Category Archives: Analogy of Being

The Difference Between the Theologian’s and the Philosopher’s Vocation

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Theology done without finding its sustenance in the incarnation of God has no source for a specified fruitfulness. That is, theology that isn’t first christology has no theological grounding except upon the neutrality of the theologian’s wit. But if the theologian is only neutral then their imaginations are free to run wild wherever the winds of social and thus theological imaginary might take them. And yet, the God who is Self-revealed for us in Jesus Christ cannot be generalized or universalized in such a willy-nilly way. The genuinely Christian theologian is bound to the scandal of particularity, to the wisdom of God, the wisdom of the cross. This wisdom has the theologian crucified to the world and the world to the theologian. As such there is no bereft theological imaginary available to the theologian if in fact the theologian will have something meaningful to say. Indeed, the Christian theologian isn’t a manufacturer or fabricator of materials, as if capable to spin theological things ostensibly out of the nothingness of their imaginary. The Christian theologian is simply, and at best, a worshipper of the God Self-explicated for us, by way of the theologian’s participation with Christ in the triune life as an adopted co-heir with Christ; and as such, the theologian’s task is to be a witness (μάρτυς) to the res (reality) they have come to encounter in the prosopon (face) of God in Jesus Christ.

Hence, unlike the philosopher, the Christian theologian isn’t attempting to discover metaphysical things in the vestiges of the natural order. The theologian, instead, is simply in union with the living triune God in Christ, which entails a lively, an organic “system of knowledge” that is based on contact with the LORD by way of Divine sustenance through ‘Immanuel’s veins.’ This is an altogether different reality from the philosopher’s. The philosopher constructs models, presents hypotheses, attempts to tap into a naked knowledge source latent in the natural order. But the theologian sits in the heavenlies above all principalities and powers gaining lived and organic knowledge of ultimate reality upon filial and personalist fellowship with reality Hisself.

Let the theologian (and the philosopher) understand.

On Barth’s Affirmation of Anselm’s ‘Proof of God’ and Rejection of A Natural Theology

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Being oppositional to natural theology is a hallmark of Karl Barth’s theological posture. His primary rejection of a natural theology isn’t a result of his socio-politico atmosphere in the Reich of Germany per se; even though it has application towards the type of Nationalistic Socialism that characterized Adolf Hitler’s vision of the golden age of Germany. Barth rejected natural theology for theological reasons; i.e., theological-anthropological reasons. He maintained a radical commitment to the reformational notion of the total depravity of humanity; albeit, in an Athanasian key. This commitment is best illustrated by his collegial correspondences, and even debates with Catholic German theologian, Erich Przywara. Przywara, was a modern advocate, and constructive builder, indeed, a retriever of the classical Thomistic analogia entis (‘analogy of being’). Przywara ultimately argued from something like a capaciousness left in fallen humanity, as if a residual spark continued to burn within the intellect; which when perfected by grace, even preveniently or objectively so, would allow fallen human beings to build an intellectual cathedral wherein its spire might reach into the heavens and touch the feet of God. But of course, this was a speculative measure by which human beings reason by a series of negations from their finite beings to its primary and first cause in the infinite being, the unmoved mover, who is, in the Przywaran frame, the God of Jesus Christ. Barth retorted to such machination with a loud Nein, such that the canton church bells in Basel were made to ring out.

Barth offered his own reading on thinking God. This has been identified by such theologians as Eberhard Juengal et al. as the analogia fidei -/relationis (analogy of faith -/relation). Barth contended that there was such a qualitative disjunction between God and humanity that outwith God’s invasion, His descending into the fallen world, outwith His assumptio carnis (assumption of flesh) it would be nigh impossible for human beings to begin to even imagine the living and triune God; let alone ‘know’ this God. What was required in Barth’s estimation was that God enter into the garb of our humanity, by becoming human Himself in Jesus Christ, and to do so unto the point of death; even death on the cross. Barth maintains that it was only this type of the dissolution of fallen humanity, and then via its resurrection in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that humanity by the Holy Spirit, in union with Christ’s humanity (spiritually), might come to have a correspondence of faith, with Christ’s faith, through Christ’s relationship to humanity mediated through His humanity, and in turn, through His human nature in inseparable relationship with the divine Logos, who is the ground of Christ’s singular person, that humanity could ever have a center in God to rightly know God by.

