Category Archives: Analogia Entis

Luther against the god of the Philosophers and Descartes on God Knowledge per Juengel

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Knowledge of God and its bases has never been an uncontested thing in theological development and discourse. The Apostle Paul, of course, famously addresses the issue of knowledge of God in Romans 1 which has become the locus classicus for proponents of an ostensible natural theology:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

To appropriate this text as if it just does teach a natural theology, or way of thinking God in a form like Thomas Aquinas’ analogia entis entails—which would be a subset of a natural theology simpliciter—isn’t justified. Those who would simply assert such need to present an argument that Paul is intending to teach that who and what God is, is latent within something like the vestiges of creation.

On a different basis, but as corollary with something like Aquinas’ analogia entis, Rene Descartes attempts to present a certain knowledge of God from his methodological skepticism; thus, doubting everything as a basis for knowing until he gets to himself (so his cogito ergo sum). Descartes is offering his own form of an analogia entis, thinking godness from his idea of God that he has more certainly established by conniving God an epistemic ground founded in his own thinking as a prius to God.

Martin Luther yells a resounding Nein (as does Karl Barth in his own way). Eberhard JĂźngel presents an insightful commentary on how Luther differs from Descartes on a theory for a knowledge of God. He writes:

Remaining at the level of rational knowledge of God, for Luther too there is a fundamental cognitive difference between the “that-being” and “what-being” of God, between the ‘existence’ and the ‘essence’ of God: There is “a vast difference between knowing that there is a God and knowing who or what God is.” See Luther, Lectures on the Minor Prophets II: Jonah, Habakkuk (in Luther’s Works, vol. 19), ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1974), p. 55. Whereas Descartes begins with the ‘essence of God’ which is comprehended in the ‘idea of God’ and moves to the ascertainment of the ‘existence of God’ through the ego . . . , Luther takes another route: “Reason . . . knows that there is a God, but it does not know who or which is the true God.. . .” And it is the misfortune of reason overstepping its boundaries that it wants to move from the knowledge that there is a God somehow to the knowledge of who God is, as Luther says: “Thus reason also plays blindman’s buff with God; it consistently gropes in the dark and misses the mark. It calls that God which is not God and fails to call Him God who really is God. Reason would do neither the one nor the other if it were not conscious of the existence of God or if it really knew who and what God is. Therefore it rushes in clumsily an assigns the name God and ascribes the divine honor to its own idea of God. Thus reason never finds the true God, but knows the former [scil. that God exists]—it is inscribed in everybody’s heart; the latter is taught only by the Holy Spirit.. . .” This difference does not obtain for faith. For faith knows that God is in that it experiences who or what God is.[1]

Luther concedes that natural humans have an abstract notion of Godness, but this is where such knowledge of God terminates. Ultimately, it could be inferred, that if this was the basis for a knowledge of God in conclusion, what people would end up with, in regard to filling out this abstract knowledge of Godness, would end up being merely a self-projection of the self onto this ‘natural’ schematizing towards a knowledge of God. For Luther, as Juengel helpfully distills, a genuine knowledge of God is only one that is grounded in the eye of faith. Which if this is the case, and I think it is, presupposes that first the hidden God (Deus absconditus) must come down to us and be with as and be the revealed God (Deus revelatus) for us. This is nothing short of what Barth (and TF Torrance) pick up on, and develop into, in Barth’s case, what he identifies as an analogia fidei/relationis (‘analogy of faith/relation’). But sticking with Luther contra Descartes, per Juengel, reason is incapable of knowing who and then what God is. And we could surmise from this if natural reason is incapable in precisely this way, then constructing a theology proper based upon categories provided for by the [classical] philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle represent, ends up being fool’s errand—a fool’s errand because this method can only lead the seeker of God into an abyss of idolatry (as Ludwig Feuerbach understood so presciently in his own modern context).

On a negative note, I present this to you so that you can more critically read what certain evangelical, Reformed and Lutheran theologians are attempting to recover in the name of an orthodox doctrine of God. They are recovering notional categories for thinking God from the direct heirs, in both the “orthodox” realms of Reformed and Lutheran thinkers, to Thomas Aquinas; and we might add, tangled into this, something like Descartes’ thinking in regard to a certainty towards knowing God. I would strongly recommend to avoid this approach in attempting to think rightly, and thus orthodoxly about the living God. As Luther knew, such intellectualist machinations about God, again, can only finally terminate in a conception of godness that is only able to repose in the notion that some ‘unknown god,’ an abstraction of the human-knower, must certainly exist. And if this ‘ratiocination’ about God is followed, what is left, is for said rationales to say both what and who God is; with an emphasis on the former, as we see fruiting in both Descartes and Thomas.

On a positive note, take heart, for those who seek to know God, as Luther so brightly understood, from the faith of Christ, it is here where the seeker stands on solid ground; as the Apostle has written: “For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” When the Christian builds upon this foundation, the one seen with the faith of Christ, it is thence that the knower of God can genuinely be called such. When we aren’t building cathedrals of knowledge of God that wait upon ‘revelation perfecting reason,’ and instead allow God’s Self-revelation to impose Himself upon us, afresh anew by the Holy Spirit in Christ, it is here that the Christian can confidently proclaim that they see the face (prosopon) of God in Jesus Christ. This is the foundation, God’s being-in-becoming for the world in Jesus Christ that God has freely elected as the basis for the would-be knower of God to genuinely know who (and thus what) He is. And this is the all-important conclusion: that God is the one who has laid the foundation for knowing God in and from Himself, for us in Jesus Christ. He hasn’t left the Christian to be an orphan, or archaeologist attempting to discover God under the rubble of the artifacts of paleo pagan thinkers of a purported ultimacy. No, God has deigned that we know God from God alone in Christ alone by grace alone through faith alone; indeed, the faith of Christ.

I won’t directly address the Romans 1 passage, per se. I will leave that to the reader, and see if they can infer how I “exegeted” that pericope throughout the body of this post. (I have also written other posts that deal directly with that passage vis-à-vis a purported natural theology reading)

[1] Eberhard JĂźngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, OR: Wipf&Stock, 1983), 124 n. 53.

