Category Archives: Analogia Entis

Against the Common God of the Danish, in Kierkegaard’s Time

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Mythology is a pervasive reality in the human experience. This is no different in the Christian experience. Christians, obviously, are just people living ensconced in a socio-cultural milieu, just as any other person. Of course, the Christian, de jure, is also someone who has been redeemed, in the redemption of God’s life for them in Christ, such that they ought to be able to discern the profane from the holy. The profane would entail anything that ends up being mythological at its core. It is a society that lives in a buffered world wherein it thinks its being starts in the self, and only potentially coming to have a concept of godness from the self’s ostensible capacity to imagine such heights. God in Christ, in the ‘divine incognito’, has come to contradict all such imaginaries; and He has done so from within the very would-be contradictory element within humanity that would seek to assert itself over against Him—that is, He has clothed Himself with our humanity with the result that His humanity for us could say No to “our humanity,” and bring humanity proper into the telos it has always already been intended for: to be in full communion with the triune God (who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).

The above has played itself out ever since the fall of humanity. Sinful humanity, even in its redeemed status, has been prone to wander; it, in its simul justus et peccator dialectic, always wants to add more, add its own take on what it best for them. Christendom has been rife with these types of developments. These days some, like Christian Smith, have identified that as moralistic therapeutic deism. Two and three centuries ago, in Daneland, Soren Kierkegaard, was confronting this type of development in his own unique and Danish setting. A Hegelian shaping of Christianity had taken hold in the Danish churches, which as a result reduced said churches into thinking God and Jesus in domesticated, even natural ways. Ways that led the people in these churches to think that God had so immanentized Himself in Jesus that they, as the church, could be in a buddy-buddy relationship with the Christ; such that these church people, and its theologians, began to think Jesus, and the triune God, from a point within themselves, rather than from an antecedent point without themselves in the person of Jesus Christ. Here father and son duo, Alan and Andrew Torrance, described how the above looked in the Kierkegaardian Danish context:

Why did Kierkegaard emphasize that Jesus Christ is offensive to the eyes of the world? For those committed to spreading the gospel, this may seem like a strange move. He was prompted to do this because Christ had become inoffensive to Danish society for the wrong reasons; he had been turned into an altogether different reality from who he is in truth. Denmark was not embracing Christ because it had been transformed by the grace of God to see the Truth of Jesus Christ; it was embracing Christ because he had become part of Danish culture and thereby transformed into “something different from what he is.” Consequently, his message had been distorted into one that would appeal to the Danish people. In short, the former scenario is a goal of Christ’s revelation as it is presented in the New Testament, according to which God’s kingdom comes to be on earth as it is in heaven. By contrast, the latter scenario is a goal of mediation in Hegelian theology, whereby the relationship with God unfolds in the cultural and intellectual progress of society. In the Hegelian theology of Denmark, “Jesus Christ” was being “remodeled” into an image that played into the intellectual and cultural games of Danish theology. The offensiveness of Christ was neutered, and “Christ” was tailored to fit the procrustean bed of Danish society. For Kierkegaard, this amounted to blasphemy, that is,

blasphemy, contained in the non-sensical-undialectical climax of clerical roaring: to such a degree was Christ God that one could immediately and directly perceive it, instead of: he was true God, and therefore to such a degree God that he was unrecognizable—thus it was not flesh and blood but the opposite of flesh and blood that inspired Peter to recognize him.

This is a complex passage that is worth unpacking, especially since Barth would draw attention to the first half of it in the second edition of his commentary on Romans. By assuming that we can know Jesus Christ directly as the God-human, Danish theology was operating on the “non-sensical-undialectical” assumption that God had assumed a form that made God directly knowable according to the (distorting) limits of immanent human reason. Danish theologians were under the impression that we can reason our way to God, degree by degree, by way of our own “flesh and blood”—that is, our own immanent cognitive faculties. Such a perception, for Kierkegaard, got things the wrong way around and thereby allowed God to be treated as an object which effectively belonged to the furniture of the world. For Kierkegaard, it is the spiritual reality of God—“the opposite of flesh and blood”—that gives us the capacity to see the God-human for who he is, thereby delivering us from our inability to do so.[1]

The Danish dilemma of Kierkegaard’s day is the very same dilemma North American, and Western churches in general, are currently and continuously being confronted with. We have squashed the Lord’s voice out of our lives by conflating our voices as His. We have become too comfortable with the Gospel, as if we possess it, when in fact the opposite is true; the Gospel possesses us; the Gospel has bought and paid for us with the precious blood of Jesus Christ. We have imagined a Jesus who fits in better with the god of the ancient tree of the knowledge of good and evil, rather than the triune God who has always already eternally been in the plenitude of His triune life and otherness within Himself.

As an aside: as the Torrances, respectively, have developed for us the way that Kierkegaard was attempting to confront the immanent frame in his day and age, what has also been addressed is that fatal analogia entis (analogy of being). The analogia has had many iterations starting medievally with Thomas Aquinas, and given modern Catholic invention in the thought of Przywara. Kierkegaard, according to the Torrances, would reject every iteration of the analogia, one and all. There is no immanent frame to think the Christian God from; it is only as He freely chooses to make contact and encounter with us that we come to have the capaciousness to finally think the true and genuine God of Jesus Christ. The Gospel is a miracle, and so is the knowledge of God that has come with it.

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 76–7.

The Yes-and-Amen-God of the Bible versus the No-God of the Philosophers and Scholastics

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As the epitomised expression of this truth, the homoousion is the ontological and epistemological linchpin of Christian theology. It gives expression to the truth with which everything hangs together, and without which everything ultimately falls apart. The decisive point for Christian theology, and not least for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, lies here, where we move from one level to another: from the basic evangelical and doxological level to the theological level, and from that level to the high theological level of the ontological relations in God.[1] In that movement a radical shift in the basic fabric of theological thought takes place along with a reconstruction in the foundations of our prior knowledge. This is evident not least in the fact that in formulating the homoousion of Christ in connection with both his creative and redemptive activity, Nicene theology laid the axe to the epistemological dualism latent in Greek philosophy and religion that threatened the very heart of the Gospel; and as such it gave powerful expression to the indissoluble connection in Act and Being between the economic Trinity and the ontological Trinity, between ÎżáŒ°ÎșÎżÎœÎżÎŒÎŻÎ± and ΞΔολογία, which secured the Church in its belief that in the Lord Jesus Christ and his Gospel they had to do directly with the ultimate Presence and downright Reality of God himself. Jesus Christ does for us and to us, and what the Holy Spirit does in us, is what God himself does for us, to us and in us.[1]

 For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. 12 For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.[2]

The passage above, from Torrance, helps us dive into what the remainder of this post intends to cover; viz. how someone like Karl Barth (and TF Torrance after him) attempted to think a knowledge of God. Not a knowledge of God grounded in discursive speculation; not a knowledge of God grounded in the heights of human wisdom; not a knowledge of God latent in the created order as vestiges of the Trinity; but a knowledge of God that is genuinely and concretely provided for in God’s Self-givenness for the world in Jesus Christ. Some, particularly so-called classical theists have identified this way of knowing God as ‘modern’ ‘neo-orthodox’ or even demonic; but it is none of those. Indeed, I would contend, rather vociferously, that this way of knowing has rootage in the type of logoi theology of the Patristics; particularly, as we see that exuded in the passage from TFT. I would argue, that to think God from abstract metaphysical constructs, such as the Aristotelians, the Thomists, the social Trinitarians, the Schleiermachereans, so on and so forth do, is to engage in an industry of idolatrous manufacturing that the genuine knowledge of God came to put to death in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Some critics of the kataphysical (or kataphatic) way for knowing God, that is the via positiva (versus the via negative) want to claim that this way entails an anti-metaphysicalism; indeed, it may well, but only in the most squeamishly understood of ways.

What is at stake in this discussion is how a theory of knowledge/revelation, one way or the other, implicates just who it is that the Christian ostensibly comes to know as the Christian God. Is the Christian going to come to think the depth dimension of God from the deep well and entryway that TFT describes for us vis-à-vis the Patristic homoousion and kerygmatic (Gospely) way; is the Christian going to think God from the way that God has freely elected to be known as Self-explicated in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ? Or is the Christian going to come to know God through the via negativa or the apophatic way for thinking God; is the Christian going to come to know God through delimiting God’s reality by circumscribing Him by the curtailments that an analogy of [human] being (analogia entis) supplies in regard to negating what it means to be human, and projecting that negation outward into a notion of godness that supposedly represents the Christian God (i.e., so the human understands themselves to be finite, they negate their finity, and presuppose that there must be a causal being who is infinite who functions as a prius to their ability to be finite etc.)?