With the aforementioned noted, Anthony Feneuil offers a helpful reading on how Barth engaged with Anselm’s so-called ‘ontological proof’ for the existence of God. As Feneuil shows, Barth could affirm Anselm’s proof without collapsing it into something like the analogia entis presented by Przywara et al. So, how could Barth affirm a ‘proof’ for God’s existence, without falling prey to his own critique of an analogia entis (which is a subset of a natural theology simplicter)? Feneuil writes (in extenso):

According to Barth, Anselm’s proof is not natural theology. Anselm never places himself on the —supposedly common to the believer and the unbeliever—ground of natural reason. The definition of God Anselm gives at the beginning of the Proslogion is not, says Barth, a definition in the strict sense of the term but, rather, a confession of faith. It does not define the nature of God but acknowledges a divine command, actually the first of the Ten Commandments (“You shall have no other gods before me”): “We believe that You are something than which nothing greater can be thought.” It is not about the abstract essence of God, but about the relation of lordliness between the revealed God and God’s creatures. Anselm does not place himself on the fool’s ground, he does not think on the same level. And the proof does not primarily prove the existence of God but, rather, the fact that, on the ground of this lordliness relationship that God initiated, it is not even possible for us to imagine, even as a mere hypothesis, the inexistence of God. The mere hypothesis of the nonexistence does not fit God. In that respect as well, God is very different  from any other object of the world (very different from a hundred–euro note, for instance). Therefore, Anselm’s proof is not an ontological proof, that is, a proof that would go from God’s essence in thought of God’s actual existence. It is not a proof in which human thought is above God, in which human thought decides about God’s existence. It is the other way around: the proof aims at showing, from the revealed name of God, that human thought cannot establish itself as a spectator above God. The proof shows that human thought, in relation to God, is unescapably limited.

Therefore, one could say that, in a sense, the proof aims precisely at negating the possibility of any natural theology, understood as a human attempt to escape the relation of obedience to God, and to establish oneself in the position of being able to make judgments about God’s existence, just as about the existence of any object. It is a proof that declares our wisdom as a folly before God. Hence, the insipiens, in Barth’s reading of Anselm—that is, the one who does not understand the proof—is not only the one who denies the existence of God, but also the one who tries to establish this existence on purely rational grounds. Who, then, is the insipiens? He is Descartes, not less than Kant, because when Descartes attempts to ground the certainty of God’s existence exclusively on human reason, he believes that he can consider God as a thought object similar to others, whose existence can always be put into bracket. Insofar, he is an insipiens: he believes that one can talk about God as about a thing or an absent person, using a third-person discourse, whereas one cannot talk about God without talking to God. Consequently, there is no fundamental difference between Anselm’s insipiens and Paul’s fool: both refer to those who do not acknowledge the foolishness of their own wisdom, but neither Anselm’s incipiens [sic.] nor Paul’s fool refer to the one who cannot reason well, for any contingent cause.[1]

If Feneuil is correct in his reading of Barth, and there is no reason to think otherwise, we can see, even in Barth’s reading on Anselm’s ‘proof’ how Barth’s rejection of a natural theology was operative. Ultimately, I would contend, Barth sees natural theology, and its subset in the analogia entis, as foolish because it attempts to decenter God’s ontology with fallen humanity’s; i.e., by asserting that there remains a residual foundation within the intellect of fallen humanity whereby knowledge of the true and living God has been retained; even if it might need a drop of God’s created grace to jumpstart it.

