implications of this claim are on display in Bonhoeffer’s critiques of Erich Przywara’s analogia entis, or analogy of being. Bonhoeffer argues Przywara’s interpretation of the image of God as an analogia entis is flawed because it assumes ‘a continuity of the mode of being in status corruptionis and status gratiae’ (DBWE 2:74). Here Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran heritage is evident. As a former Augustinian priest, Luther’s Lectures on Genesis (1535/6 CE) had followed Augustine’s The Literal Meaning of Genesis (c. 401–16 CE) by interpreting Genesis 3 and Paul’s letters as teaching that human beings lost the image of God with Adam’s fall. According to Przywara, ‘[human] being, whether in the original state of Adam or in Christ, may always be certain of its analogy to God’s being (DBWE 2:75). Opposing this view on ontological grounds, Bonhoeffers asks rhetorically ‘whether there is in fact a being of human beings in general that is not already determined in every instance as their “being in Adam” or “being in Christ,” as their being-guilty or being-pardoned, and only as such could lead to an understanding of the being of human beings’ (DBWE 2:75). Bonhoeffer faults Przywara’s interpretation for positing a human nature that reflects—i.e. is the image of—the divine nature, without accounting for the biblical witness’s binary of two human conditions: either ‘in Adam’, a postlapsarian state of corruption, or ‘in Christ’, a state of grace in which the human image of God is renewed as a new creation (2 Cor. 3:18, 5:17; Eph. 4:23-4; Col. 3:9-10). This critique of Przywara would re-emerge in Bonhoeffer’s winter 1932/3 lectures on ‘Creation and Sin’ and ‘Theological Anthropology’ (see Howell, 2016).

According to Bonhoeffer, then, being in Adam is ontologically discontinuous with being in Christ. Those who reject the notion that they are sinners in need of Christ’s reconciliation are ‘in Adam’, whereas those who in faith confess their needed reconciliation are a new creation ‘in Christ’. Furthermore, only by faith in Christ is God recognized as Creator, the world as fallen creation, and human beings as God’s creatures (DBWE 2: 151). That we do not know God as Creator apart from Christ is nowhere more apparent than in Bonhoeffer’s 1931 lecture on the theology of crisis.[1]

As Puffer insightfully identifies in Bonhoeffer, we can clearly see that the analogia entis was anathema for Bonhoeffer. It isn’t difficult to see the role the Luther[an] simul justus et peccator plays in the binary vis-à-vis the ‘two Adam’s’ motif as that functions in Bonhoeffer’s development against a classical or even revised notion of an analogy of being. And this is to the point: for Bonhoeffer, as I think, for the Apostles, there is a discontinuity between the conditions of humanity we find in the first Adam versus the greater and second Adam who is the Christ. This contrasts quite starkly with the classical analogia as we find that in Aquinas; insofar that Przywara echoes Aquinas the same holds true for him.

The reduction is this: if there is a distinction between Adam and Christ, then the analogy of being cannot hold theological epistemological (nor ontological) water. If ‘grace perfects nature’ as it does for Aquinas et al. then an analogia entis not might only obtain, but it necessarily must insofar that a knowledge of God, in a God-world relation, is under consideration. If nothing else we can see how a priori theological commitments impinge on these questions. But I would maintain that the anti –analogia entis posture we find in Bonhoeffer (and Barth) comes not from a speculative a priori theological commitment, but instead from an a posteriori evangelical given as that comes immediately through God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In other words, I maintain, along with Bonhoeffer (and Barth) that there is no knowledge of God outside of an encounter with Him which we realize by the very faith of Christ. That is, there is no objective knowledge of God apart from His subjective confrontation of us, moment-by-moment, through the ever-present Christus praesens that invades our lives by the Spirit. It is by the Spirit that we call Jesus Lord, and it is by the Lord that we have the liberty to finally see God for who He is in Himself for us; rather than speculating about what and who He might be from an analogy grounded in abstract nature from His (so the analogia entis).

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[1] Matthew Puffer, “Creation,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 182.