Karl Barth, has been critiqued by the so-called self-proclaimed ‘classical’ theologians as an anti-metaphysical theologian. Indeed, Barth may well fit this characterization, but only in a highly muted way (that is, in regard to what a metaphysic could entail if understood expansively and Christ conditionally). I think Barth fits the biblical way for thinking God. As the Apostle Paul (by the Holy Spirit) has said: “For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” This theme is pervasive in the corpus of Paul, and other New Testament writers; that is, the theme of knowledge of God that is wholly grounded in God’s Self-revelation (from above) in Jesus Christ. The biblical account for knowing God is purely tied to God first knowing us, as Paul writes further: “However at that time, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those which by nature are no gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God . . . .” This is the theory of a Christian knowledge of God, according to Scripture. It is not a knowledge that leads to a No-God, as Isaiah, Paul, Barth et al. discuss; but it is a theory that comes from and leads back to the Yes-and-Amen-God of the apocalyptic invasion of the living God for the world in the elect humanity of Jesus Christ. This is not a God based on speculations, or pietisms, or human angling. This is the God who was, and is, and is to come; the God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Bruce McCormack helps to detail Barth’s supposed anti-metaphysical approach to thinking God. Ultimately, I would argue that whether or not a theory of knowledge of God reaches some ad hoc high mark of metaphysical acuity is neither here nor there. Barth agrees, and thus as McCormack shows, his thinking in this regard goes thusly.

“Metaphysics”, as Barth understood it, refers to the classical attempt to provide an account for the order which a human subject observes in the world about her. Extrapolating from observed phenomena, she posits the existence of a First Cause or a First Principle. It is the rejection of this order of knowing which is in view when we speak of Barth as “anti-metaphysical”. It is important to clarify this now, for just three years later (in his Göttingen lectures on dogmatics), Barth would not hesitate to reflect upon theological themes which the nineteenth-century mind had been accustomed to regarding as “metaphysical”: the ancient Church doctrines of the immanent Trinity, the anhypostatic-enhypostatic Christology, the being and attributes of God, etc. To the vast majority of nineteenth-century theologians, these themes were “metaphysical” because they referred to alleged realities which lay beyond the limits of human knowing and therefore could only be accessed by means of the metaphysical way of knowing or by speculation. Barth was in agreement with the nineteenth-century theologians to this extent: if one were to be in a position to address the questions which arise in these regions of discourse, it would not be possible on the basis of the metaphysical way of knowing. The ground of the possibility would have to be sought elsewhere: in his view, in God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. So speak of Barth as “anti-metaphysical” refers to his attitude towards a particular way of knowing (the path taken); it does not entail the bracketing-off of particular regions of discourse from discussion in an a priori fashion. Indeed, Barth would always be convinced that an anti-metaphysical stance in theology was thoroughly compatible with the consideration o the themes just enumerated.

The significance of Barth’s anti-metaphysical attitude for an understanding of Romans II is this: Barth has been convinced for some time that the way taken by a person who seeks to know God will, to a large extent, determine the kind of God one arrives at, or even whether what is arrived at is God at all. In Romans II, he took great pains to show that what was typically understood as God in the theology of his time was, in reality, the ‘No-God’ of this world. Seen within the range of possible conceptions arising naturally out of human capacities for knowledge, what is understood under the name “God”:

is always only a something in contrast to another something, a pole in opposition to a counter-pole, a magnitude next to other magnitudes, a yes in relation to a no; not, however, the Either which has already overcome the Or, not the Yes which lies beyond yes and no, not the power of the reversal from death to life. . . . For God who is a something in contrast to something else, a pole over against a counter-pole, yes against no, the God who is not the completely free, unique, superior, victorious God, is the no-God, the God of this world.

More than any other human possibility, Barth argues, it is religion which is responsible for creating the dualism of the here and the beyond. But God is not ‘the beyond’. God is not the ‘elongation of nature into a super-nature or a behind-nature (metaphysics)’. The being of God lies beyond what we naturally think of as the here (Diesseits) and the beyond (Jenseits). ‘God is not accidental, conditioned, bound to the opposition of here and there, but rather the pure negation, and therefore the beyond of the “here” and the “beyond”. . .’ . God stands beyond all this-worldly polarities, contrasts, or dualisms, whether they be nature and spirit, materiality and ideality, body and soul, or finite and infinite. God is not the Infinite! The Infinite is only a projection; it is the finite, stripped of all its limitations and projected on to a higher being. But because it is a projection, it always remains inseparably bound to the finite as its antithesis, its mirror opposite. It is not the absolutely free and creative Origin of all things. God is the Eternal, not the Infinite; the Origin, not the First Cause set next to and in a series with other causes; the Creator of all things, visible and invisible. ‘God stands over against humankind as Origin, not as Cause. . . . The human individual in his existence and being is always created; not somehow only conditioned but rather, together with everything which conditions and can condition him (and even if it should be called “God”) created. In other words, everything which can only condition us is still only a created reality like unto ourselves and therefore, to the extent that it is called “God”, is only the No-God of this world. In following Barth’s relentless pursual of this theme, it becomes clear that his purpose is to locate God beyond the realm of any and every conceptuality readily available to us, whether through a via negativa or a via eminentiae or a via causalitatis. The being of God lies on the far side of the ‘line of death’ which separates the world of time, things, and people, together with every conceptuality bound to it, from the eternal.[3]

These matters might seem heady to some, but they are of the upmost import when we consider the implications of getting God wrong. Syncretism has always plagued the people of God, as far back as the Garden of Eden and onward. We trick ourselves if we imagine that just because there might be a long traceable line of interpretive tradition vis-à-vis a knowledge of God, as that has unfolded in the various periods of Christian theological development, that somehow these developments represent a concursus Dei, a causal act of God behind them. But this way of thinking God in a God-world relation is to impose our speculations of how God must be acting simply because the “natural” history of ideational development has turned to and fro in the here and there of what is historically. But that is not how God has revealed Himself to humanity. God has disrupted the “natural order of things,” by the invasion and thus irruption of His gracious and otherworldly life for the world in Jesus Christ. If this is the case, then to think God biblically, must be to think God from the Bible’s res (reality) in Jesus Christ. This way of thinking God, definitionally, is not subject to the machinations of an abstract humanity, thinking speculative thoughts, about a supposed pure being (actus purus) up yonder in the nether regions of space.

More could be said, as it always can be. But I think it is best for us to simply recognize, as Christians, that the God we know is the Yes-and-Amen-God of God’s inner triune life for us in the eternal Logos, the eternal Son become human, that we, by this Grace might become what He is as adopted sons and daughters of the living God. We ought to, in kind then, just say no to the No-God constructed out of the shadowy and wistful constructions of the abstract human imagination.

 

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 95.

[2] The Holy Spirit and Apostle Paul, Galatians 1.11-12: New American Standard Bible 1995.

[3] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 246–48.

The Miracle of the Gospel against Worldviewism

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When we think of ‘worldview’ as an analytic tool, in order to categorize various belief systems worldwide, we often think, as Christians, that we have a spot in that type of indexing. But I am not ultimately a proponent of thinking of the Christian reality in the philosophical terms presupposed for thinking in terms of a worldview. Even so, insofar as this discipline of intellection goes, it can be helpful in at least providing a sense of order in regard to thinking about the various juxtapositions of the various ‘belief systems’ that populate the world, and its peoples. But at the same time, when the Christian gets into the ‘meatier’ things what ought to become evidently clear is that the Christian reality, who is the Christ and the triune God, are incapable of being subject to the sociological strictures used to adjudicate belief systems. The Christian reality gets behind such maneuvers; it is basic to the very fabric of seen and unseen reality; it has no analogues in the created order; it is a miracle of sui generis and novum magnitude.