[1] Anthony Feneuil, “The Cross of Wisdom: Ambiguities in Turning Down Apologetics (Paul, Anselm, Barth),” in Christophe Chalamet and Hans–Christoph Askani, eds., The Wisdom and Foolishness of God: First Corinthians 1—2 In Theological Exploration (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 174–75.

The Great Chain of Being in TF Torrance’s Theology

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For TF Torrance there remains a “chain of being” in regard to knowing God. But it isn’t from the effects and vestiges of creation worked back to God, in a hierarchy of being, wherein knowledge of God is derived from for Torrance. It is the chain of being of the inner-triune being of God for us, as that becomes evangelical for us in the coming of Jesus Christ, wherein the chain of being for knowing God comes. Jesus is God’s point of contact between God and humanity wherein the hidden God becomes the revealed God, invading our fallen humanity from the inside-up, thus loving us into His life with the Father by the Holy Spirit; and allowing us, to become participant by grace in the eternal fellowship and Self-knowledge God has of Himself, as that has become for us, in the bosom of the Father, in the face of the Son [of David]. As such, for TF, there is no abstract or independent chain of being between God and humanity whereby a naked humanity clothes itself with the righteousness and knowledge of God; indeed, as it ascends the ladder from seen to unseen, from effect to Infinite Causer. For sure, that would be an intellectual Pelagianism, at best. The chain of being is God’s triune being that has chosen to not be God without but with us in the second person of His being, in the eternal Son, the Logos, Jesus Christ. The interpenetrative bond, the subject-in-being onto-relation coinherent between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a chain of being in perichoretic solidity that cannot be touched, but by the heart of God for us in Jesus Christ.

‘The Faith of Christ’ in Contradiction to the gods of the Metaphysicians

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What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens? A question from the days of Tertullian, and now down through the centuries. I would vociferously argue that Jerusalem must condition Athens in such a way that Athens becomes nothing more than a pretext to be used by the textuality of God’s life Self-revealed for the church and world in Jesus Christ. This question of “faith and reason” has been given many iterations and treatments throughout the halls of history, whether that be from someone as boisterous as Martin Luther, or someone as methodologically skeptical as Rene Descartes. Indeed, the reformational scholastics themselves, and their progeny, even into the repristinate of today, ostensibly maintain that the metaphysics of the classical Greek philosophers is in fact univocal towards thinking and speaking the Christian God.

I protest, and so does Eberhard JĂźngel:

The faith which interposes such questions is a disturbance. But should not faith be seen as a disturber of the metaphysical thought of God, as even its greatest menace? Was it not necessary that a study of religion within the boundaries of pure reason would have to come to the aid of the metaphysical concept of God in order to reduce the all too human discourse about a God who reveals himself in history to a rational level? Did not faith have to be subordinated to that morality which was established without faith, if it were not to become irrational in and of itself and thus be dead?

But then faith will reply with the question whether it really is such a rational capacity that a theoretical or practical use of reason, separate from the event of faith, can prescribe reason’s function. What becomes of God when an abstract “I think” or an abstract “thou shalt” sets the context from the outset within which one then may and must decide what merits being called God? Although the intention to maintain the strictest possible distinction between God and man cannot be supported too strongly by theology, does not this approach lead to a result which is totally opposed to that intention? And finally, if God has been established as the securing factor for man, has not then the decision been already made that from now on the securing must become the god of man? Is not ultimately the categorical imperative the grand attempt to establish the morally understood security of the human race as its highest good? If “nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will,” then does not the good will which secures the welfare of the human race become the god of man?[1]