Calvin in Barth’s Services on an ‘analogy of relation’ against Natural Theology and Her ‘Resourcers’ in scholasticism Reformed

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Knowledge of God is the key, that is to the ‘secret of creation.’ If “Jesus Christ is indeed the real ground of creation,”[1] then in order to know what in fact creation is for, we must first know its Creator. But as Karl Barth underscores, in a rather Athanasian key, if Jesus is the ground of creation, and if Jesus is indeed the ‘Son of the Father,’ then to know the inner-ground, the secret of creation is first to know Jesus, to know the Son. As such, prior to knowing what and who creation is for, as the case may be, we must first come to know the Creator not as brute Creator, but as Father of the Son. It is from this frame of reference the Christian principially will come to think God all the way down; down into the flesh and blood humanity of the Son become man in Jesus Christ. This implicates, it even contradicts the classical theistic and/or scholastic mode for attempting to know God. This ‘mode’ thinks God by a prior means, by speculating upon the creation, with the philosophers, before coming to know God as Son of the Father; and thus, as Father of the Son. Because they fail to think God from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ, all the way down, they end up thinking from an abstract place about both the who-ness and what-ness of the living God. Once they establish that God exists (like Thomas in his Prima pars), they then are ready to think God as Son of the Father. But you see what this step does: It inherently ruptures the creation from the Creator, such that the former, at an epistemological level, comes to predicate the latter at an ontic level. Barth rightly excoriates such epistemologies as failures at more accurately knowing the living God; he rejects this type of natural theologizing at the very get-go, as would his patron saint, Athanasius.

What many of the Reformed of today might find troubling is that Barth can appeal to the namesake of the Calvinists himself, John Calvin. Barth can find commentary from Calvin on cognitio Dei (‘knowledge of God’) that militates against the natural theology of the scholastics Reformed. Even if Calvin has some dissonance, ultimately, that is when it comes to presenting a coherent position on knowledge of God, vis-à-vis his duplex cognitio Dei (‘twofold knowledge of God’), it is precisely in this dissonance that ripe fruit can be plucked by Barth in service of making his case for the inner reality of creation being God’s covenant life of grace for the world in Jesus Christ; and thus, to know creation as creation is to first know it as that is gift in God’s life of grace for the world come down in the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. Here Barth plucks Calvin’s fruitfulness found in what better place, but Calvin’s commentary on Genesis. Note how he puts Calvin to his services:

To my knowledge, the strongest testimony of theological tradition in this direction is Calvin’s foreword to his Commentary on the Book of Genesis (1554). In this work he recalls 1 Cor. 1:21: “For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” What Paul obviously means is: it is in vain for God to be sought by reference to visible things, and indeed that anything should remain, except so that we should be brought straight to Christ. Therefore we should make our beginning not with the things of this world, but with the gospel, which puts forth one Christ with his cross and holds us in him. In view of this, Calvin’s conviction is also: indeed it is vain for any to philosophize in the manner of the world, unless they have first been humbled by the preaching of the gospel, and have instructed the whole compass of their intellect to submit to the foolishness of the cross. I say that we will find out nothing above or below that will lift us to God, until Christ has educated us in his school. Nothing further can be done, if we are not raised up from the lowest depths and carried aboard his cross above all the heavens, so that there by faith we might comprehend what no eye has ever seen, nor ear ever heard, and which far surpasses our hearts and minds. For the earth is not before us there, nor its fruits supplied for daily food, but Christ himself offers himself to us unto eternal life; nor do the heavens illuminate our bodily eyes with the splendor of the sun and stars, but the same Christ, the light of the world and the sun of righteousness, shines forth in our souls; nor does the empty air spread its ebb and flow around us, but the very Spirit of God quickens and enlivens us. And so there the invisible kingdom of Christ fills all things, and his spiritual grace is diffused through all things. To be sure, this ought to prevent us from looking to heaven and earth as well and in this way fortifying ourselves in the true knowledge of God. For Christ is the image, in which God not only allows his breast to be seen, but also His hands and feet. By ‘breast’ I mean that secret love, by which we are enfolded in Christ; by ‘hands’ and ‘feet’ I understand those works which are set before our eyes. But: As soon as we have departed from Christ, there is nothing is so gross or trivial that we can avoid being mistaken as to its true nature. (C.R. 23, 10 f.). We do not find in Calvin any more detailed explanation or exposition of this programmatical assertion either in the Commentary on Genesis or in the relevant passages in the Institutio. Yet there can be no doubt that he has given us a stimulus to further thinking in this direction. The step which we ourselves have attempted along the lines he so impressively indicated is only a logical conclusion which is as it were set on our lips by the statements of the fathers, although they did not draw it for themselves.[2]

As Barth notes, whilst Calvin mined the depths of the fathers, he took them in a direction that they didn’t go in the type of explicit ways that he took them; that is with reference to ‘knowledge of God as Redeemer’ vis-à-vis ‘knowledge of God as Creator.’ As an extension of this constructive reception on Calvin’s part, that is of the implications provided for by the fathers, Barth constructively receives Calvin’s insights and applies them in a Christ concentration that Calvin only provided for in an incipient way. The material point of the matter is that as Barth has underscored, to know what creation is about we first must know who the Creator is; and the only way we can do that, according to Barth, and more importantly, according to Holy Scripture, is to understand that Christ is the ‘firstborn from the dead.’ That is to say, to understand that creation’s ultimate telos has always already been the Christ, as David Fergusson aptly notes: “the world was created so that Christ might be born.” It is this type of patristic theo-logic, to think God as Son of the Father (per Athanasius), that Barth is appealing to, and pressing Calvin into his services in this way; such that to think creation rightly, according to Barth, is to first think the ‘Son of the Father’ in Jesus Christ. It is as we are confronted with this effervescent reality of God’s life come with hair, toenails, flesh and blood, that creation comes to life, just as sure as the Son of Man fell into the ground as a seed, died, and sprung to life in the greenness of new creation, as the consummation and ground of creation’s final existence and reality. And it is union with Christ (unio cum Christo) by the Spirit that the ontological ground of creation, as that comes as a prius for us in Jesus Christ, gives epistemological life for us as we see the face of God, and thus creation’s ultimate reality, in Jesus Christ’s vibrant smile for us.

The moral: to attempt to think God from nature, from a natural theology, and in extension, as natural law, is to think a projection of ourselves into the vestiges of creation and name those vestiges Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is to say, it is idolatry to attempt to think God outwith principially thinking Him from the evangelical contours of His life for the world in the fullness of life for us in Jesus Christ. It is only as we repose in this analogia relationis (‘analogy of relation’) that has eternally co-inhered between the Father and Son by the Holy Spirit, that we have any hope of knowing the God who has eternally inhabited the supra-physical reality of His triune life of plenitudinous joyousness.