For the remainder of this article, I want to provide a good word from Karl Barth on the problem that thinking about the Christianity reality, in terms of worldview, presents the Christian with. This type of thinking might contradict dearly held beliefs about the very structure of reality, for some. But I think that what Barth is getting at is, indeed, the most faithful telling the Christian can hear in regard to thinking about both protology and eschatology with reference to their center in Jesus Christ. What will be observed, as I develop this a bit further, is the primordial nature of the Christian reality; such that its reality has no competitors, as if in a dualistic duel.

Robert Dale Dawson writes, with reference to Barth’s theology of the resurrection, and the primal significance and reach such theology has towards Barth’s thinking.

A large number of analyses come up short by dwelling upon the historical question, often falsely construing Barth’s inversion of the order of the historical enterprise and the resurrection of Jesus as an aspect of his historical skepticism. For Barth the resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of the sort to be analyzed and understood, by other data, by means of historical critical science. While a real event within the nexus of space and time the resurrection is also the event of the creation of new time and space. Such an event can only be described as an act of God; that is an otherwise impossible event. The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.[1]

Dawson sets us up to read Barth well with reference to the problems that world-view presents its would-be practitioners with. The reader will notice how Dawson’s description of Barth’s thinking of “the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God” dovetails nicely with Barth’s thoughts in general, with regard to thinking the Evangel in the terms that world-view presupposes.

Barth writes at length:

. . . We conclude this introductory consideration with an observation which in the light of this applies to the Christian doctrine of creation as a whole.

Its theme is the work of God which is characterised by the fact that—because the covenant is its basic purpose and meaning and God in Jesus Christ is the Creator—it is divine benefit. The character of its theme, established in this way, is what distinguishes the Christin doctrine of creation from all the so-called world-views which have emerged or may conceivably emerge in the spheres of mythology, philosophy and science. It differs from all these by the fact that it is based on God’s revelation. But this is not merely a formal difference. It is also material. The Christian doctrine of creation does not merely take its rise from another source. It also arises very differently from all such world-views. It not only has a different origin, but has a different object and pursues a different course. The divine activity which is its object can never become the theme of a world-view.

The truth of this assertion is seen at once from the fact that none of the world-views so far known to us has attained to the concept of creation by following to the end the way from noetics to ontology and genesology, but has usually remained stuck either in noetics or at most in ontology. The philosophical equivalent for the theological idea of divine creation would have us to be at least that of a pure and basic becoming underlying and therefore preceding all perception and being. But the world-views normally take their point of departure within the circle of perception and being, subject and object, and are content to describe it according to the relationships determined by a particular view, the variations and differences, progressions and retrogressions, between the individual systems being so great that on the one hand the universe seems to be more like a great thought, and on the other more like a great machine. In some cases the basic problem of becoming, the question of the whence of the universe, whether it be conceived as thought or machine, is not even noticed but naively ignored. In others it is not overlooked but consciously left open, with a resigned or emphatic assertion of its inherent unanswerability. In others again there may be an attempt to answer it, but only in the form of a geneseologically deepened noetics or ontology, so that it is not really answered but only distorted. For the problem of becoming as opposed to that of knowledge or being is a new and independent problem which cannot be answered by any interpretation of knowledge and being and their mutual relationship. It must be viewed independently if it is to escape the suspicion that it has not really been viewed at all.[2]

The reader might better be informed now, at the very least, as to why Barth rejects the discipline and categorization that world-view offers as an analytic tool; at least in regard to thinking the Christian reality. I am, once again (surprise!), in agreement with Barth on this. His rejection of worldview thinking, of course, fits well with his rejection of natural theology; indeed, his rejection of natural theology naturally (pun intended) leads to a rejection of thinking in terms of worldviews.

When it comes to the evangelistic task (gift), personally, I make use of whatever tools seem necessary for that particular engagement. Speaking in terms of worldviews, initially, might be helpful towards grabbing some sort of intellectual footing among the people we are seeking to reach for Christ. But for me, really, the better way is to go the way of Barth; at least when proclaiming the Gospel to people. People (all of us) need to be confronted with the unapologetic and weightiness of the living God; that’s what a genuine presentation of the Gospel does (and comes with). It is the ‘natural man’ who wants to reason their way to whatever they want to reason themselves to. But the Gospel, and its eternal reality, is not natural. The Gospel is supranatural even as it comes veiled in the natural of the human body. It is in this way, on the analogy of the incarnation, that the Gospel (God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; for ‘revelation is reconciliation’) is in the world, but not of it. God is genuinely and fully human in Christ, but human in the sense that He is, in Christ, the archetype, the firstborn of creation, humanity (cf. Col 1.15). He is the One for the many. Even this movement itself, its unilateral ingress, ought to show the seeker the Way, the order of God; indeed, the order of the Gospel itself. The order, as Dawson, with reference to Barth, and Barth himself have shown is of a primordial nature vis-à-vis the creation (and re-creation) of the world. There is no “worldview” that can account for that since the world has no view without first being created and re-created ex nihilo, as it were, in and from the resurrection of God in the humanity of Jesus Christ. Worldviewism can attempt to give account for these heights via propositions and generalizations, but the Gospel itself ultimately resists such attempts; the Gospel represents, to use philosophical jargon: the scandal of particularity. The claim of the Gospel is that there is only One living God, and that He is for us, for the world in Jesus Christ. The claim of the Gospel is that Christ alone is the way, the truth, and the life; that is the primordiality of the whole thing. The Gospel, and all of its implications, is the MIRACLE.

[1] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §42 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 335-36.

classical Calvinists (and Arminians) Don’t Actually Affirm Total Depravity

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I just wrote the following, off the top, as a long Tweet; take it for what it’s worth.

It’s ironic when you think about it: classical Calvinists claim to be strident proponents of a doctrine of total depravity. But when you actually look at the historical ideational development there, what you get from them is a Thomist intellectualist anthropology. This entails that the intellect is the defining component of what defines a human being as a human being in a faculty psychology. The classical Calvinist (and Arminian), following Aquinas and Aristotle, requires that at the time of the fall the intellect and will remain intact, and only tarnished; and that the affections (or emotions) are what fell in the eating of the forbidden fruit. They need the intellect to remain intact, at some level, in order for the chain of being between themselves and the Big intellect or brain in the heavens (God) to have analogous connection, insofar that human beings are effects and images of their final cause in and from the pure being of God. It is upon this basis, i.e., the radical interconnectivity between God as the cause, and everything else, in a hierarchical chain of order, that is put into effect by the primary cause of God, wherein a knowledge of God, by way of natural and intellectual means (so, natural law/theology) can be appealed to by both the Catholic and Post Reformed orthodox theologians. And so, their actual doctrine of total depravity isn’t ultimately an accurate depiction of what someone might think. Humanity remains humanity after the fall insofar that they are connected to their primary cause by way of analogous intellects. As such, humanity, in this frame, maintains a point of contact with God through the intellectual prowess. After the fall what fallen humanity needs isn’t ultimately re-creation (from actual death to life), but a medicine of grace wherein nature is once again perfected to its original perfection in God. This is why it can be effectively argued that Post Reformed orthodoxy offers a semi-Pelagian soteriology, just as much as the Catholic system does (they are of apiece).

Barth, on the other hand, rejected this type of intellectualist anthropology, and maintained what you’d think a doctrine of total depravity would entail. Viz., that humanity, after the fall (and even before), has nothing inherent in itself to make connection with God; i.e., nothing natural, so to speak. As such, it requires an absolute re-creation of humanity, in the vicarious humanity of Christ, in order for there to be a correspondence, or analogy of relation, between God and humanity (contra the analogy of being and natural theology). Humanity comes to have a correspondence for knowledge of God, insofar that Christ re-creates that for us in His resurrected and ascended humanity; and in His humanity come and coming.

