‘Epistemological Inversion’: God Knowing Us First So We Might Know Him

Posted on August 27, 2024 by Bobby Grow

I remember when I was in Bible College, studying apologetics vis-à-vis worldview class, an axiom of sorts was presented to us in regard to a God-world relation: 1) God is prior to us ontologically, 2) humanity is prior to God epistemologically. Does the reader spy a problem with this arrangement; maybe an inherent dualism wherein there is seemingly both an abstract God from humanity, and an abstract humanity from God? When I first heard this axiom it intrigued me, but didn’t sit all that easy with me either. It took me awhile, like years, including going through seminary, and then further study following. I finally saw the inherent theological error to this mode of theorizing a knowledge of God; i.e., that it is de jure entirely nonChristian to think about God and humanity in a competitive way. That is, it is antiChrist to presume that ‘we,’ as a people, can ever come before God in any way. The very first verse of the Bible says so: e.g., ‘In the BEGINNING God . . ..’ Further, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Even more, “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained [ἐξηγήσατο exegasto exegeted] Him.” And the Apostle, “For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation [ ἀποκαλύψεως apocalypsis apocalypse unveiling] of Jesus Christ.” This small smattering of passages, from both the Old and New Testaments ought to suffice in making the point; for the Christian knowledge of God doesn’t come prior to God, from an inherent sparkle of knowledge in the human; knowledge of God, according to Scripture, comes from God Self-revealing, Self-exegeting Himself for us in the Theanthropos GodMan, Jesus Christ. Accordingly, it follows that in order to have an actual ‘theological’ knowledge of God, this must come first through an ‘evangelical’ knowledge of God. That is to say, that in order for a fallen human being to have a genuine knowledge of the triune God, they must have union, participation with God, through the mediatorial and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ: for He alone is the center of God for us (pro nobis).

Thomas F. Torrance agrees with the above, and identifies this type of knowledge theory as an ‘epistemological inversion’ (kataphysin). That is, contra the classical theistic way of knowing God, an epistemological inversion sees an order to knowing God as that is, as a prius, grounded in God’s being in becoming for us in Jesus Christ. So, for Torrance, there is an order to being-order to knowing relationship between God and humanity that starts in God being for us; then moves in actualization in God becoming us; resulting in our becoming Him, by grace not nature, through union with Jesus Christ (unio cum Christo), by the faith of Christ. There is nothing abstract, but only concrete in this theory of Christian knowledge of God; it is grounded in ‘God’s grace all the way down.’ In this frame, there is no dangling creation running amok, thinking God or not thinking God on its own terms. For Torrance, and me, there can be only one way, one starting point, for knowing God, and that is in and from the triune and perichoretic interpenetrating life of God which is eternal Love. This ground, necessarily negates the possibility for an abstract humanity having an inherent ‘pure’ capacity to conjure the true and living God. This reality, necessarily defeats the notion that a naked humanity could speculate themselves into the heavenlies and come back with a more accurate knowledge of the true and the living God (indeed, isn’t a naked humanity what got us into this mess to begin with?).

So, TFT:

Inevitably we have already had to discuss some of the specific requirements of theology as a science in order to distinguish the way in which general scientific activity takes place in theology from ways appropriate to other sciences, but we have now to examine more closely the distinctive characteristics of theological activity. Some repetition is therefore inevitable. All of these requirements arise directly out of respect for and devotion to this unique Object, God in His Revelation, or rather all are required of us from the side of the Object, as adaptations of our rationality in modes of activity congruent with it.

The primary thing we have to note is the utter lordship of the Object, its absolute precedence, for that is the one all-determining presupposition of theology. Theological activity would not be scientific if it did not yield to it its rightful place. This prescribes for theology a unique form of inquiry in which we ourselves altogether and always stand in question before the Object. We know only as we are known, and we conduct our research only as we are searched through and through by God. The main point we have to single out here is that knowledge of God entails an epistemological inversion in the order of our knowing, corresponding to the order of the divine action in revealing Himself to us.