There are many today, particularly those attempting to resource the scholastics Reformed of the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively, who are introducing the evangelical churches to a god connived from speculative categories; as if God might be known and grammarized in the abstract ways we noted earlier. They would have people think that God is a monad, and our only hope for knowing Him is if first he elected us individually (so the decretum absolutum), and then secondarily, as a result of being one of His ‘elect’ we might come to have capacity to observe Him as His vestiges of infinitude, eternality, and immutability lay latent on the soil of the earth and atmosphere of the heavens, as those are discovered by our powers of abstract rationales and creativity. Indeed, I may have misspoke, even the pagan philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, according to these ‘resourcers,’ have the capacity to see God’s vestiges in the creation, what they require, and what only the elect of God have been gifted with is a superadditum of ‘grace perfecting nature,’ of ‘revelation perfecting reason,’ such that the theologian can finally make the leap from God’s effects in the created order to their final cause and repose in the Unmoved Mover of actus purus (‘pure being’) who they name Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Barth is countering this; he is putting Calvin to work to counter this; and he is intimating that certain church fathers are odds with this type of ‘classical theistic’ reasoning that would attempt to think creation, and thus its Creator, in abstraction from the primacy of Christ, and our union with Him as the ground and basis for a genuine knowledge of the genuine and living God in Jesus Christ.

Be Blessed

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §40 [031] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 30.

[2] Ibid., 30-1. [italics mine, they represent the translation of Calvin’s Latin]

God the Father

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God is my Father.[1] Jesus said to Mary post-resurrection, “I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.” God is our Father. Athanasius writes: “Therefore it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.”[2] This is the Christian way for knowing, for thinking God; this is the way those who have the Spirit can call Jesus, Lord; that is, as recognizing their Shepherd, knowing His voice as Son of the Father. As Athanasius rightly noted we don’t think God prior to God thinking us for Himself in Jesus Christ; we don’t attempt to approach God by some sort of two-step into His presence through an abstract creation. As Christians we only know God as Son of the Father by the Spirit; if we don’t, we only know a god of our own imagination and fabrication. Indeed, a notion of godness developed from our fertile imaginations, as if we might see God in the trees, the birds, the fishies, even ourselves. This really is the only alternative to thinking God as our Father. If God is not first the Father, then He is not the Son of the Father, and instead He simply turns out to be a brute creator contingent upon our predication of Him.

Barth writes:

(a) The subject “God” of which it speaks—and in the creed this obviously brackets all three articles—is not synonymous with the concept of a world-cause, rightly or wrongly postulated, disclosed or fulfilled. We may take any view we like of the existence or nature of a world-cause, but it is always posited by man, and therefore even if it is an uncreated, creative and supremely perfect being, it still belongs to the creaturely sphere. It is not God. It is a successful or unsuccessful product of the human mind. It is not identical with the Creator coeli et terrae [Maker of heaven and earth]. Nor can it be subsequently identified with Him and given His titles and predicates. Whenever this happens, belief in the Creator loses its basis and therefore its certainty, its original meaning and therefore its credibility and practical import. The God who created heaven and earth is God “the Father,” i.e., the Father of Jesus Christ, who as such in eternal generation posits Himself in the Son by the Holy Spirit, and is not therefore in any sense posited from without or elsewhere. It is as this Eternal Father, determined in the act of His free expression and therefore not from without but from within, determining Himself in His Son by the Holy Spirit and Himself positing everything else, that He is also the Creator. And it is again as this Eternal Father, and not in any other way, that He reveals Himself as the Creator, i.e., in Jesus Christ His Son by the Holy Ghost, in exact correspondence to the way in which He has inwardly resolved and decided to be the Creator. As He cannot be the Creator except as the Father, He is not known at all unless He is known in this revelation of Himself.[3]

As Barth rightly points out, when we attempt to establish certainty of God on our own, whether that be individually, or collectivistically, we end up circumscribing a notion of God not from God, but from ourselves. When we go this route, abstract from God, and we understand ourselves as the concrete that founds the certainty of God’s existence, He necessarily ceases being our Father, and at best (or worst) becomes a cloned god; a mirrored existence of ourselves who we pump up with superhero powers of the sort that can create worlds populated with the birds and the bees, and thus us. As Barth grasps, and Athanasius prior to him, Jesus’s declaration to Mary wasn’t some type of throwaway statement made in passing. Indeed, what Jesus was once again emphasizing was that in the face of resurrection, indeed the re-creation, the first Word of God is that God is Father. As Father, and Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit, the children of God have an “apocalyptic” basis through which they have gained a capaciousness to think, to know God in real reality. That is to say, to know God not upon a foundation Mary had prefabricated, indeed, her imagination only took her as far as the gardener. But to think and know God the same way that the Son, the One in the bosom of the Father who came to explain Him, knows God, and has known God as His Father, just as sure as He is eternally the Son by the Holy Spirit.

These are deep matters, doxologically sourced by the Father for us in His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. Miss ourselves for the “Father,” and we construct a world in our image, and then attempt to bear its burden. This is the fallen world we inhabit, a world populated by a humanity who can only think God as far as the groundskeeper; a world that would rather they be Father and attempt to manage a world of their own making in the face of the living Father. This, of course, only ends in a world of orphans and destitution. When the person comes to finally recognize that the Father has adopted them into His family through and in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, it is at this point that they can cease from bearing the burden of false-fatherhood they have been attempting to live out since their conception.

“Pray, then, in this way:

‘Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
 ‘Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
 ‘Give us this day our daily bread.
 ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
 ‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’

 

[1] I have written on this theme previously in my personal chapter for our first volume of Evangelical Calvinism. My chapter is titled, “Analogia Fidei or Analogia Entis: Either Through Christ or Through Nature.” This chapter also, more recently, has served as a basis (among others) for my dissertation and PhD by publication currently under examination.

[2] Athanasius, Contra Arianos 1.9.34.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §40 [011] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 10.

Kataphysics. TFT’s ‘stratified knowledge of God’ and the Christian Existence

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Either something is, or it isn’t. Surely, there are nuances on a continuum, and we should all be aware of that as we approach any system or maybe better, organism of thought. Nonetheless, in the end, either a framework of thought is sound and corresponds to reality or it doesn’t. This seems like a good working definition of critical realism. If we apply this to a theological prolegomenon, what, in the end, will obtain, is that we will use various criteria to determine whether or not some belief structure, that we may or may not adhere to, is actually true or not. This process is undertaken, often unspoken, and uncritically, by the masses, in our case, the Christian masses, as we approach whatever interpretive tradition, we think is most proximate in regard to explicating the entailments of the kerygmatic (‘Gospely’) reality as revealed in Jesus Christ. But is this process as smorgasbord as I’m making it sound?