 

All You Ever Wanted to Know about Barth’s Analogy of Faith

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The Deus absconditus (‘hidden God’) is the Deus revelatus (‘revealed God’) in Jesus Christ. But how do we know this? Because Jesus said so; He demonstrated so. A genuine Christian theologian isn’t given to fits of speculation about godness. A genuine Christian theologian is definitionally such simply by the confession that they are Christian. But much of this has gone by the wayside in the development of dogma in the catholic Church. In Latin theology for example, where Thomas Aquinas has been canonized, for both the Catholic and Protestant theologian alike, the method for developing a doctrine of God is based in speculation, and an analogia entis (‘analogy of being’). But this kicks against the premise of Scripture itself. Holy Scripture is Holy without proof. In other words, God just shows up in Scripture. He says I AM. Likewise, Jesus says: I AM. This represents the character or ethos of a genuine Christian theology. That is, the Christian knower of God only knows who (and even what) God is by way of God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. It is as the Christian comes into union with Christ by the Spirit that they come to have a genuine ground for thinking who God is; that is, a ground grounded in Godself for us in Jesus Christ. In other words, in this frame of relation, the Christian can think and know God concretely as they have been granted eyes to see and ears to hear from Christ’s vicarious eyes and ears for us in His mediating humanity. It is here that the Christian theologian can know, think, and speak God. It is in this Holy and sanctified ground where the Christian’s knowledge of God isn’t based in a center in themselves (and thus a speculative, discursive model), but from the center of God for us in Jesus Christ.

The aforementioned is what characterizes Karl Barth’s way for thinking and doing Christian theology. For Barth, and for me, the centraldogma of Christian theology is Jesus Christ. We know this because in the Dominical teaching Jesus says that the ministry of the Holy Spirit, who inhabits the Christian’s heart now as a guarantee, is radically Christ concentrated. The Holy Spirit isn’t given to fits and flights of speculation of an abstract notion of godness; nein, the Holy Spirit’s sole ministry is to push us deeper and deeper into the words and reality of Jesus Christ. It is from whence that the Holy Spirit comes alongside, hovers about, and comforts us. Not by pointing us to an actus purus (‘pure being’) notion of God, but pointing us to the Son of the Father (see Jn 14—16).

With the above in mind lets read along with Bruce McCormack as he describes Barth’s approach to knowledge of God, which is both a terminological analogia relationis (‘analogy of relation’) and analogia fidei (‘analogy of faith’).

. . . Beintker says, ‘the Denkform of the analogia relationis sive proportionalitatis, which sets forth a correspondence between the God-human relation and the human-human relation, forms a constant in Barth’s work from the time the Tambach lecture on.’[1]

The crucial passage appealed to in order to confirm this view is this: ‘The human being does indeed do something corresponding, parallel, analogical in her own creaturely sphere of being in view of that which God does in His, in that He reveals Himself.’.. . What is at stake in this passage is indeed an analogical relation between divine speaking in the act of revelation and human knowing in the act of faith. Beintker is right to see in this an example of what Barth would later call the analogia fidei. It must be pointed out that the Göttingen Prolegomena only came into Beintker’s possession as he was correcting the final draft of his book for publication. Had he had the earlier version of the prolegomena, he would have had to adjust his thesis slightly, placing the first instance of the analogia fidei in 1924 rather than 1927—as he himself implicitly acknowledges through the provision (in the final draft) of the parallel passage in Unterricht to the one just quoted.[2]

McCormack continues:

The ‘analogy of faith’ refers most fundamentally to a relation of correspondence between an act of God and an act of a human subject; the act of divine Self-revelation and the human act of faith in which that revelation is acknowledged. More specifically, the analogy which is established ins a revelation event is an analogy between God’s knowledge of Himself and human knowledge of Him in and through human concepts and words. There are three aspects of this analogy which need to be highlighted. First, the analogy in question is not posited with creation. It is not an analogy between the being of Creator and the being of the creature—which Barth refers to as an analogia entis in contrast to an analogia fidei. The focus here is not being but rather a highly concrete event: the event of revelation. Second, there is nothing in the being or knowing of the human subject which helps to bring this event about—no capacity or pre-understanding which might be seen as a necessary precondition to its occurrence. The only capacity needed for the analogy is one which God Himself graciously provides in the event itself as a gift, namely faith. In the event of revelation, human knowledge is made by grace to conform to its divine object. Thus (the reader will forgive an overused metaphor, but it is good Barthian language), the direction in which the analogy works is always ‘above to below’. That is to say, God’s Self-knowledge does not become analogically related to a prior human knowledge of Him in revelation; rather, human knowledge is conformed to His. God’s act is the analogue, ours is the analogate; His the archetype, ours the ectype. Third, the ‘analogy of faith’ is to be understood ‘actualistically’, that is, strictly as an event. The relation of correspondence which is established in the revelation-event endures. Thus, the ‘analogy of faith’, once realized, does not pass over into human control. It must continue to be effected moment by moment by the sovereign action of the divine freedom if it is to be effected at all.

The central area of theological reflection to which this understanding of analogy was applied by Barth is that of the relation of the content of revelation to human language (concepts and words). Barth’s view is that human language in itself has not capacity for bearing adequate witness to God. If human language is nevertheless able to bear witness, it will only be because a capacity not intrinsic to it has been brought to if from without. But that is grace, not nature. In a gracious and sovereign act, God takes up language of human witnesses and makes it to conform to Himself. God must therefore speak when spoken of by human witnesses if such witness is to reach its goal. He must reveal Himself in and through the ‘veil’ of human language. It is at this point that the inherently dialectical character of the analogia fidei is seen.[3]

There are many trails we could take out of this concise explication on Barth’s analogia relationis-fidei, but let me highlight just a couple. The basic premise of Barth’s et al. understanding of the analogia fidei versus an analogia entis is anthropological; but of course, as is typical with Barth, anything that is anything in theology is first and always Christological. What is underwriting Barth’s doggish commitment to his ‘analogy of faith’ is the biblical teaching of a radical human depravity. You will notice that as McCormack was sketching these things for us, he kept pressing that in Barth’s theology God acts both sovereignly and unilaterally for us; if He didn’t, then knowledge of God left to our own machinations could only conclude in idolatry. So, for Barth (for me) there is no ‘grace perfecting nature’ or ‘revelation perfecting reason,’ there is only the impossible possibility that has actualized in the event of God’s free choice to Self-reveal for us in Christ. In Barth, as we also observed in McCormack’s development, there is nothing inherent to natural humanity (because of the fall) that could correspond, even analogously, to a knowledge of who and what God is; again, such endeavor could only end in an idolatry of self-projection. This is key, when considering Barth’s thinking on his ‘analogy of faith’: i.e., human language in itself, or by nature (precisely because of the fall) has been lobotomized to the point that it can only operate in sub-human ways. As such, when a ‘natural’ person, such as the classical philosophers, attempt to think God, all they can do is build a construct based on negation; all they can do is look within, negate their obvious finity, and then posit that God must be humanity’s opposite and thus infinite so on and so forth.

Hopefully, if you were wondering about these things, this post has cleared it up for you.

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909—1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 10 n. 32.

[2] Ibid., 10-11 n. 33.

[3] Ibid., 16-18.

Against Speculative Scholastic Theologies: For Confessional Cruciform Theologies

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Being a genuine Christian theologian starts at the point that we become Christians. The same confession made to become a Christian, is the same confession that remains as the ground of our theological witnesses as Christians. The fact of our sin never leaves us. We are constantly sinning, and the person who says otherwise “is a liar and the truth is not in them.” But the Good News, indeed, is that we have an Advocate with the Father; we have a Savior, and His name is Jesus Christ! This is the ground of all Christian theologizing; the only other ground is unbelief. And as Jesus chides the Pharisees of in the Gospel of John, it is seeking the praise of others, rather than God’s praise, that is the core of unbelief. And so, for the true Christian theologian they will always remember that they sin daily, and thus are in need, afresh anew, moment-by-moment, of the fresh in-breath of the Holy Spirit as He brings Christ’s power of resurrection into our lives as the reversal of what would intend to keep us in belief; of what would intend to makes us atheologians rather than genuine theologians (of the cross). Eberhard JĂŒngel says it this way:

8. Unbelief — inability to speak, and our cry for deliverance

One of the problems of being sinners turned in on ourselves is that we lose our ability to speak our faith. Our guilt makes us dumb. Instead of talking to God, we talk about him. Of course, we can hide our speechlessness behind vapid chattering. The fact remains that we have nothing to say about God. By refusing to utter the one thing we have to says as sinners, our confession of sin, we have nothing at all to say before God or about God. By remaining silent at the wrong time, we are forced to remain completely silent. We can find no words that are true. The sin of unbelief is matched by sinners’ inability to speak before God.

Such speechlessness is the passive dimension of that active urge to relationlessness of which we spoke. It comes home to roost when sinners find themselves unable to speak. And with that inability, sinners suffer the whole lack of substance and insecurity of their sin. They suffer it while alive in the form of a shadow constantly cast over them by death. And they suffer it in death because the silencing of sinners in death is final.