In all our knowing it is we who know, we observe, we examine, we inquire, but in the presence of God we are in a situation in which He knows, He observes, He examines, He inquires and in which He is ‘indissoluble Subject’. He is the Lord of our knowing even when it is we who know, so that our knowing is taken under command of the lordship of the Object, the Creator Himself. We can only follow through the determination of our knowing by the Object known who yet remains pure Subject. This relation, in which the ultimate control passes from the knower, who yet remains free, to God who is known in His knowing of us, is an important aspect of what we call faith. Faith entails the opening up of our subjectivity to the Subjectivity of God through His Objectivity. Faith is the relation of our minds to the Object who through His unconditional claims upon us establishes the centre of our knowing in Himself and not in us, so that the whole epistemological relation is turned round—we know in that we are known by Him. His Objectivity encounters our objectivity and our objectivity is subordinated to His and grounded in His. But it is precisely in knowing us, in making us the objects of His knowledge, that He constitutes us subjects over against Him, the lordly Subject, and therefore gives us freedom to know Him even while in our knowing we are unconditionally bound to Him as the Object of our knowledge. Here our effort to subdue everything to our knowledge is halted and obstructed by God, for He is the one Object we cannot subdue. We can know Him only as we are subdued by Him, that is, as we obediently rely upon His Grace.[1]

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 131–32.

Dark Heart-Inscrutable Sin Contra Natural Theology-Law

Posted on August 8, 2024 by Bobby Grow

“The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it?
“I, the Lord, search the heart,
I test the mind,
Even to give to each man according to his ways,
According to the results of his deeds. –Jeremiah 17:9–10

This is going to be a very brief screed on the inscrutable reality of sin and evil. As the prophet Jeremiah speaks for Yahweh, or as Yahweh speaks directly through Jeremiah, something is quite clear about the human fallen heart: i.e., it is beyond our comprehension. The only commentary or explicator provided for its depths comes in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. It was this that was required in order for the ‘desperately sick’ and ‘deceitful’ heart to be dealt with. Just as with the torture and evil happenings that befell Job, God never explained the background behind it all to Job. Via dramatic irony the reader understands that it was the devil who was given permission by Yahweh to “slay” Job, but Job didn’t know that while in the midst of it all. I bring Job up merely as an analogy for the depths of sin and evil, and the way God explains it to us; He doesn’t. Even so, what can be gleaned from this is that sin and evil have an inexplicable core-depth to it that the human mind could never grasp; God alone has real knowledge of good and evil; God alone is good, as Jesus said of His life in the triune Monarxia. Yahweh’s engagement with evil, with sin as a subset, is to become human, be put to death for all of humanity, and by so doing reverse the dissolving effects of evil and sin into the nothingness-reprobate status that it entails.

The above has many implications. One of those implications has to do with the impact that the dissolvent of sin and evil has upon the intellect. According to Scripture its effect is so far reaching that it kills humanity; that is, it kills humanity’s capacity to be in right relationship with Yahweh; to have a real knowledge of the triune God; to even have the capacity or desire to follow God. We know from Jesus, particularly in the Gospel of John, that the fallen heart loves the darkness rather than the light. That is to say, the human fallen heart is ensconced within the darkness and loves it that way. Without an outside “intervention” or intrusion we would stay captive to our greatest affections, even as those find their source in a heart always already inward curved.

The aforementioned is why I reject any form of a so-called natural theology. The noetic-ontic effects of sin in an evil world are so deep and dread that the fallen human’s knowledge of God is always and only contingent upon a person’s participation within God’s life as that is mediated through the vicarious-priestly humanity of Jesus Christ. This is a purely biblical theological account. When you have folks within Protestantism, especially those who claim to be the Reformed orthodox or Lutheran, claiming that a natural theology, natural law is in play for developing a Christian theology, you know that they are relying on an extrabiblical account of things. You know that they are relying on some type of intellectualist anthropology (typically, Thomist) wherein they maintain that while humanity is totally depraved, some small spark of the intellect, which is the essence of what it means to be human, just as it is the ultimate essence for God to be God (as the Big Brain in the Sky), has remained untouched. It is in this small space of a spark that they reason even a fallen humanity, through a naked reason, has enough inherent intellectual power to rightly think Godness; to think the categories of God’s life. But biblically this cannot be sustained. This, at its very reduction, is why Barth forever rejected natural theology, particularly as that was juxtaposed with his in-person and Roman Catholic correspondent, Erich Przywara.

On Being a Real Protestant: Calvin and Barth against Thomas and the Thomists on a Vestigial Knowledge of God

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Bobby Grow

Is God really knowable, secularly, in the vestiges of the created order? In other words, does God repose in the fallen order to the point that vain and profane people can come to have some type of vestigial knowledge of the living God? According to Thomas Aquinas, and other scholastics of similar ilk, the answer is a resounding: yes. Here is Thomas himself:

as we have shown [q. 32, a. 1], the Trinity of persons cannot be demonstratively proven. But it is still congruous to place it in the light of some things which are more manifest to us. And the essential attributes stand out more to our reason than the properties of the persons do, for, beginning from the creatures from which we derive our knowledge of the personal properties, as we have said [q. 32, a. 1]. Thus, just as to disclose the persons we make use of vestigial or imaged likenesses of the Trinity in creatures, so too we use their essential attributes. And what we call appropriation is the disclosure of the persons through the essential attributes.[1]