According to TF Torrance, Christian theology, if it is to avoid being Pelagian, is an exercise pre-determined by God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In other words, for TFT, the theological task is either kata physin (‘according to the nature of thing’ under inquiry) or it is simply a self-projection of the would-be knower in regard to thinking God; and thus, self. So, for TFT, who God is, is not known by a prior optics developed by people attempting to think an idea of an abstract infinite, or actus purus (‘pure being’), a part from Godself. For TFT knowledge of God is purely ordered by God’s free choice to be for us in Jesus Christ. It is this antecedent, extra nos (‘outside of us’) reality that is the ground by which any true knowledge of God will obtain. This is, for TFT, the basis for a theological or critical realism. That is, that knowledge of God is not discovered, but instead it is Self-revealed by God for us, because of who God is as triune love, that a potential theologian might actually come to know the true and the living God. TFT calls his approach to a knowledge of God a ‘stratified knowledge of God.’ He explicates what that entails in his book Christian Doctrine of God. Ben Myers offers a nice distillation of what TFT is after with his theory of a stratified knowledge of God:

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 intutive 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.[1]

This movement of knowledge of God, as Myers helpfully details, starts when even as a mere child a person is confronted by the reality of God in a simple Gospel presentation. As the child responds to the ‘Good News,’ that is as objectively grounded in Christ’s vicarious response for them first, this movement into a more and more refined knowledge of God starts the process. It is a movement from an evangelical to a theological knowledge of God. Where the child matures and grows in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ, moving into the Holy of Holies of God’s life as the One who has eternally been in the ‘bosom of the Father’ takes us into the bosom, even as He first took our humanity for Himself. But this is the kataphysical (V metaphysical) basis upon which the child comes to see God from within His inner triune life, as that has been revealed and provided access to through His outer life for the world in Jesus Christ.

For TFT, the aforementioned is the basis by which a genuinely Christian theological framework can be ‘verified’ as to its veracity as truly corresponding to the reality of the living God or not. Insofar that various theological systems stray from this kataphysical center in God for us in Christ, it can be determined whether or not a system of thought and theological reflection ought to be pursued or not. These are the critical bases by which the would-be Christian theologian might come to have a genuinely accessing approach to God. All other approaches, approaches grounded in abstract and speculative metaphysics, with pure beings, actual infinites, unmoved movers, and the like are understood as imposters in regard to genuinely offering an accessing entrée into the throne room of the living God. Since God in Christ, our high priest, and the mediator between God and humanity / humanity and God is the only one who has penetrated either side of the Creator/creature distinction, it is only through Him, in an intensive and principial way, that the would-be theologian could ever hope of crossing into the near country of God’s inner life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So, as you are confronted by a host of seemingly competing theological systems, all claiming, to one degree or another, to be the most proximate way to think God; ask yourself, are these systems radically grounded in God’s Self-revelation of Jesus Christ or not? Are they based in an intensive understanding of what it means to be in union with Christ (unio cum Christo), and thus founded in a ‘participatory’ ground, in Christ, for thinking God with Christ by the Spirit? Or are they offering an alternative way that presumes an abstract natural way for thinking God from an abstract analogy to an abstract humanity for thinking God from abstract effects in the world back to their abstract and monadic first cause in a simple pure being known, abstractly, as God? Depending on what way you choose to go at this fork in the road will determine, really, the trajectory of your whole Christian life. Indeed, that is what these matters reduce to. Ultimately, whether or not we have a good way to think God, or not, that does not change the objective de jure reality that God is for us in Jesus Christ; i.e., it doesn’t change a confessing Christian’s eternal destiny. But what does potentially change, is how a person’s Christian life unfolds here and now. Will it be based on a solid foundation, the foundation that God alone has laid for us in Jesus Christ (cf. I Cor. 3.11), or instead, will it be based on a self-asserted construct for thinking God that presumes as if the person’s own abstract givenness, and collectivistically and historically so, is good enough for thinking God; as if nature only needed to be perfected and not re-created. Without orthodoxy there can be no orthopraxy, and it is the latter that is really of ultimate concern for the Christian existence.

[1] 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.

Transitioning from a ‘Substance’ to a ‘Personal’ God: Confronting the Substance-Abusers

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There is a lot of talk about ‘substance theology’ these days, and in the past days. Indeed, substance language marks classical theism as the way to talk God at least since the days of Thomas [of Aquino], if not further back since the Greeks started using the language of ousia or ‘being’ for talking God (but that was a little different from the Thomist heritage in the sense that they often used ousia as synonymous with hypostases or ‘persons’ and vice versa). No matter what period past to think and talk God in terms of substance has become considered the orthodox way, the way of the consensus fidelium, the way of retrieving all that is holy and orthodox in regard to talking and thinking God. Any verging from substance metaphysics, especially as we have developed into Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment ways, is considered heresy by the faithful. Indeed, if you scan various literature, and even online conjecture, what you will often find in such quadrants is that anyone who attempts to think God in overt ‘personalist’ or personal terms must be some sort of heterodox, at best, and heretic at worst. The label the faithful place on those who would attempt to think and talk God in overtly personalistic terms is: ‘theistic personalism.’ Such people want to claim that said theistic personalists, in regard to talking and thinking God, are nothing better than ‘social Trinitarians,’ thus operating from a panentheist view of God wherein God is thought purely from below to above. This is the charge made against those of us who would fit the so-called theistic personalist label, and yet it fails to recognize the argument of the beard it thinks from; it fails to make distinctions on a continuum; it fails to recognize that God Self-revealed is Father of the Son / Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit—these are ultimately personalizing personal terms and realities ‘revealed’ about who God is. Thusly, it is important to allow such revelation about God to determine the way we think and talk God. And if ‘substance’ language were to be used it would have to be reified by the pressures provided for by the Self-revelation of God, otherwise the “substance-abusers” (haha) would be the ones guilty of a social Trinitarianism; i.e. of importing concepts from below to the above, in regard to God (in fact this is exactly what obtains, I would argue, when such substance-abusers attempt to think God from His effects in the created order; to think God from the so-called analogia entis).