Sinners can only be released from this state of speechlessness by the power of the resurrection. They can only be saved by the vitalizing Spirit of Truth and the Word of Truth bringing forgiveness from guilt. For the Spirit of Truth testifies and the Word of Truth proclaims the encouraging news of forgiveness and blotting out of sins, so that where sin increases, the grace of God abounds all the more (Rom. 5:20b), so much so that it sets sinners free to confess their sin.

A confession of sin of this sort will, of course, not be satisfied with what Peter said: ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man’ (Luke 5:8). Sinners could not have a more foolish reaction. The abundance of divine grace towards the excess of our human need and guilt rather suggests that we pray: ‘Lord, come in to us, for we are sinners!’ Where such a prayer is prayed, in a world full of death and darkness the Christian church emerges, drawing its life from God’s compassion and sharing it with others.

Such a prayer is the only way. It is, in fact, the way which has been given to us to participate in the overcoming of sin, to work together with the grace of God as ÏƒÏ…ÎœÎ”ÏÎłÎżáœ· ΞΔοῊ. Given this one, this unique way, we cannot be synergistic enough. By crying out for forgiveness of sins, for deliverance from evil, for that matchless fellowship with God the Redeemer, sinners are doing the only thing  they can to become justified sinners. To cry out for forgiveness of sins and deliverance from evil, despite the apparent simplicity of such an action, is the one great thing that human beings can do to contribute to their justification by faith alone.[1]

Much to consider, but for our purposes I want to hone in on one aspect that Juengal touches upon: viz., the idea that if the base of our theologizing is not the crux of the Gospel itself, insofar that that crux is ‘He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him,’ then what other theologians speak of is indeed only idle chatter. When the theologian attempts to think God from a theological methodology rooted in speculation, as scholasticism does for example, all said theologian is doing is pretending to talk about God rather than with God. As Juengal rightly identifies, the genuine theologian is one who dialogues with God; the genuine theologian is the one who prays out loud for others to hear; the genuine theologian is the one who, as they speak to God, and as He speaks Himself in Christ back to them by the Spirit, proclaims this Good News con-versation with others. Speculative theologians, and theologies don’t, indeed, cannot do this.

You see, all of this comes back, really, to a theological anthropology; or lack thereof. If a person operates from a Thomist intellectualist anthropology, one wherein the intellect is understood as the definitive component of what it means to be human—indeed, after the notion that God is the Big Brain in the sky—all that the retainer of such anthropology can do is attempt to imagine God, as if God is corollary with their own creatednesss; albeit, by analogy (think, analogia entis). Juengal rightly notes, that such theologizing is only straw ready to be burned at the Bema judgment seat of Christ.

May we be theologians of the cross, rather than theologians of glory. May we do theology as we speak to theology proper in Jesus Christ by the breath of the Holy Spirit. May we repudiate vain speculations and imaginations about God, as if such speculations could be anything other than the self-projections, and thus self-impositions upon a cipher-god that we attempt to force into the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. There is no power in speculative theology, only in the concrete theology pulsating through the veins and flesh of the risen Christ. It is here, at the Right Hand of the Father where genuine Christian theology is done; Christ, living to make intercession for those who have confessed their sin, and from this ground the theologian articulates a theology that is worth shouting from the rooftops!

[1] Eberhard JĂŒngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (UK: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 145-46.

The Christian God is without Proof

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“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law. -Deuteronomy 29:29

No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him. -John 1:18

For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. 12 For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. -Galatians 1:11-12

16 For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. 17 For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to Him by the Majestic Glory, “This is My beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased”— 18 and we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. -II Peter 1:16-18

The theme of the above passages ought to be apparent: the Christian God is absolutely a revealed God. Knowledge of the Christian God is not grounded in speculation, as we get from the philosophers about the actus purus (‘pure being’). The Christian God, particularly as we encounter Him in the burning book, the Bible, just is. In Holy Scripture Deus dixit (‘God has spoken’), and because He has first spoken, those with eyes to see and ears to hear, have a God who just shows up, and thus we have someone to respond to. We aren’t reliant on an active intuition, or an active intellect in our knowledge of God; we don’t epistemically precede Him only to come to know His ontology as a matter of self-discovery; we don’t speculate like Thomas Aquinas does in his Prima Pars with reference to proving God’s existence five different times. No, we are fully reliant upon the God who simply shows up without explanation; He speaks and does, and thus we have a God to respond to; a God who is allowed to explain who He is for us and with us. Like Job, we simply sit there in our pain and squalor and are confronted with the God who just shows up without explanation. This becomes the Christian’s way, and mode of existence all the days of their lives; viz. we wait on God to speak, and we respond to His speaking by the Spirit in Christ. Eberhard JĂŒngel captures the sentiment this way:

Regardless of this logical problem, however, Christian theology cannot ask the isolated question about the existence of God. For Christian theology is the explanation of what faith sees itself to be. So it presupposes faith in God and, of course, the existence of God. That is what distinguishes it from philosophy. Schleiermacher was right in demanding that dogmatics match the Scripture and the symbolical books, which ‘do not prove but simply assert’ the existence of God. ‘Dogmatics must therefore presuppose intuitive certainty or faith; and thus, as far as the God-consciousness in general is concerned, what it has to do is not to effect its recognition but to explicate its content.’ The faith which is presupposed by dogmatics is, however, by definition faith in God, revealed in Jesus Christ and revealed as a gracious God.[1]

This kicks against many an apologetic and theological effort to find God in the vestiges of the created order. But if the Christian is going to have a genuinely Christian notion of God it will wait and listen to God as He comes to us afresh anew over and again in the face of His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. This runs counter to the analytically and scholastically minded, whether antique or modern. Nevertheless, this always already is how the genuinely Christian God has been known; that is, through His Self-exegesis in Jesus Christ. Any other attempts at knowledge of the Christian God will necessarily flounder and end up with syntheses that present us with a Feuerbacherian god of self-projection, no matter how hallowed its traditions are.

The industrial theological complex is bent on proving God’s existence as the preamble to their theologizing. It is determined to affirm a natural law, and natural theology wherein its centripetal movement is shaped by its own machinations and genius to think God abstract from God, and then name this abstraction the Christian God after the theologians and philosophers of religion have had adequate time to synthesize this abstraction with the God they finally get to in Holy Scripture. This is not the way, and it should be repented of post-haste.

[1] Eberhard JĂŒngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (UK/USA: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2001), 46.

Barmen, Barth, and Agamben against BigMedicine as State Church

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I was just re-reading the following post which I originally posted on September 13, 2021. I was looking for a post that got into the role that natural theology and no-natural theology plays in regard to Christian praxis vis-Ă -vis the state. This particular post has to do with BigMedicine, and what I call, along with Agamben, a new religion. Really it isn’t new at all though. Hitler rationalized that what he was doing, in pushing forward his third reich, was being done in the name of medical and scientific advancement (thus cultural advancement ushering in a new millennium where he would be Lord). Currently internationalist BigMedicine, under the rulership of similar megalomaniacs (relative to Hitler), is seeking to impose their understanding of the resurrection of humanity, through the genius of their own machinations, as that is given expression in technological and medical mode (among other modes) on the people of the world. My point is that the evil that funded Hitler’s worldpicture has never gone away. And what funded Hitler’s vision of the world was the immanentization and thus collapse of the Kingdom of God into the kingdom of man, such that humanity writ large could discard God and name itself God. This is Genesis 3 given blossom. The heart of fallen humanity hasn’t changed, as such the way that heart is dealt with must not change either. To think of nature as if it is abstract from God’s upholding Word, as if it is now contingent upon our (humanity’s) word, is indeed the epitome of the spirit of Antichrist. And yet this is what natural theology trades on; that is, the idea that nature has latent within it the resources for seeing and knowing God. In the secular iteration of this theology we end up getting something like Hitler, or the internationalism (funded by corporatocracy etc.) we see currently attempting to rule the world. What such people need to be reminded of is that the Kingdom of God is not within our grasp. These would-be gods need to understand that we possess nothing, and only have life and sustenance by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. That we have no access to God, that there is no pure nature latent with the vestiges of God simply waiting to be discovered by a profane and abstract humanity. This is why natural theology (for me, in all of its iterations) must be denounced over and again. It simply believes that the fruit Adam and Ever partook of actually did make humanity God. And so with this long introduction (for a blog post) I leave you with the following:

What is the relationship between the state and church? This question was thrown into intense relief at the outset of the so-called Nazification of the church in Germany back in the thirties. Because of this serpentine evil pressed against the people, and thus the German church, leaders in both the Lutheran and Reformed communions came together to form what would become known as the Confessing Church. Its most well-known participants were Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The leaders in this emerging church felt compelled to offer a declaration that would galvanize their respective position against what they discerned to be an overstep (understatement) of Hitler and his state church. The Confessing Church leadership believed, and rightly so, that the state had no business interfering with the church’s business; equally, they were convicted that the state itself had its own God-ordained integrity, to maintain order and law in and among the broader population. They articulated what they believed, with reference to these matters, in what came to be known as the Barmen Declaration. It is composed of various theses, under which explanation, both positive and negative is given. The thesis that particularly focused on the relationship between church and state is found in thesis 5; it reads as follows:

5. “Fear God. Honor the Emperor.” 1 Pet. 2:17

Scripture tells us that by divine appointment the State, in this still unredeemed world in which also the Church is situated, has the task of maintaining justice and peace, so far as human discernment and human ability make this possible, by means of the threat and use of force. The Church acknowledges with gratitude and reverence toward God the benefit of this, his appointment. It draws attention to God’s Dominion [Reich], God’s commandment and justice, and with these the responsibility of those who rule and those who are ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word, by which God upholds all things.

We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the State should and could become the sole and total order of human life and so fulfil the vocation of the Church as well.

We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the Church should and could take on the nature, tasks and dignity which belong to the State and thus become itself an organ of the State.[1]

Christiane Tietz in her recently released book, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict, offers the following commentary and context for thesis 5:

The fifth thesis describes the relationship between church and state. The state is to provide justice and peace, the church is to remind the state of the kingdom of God and make the state aware that it must answer before God’s commandment and righteousness. There are two statements of rejection expressed under this thesis: the doctrine of the “totalitarian state” that seeks to dominate all areas of life, including the church, is rejected, as is the teaching that the church should take over the tasks or characteristics of the state. Barth later noted that a strong and vital church would have needed to judge the abuses of the Nazi state even more strongly. Even for these statements however they had to summon all their courage. In light of the ideology of that era the theses were “an immense contradiction.”[2]

Because my audience is varied, and probably not generally in-step with me on discerning our times, I want to provide further elaboration on what I think is actually happening in the state; and then how that is related in sinister form to the church at large. In order to help me elucidate my own perspective I will share a passage from Giorgio Agamben where he discusses the collapse of state directed medicine into a religion of its own. He writes:

The medical religion has unreservedly adopted from Christianity the eschatological appeal dropped by the latter. Capitalism, by secularising the theological paradigm of salvation, had already eliminated the idea of the end times, replacing it with a permanent state of crisis without redemption or end. ‘Krisis’ was originally a medical concept which designated, in the Hippocratic corpus of texts, the moment when the doctor decided whether the patient would be able to survive the disease. Theologians reprised the term to indicate the final judgement that occurs during the last day. If we look at the state of exception which we are now experiencing, we could say that the medical religion combines the perpetual crisis of capitalism with the Christian idea of the end times, of an eschaton where the extreme decision is constantly ongoing and where the end is simultaneously rushed and deferred in an incessant effort to govern it, without its ever being resolved once and for all. It is the religion of a world that feels itself to be at its end, and yet it cannot—like the Hippocratic doctor—decide whether it will survive or die.[3]

Lots of rich insight and perspective provided for by Agamben, but for my purposes what serves instructive is the link that is made between the medical superstructure, particularly as that is supported by the state (ie FDA, CDC, BigPharma, WHO etc.), and how this has sought to displace the church’s role as the church. Attendant to this sublation, of the church by the state, the medicine-state as religion now seeks to baptize all of its elect (even by the sword if necessary) with their ‘means of grace’ administered through the various holy waters on offer; whether that be mRNA based, or not. But without getting into those details further, suffice it to say, the church now is in just as precarious of a situation, and even greater than, what the Confessing Church was facing in the natural theology being promulgated by the state church of the Third Reich and Hitler. Things have been sophisticated since the 1930s by way of technology, and new communicative strategies and platforms for mass media and propaganda; but the sinister nature, and unholy ingress of the state into the sphere of the church is at an all-time high.

When state tyranny infringes on the people in general, and the church in particular, it is the church’s rightful place to say a resounding and holy, Nein! The church is here to bear witness to the reality of God’s life for the world, and the truth that comes with that kind of life as the ground and grammar of everything. When the state conflates itself with the church as the church, when it has ministers on the payroll, as they do in America through COVID relief, so on and so forth, this is the time for the Confessing Church of the 21st century to yell out a resounding, No! The Confessing Church is like the sons of Issachar who had “men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do (I Chronicles 12.32) . . . .” When the church discerns a tyrannical state using the name of Christ to grow its tyranny, particularly as it does that in the place of and as the church, then it is time for the churches, and any semblance of an emerging Confessing Church to take the mic and say, No!

Unfortunately, most mainstream evangelical pastors, and other church pastors of various movements and traditions, have failed to call out the statism as churchism currently underway in the world. They have failed to recognize, unlike Agamben, that there is a new religion in the world, and it is BigMedicine as a proxy for the state. Until pastors and theologians in the mainstream come to this realization, they will continue to bow the knee to Caesar, not realizing that they are even doing so. They will continue catechizing their people with notions that the ‘loving’ thing to do is to be baptized into this new religion, and bear witness to the fact that salvation has come to the masses in and through this new form of baptismal regeneration. Indeed, here is a learned pastor, I know, who just yesterday posted the following on Facebook:

Regardless of whether or not a government has the “right” to mandate vaccinations, masks, and social distancing, and regardless of whether or not I as an individual have the “right” to refuse, because I am a follower of Jesus called to love my neighbor, I have been fully vaccinated, I wear a mask and practice social distancing in public, and I avoid crowds. I’m not afraid of COVID-19. I love you enough to do whatever I can to protect you. If I catch SARS-CoV-2, I’ll likely recover fairly quickly because I am fully vaccinated, but I could still transmit it to someone who isn’t or to someone with a compromised immune system. As a follower of Jesus, I’m called to lay down my “rights” and serve. I don’t want you or any of your loved ones to wind up on a ventilator in an ICU. I’ve been in too many ICUs to wish that on anyone. Nor do I want you or your loved ones to die from a deadly pandemic. I’ve officiated at far too many funerals to ignore that possibility.[4]

This is a perfect example of how the state has reached into the church, and in the name of health and safety, presented ministers of the Gospel with a new law-code and Great Commission to be followed. It is couched in subterfuge and misinformation, and on this pastor’s part, received without any critical investigation whatsoever. As a result, he has become an unwitting tool in the hands of the angel of light, declaring health and safety over the masses in the name of an elixir that self-proclaims itself as the current means of salvation for the world.

The Confessing Church of the 21st century needs to cry out, Nein!, over and over again; and to do so as the sons and daughters of Issachar: viz. with understanding!

 

[1] Barmen Declaration.

[2] Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 235 kindle.

[3] Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now?: The Epidemic As Politics (Lanham: Rowman&Littlefield, 2021), 53.

[4] Anonymous, accessed 09-13-2021.

On Being Apocalyptic and Anti-Natural Theology in Theological Orientation

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I wrote the following four years ago. This locus remains my primary point of theological interest. That is, how the Christian claims to know God, under what pressures, has the greatest theological, political, sociological, and ethical implications we could fathom. As you will see, beyond the programmatic entailments engaged with in the following, natural theology, and adherence to it, has clear and present impact on the daily lives of real-life people; whether personally or collectively (as a society). If it is maintained that God and His ways can be known in an abstract ground latent in human reason, consciousness, or brute nature itself, then this will frame the way the Christians under this specter develop their respective ethics and politics; indeed, in light of their ostensible theological soundings. This is why, for Barth, this was all so pressing; particularly as he inhabited the range of two World Wars. In the Reich context it was evident for all to see how a form of natural theology could be deployed for the evilest of ends. In my view, there is no way to massage natural theology into a form that magnifies the name of Jesus Christ. Thus, along with Barth, I believe that the analogia entis (as a subset of natural theology) is Antichrist! We can see how so-called Christian leaders today are equally committed to natural theology, and how that is allowing them to capitulate to the global politics of the day; particularly as that is focused on the politicization of the “health crisis,” so-called “climate change,” and the deployment of critical race theory. All of these things fall under the rubric of natural theology. Confidence in the natural human capacities leads people to the conclusion that we have the powers to manipulate “naked” ideas, or brute natural forces, just the same, to our own beneficial ends. All we end up doing under this sort of posture, though, in my view, is to take by force what alone belongs to God; who alone searches the hearts and minds of all humanity.