Prior to the above passage Juengal has been discussing how certainty and non-certainty might work within a theological and philosophical frame vis-à-vis God. Without getting into the details, for our purposes, the questions Juengal puts to the God constructed from classical and modern metaphysical premises are sufficient. Sufficient, for drawing attention to the fact that faith itself, if indeed it has to do with a genuine knowledge of the genuine and triune God of the Christians, has its starting point insofar as God starts with us first; that is, rather than us starting with God first. Is Christian faith intended to provide a provision of self-security in a seemingly insecure world for its own sake (something like a ‘god-of-the-gaps’)? Or is Christian faith purely focused upon knowledge of God that is focused on God as God, as God is in Himself as the reality who indeed is to be worshipped simply because He is, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Well of course, the Christian should want to say the latter rather than the former. But methodologically so much of Christian theology, one way or the other, no matter how much piety and piousness is on display, has given way to thinking God only after God has first been thought by the profane mind. Indeed, the mind that is ultimately seeking a huge scratch for the itch of uncertainties, for the chaos that this world presents each and everyone of us with upon our respective arrivals on planet earth.

I think the moral here is that God’s Self-revelation is categorically distinct, in a sui generis type of way, from the metaphysics. That is, knowledge of God for the Christian entails a vulnerability. But the vulnerability isn’t about assuaging our own anxieties about the ostensible disorder of the world, and our place in it. The vulnerability is that we don’t have the capacity to disentangle ourselves from the chaos of this world order; no matter what type of metaphysical structures we might build in that very attempt. The genuine vulnerability we have is that without being rightly positioned within the order that God has set about, we indeed will seek to create our own veritable towers of Babel; reaching up to a certainty of reality that ultimately has to do with ensuring a salvation for ourselves rather than being reliant upon the One who can actually provide us with a true and rightly ordered salvation, as that obtains in Godself for us in Jesus Christ. And it is this, this faith of Christ, that confronts the metaphysically construed gods, who seek a faith built upon its own internal premises, rather than the alien premises of faith provided for, truly, by the living God for us in Jesus Christ.

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf&Stock [reprint], 1983), 195–96.

Reading Romans 1 Against Natural Theology

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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. –Romans 1.18–22

The above pericope has been used as the locus classicus for those who want to argue for a ‘natural theology,’ in regard to a theological methodology. That is, for anyone interested in promoting the idea that the triune Christian God can be liminally known simply by reflecting on the effects of nature; indeed, as those are reasoned back to their first cause (in a chain-of-being knowledge and casual schemata), in the cause of all causes, who just is God. But New Testament exegete, Jason Staples, argues something much more biblical,

In contrast to the standard Jewish polemical argument that Israel has been set apart from the theologically ignorant pagans by the reception of the Torah, the account of Rom I: I8–32 “offers a completely distinct explanation.” In Paul’s account, Kathy Gaca explains, the idolaters are “not theologically blind outsiders but something far more reprehensible in biblical terms. They are knowledgeable about God . . . yet have become rebels.” This is not a minor change. Right from the start, the alert reader familiar with traditional Jewish polemics will be startled by the assertion that “what is knowable about God is revealed among them, for God has revealed it to them” (I:19). Since when has the knowledge of God been revealed among the pagans? Is not the knowledge of God granted through the Torah the very thing that has set Israel apart?

Unlike Wisdom’s ignorant idolaters who failed to realize the knowledge of God through extrapolating from creation to creator, Paul tells a narrative in which the explicit revelation from creator to creation is realized but rejected. As such, like Adam, the subjects of Romans are “without excuse” or “indefensible” . . . precisely because they knew better and rebelled against the revelation of God. Not only did they have access to divine revelation, the “understood” . . . the “unseen things.” . . . Rom I:18–32 does not speak “of people who should have known God’s attributes through the creation around them” but rather of people who did know God’s attributes through the revelation God gave them. By implication, the knowledge of God and divine revelation is not in fact a safeguard against impiety and sin as Wisdom suggests (I5:2) but rather is the very reason the revels of Rom I stand without excuse for impiety and injustice. In Johnathan Linbaugh’s words, “Wisdom’s polemics targets idiots; Paul aims at apostates.”[1]