Karl Barth makes appeal to John Calvin to repudiate this type of ‘vestigial’ knowledge of God, as we find that in Thomas Aquinas previously. Calvin might not develop an anti-natural theology in the ways that Barth does, but he does share with Barth a principled and prior commitment to a radical theology of the Word, to a knowledge of God as Redeemer prior to Creator. And so here we have Barth and Calvin joining forces, even if only in incipient ways, on Calvin’s part (mediated through Barth), against the Angelic Doctor, St Thomas Aquinas:

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]

This is one reason among many why any serious Reformed person who would ever think that resourcing Thomas Aquinas and his Aristotelianism as a ‘congruous’ means by which to think God becomes quite staggering. Such a move flatly contradicts a principled and intensive commitment to the so-called ‘Protestant Scripture Principle.’ And yet, as the Post Reformed orthodox history bears out this is exactly what many of these Reformers did; they built their “Reformed” systems of theology on the Thomistic and Aristotelian ground provided for them in the Latin theological heritage so bequeathed. I’m still of the mind that it’s better to actually be principially Protestant rather than functionally Tridentine and Roman Catholic in my theology, as a Protestant. Many like Matthew Barrett, Craig Carter, and more seriously, Richard Muller and David Steinmetz et al. disagree.

[1] Thomas Aquinas, ST 1, q. 39, a. 7 cited by Gilles Emery, OP, The Trinitarian Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 328–29.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §40 [031] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 30–1 [italics mine, they represent the translation of Calvin’s Latin].

Job’s Dramatic Irony: Getting God Right Through Suffering Rather than Nature

Posted on May 5, 2024 by Bobby Grow

The biblical book of Job, literarily, operates with what is called dramatic irony. Here is how the Oxford Dictionary defines dramatic irony:

a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character’s words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character.[1]

As a reader, or even movie-watcher, we the audience have the capacity to read or watch with this type of ‘irony.’ We can skip to the end, and then read the beginning to the end, knowing what the final outcome is. Or we can read through a book or watch a movie in total, and next time we come to read or watch said book or movie we will already know what the characters present in the storyline remain unaware of throughout. Indeed, the drama of our lives before God, could be characterized as a dramatic irony as understood in Christ. We have the capacity, in God’s life of Grace, who is the Christ, to know how it all ends. We don’t have the details of how that looks in our daily and personal lives, but we know the One who does; and in a general way, with important specifics in tow, we know what we can expect in the end/Eschaton. As such, we can look at our unfolding stories in light of the End, the Beginning and End, and rest in the knowledge that no matter what we walk through, both the deep waters and the fire, in this cruci-shaped life, we will indeed resurrect.

In the instance of Job’s story, we have many of the details. We know that God judged, and in the end found Job faithful, and Job’s friends faithless (not even acknowledging the youngster, Elihu’s existence). But I was thinking, as I just finished reading Job again: when you listen to Job’s “friends” and their “counsel” or “beratement” of him, at first blush it sounds like they might be offering many profound insights with reference to the character and action of God. But what we know, even from the beginning of the story, is that Job’s friends, while stating, surely, some true facts about God, that they were working off a faulty natural theological assumption based on their own lights. They presumed that Job must have been in some sort of vile sin, thus justly undergoing God’s judgement on his life. Throughout the plotline of Job’s travail, he grows in the grace and knowledge of the LORD, while his friends stay static, thinking of God through static terms, based on their own naturalistic reasoning, their own prefabricated notions in regard to God’s ways, and thus arriving at horrifically bad conclusions as they approached their “friend,” brother Job.

I was just thinking, I don’t want to operate like one of Job’s friends. I want to be Job instead. I want to know who God is as I trust and depend on the One who alone raises the dead. With Job I want to be the one who says “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last He shall stand on the earth.” I don’t want to think God based on my own wits, or others’, thus arriving at faulty and crooked theology and its attending spirituality. I want to know God through the shape of His cross in Jesus Christ; depending upon His grace, which is sufficient, thereby genuinely coming to know the true who-ness of God from His inner-life, as I participate in that through the mediatory person of Jesus Christ, through union with Him by the re-creative and bonding work of the Holy Spirit.

[1] Oxford Dictionary, accessed 05-05-2024.