With the aforementioned, we now turn to the body of this post.

How do we know God? There are traditions for answering that very question; I follow a particular tradition in contrast to another prominent tradition. This post will explore this question by providing some lengthy description of its unfolding in 20th century modern theology. We will read along with David Congdon, at length, as he describes Karl Barth’s relationship to the analogia entis tradition, and the alternative that is situated in Barth’s dialectical theology. After we have read along with Congdon, we will bring what Congdon has surfaced for us in Barth’s theology into a brief discussion on a doctrine of creation in general. I recognize that I write about this issue frequently and often here at the blog, and this should alert you to the importance I see in it.

In the process of developing Barth’s (and Bultmann’s) style of dialectical theology Congdon breaks off in a section and gets into the issue of knowledge of God vis-à-vis the infamous analogy of being; most commonly associated, in medieval theology, with Thomas Aquinas, and in modern theology with Roman Catholic theologian, Erich Przywara. The version of analogia entis that Barth is most animated by is the version of his German theological counterpart, Przywara. Barth’s reasons for being so animated are indeed contextual to the Third Reich milieu he was situated within, and the way that the Volk (national) church deployed things like the analogy of being, and natural theology in general, towards their evil ends. Some want to relativize or marginalize Barth’s animus towards the analogy of being by arguing that that was only a consequent and development per his idiosyncratic situatedness. Thus, the marginalization goes, Barth’s stance against the analogy of being may have served his purposes towards an attempt at assassinating the Nazi conflation of church and state, but for our current purposes, theologically, such animus would be misdirected. But what this critique fails to appreciate is that the forces Barth was contesting are the dark forces and principalities and powers that have always already been present in this space-time continuum. In other words, there is nothing idiosyncratic about Barth’s stance against the analogy of being or natural theology in general that aren’t just as prescient and present in the 21st century—look around, we are currently in a corporatist oligarchic globalist state wherein the principalities and powers are just as heavy upon us (in their own expressions) as they were in the Deutschland of Barth and the Confessing Church of Bonhoeffer.

In the following David Congdon helps elucidate what in fact this whole debate is about; in particular in Barth’s contest with Przywara (and then by application to the German civilization and Emil Brunner). You will also see the way Condgon, per his thesis, ties this particular debate into a theology of mission (which ties into colonialism and nationalism). We will leave that particular discussion to the side (i.e., mission) to focus on Barth’s problem with the analogia. Congdon writes (in extenso):

The year 1932 marks the climax of the confrontation between Barth and Erich Przywara. Three years earlier, in February 1929, Barth invited Przywara to MĂŒnster to participate in his seminar on Thomas Aquinas. In December 1931, Przywara visited Barth again in his seminar on “The Problem of Natural Theology” while at Bonn. These debates, together with Przywara’s request in April 1932 that Barth review his book, Analogia Entis, and the rising political unease in Germany, resulted in Barth’s famous statement in the preface to KD 1.1 that the analogia entis is “the  invention of the anti-Christ.” It was the 1929 meeting that really set the stage for their disagreement, and in particular a comment Przywara made on the morning of February 6. According to the student protocols of the seminary, Przywara began by defending his position regarding the manifestation of God’s revelation in history, including in human consciousness. In his defense he cited the Thomistic axiom “gratia non destruit se supponit et perficit naturam” (grace does not destroy but supports and perfects nature). Przywara understood grace to be both created and uncreated, both native and alien. The justification of the sinner does not annul but rather brings to fulfillment the grace already present in us by virtue of our creaturely participation in the being of God.

Within weeks after this seminar visit Barth delivered his response to Przywara in the form of his lecture in Dortmund, “Schicksal und Idee in der Theologie.” While Przywara is not mentioned, he is the “silent conversation partner throughout.” This is especially clear when he addresses the Thomistic axiom directly:

“Gratia non destruit, sed supponti et perficit naturam.” Analogia entis: thus each existing being as such and also we human beings as existing beings participate in the similitudo Dei. The experience of God is for us an inherent possibility and necessity. . . . The word of God does not mean for human beings a confirmation and reassurance of the naïve confidence that the experience of God is, but rather . . . in contrast to the whole range of possible experience it says something new and not merely more strongly and clearly what people could know anyway and even experience elsewhere. Indeed, this is how things always stand between God’s word and human beings, in that it proclaims something new to them and comes to them like light in the darkness. It always comes to them as to sinners, as forgiving and thus as judging grace. . . . Therefore that ability and necessity, that capacity for experiencing God, cannot be understood at any rate as something “natural”—meaning something given with our existence as such or subsequently associated with our existence as such, nor can it be understood by an appeal to a “gratia inhaerens,” by virtue of which the knower and known would simply and in themselves be in the relation to God of the analogia entis.

Barth explicitly rejects the very axiom to which Przywara appealed to support his position. Grace, Barth says, neither has a basis in nature nor does it become subsequently part of nature. The grace of God is always a judging and forgiving grace, and for this reason it never becomes a “given” (datum) that lies at our disposal. It remains wholly nongiven even in the concrete event of Christ wherein God gives Godself to us. Grace always confronts us as a new event.

Keith Johnson makes this astute observation that much more is at stake here for Barth than simply the old Protestant-Catholic debate over justification, though that is certainly at the heart of the dispute. What concerns Barth is, in fact, the same colonialist logic of the gospel’s cultural captivity that prompted his dialectical revolt against liberal theology fifteen years earlier.

The link between humanity and God [Barth] recognized in 1929 followed the pattern he had seen in 1914 when his former teachers enlisted God in support of their own cause by giving their blessing to the war. Barth’s theology, from that moment on, had been driven by his goal of overcoming this mistake. In Przywara’s analogia entis, he discovered a sophisticated version of the same error, and in the Germany of 1932, the political winds were stirring in much the same way they had in 1914.

Barth’s remark in 1932 about the analogia entis as the “invention of the anti-Christ” is therefore “a direct function of his context. . .. The political turmoil around him had to be on Barth’s mind, and in his view, the church appeared to be complicit in the events that were unfolding.” In other words, the danger in Przywara’s thinking was that he provided a robust theological framework capable of justifying the nationalist propaganda and colonialist endeavors of the German nation. The fact that Przywara’s theology had such a strong internal consistency and grounding in the tradition made if far more dangerous than the liberalism of Barth’s teachers and Protestant contemporaries. It is for this reason that Barth was compelled to sound a clear and unequivocal denunciation of the analogia entis.

To make matters even more interesting, Przywara developed his account of analogy for missionary reasons. He understood the analogia entis as a “missionary principle” whose purpose is to prompt the church to positively engage German culture as the place where God is presently at work. The analogia entis accomplishes this task because “it attempts to meet the world on its own ground rather than insist that the world move to its ground.” We have to recall that, during these years of conversation with Przywara, Barth was simultaneously engaged in a debate with Brunner regarding the “point of connection” between nature and grace. And like Przywara, Brunner also viewed his account of the AnknĂŒpfungspunkt as a missionary concept. A pattern quickly began to emerge. In each of these three situations—the liberal capitulation in 1914, Przywara’s analogia entis in 1929–32, Brunner’s AnknĂŒpfungspunkt in 1929–35—Barth faced a theological position that claimed mission as its ground and aim, and on the basis of this appeal to mission sought to find a point of connection or continuity between God and humanity. The liberal theologians found it in German civilization, Przywara in human consciousness and experience, Brunner in the faculty of reason. In each case the will and work of God became continuous with what is already given and native to human beings in their creaturely existence, and so in each case Barth rendered a decisive verdict in the form of, respectively, the “No-God” in Der Römerbrief (1922), the “invention of the anti-Christ” in KD 1.1 (1932), and the famous Nein (1934).[1]

After this lengthy and enlightening treatment offered by Congdon, I think the primary point of reduction comes to the issue orbiting around a “point of connection” (AnknĂŒpfungspunkt) between God and humanity. As Congdon underscores this has taken various expressions through the centuries, whether that be with Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Przywara, the German nation (of the third reich), or Brunner; it is the issue of ‘the point of contact’ between God and humanity that is significant. It is significant, particularly in Barth’s context, because of the ethical and theopolitical implications this locus entails.