Staples’ argument is much more involved than the passage I just shared from him. But it serves our purposes precisely at the point that it signals an alternative, and more biblical way, to exegete Romans 1. It isn’t and thus shouldn’t be used as THE prooftext for giving natural theology the biblical ground it so desires; that it so needs, to be hip to the “catholic” groove. On this occasion Paul is making a particular argument vis-à-vis the relationship between the Jews and the Church (as given further development and climax in chptrs. 9—11). The underlying point of Romans 1, in Staples exegesis, is that it isn’t a naked creation that holds the vestiges by which the Christian God can be known; even if only discursively. Instead, as Staples shows latterly, Romans 1, as apiece with the following context in chapters 2—3, is written in order to reinforce the judgement that the Jew (which in itself is a complicated designation in the Pauline theology), and that the world, mediated by the ones who should have known through God’s Self-revelation as attested to in Holy Scripture, in the Torah, in particular, should have come to know and submitted to.

Staples’ argument resonates deeply with my own sense on this passage, relative to the notion that God has only ever really been known personally, and even generally (because how else would a personal God be known?), through God’s intentional and personal revelation first presented to the Jews in the Torah. To the Jew first, then the Greek.

[1] Jason A. Staples, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 118–19.

A Rejoinder to the Credo Alliance on Natural Theology

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I just listened to a Credo Podcast featuring Matthew Barrett, J. V. Fesko, Fred Sanders, and Scott Swain. The title of the podcast is: Is Natural Theology in Conflict with the Gospel: Credo Alliance. You can go and listen to it for yourself (only approx. 30 minutes), by clicking on the linked title.

They all affirm the value of a natural theology; in the history often identified as the Two Books of Revelation (i.e., general/natural and special/revealed). What somewhat surprised me as I listened to each of them present their thoughts on this particular locus was how they seemingly, and unwittingly, moved back and forth between wanting to affirm their natural theology, and at the same time mistaking a theology of nature for their natural theology. They conflated a Logoi theology with a natural theology. They respectively were attempting to have their theological cake and eat a natural one too. But in this pursuit, in an attempt to maintain the primacy of the Protestant Scripture Principle in tandem with a natural theology, they ended up referring to a theology of nature, as if this could serve as a methodological natural theology. The lack of nuancing here left me wondering if in fact any of them actually understands the entailments of a methodological natural theology (as we find in Thomas Aquinas, Erich Przywara et al.). The panel referred to Thomas, as if a theological homeboy, but then began to sound more like acolytes of St. Ephrem the Syrian; or even, TF Torrance.

It is a weird thing—theological knowledge acquisition—often you build up in your mind’s eye perceptions of people, guilds and so forth. You presume that there must be some deeper well that stands behind it all; something that is overwhelmingly elevated and interstellar even. But the fact of the matter is that the human being, no matter how learned, no matter how read, has a limit. We all have liminal-meters that keep us situated in our creaturely places, such that when we expose our apotheosis of the theological edifices and grand mastered superstructures, the reality hits once again: we are of all people most to be pitied if Christ be not risen. If the limit isn’t the Word of God, the Logos of the triune God in the prosopon of Jesus Christ, if the limit includes a reason abstract from the filial bondship that the Son has with the Father by the Holy Spirit, then we will always be exposed as the philosophers we are, rather than the theologians we are wont to be.

All of this to say, respectfully: what I heard from this panel was quite a bit of confusion about what in fact they understand a natural theology to entail. What is it? A methodological natural theology that sets the epistemic quest for the theologian to gain God-knowledge, or is it a theology of nature wherein the little logoi in the Christologically conditioned cosmos finds its gravitas solely in the Logos of God? Such that nature itself is suffused with the primacy of Jesus Christ as the true Alpha and Omega of God. The theologian cannot simply hand-waive to wanting a primacy of Holy Scripture in the theological endeavor, and then sublate that by a reference to a muddled notion of natural theology in the same breath. If you listen to the podcast let me know if you come away with the same impression I had, or something else.