The Gospel of Truth Confronting Our ‘Happily Sick’ Selves

Posted on December 6, 2023 by Bobby Grow

The Gospel is a Gospel of offense. Christ in the assumptio carnis doesn’t only explain God to us from within Himself and the triune life (Jn 1.18), but He explains who we are as fallen human beings vis-à-vis the holiness and person of the living God. The Gospel doesn’t allow us to remain comfortable with our sins; the Gospel doesn’t allow us to find companionship with our evil, dark and depraved hearts. The Gospel is the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life; as such, it puts us in our place. For the natural [hu]man this causes squirming, it challenges our base desires at their very root; the desires we’d rather live our live-long days with. But the Gospel pronounces a disruptive and loud, No! Gracefully, the Gospel doesn’t just take us to the dark side of our fallen condition; it dialectically, and at the same time, elevates us into the Light and Life of God.

Read along as father and son duo, Alan and Andrew Torrance explain how this looks in the theology of Kierkegaard:

To analyze Kierkegaard’s position more precisely, there are primarily two ways in which he considered Christ to be offensive. The more obvious of the two ways is that Christ proclaims a deeply countercultural message. While Jesus ultimately brings good news to the world, not everything he says will be immediately appealing, especially to elite members of society. For Kierkegaard, this point should be obvious to any sincere reader of Scripture. The reason Christ’s message is unsettling is that so many of us are content with the shape of our sinful lives. In the grip of “the sickness unto death,” we define ourselves according to our own finite ends in a way that is dead to God and in “the state of deepest spiritual wretchedness.” As Climacus puts it, the sinner exists in a state of imprisonment in which he “holds himself captive,” and in this state, he is oblivious to the sickness that accompanies his overly positive view of his life. When caught up in sin, it is extremely difficult to notice, let alone take seriously, our state of despair. We are happily sick, so when the true world-changing gospel message is spoken into this situation, it cannot simply be taken as a message that supports us in our daily lives. When God assumes human form, God does not settle in with us in our “sickbed,” nor does God comfort us in our sinful ways. Rather, God reveals Godself by acts of revelation that seek to deliver us from sickness. Anti-Climacus writes:

Christianity did not come into the world as a showpiece of gentle comfort, as the preacher blubberingly and falsely introduces it—but as the absolute. It is out of love that God so wills but it is also God who wills it, and he wills as he wills. He will not be transformed by human beings into a cozy human god; he wills to transform human beings and he wills it out of love.[1]

We will pick up with the ‘second way’ next time. Suffice it to say, Kierkegaard is onto what should appear to be the obvious: i.e., as fallen creatures we are more than comfortable with our fallen ways. Indeed, as fallen creatures, we aren’t even really aware that we are in fact, sick; more biblically, dead! As the Christology of Kierkegaard underscores, outwith Christ’s penetration into the soil and slum of our souls, we would simply run head-long, with glee, into the eternal abyss. But God’s love is greater than our blindness; and because God is gracious, He elects our humanity for Himself in Christ, and gives us His vicarious eyes. He gives us His eternal Light that we might see Light, and come to recognize the darkness that we so gleefully inhabit outwith His disruption into our humanity.

As an aside: the aforementioned has another implication. It implicates the way knowledge of God does or doesn’t work. If Kierkegaard’s theology is true on this front (and I think it is), this entails that fallen creatures left to themselves have no capacity in themselves, other than to see their darkness as light. Indeed, left to themselves, fallen humanity will construct God and gods in their light, which in fact, of course, is only their darkness in the end. The fallen creature needs God’s Life to assume theirs; bring their life up into His; and it is then only from that inhabitation that fallen humanity is elevated into a status and capacity, through union with Christ by the Spirit, that they can come to think and speak God’s thoughts Deus dixit (‘after He has spoken’). Natural theology simply doesn’t have the chops to offer a theological ontology/epistemology/anthropology that brings a fallen humanity into a genuine and viable knowledge of the living God. Christ alone remains the only mediator between God and humanity whereby fallen humanity can become adopted and elevated humanity as participants in and with Christ’s vicarious humanity for them/us.

Many other implications to be visited, but this will have to suffice for the moment.

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 77.

Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance, The Modern Versions of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham?

Posted on September 19, 2023 by Bobby Grow

When engaging the theologians, it is an important exercise to broaden out the frame, every now and then, in order to get a greater, even critical understanding of just who we might be engaging with. This holds true for any of the theologians, including Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance (the two modern theologians who, of course, have had the greatest purchase in my life over the last, almost, two decades). In an effort to expand the scope on the way we might respectively approach Barth and Torrance, I wanted to offer some words from ecclesial intellectual historian, the late, Steven Ozment. In the following, Ozment is describing the way that 20^th century, Étienne Henri Gilson, a French historian of philosophy and intellectual history, understood the impact that medieval theologian, Duns Scotus, and philosopher, William of Ockham, ostensibly had on what Gilson took to be the disruption of the pinnacle of all medieval theological acumen in the blessed work of the Angelic doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas.