If God can be thought from nature (or natural capacity), if the boundaries between God and humanity, God and the nations can be forcefully brought together by identifying an inherent capacity with nature itself that is gestationally waiting for God to activate and give it birth, then who’s to regulate this sort of grounding between God and humanity; the theologians, the politicians? Barth says Nein. He seeks to take away this seduction for the ‘natural’ human heart, and place the ground for “the point of connection” within the life of Godself in the hypostatic union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ. This is why the type of analogical knowledge of God that Barth supports is grounded in what he calls an analogia fidei/relationis (analogy of faith-relation). Barth recognizes the role that analogy plays in the correspondence of our knowledge of God with God’s knowledge of Godself; but again, even as Barth recognizes the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between God and humanity, and precisely because of that, the shape of analogy he can support is one where it is objectively grounded not in a faceless apophatic God, but only in and from a center in himself that is for us in Jesus Christ. For Barth, within the Calvinian frame, faith is knowledge of God, and faith itself is the bond that God alone in the humanity of Christ has in se but for us as he transcends the ditch between himself and us within a creational nexus wherein all of creation has always already been attenuated and teleologized by Christ who is the Supreme and Firstborn of and for Creation.

I said at the beginning of my post that I was going to also get into a doctrine of creation. At the close of my paragraph above I start to hint at that discussion, but because of the length of this post I am going to close it now. I hope you can at least appreciate what is at issue in this discussion as a result of reading this post. Indeed, Barth had a context, but so has all of theological development; even so called catholic or ecumenical developments. The contextual and conditioned nature of theological development doesn’t negate its global availability or reduce its force to the period or circumstances of its locational unfolding; instead, the merit and weight of various theological developments, such as Barth’s anti-natural theological / anti-analogia entis posture, are weighed strictly by their proximate value in bearing witness to the res (the reality) and power of God’s Gospel who is Jesus Christ. I hope you’ll consider that if you are prone to writing Barth’s position off simply because Barth wrote his theology in the context and shadow of Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. Just maybe Barth’s theology, even though his heretic was partly German nationalism instead of Arius, has angel’s wings under it; in such a way that it might be a ministering spirit to the thirsty souls adrift in the 21st century evangelical theological wasteland (and I’m referring to the lacuna of Christian Dogmatics for the evangelical world).

 

[1] David W. Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 292-95.

Is Thomas Torrance Really a Thomist?

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Bruce McCormack argues, contra Hunsinger’s reading of Barth, that Hunsinger’s reading of Barth’s Trinitarian theology is in fact modulated through TF Torrance’s reading of Barth. McCormack further argues that TF Torrance’s approach is in fact Thomist, particularly when it comes to thinking a doctrine of God, and thus represents an inaccurate lens through which to read Barth, who of course is not Thomist.[1] In light of that it is interesting to read the way that Gilles Emery, OP describes Thomas Aquinas’ speculative approach to thinking God from the ad extra or economy of God’s life. But before we see what Emery has to say, let’s reread a summary offered by Ben Myers of TFT’s approach towards a knowledge of God; it is known as his ‘stratified knowledge of God’ theory (which TFT articulates most directly in his book The Christian Doctrine of God). Here is Myers:

Thomas F. Torrance’s model of the stratification of knowledge is one of his most striking and original contributions to theological method. Torrance’s model offers an account of the way formal theological knowledge emerges from our intuitive and pre-conceptual grasp of God’s reality as it is manifest in Jesus Christ. It presents a vision of theological progression, in which our knowledge moves towards an ever more refined and more unified conceptualisation of the reality of God, while remaining closely coordinated with the concrete level of personal and experiential knowledge of Jesus Christ. According to this model, our thought rises to higher levels of theological conceptualisation only as we penetrate more deeply into the reality of Jesus Christ. From the ground level of personal experience to the highest level of theological reflection, Jesus Christ thus remains central. Through a sustained concentration on him and on his homoousial union with God, we are able to achieve a formal account of the underlying trinitarian relations immanent in God’s own eternal being, which constitute the ultimate grammar of all theological discourse.[2]

And here is how Emery distills Aquinas’ approach:

In sum, Thomas finds in the action of the Trinity, as brought into focus by Scripture and received by faith, the revelation of the divinity of the three persons, their personal existence, and their relations. This rapid survey shows us the path on which Thomas will leas us through Trinitarian theology. The spring of Trinitarian theology is the reception of the revelation of the Trinity in the economic actions of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian teaching in the Summa Theologiae will seek to present this same reality which the action of the persons discloses: their unity and their distinction. And, in studying the eternal mystery of the three persons who are one God, speculative theology will equally seek to show the depth of the creative and salvific action of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.[3]

If Emery is right about Aquinas the ground for knowing the triune God is the economic Self-revelation of God in the incarnation. Similarly, as noted by Myers with reference to TFT, the economic revelation of God is the evangelical ground for thinking God in a stratified way. Both Thomas A. and Thomas T. maintain the primacy of the antecedent or immanent Trinity, thus avoiding the collapse of the processions of God in the inner life (in se) into the missions of God in His outer life (ad extra) for us. The difference between the two comes from how a theological ontology is conceived. That is, what is the relationship between a theory of revelation (so theological ontology), and a theological epistemology, insofar as that relates to a natural theology? In other words, does TFT maintain that nature has an integrity of its own in the sense that all it requires to become total is a perfecting of nature by God’s grace? Or rather, does TFT maintain that outwith the condition of God’s re-creation for the creation that creation has no capacity of its own to see or know God in any way? Thomas Aquinas maintains, per his dictum, that ‘grace perfects nature.’ As such, at a theological-anthropological level, he holds that in the fall humanity didn’t lose the intellectual capacity to think and see God’s effects in the created order. For him, as a result, while creation outwith the incarnation’s reality is diminished because of the fall (noetically), it is not fully dead; it simply requires its missing link to ascend to full capacity (so ‘perfecting grace’). Torrance rejects this, along with Barth, and believes along with Athanasius, that humanity was plunged into a subhumanity as a result of the fall, and thus it requires God to become incarnate if humanity has any hope of living, in an elevated way, into the reality of what it genuinely means to be human coram Deo.

There are some similarities between Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Torrance, but in the end, they are ultimately equivocal in the sense that they operate from different theological ontologies, and thus theological epistemologies and anthropologies, respectively. For TFT the entrĂ©e to genuinely knowing God is principally conditioned by concentrating on Christ alone, as God’s center of Himself for us, to know and worship Him through. For Aquinas, Christ comes in as the bright knight on a shiny white horse salvaging ‘Eden lost,’ and restoring it to its once stellar place in the created order. While Aquinas has language like “re-creation” in his lexicon, it really cashes out to be more of a “re-storation,” and this is what differentiates Thomas from Thomas. Aquinas operates with a protological emphasis, whereas TFT works from an eschatological focus in regard to a knowledge of God (Aquinas has the original creation driving his ontology, whereas TFT has re-creation conditioning his). These have substantial points of departure, and thus McCormack’s claim that TFT is really a Thomist doesn’t follow. Just because TFT thinks from the notion that there is an anteriority of God, that is prior to His Self-revelation in the economy, does not necessitate or reduce TFT to being a Thomist, per se. It just means that TFT, if anything, isn’t all that Hegelian (and I don’t actually think Barth is either).  

 

[1] See Bruce McCormack, “Election and the Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger,” Scottish Journal of Theology 63 (2): 203-24 (2010).

[2] Benjamin Myers, “The Stratification of knowledge in the thought of T. F. Torrance,” SJT 61 (1): 1-15 (2008) Printed in the United Kingdom © 2008 Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd doi: 10.1017/S003693060700381X.

[3] Gilles Emery, OP, The Trinitiarian Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17 [emboldening mine].