On the Thomistic Captivity of the Protestantisms: Knowledge of the triune God

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Human agency is lost in the fall (which remains an inexplicable thing). The only hope for human agency to be reestablished before God is for God to re-create it as He has for us in the human agency of the Second and Greater Adam, who is the Christ. This is one reason people of a certain ilk reject the notion of a natural theology, and its subset in the anologis entis (analogy of being). Hence, knowledge of God is a purely Graced reality, and not a natural one in any way. I am, in fact, of said ilk (shocking!) I will always find it shocking the self-professed Reformed orthodox and Lutheran orthodox folks affirm natural theology as the fundamentum of their theological projects. Don’t you see why? These forlorn Protestantisms claim to hold to a radical form of Total Depravity, wherein what it means to be human, in a fallen sense, is to be so polluted by and riddled with sin, that ostensibly the ontic capacity, along with its noetic counterpart, cannot and will not come to know the true and the living God.

And yet I would suggest these Protestantisms are held within a Thomistic Captivity. That is, for them, as with Aquinas, what it means to be God, and then as corollary, what it means to be human, is to constantly have a resident and active intellect at play. And for the creature, even postlapsarian, this entails that the intellect, at the very least, retains its spark of being. That is, in order for the integrity of God’s being to be upheld, for those in the Thomist Captivity, human being’s intellect must be upheld even post-fall. As Steven Ozment so eloquently describes this chain of being for Thomas and his children:

The assumption that real relations existed between God, man, and the world made possible Aquinas’s confidence in a posteriori proofs of God’s existence; finite effects led necessarily to their origin, because they were really connected with it. The same assumption underlay Aquinas’s distinctive views on the “analogical” character of human knowledge and discourse about God. According to Aquinas, one could speak meaningfully of one’s relationship to God by analogy with one’s relationship with one’s fellow man because a real relationship existed between the values of people shared and those God had prescribed.[1]

With Thomas, for me, it isn’t the idea “that real relations existed between God, man . . . ,” I am a critical/theological realist after all. The problem in the Thomistic frame is that the ‘point of contact’ between God and man, the point of relation, is predicated by a chain-like continuity between God’s intellect and humanity’s (intact, at whatever level postlapse). But the Bible teaches otherwise in regard to the effects of the fall, on both the world simpliciter, and humanity.

I submit, that in order for humanity to come to have a genuine knowledge of the triune God, that the triune God must become us that we might become Him by grace. Without this participatio Christi all the human can do, even in the name of Christ, is construct monuments of their own intellects and worship them as God. This is why I reject the premises of a natural theology; and this is why I would recommend that you do the same.

[1]  Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 49.

Disallowing Secular Unbelief to Dictate the Terms of God

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Secular, worldly unbelief. I think Christians often allow the bar to be set much too low. Much of Christian theology, for example, especially those that have taken shape in the natural theology forest, allow the skeptic’s unbelief to dictate the types of questions the theologians seek to answer. Primary of which are observed in Thomas Aquinas’ Prima Pars (first part) of his Summa Theologiae. Here, Thomas seeks to answer the questions of God’s existence, and whether or not it is coherent to believe that God exists (like a generic God; albeit, in Thomas’ context this would be applied to the Christian God simplicter, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case for him). Once Thomas felt that he had sufficiently answered the skeptic’s arguments, about what God is; he then proceeded onto other matters—which would entail the Trinity, the Church, Justification and all other theological matters. It isn’t really the order of theology, per se, that is problematic with Thomas’ method (although I would qualify and say: that the order is bereft because it starts with a Monadic conception of God; even so, it starts with God, just from the wrong place). But the fact that he feels compelled to first prove “a God’s” existence, and then only after that apply this “proven God’s” existence to some of the more Dogmatic questions of the Church has a highly disordering effect after all.