With the aforementioned noted I think it would be interesting to observe how things transitioned from thinking and talking God in terms of substance to subject (or in personalist terms). Eberhard Juengal offers a helpful sketch of how this transition took place in the ‘theology’ of Hegel (which of course post-Hegel would have far-reaching implications towards the development of a so-called ‘modern theology’). Juengal writes:

These distinctions between the three forms of religion are only apparently formal. They have their effect in the content of the religions. This can be shown in the statement about the death of God, which belongs to revealed religion, statement which formulates a precise step of the relationship of being and consciousness, a relationship which is so decisive and full of tension for the history of the spirit. That being which is independent of any other, “. . . that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself,” has been called “substance” ever since Aristotle. It is characteristic of substance that it does not exist in something else. According to Hegel, this distinguishes it from the subject. Whereas substance rests in itself, for Hegel the subject is “the process of positing itself, or in mediating with its own self its transitions from one state or position to the opposite. The subject comes to itself whereas substance has always been in itself. The essence of substance is autonomy, that of the subject is self-movement. Part of the self-movement of the subject is mediation by something else, which for its part is what it is through the subject. And the subject does not lose itself in that other thing, but rather together with that other thing, which exists because of it, it arrives at a freedom which surpasses the autonomy of substance, the freedom of self-consciousness. Therefore, in Hegel’s view, “. . . everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.” Only a substance which has become absolute subject and which is understood as absolute subject can be regarded as God. From this point of view, the differentiation of the three forms of religion has taken place. They mark the pathway of the substance toward its being a subject.[1]

If you have ever heard the language Being in Becoming with reference to God, what Juengal describes above, with reference to Hegel, would be where such language and conceptuality comes from. It is this ‘turn’ to ‘Being in Becoming’ that many classical theists maintain results in collapsing God into the modalism of the economic, or the ‘world-being’ (my word), such that God becomes a predicate of His becoming. But even as noted in the sketch of Juengal, this would be wrong-think. For Hegel, according to Juengal, there would be no becoming without the prius of God’s life as “substance,” or antecedent-being. Of course, the type of dialectical inflections this takes in the Hegelian system is a thing of its own imagination, but his development, even as he has described this type of distinction between substance and subject, is not the only or necessary way to think and talk God as ‘Being in Becoming.’

A good reading of Barth’s theology, as Juengal offers in his book God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth, identifies a way to think in potentially “Hegelian” terms without actually becoming (pun intended) Hegelian; just as Barth thinks in Kantian terms without actually becoming Kantian. It is possible to reify grammar, just as the Nicenes did with the Hellenic language (of substance or ousia) at their time, and end up with a linguistic and conceptual sitz im leben wherein the [Hellenic, or Hegelian et al.] ‘text’ simply becomes a pre-text awaiting the re-texting provided for it by an alien reality—in the case of Christian witness, the Kerygma—such that a non-correlationist Christian grammar is produced without the metaphysical baggage that originally gave rise to said grammars in their original (Hellenic, Hegelian, Kantian et al.) contexts. The question always remains: is there a better context-laden grammar out there, that is for thinking and talking God, than other alternatives might offer? This is the question that ought to drive all constructive and Church dogmatic theological endeavor, but it doesn’t. So, instead we end up with the substance-abusers calling the constructivists (which is what Thomas was during his day, by the way) that nastygram: “theistic personalists.”

The point in all of this, for me, and hopefully for you, is to recognize that theology has developments; some good, some bad. But what should be indicated here is that good theology is always already developing, and that it isn’t slavishly domiciled into one supposed ‘sacrosanct period’ of an ostensibly orthodox development of being. God still speaks, in other words: Deus dixit.

 

 

[1] Eberhard JĂźngel, God as the Mystery of the World (Eugune, OR: Wipf and Stock Reprint Mohr Sieback, 1983), 80-1.

Pure Nature

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Pure nature, I’ve referred to it before at the blog. In my view it represents all forms of ill-formed theological efforts in the history of theological efforts. There are attempts in something like the ‘mediating’ theology of the Novuelle Theologiae of someone like Henri de Lubac, wherein the hard edges of a Tridentine (and scholastic Reformed) development of pure nature are softened, but I believe the whole apparatus must be abandoned in favor of a genuinely Christ conditioned, and thus, Grace actualized notion of a God-world relation. But you might still be wondering what a natura pura (pure nature) entails. In order to get a better grasp, let me share a citation Barth makes in his CD to G. Wünsch’s description of what reduces to the entailments of a ‘pure nature.’

“1. As everything has the origin of its being in God and no creature can disown the Creator, there is no opposition in kind between natural, i.e., this-worldly, immanent morality as directed by naturalistic and human criteria, and, on the other hand, Christian morality as determined by the being of God. Only the pure being of the world and man, as these are in themselves apart from sin, must in its pure essentiality determine the laws of the moral. This is pure being, which lies at the base of all empirical existence and can be disengaged from it, is the obligating being in the sense of the pure law of nature; it is the means of the primal revelation which is accessible to every man.

2. But Christian morality is directed to the God of the revelatio specialis [special revelation] which has taken place in Jesus Christ. It includes natural morality, which, with the help of an overbracketing of values, will always be an idealistic morality, and in content it shoots out beyond it. Its particularity is given divine sanction to natural morality, to recognise its commands as expressions of God’s will effected by creation, and to demand reverence not only for the essence of the world, but also for the being of God. It demands an attitude on the part of man to God which corresponds to the distinctive relationship to Him; the relationship of creature to Creator, or rather, of pardoned sinner to gracious God, a relationship of absolute reverence, love and gratitude.” (G. Wünsch, Theo. Ethik, 122ff)

In Marburg, where this was written, it was not appreciated that the very same thing could be written in Münster, Paderborn or Freiburg—only better.[1]

Barth, in his parting comment, in regard to Wünsch’s description of things, makes clear that he sees a correlation to what he, in the context of this section of the CD, believes is present between his former ‘neo-Protestantism,’ and the Tridentine Catholic understanding of the relationship between nature and grace. That is, he believes there is a broad commitment to the Thomist axiom of ‘grace not destroying but perfecting nature’ as the basis of so much of the theological developments; whether those be of the classical Romanish type, or the modern Teutonicish type. Barth believes no matter who is giving ‘pure nature’ (as understood in the ‘analogy of being’ analogia entis) a basis in their respective theological treatments, that such theologies ought to be repented of post haste.