After the Parisian condemnations, Gilson argued further, the work of the Franciscans Duns Scotus (ca. 1265–1308) and William of Ockham (ca. 1285–1347) further undermined the Thomist synthesis. Scotus was seen to narrow the range of scholastic speculation by finding far fewer theological truths philosophically arguable than had Aquinas and other thirteenth-century theologians. The hallmark of Scotist theology was its appreciation of God’s distance and otherness. The vast differences between God and man moved Scotus far more than areas where reason and revelation overlapped and seemed to suggest a unity of things human and divine. Will, not intellect, became the central theological category in Scotist theology; what God and man did was more basic than what they were in themselves. The primary object of faith ceased to be God as pure being (actus purus) and became God as he revealed himself to man in Scripture. And the latter required trusting acceptance from man, not rational understanding.

Gilson found in Ockham the extreme conclusion of Scotist voluntarism and covenant theology: the confinement of theology to the sphere of faith and revelation and the denial of any rationally convincing knowledge of God. “Ockham is perfectly safe in what he believes; only he does not know what he believes, nor does he need to know it.” Here, for Gilson, the divorce between reason and revelation became final and the golden age of scholasticism effectively came to an end. Faith that was content simply to believe had supplanted faith that sought full understanding.

Other scholars, sharing Gilson’s perspective, believe a natural alliance existed between Ockhamist philosophy, which denied direct rational knowledge of God, and Neoplatonic mysticism, popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which sought God in transrational and even arational experience. They also believe that it was not coincidental that the leader of the Protestant Reformation was a careful student of both Ockham and the German mystics.[1]

At a purely superficial level, does the reader see how what Barth and Torrance are doing sound a lot like the characteristics present in the thought of both Scotus and Ockham, respectively? Do you see how theologians like Barth and Torrance might be read as modern-day adherents of what also became known as Nominalism (i.e., what we see, loosely, in the thought-life of both Scotus and Ockham, respectively)? Indeed, some would attempt to argue that Immanuel Kant himself, and the dualism he proposed, was very much so akin to the nominalism developed by someone like Ockham. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of all of that, let it simply be noted that while someone like Barth was indeed conditioned by the impact of Kant on the modern Germanic ideational landscape, what Barth was doing, by way of the analogy of the incarnation (and thus faith), was to flip any sort of Kantian or Nominalistic dualism on its head by bringing the heavenlies into the earthlies as that obtained and concretized in the incarnate Son of God, the Man from Nazareth, the Theanthropos, Jesus Christ.

While the details of these matters go deeper than we will be able to penetrate herein (because of space and attention-span constraints), I think it is important to recognize that what we get, say, in the theologies of people like Barth and Torrance, have historical antecedents that reach much deeper into the well of historical development than many might imagine. Indeed, those who have imagined, in deeper more informed ways, would see something like what we are doing with Athanasian Reformed (Evangelical Calvinist) theology, as in contest with the Aristotelian/Thomism they believe entails the most orthodox way to be orthodox. It is possible to see, as we read Ozment’s distillation of Gilson’s critique, how the ole’ Thomist axiom of grace perfecting nature might become disjointed, indeed, destroyed if we were to follow the via moderna of the Scotuses, Ockhams, Barths, Torrances et al. of the world. They are afraid that if we follow the ‘modern way’ the whole Christian ground of knowing God by way of natural reason will be lost to the winds of the disenchanted moderns; i.e., those who don’t see a necessitarian link between God’s being, as the first cause, and the effects caused by God in the created order. As such, for the opponents of the perceived ‘modern way’, what is at stake is the loss of all theological order; is the loss of all ecclesiastical authority (even if presaged by a ‘paper pope’ instead of a ‘papal’ one). And yet theologians like Barth and Torrance, instead of grounding all of known reality in the ostensible capaciousness of the purely created order, ground such capaciousness in the in-breaking of God’s life for the world in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ (so within the “logic of grace” as TFT would identify that).

Things to ponder. I won’t attempt to tie this off here. I simply wanted to note how there is more than meets the eye when we are engaging with the theologians; even when those theologians are Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance.

[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), 15.

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

Posted on August 27, 2023 by Bobby Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on July 31, 2023 by Bobby Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Miracle of the Gospel against Worldviewism

Posted on June 14, 2023 by Bobby Grow

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

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

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

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

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

Barth writes at length:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on April 26, 2023 by Bobby Grow

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

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

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

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