So, the above is an example of how I believe, at a high level, theology can take its cues and categories from the wrong unbelieving people; and then, of course!, end up with the wrong theological and biblical conclusions. But I think this happens to each and everyone of us, as Christians (at least those attempting to walk as intentional Christians), as we are constantly bombarded with the wares of our Secular Age. As the Apostle Paul counters, even as he is referring to the false teachings and antagonisms of the Pseudo-Apostles in Corinth:

Now I, Paul, myself urge you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—I who am meek when face to face with you, but bold toward you when absent! 2 I ask that when I am present I need not be bold with the confidence with which I propose to be courageous against some, who regard us as if we walked according to the flesh. 3 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, 4 for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. 5 We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, 6 and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete.

I am looking at the principle embedded in the emboldened section in particular. Wherever these “speculations” are coming from, whether it be from Joe Pagan at work, or if it be Plato in the heavens, we are to discern such things for what they are, and “take it captive” unto Christ. The simple point I am drawing on is that it is a spiritual battle to ensure that the way we think God, as Christians, is only taken from, and in an immediate way, from God who has spoken to us (and speaks to us) in His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Even if there are hallowed traditions, some might call it the Great Tradition of the Church, without any further explication (i.e., it just is), these traditions themselves are always subservient to the reality of Holy Scripture, the theology of the Word, Jesus Christ. And this is the battle we face, on the daily, as Christians. This applies to all Christians, in one way or the other. We are faced with unbelief all around; that’s what this evil age entails. But we are to be more vigilant than theologians of glory, who seek to synthesize the wisdom of the world with the wisdom of the cross. Indeed, we are to be theologians of the cross; and by the wisdom of God, which is the cross of Christ, we are to recognize these false speculative and flighty ideas about God, even if they have many solid layerings and accretions of traditions behind them, in the name of the Church, and test them, in the face of Christ and the triune God, to see if they be so.

This is a prayerful way though.

‘At any rate, it is not at all clear that He controls dogmatic thinking concerning Himself.’

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It is time to break my blogging fast. It is fitting, the topic of this post, because I am nearing the end of my Philosophy of Religion class at the University of Oxford (next week is the last). There is one unit left, it is on Faith, Prayer, and the Spiritual life. The class is largely populated by atheists and agnostics. The text we used for class (which was augmented by many other readings and lectures) was written by an Oxford philosopher named T. J. Mawson, Belief in God. He is a Christian theist, but a panentheist who holds to a Christian universalism. What became stoutly reinforced to me was that the god of the philosophers (or the no-god) has no correspondence with the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. Mawson is arguing for the existence of a philosophical Monad; a Pure Being; an Unmoved Mover; Pure Act (actus purus). Indeed, he is arguing from within an analytic philosophical key; but, nevertheless, this key is still funded by the Hellenic Monad of the classical philosophers.

Unfortunately, too much of that “key” has been pressed into the development of Christian theologies; both antique and modern. This has always been at the basis of my critique of what I have called classical Calvinism (as a riff on classical Theism). Too much of the ‘being’ that can be proven is synthesized with the God of Christian revelation, such that the God produced is something of a hybrid notion of God wherein God functions more like a philosophical monad rather than a personal and relational God of triune Self-given love, one-in-the-other as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The god of the philosophers has no place with the God who we have come to know in the face (prosopon) of Jesus Christ.

Karl Barth, observes the same thing as that has largely taken place in the ‘older orthodox theology’ of the Protestant Reformed of the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively. Indeed, what is imbibed by the orthodox, it could be said, is simply just the re-gestation of a mediaeval theology as that developed on the ‘Western front’ of the Latin church. Barth writes:

The weakness of the older orthodox theology was that in all its doctrine of the divine providence, and of the creation and man, and earlier of God and the election of grace, it believed that it could dispense with this relationship either entirely or almost entirely. It thought and spoke about the divine ruling as an idea. With all of its divergence from individual philosophical systems, its development of the concept was far too like the philosophical development of a concept. In spite of the testimonies from Scripture, it was content with what was basically a quite formal and abstract consideration of the subject. It did not make it at all clear to what it ought really to be looking at as a Christian theology, and more often than not it did not even look there, but somewhere else. This was the root of all its uncertainties and deviations, of all the dangers to which it more or less openly exposed itself as it proceeded, and above all of the insipidity or colourlessness of all its thinking to which we drew attention at the outset. The One who is described as King in Holy Scripture is acknowledged to be such, but He does not act as such. At any rate, it is not at all clear that He controls dogmatic thinking concerning Himself. At many points He seems in fact not to control it. What does control it, and what is passed off as the authority which controls the whole universe, seems rather to be the concept of a supreme being furnished with supreme power in relation to all other beings. And the credibility of what is ostensibly said about the rule of God seems to depend upon the existence of this being. With regard to this, we may say: 1 that the existence of such a supreme being is itself highly doubtful, and therefore the credibility of a doctrine of God’s rule cannot be a Christian doctrine because the God of Christian teaching is certainly not identical with that supreme being. If we are still under the shadow thrown by this twofold difficulty, it is high time that we moved away from it.[1]

I clearly concur with Barth’s last clause (and the whole passage!): “. . . it is high time that we moved away from it.”

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §49 [176] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 180.

Maimonides on Divine Simplicity: With Christian Relief

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More from the philosophy class. As I reread this just now I didn’t really answer the whole question. Although, I amended it since in the class forum.

What does it mean to say that the concept of God is simple? Can this claim be held together with the claim that God has attributes? If so, how? If not, is this a problem for theism?

The concept of God as simple simply entails that the God conceived of by folks like Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides et al. is a Monad. I.e., a non-composite being who is not made up by its parts or properties in addition, but a singular substance who is also identified, within this complex as an actus purus (‘pure act’), pure being, unmoved mover so on and so forth. It is this construct, as in this case, exemplified and articulated in the tongue of Maimonides, that all of the so-called Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) can have a shared starting point in their respective God-talk.

As noted by Maimonides, his knowledge of God, after Aristotle and the philosophers, is arrived at by a process known as the via negativa (negative way). This speculative process is undertaken, as Maimonides develops, within an apophatic frame for thinking the ineffable God. That is to say, that God is so necessarily hidden in this frame, that all the would-be knower of God is left with, at a basic or primordial level, is to engage in a process of negating the seen, the “known,” like the negation of nature in general, or even human being in particular, and to think God’s perfections or attributes, from these speculative means; as the philosopher works their “way up” the supposed chain of being; whose first cause, is indeed the unmoved mover, the monad known as God.

Christian theism alternatively—and I use that language in a particular way, noting a trinitarian way for thinking God—I would argue is necessarily a kataphatic (versus apophatic, in a sense) religion. That is to say, Christian theism thinks God first, not from a negation of human being, or nature in general, but from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. John 1:18 says: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.” The word translated as ‘explain,’ in the koine Greek is exegesato, to exegete, to “read-out.” Indeed, even in this passage there is a sense of apophaticism in God, that is to say that He indeed is a hidden God. But to the point, on the Christian account, God freely chose to Self-reveal and explain Himself in the face of His Son, Jesus Christ. This is why Christians first think God not as a faraway pure monadic being, but as our Father (as Athanasius emphasizes: “Father of the Son, Son of the Father”). A genuine Christian theology works from a via positiva (‘positive way’) towards thinking God. That is, from revelation rather than speculation.

In the end, classical theism, and as that has been appropriated by certain traditions within Christianity, does take on the type of thinking that Maimonides articulates in regard to divine simplicity; and “its” methodology. And yet there are other traditions, like the one I affirm, within Christianity, who think God from within only positive, Self-revealed terms; indeed, as the base of a theological methodology itself. And yet all orthodox Christians, at some level, will affirm that God is simple (non-composite). Even so, there are other more relational ways to engage with that notion. My teacher, Karl Barth, evangelizes the concept and re-terms it as ‘Divine Constancy.’ But that requires further development, and more space than available at the moment.