Even today, in my own experience and exposure, natura pura continues to dominate the theological scene; whether that be of the highest academic echelons, or the lowest popular-level domains on YouTube. When nature is thought of as an independent antecedent reality (to God) of its own standing—even if the pious assertion is made that “well, of course, God is still the Creator”—then only idolatry of Pelagian and synergistic and syncretistic force can reign. According to the “Barthian correction” there is nothing anterior to God; God is God. As such, nature has no meaningful independence of its own, which of course Barth’s reformulated doctrine of election makes clear. That is, if the Son eternal, to be incarnate and incarnated, is the enhypostatic ground and grammar of creation’s (nature’s) telos (purpose), then to attempt to think grace as only a perfecting of an already existing, and ostensibly abstract nature, from God’s protological purposes (i.e. the Lamb slain before the foundations of the world) is to give nature a primacy and primordial-ness that, at least from a genuinely Christian taxis (order) of things it cannot have. And that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Aren’t we as Christians supposed to be forwarding, bearing witness to Christ as the primordial reality of all reality, as Maximus the Confessor understood, bearing witness to the Cosmic Christ? And yet somewhere along the line the gold plundered from the Egyptians, or the Greeks, as the case may be, was manufactured into a golden-shiny thing that has become the way “classical” Christians have ostensibly thought the true and the living God.

Barth et al., including myself, is calling Christian theology back to its apocalyptic and revelational ground in a slavish commitment to a Christ concentration that can only be known through genuinely thinking God from Christ principially. As Christians, if we were to make the proper theological connections, if we were to “connect-the-dots” and implications of theological ideas, if we were to recognize, among some, respectively, that in fact there are theological ideas to connect in the first place, then we would be all the better to live the doxologically oriented life that a genuinely Christian theology, which understands God is God, ought to bring us to. Instead, among all Christian theological demographics (ranging from the academic to the popular) what is being “recovered” for the churches is a theological discourse and development grounded in pure nature. May this become anathema.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 §36 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 25-6.

Barth’s Christological Novum

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Here is Barth talking about event, and how, as Samuel Adams says: “If the event contextualizes us, rather than being contextualized by us, then we can say that it is something new, since its origin is “outside” of us and has the nature of an “event. . . .”:

God’s revelation in its objective reality is the person of Jesus Christ. In establishing this we have not explained revelation, or made it obvious, or brought it into a series of the other objects our knowledge. On the contrary, in establishing this and looking back at it we have described and designate it a mystery, and not only a mystery but the prime mystery. In other words, it becomes the object of our knowledge; it finds a way of becoming the content of our experience and our thought; it gives itself to be apprehended by our contemplation and our categories. But it does that beyond the range of what we regard as possible for our contemplation and perception, beyond the confines of our experience and thought. It comes to us as a Novum which, when it becomes an object for us, we cannot incorporate in the series of our other objects, cannot compare with them, cannot deduce from their context, cannot regard as analogous with them. It comes to us as a datum with no point of connexion with any other previous datum.[1]

This is a profound yet seemingly straightforward point, or it should be! Barth’s point is that God in Christ is indeed the Novum precisely because He is not from us, He is not contingent upon our creaturely modes of signification, but, indeed, He is the living and Triune God who has come near to us (‘nearer to us than we are to ourselves’), and for whom there can be no analogy. For Barth, God is sui generis, or of a classification that God alone maintains singularly. He is the primordial, history de-limiting, and sustaining reality without whom there would be no reality to begin with. And because this is the case, as Barth so eloquently articulates, there is nothing anterior to God, not even, especially not our knowledge of God, and thus of ourselves. The human condition is such, by way of implication, that unless God confronts and contradicts us with who He is, we have no hope of knowing who we are; because we only are precisely as we stand coram Deo before the living God.

If only more Christians could come to know this, and more than that: internalize this reality. People in general, and even malnourished, Christians in particular, are never pushed to think deeply about ‘being.’ As such, they simply operate as if life is their possession. And when God is introduced into this combine, under these false conditions, God becomes a functional possession of the ‘human given.’ This is why I so adamantly oppose so much of the classical prolegomena, or theological methodology. It supposes that human beings, as such, have a givenness, a “possessedness” all their own, as that is ostensibly supplied by God as the Creator waiting to be ‘discovered’ in the vestiges of the created order. It is this idea of the ‘created order,’ or pure nature[2], that funds an analogy of being wherein creatures have ‘natural’ capacity to think God from His purported ‘effects,’ in the created taxis, back to their antecedent ‘cause,’ who is God. And it is this framework wherein God becomes sublimated by His created order, at least epistemologically, insofar that it is maintained that there are analogies for thinking God in the created order, albeit, asymmetric or with dissimilitude, vis-à-vis their ultimate cause.

As Barth has reminded us, God is God.

 

[1] Barth CD I.2, 172 cited by Samuel V. Adams, The Reality of God and Historical Method (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic Press,), 135.

[2] See Matthew Bernard Mulcahy, “Henri de Lubac argues that, in early modern times, a pernicious concept began to become commonplace in Roman Catholic theology: this concept is ‘pure nature.’ Pure nature is human nature, considered without reference to grace or to the supernatural destiny of personal union with God. . . .”

The Contemporary Reformed Are Recovering Catholic Modes of Thinking and Thus Spirituality: The Genuine Protestant Way Against Analogia Entis

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If you’re a Catholic or scholastic Protestant thinker, you’ll follow along with Erich Przywara’s dictum (following Thomas’) of ‘revelation perfecting revelation.’ You’ll see a continuity between the naked philosopher’s machinations, and what comes in perfection through God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. You’ll maintain that humanity, since it is born into an iteration of God’s grace (which is an abstract creation), has the capacity, albeit, finite, to think towards the God of creation. On the other hand, if you’re a genuinely Protestant thinker who takes the noetic effects of the fall, who takes total depravity seriously, and who does not sublate such teaching with a Thomist intellectualist anthropology, you’ll be like Karl Barth and repudiate something like Przywara’s analogia entis. 

In other words, Barth sees the same ‘prefix’ that condemned in ‘The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life’ operative within Przywara’s Analogia Entis. Przywara posits that insights gained apart from God’s revelation of Jesus Christ stand in continuity with those acquired in and through this revelation because the ‘nature’ that philosophers are examining is, in fact, within the realm of grace simply as a result of God’s act of creation. Here lies the problem. Barth believes that this account overlooks the effects of the human sin. In his view, God’s act in creation cannot lead to true knowledge of God because creation is fallen. If nature stands in continuity with grace, therefore, it can do so solely because of the justifying work of Jesus Christ. This means that any relationship with God, or any true knowledge of God, stems solely from the knowledge of our justification. This is where we must start. Knowledge obtained from sources other than this starting point in Jesus Christ — such as the knowledge gained by the philosophers — does not stand in continuity with the knowledge of God given in and through Christ. The revelation of Jesus Christ, rather, comes from the outside as something new and distinct, and it stands in judgement over all other sources for the knowledge of God.1 

We currently have a bunch of scholastic Reformed theologians telling their students, and anyone who will listen, to recover Thomas Aquinas’ way of ‘grace perfecting nature.’ And yet this is at precise crosspurposes with Luther’s reformational move of solafidian. Barth understands the original intention and implications of Luther’s reformation, the scholastics Reformed remain clueless here. If you claim to be a committed Protestant who affirms an actual fall, with all of its ontological and noetic implications, then you ought to repudiate the natural theology of the Catholics, and scholastics Reformed. The scholastics Reformed only re-appropriated the Catholic mode of theological epistemology, and its prior doctrine of creation; they do not operate as genuine Protestant thinkers. Just because that’s ‘part’ of the Reformed heritage, ie the scholastics Reformed, does not make it the orthodox Protestantism that ought to be redivivus; but that is the driving supposition behind this particular recovery movement.

 

1 Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 149.  

Does Theology Perfect Philosophy? Barth’s Nein / Przywara’s Ja

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Kenneth Oakes’ book Karl Barth on Philosophy and Theology, which I reviewed a few years ago for the blog, presses the same point that Keith Johnson does in his book Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis. The point is the way Barth sees the relationship between philosophy and theology; he doesn’t, not in the way that post-mediaeval classical theism does in its effort to synthesize so-called faith-and-reason. This is one of the primary factors that has drawn me to Barth over the years. His prolegomenon is conditioned solely by what he considers to be both the formal and material principle of a genuinely Christian theology: i.e. submission to God’s Word. The way he does that is different, of course, than the way someone like Catholic Thomas Aquinas submits to divine revelation, and/or the way that scholastic Reformed theologians do that in the Post Reformation Orthodox period of Protestant development. Again, this point cannot be overstated in regard to the work I have been doing for the last many decades; indeed, my work has been driven by this sort of kataphysical, as TF Torrance would identify it, mode of theological development. That is, I see a need, along with Barth et al., to be slavishly submitted to the reality of Holy Scripture’s object in Jesus Christ. Not just in a cursory way, or as Richard Muller might say it, an “extensive way,” but in a principial or “intensive” way, such that Jesus Christ is understood as the warp and woof of every dot and iota within Holy Scripture. To see Jesus as the regnant telos of the heilsgeschichte found in the deposit of Apostolic (depositus per Apostolicum) witness entailed by its canonical reality.

Johnson helps the reader understand Barth’s mindset as he engaged with the analogia entis (analogy of being1) articulated by his theological nemesis (but friend), Erich Przywara. Here it becomes clearer in just what way Barth thought the relationship of the philosopher to the theologian, and how that, at its very principled base, contradicts the way Przwyara understood the analogia entis as that was conditioned by his ecclesioncentric mode of thinking as a Catholic theologian. Johnson writes,

That Przywara was on Barth’s mind is apparent in the first lecture as Barth explains the title and his objective for the talk. The title, Barth explained, refers to the ‘two boundaries of human thought’, realism and idealism, which form the ‘basic problem of all philosophy’. Barth’s goal is to use those “boundaries’ as the framework from which to ask questions about the proper relationship between philosophy and theology. To flesh out his reason for taking up this task, he draws an analogy between the relationship between theology and philosophy and that of the church and the state. Just as ‘the church finds itself in the framework of the state but does not exist in competition with it . . . so theology understands itself as (the) fundamental reflection about human existence as discussed within the framework of philosophy’. Theology is a human enterprise, and as such, is uses the same tools of language, concepts, and categories that philosophers use in their own attempts to describe the human situation. This correspondence leads to a temptation, Barth says, because while the theologian can speak about the human situation only in the ‘crabbed, constricted, and paradoxical way’ forced upon it by its adherence to divine revelation, the philosopher ‘is in a position to say it all so much better, more freely, more universally’. This situation places the theologian ‘under the insufferable pressure of a situation where [he] can speak only humanly and where this occurs so much better in philosophy’. Hence, just as the church must deal with the temptation of trying either to become the state or be absorbed into it, theology must deal with the temptation of trying either to become philosophy or be absorbed into it. The fact that the shift from theology to philosophy occurs by only a ‘few small shifts in accent’ or a ‘few minor adjustments’ makes it all the more dangerous. Theology can avoid these dangers, Barth says, only if it realizes its true task: adhering to God’s Word. He will develop what this means in more specificity as the lecture progresses, but at this point, he simply means that theology proper is that which ‘thinks and speaks not about those boundaries of human thought, but with all possible objectivity about God’.

The fact that Przywara’s project centers upon the relationship between philosophy and theology — and their point of connection in the analogia entis —is working in the background of Barth’s thoughts here, and the way that he frames this relationship points to a key difference he recognizes between Przywara’s project and his own. As we have seen, Przywara’s account of the analogia entis is built upon the notion that philosophical thought about God failed to recognize the proper relationship between the boundaries of divine immanence and transcendence and thus failed to arrive at any true knowledge of God. The analogia entis is then posited as the alternative that resolves the false dichotomy left by philosophy, since it maintains the proper ‘tension’ between immanence and transcendence. This argument stands directly in line with the Catholic dictum that Przywara cited in Barth’s seminar: ‘revelation does not destroy but supports and perfects reason’. That is, Przywara describes the problem of philosophy, which works form reason, and then proffers the analogia entis, which was derived from divine revelation in Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church, as the solution to that problem. Revelation, in short, works in concert with reason because the two are engaged in the same basic task, and revelation ‘fulfils and perfects’ reason because the Catholic analogia entis accomplishes, on the philosopher’s own terms, what the philosophers themselves could not.2

What must be born in mind is that Barth was a dedicated Protestant theologian, whereas Przywara was, of course, Roman Catholic. What’s at stake in this tussle, as often is the case, is really an anthropological point. Przywara would have been committed to the Thomist Intellectualist anthropology wherein the intellect remained morally solvent, even after the fall. Thus, the noetic effects of sin weren’t as death-dealing for Przywara as they were for Barth. As such, Przywara could and did imagine a world wherein human beings could still think after God even without the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit; that there was still a ‘spark,’ as it were, of the imago Dei operative that simply needed to be ‘restored’ or ‘perfected’ by revelation. For Barth, not only as a Protestant, but a Reformed theologian, this premise does not work. For Barth, as for any principled Protestant Christian, the noetic effects of the fall were so deep and sweeping that humanity itself, in its ruptured status from God, who is the ground and being of all human being, was plunged into an Athanasian ‘subhumanity’; since humanity, according to Scripture is only humanity when it is in right and reconciled relationship with God. Because of this rupture the only hope for a knowledge of God to obtain was if God unilaterally irrupted into humanity, re-create it in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, and give humanity the capacity to rightly think God as God thought Godself for humanity in the risen humanity of Jesus Christ, as humanity is brought into an actualized union with Christ (unio cum Christo) by the Spirit.

The really crazy thing in this story is that the Protestants of the 16th and 17th centuries, namely, the Post Reformed orthodox, took up the anthropology that ended up informing Przywara’s own Catholic anthropology. As such, what has come to be known as historic Protestant Reformed theology, by and large, is really nothing different, in anthropological-principle, than what we find in the analogia entis way of someone like Przywara. I personally know people, Reformed guys, who will argue with me all day about the value and need of some form of the analogia entis. These guys (and gals) are in the process of retrieving the ideational seeds that gave rise to both Thomas Aquinas’ and Erich Przywara’s analogia entis, respectively, as if this is the Protestant way. And so, in my view, they sadly betray the very Protestant principle (the Scripture Principle, and the attendant anthropology with that as far as the extent of the noetic effects of the fall etc.) they say they are intent on retrieving. They ironically operate like Catholic thinkers rather than genuinely Protestant ones as we see in Barth. Przwyara was an intellectualist, just as his counterparts in scholasticism Reformed are, that’s what this is all about in our current theological cultural moment of recovery. But these recoverers don’t understand the sources of their own religion; they don’t understand how they are really just Catholics in Protestant dress.

I digressed, somewhat. But maybe the digression will help the reader see how all of these types of things are related in the end. Maybe the reader will see why I still feel compelled to alert people to what is going on in regard to current theological developments. At the end of the day this isn’t simply a matter of arid academic complexity, ideas have real life consequences that impact real life Christian spirituality.

 

1 Johnson cites Przywara’s basic definition of what he means by analogia entis:

By virtue of the objective and actual ‘God over us and God in us’ of the analogia entis, all aspiration after God, and all experience of God which solves its riddles, is the dynamic and contemplative consciousness of Being described by Paul in the words, ‘He created the human race . . . if haply they might feel after God and find him, though He be not far from every one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17.26-28). Thus all movements towards God, all illumination by God of the human experience which seeks to enlighten itself, presupposes a tranquil condition of ‘God in me and I in God’, because precisely by reason of the nature of the analogia entis, the relationship between God and man is not a function of man’s activity, but of God’s condescension. (Przywara, Religionphilosophie, p. 410)

See, Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 78.

2 Ibid., 94-5.

 

Erich Przywara’s antiChrist, the Hydra-Headed analogia entis

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Keith Johnson continues to develop both Karl Barth’s and Erich Przywara’s theories of knowledge of God, respectively. Currently, he is treating Przywara’s existentialist side towards a knowledge of God, as that is juxtaposed with what he identifies as the essence side (which we will not get into at this juncture). The essence side has to do with the immanent, or the horizontal frame of reference in regard to knowledge vis à vis God; whereas the existentialist side has to do with the order of how vertical knowledge of God obtains vis à vis a God-human relation. Is this order from below to above or above to below? According to Johnson, Przywara maintains that an imbalance to either movement, relative to “above” and “below” knowledges of God, has led to what he calls ‘theopanism.’ Theopanism, for Przywara, is really just code for a complex of an active or passive relation to God, in regard to the direction that knowledge of God ingresses; whether that knowledge starts from above and is active on God’s side and passive on the human’s side, or whether it starts from below and is active on the human’s side and passive on God’s side. Either way this is panned, for Przwyara, it reduces to the problematic of what he, again, identifies as theopanism.

The problem of existence raises a different question: ‘Does religion, as relation between God and humanity, come into being from above downwards, as ultimately an “act of God,” or is it formed from below upwards, from man, and therefore ultimately as an “act of man?” This question has been problematic, Przywara explains, because the tendency has been to choose one answer to the exclusion of the other. Here Przywara follows arguments he had developed in earlier essays and lectures. On the one hand, those who emphasize that the relationship is the result of an ‘act of God’ rob the world of its own reality by making the human relationship with God—and thus human existence itself—an extension of divine action. The result is that creation becomes nothing more an [sic] extension of God’s own life. This is the error of ‘theopanism’, and Przywara associates it with Luther and his modern heirs, including Barth. On the other hand, those who argue that this relationship is the product of an ‘act of man’ commit a form of pantheism because God merely becomes the ‘ultimate basis for all rationality’ and the ‘ideal meaning of humanity’. In the end, Przywara insists, the two errors merge into one as theopanism ‘appears at bottom to be only camouflaged’ pantheism. While pantheism is built on the rationalism of the active human being, theopanism is the rationalism of the passive human being; underneath these surface differences, however, they are nothing more than ‘two forms of one and the self-same rationalism’. God becomes simply ‘the cloak of an inward dialectic’, meaning that once again, any notion of true communion with God has proven impossible.1

Przywara’s critique, as presented by Johnson, is interesting in light of the fact that, with reference to Barth, he sees Barth, not to mention Luther et al., as endemic to the theopanist specter. The issue becomes, for me, not whether or not Barth et al. fall prey to Przywara’s critique, but whether or not Przywara’s premises are sound to begin with.

On face, I would claim that Przywara identifies a potential binary, that is between the divine and human, but this binary seems unremarkable in the sense that it is simply the classical identification of the Creator/creature distinction. To suggest that one side of that equation can be played off against the other, in the way Przywara seems to suggest, seems to presuppose an implicit and inherent dualism that God’s Self-revelation itself vitiates into the dither of no-thingness. That is to say: even with a classical Creator/creature distinction in play, that distinction, by revelational definition (V philosophical) is always already asymmetrical at greatest. God is God, as such, knowledge of Godself will always already, and necessarily be anterior to human knowledge of God; whether or not the latter knowledge be construed in active or passive categories. Thus, from the get-go, Przywara’s premise, in regard to his theopanism, begins to fail precisely at the point that he misrelates a God / human relation in a knowledge of God combine.

Johnson is just about to get into treating Przywara’s solution to this above-below / below-above dilemma vis Ă  vis knowledge of God, as Przywara has presented the supposed problem. But, from the get-go, I have already spied a methodological and definitional problem in the way he has framed this dilemma. God is God is the all-important frame, particularly as that relates to the way humans know God. Jesus is the answer; what’s the question?

 

1 Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analgia Entis (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 69-70.