Category Archives: Ben Myers

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

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

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

Thomas F. Torrance’s model of the stratification of knowledge is one of his most striking and original contributions to theological method. Torrance’s model offers an account of the way formal theological knowledge emerges from our intutive and pre-conceptual grasp of God’s reality as it is manifest in Jesus Christ. It presents a vision of theological progression, in which our knowledge moves towards an ever more refined and more unified conceptualisation of the reality of God, while remaining closely coordinated with the concrete level of personal and experiential knowledge of Jesus Christ. According to this model, our thought rises to higher levels of theological conceptualisation only as we penetrate more deeply into the reality of Jesus Christ. From the ground level of personal experience to the highest level of theological reflection, Jesus Christ thus remains central. Through a sustained concentration on him and on his homoousial union with God, we are able to achieve a formal account of the underlying trinitarian relations immanent in God’s own eternal being, which constitute the ultimate grammar of all theological discourse.[1]

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

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

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

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

A Rant on Leighton Flowers’ Rationalist Attempt at Theologizing: And a Correction by Thomas Torrance’s Stratified Knowledge of God

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Faustus Socinus

As I drive home from work I continue to listen to this guy, Leighton Flowers; I’m not sure why—I must be something of a theological rubberneck. He continues to push his soteriological framework which he calls: Provisionism. I’d simply call it Calminianism; the lowchurch, baptistic attempt to draw strands from what they take to be fulgent from both Five Point Calvinism and Arminianism. What he is communicating is not something evangelicals like me haven’t grown up with their whole lives; we have! The problem I have with Leighton, ultimately, is that he is teaching young minds how to be rationalist in their approach to Scripture and theology. He appeals to a solo Scriptura mode, denouncing theological exegesis every chance he gets. He thinks, through a series of anecdotes, based in pure rationalism, rather than theological theology, that he has put classical Calvinism to death. I’m all for placing classical Calvinism in its proper place; I think classical Calvinism represents a mode of theological development that ought to be ultimately repudiated; but at the same time it did, in its time, under the material available, forward a theological grammar that can be helpful for the rest of Christendom to glean from and deploy in its attempt to come to the unity of the Faith once for all delivered to the saints.

Unfortunately, Flowers, as I noted, does his thinking from a Lockean-like universe wherein rationality, his, is of a premium; and he fails to recognize that Christian theology, that is genuinely Christian, does it thinking from confessional norms grounded and conditioned in and by the triune life of the living God. In other words, Flowers would be well-advised, and anyone who attempts to do ‘theology’ like him, to do their thinking from the homoousial reality of God’s consubstantial life with us in the Theanthropos, Godman, Jesus Christ. Thomas Torrance offers a better way for Flowers to think, it is what TFT identifies as a ‘stratified knowledge of God.’ Ben Myers offers a helpful and precise sketch of what this entails for Torrance:

Thomas F. Torrance’s model of the stratification of knowledge is one of his most striking and original contributions to theological method. Torrance’s model offers an account of the way formal theological knowledge emerges from our intutive and pre-conceptual grasp of God’s reality as it is manifest in Jesus Christ. It presents a vision of theological progression, in which our knowledge moves towards an ever more refined and more unified conceptualisation of the reality of God, while remaining closely coordinated with the concrete level of personal and experiential knowledge of Jesus Christ. According to this model, our thought rises to higher levels of theological conceptualisation only as we penetrate more deeply into the reality of Jesus Christ. From the ground level of personal experience to the highest level of theological reflection, Jesus Christ thus remains central. Through a sustained concentration on him and on his homoousial union with God, we are able to achieve a formal account of the underlying trinitarian relations immanent in God’s own eternal being, which constitute the ultimate grammar of all theological discourse.[1]

If Flowers were to follow this method of theological reflection he could avoid his rationalist approach to all things ‘theological.’ I keep putting theological in quotes, when referring to Flowers, because I don’t take what he is doing to be actual Christian theology. In order for Christian theology to be genuinely Christian it must be principially and intensively grounded in and from Jesus Christ who is the evangel of God for us. As Torrance rightly understood the Gospel isn’t a concept, but a person; and the Christian can only think God’s thoughts, from a center in God, as they do so in participation with God in the mediatorial and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.

Folks like Flowers fail at doing Christian theology precisely at the point that they don’t start in God’s confession that He is for us in Jesus Christ. Flowers fails at doing Christian theology because he fails to recognize that there is such a thing as a theological ontology—God’s triune life—that comes prior to a genuinely Christian theological epistemology; i.e. there is an order of being that is antecedent to a prior of knowing. To realize this allows the Christian to start their thinking in what Anselm famously identified as fides quarens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). Note the emphasis on faith. A proper conception of Christian faith cannot start its thinking, but from the ‘faith of Christ’ (pistis Christou). As Calvin realized, biblically speaking, faith is knowledge of God. And according to Scripture Jesus is God’s knowledge, God’s wisdom, God’s Self-exgesis for us (cf. Jn 1.18; I Cor 1.30). It is as we are in union with Christ (unio cum Christo), that real knowledge of the triune God can obtain; outwith this union, and the realization that this is the only place wherein genuine knowledge of the living God is realized, all one can do is what Flowers does—i.e. turn-to-the-subject, and rationalize an ostensible theological framework that has its grounding in an abstract conception of humanity that is mondic-like in its day to day existence (in other words, it starts with itself and thinks its way towards God from its own inherent intellectual and spiritual resources—God-given as Flowers is wont to emphasize).

Flowers can signify a multitude of various theological traditions out there; ones that equally claim to engage in Christian theology, when in fact all they are doing are self-projecting themselves onto what they perceive to be the God of the Bible. <rant over>

[1] Benjamin Myers, “The Stratification of knowledge in the thought of T. F. Torrance,” SJT 61 (1): 1-15 (2008).

Into the Far Country: Jesus and Israel in the Theologies of Barth and Torrance

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The order of salvation, Christ's Life for usI just finished reading Mark R. Lindsay’s book Barth, Israel, and Jesus: Karl Barth’s Theology of Israel. Lindsay’s treatment was highly stimulating, and represents a stellar contribution to Barth studies. The topic of this book was especially intriguing to me, particularly because of the role that the nation of Israel plays in God’s salvation-history as the covenant people through whom he mediates salvation to the world. Also, given my background, growing up as a dispensationalist, and thus a Christian Zionist, Israel has always played a unique role in my vision of the Bible, politics, and ethics. I have since repented of my former dispensationalism, nonetheless, Israel, both ethnically and theologically have a dominant role in my thinking; particularly because Jesus was from the Galilee, the man from Nazareth.

This will not be a full book review (Ben Myers wrote a book review back in 2007 here), but you can take what I write here as a recommendation for you to tolle lege, take up and read Lindsay’s book (if you can get your hands on it, it is an academic title which means it is exceedingly expensive). What I want to cover for the remainder of this post is to touch on Barth’s understanding of Israel in reconciliation. Lindsay provides good coverage of this, among so many other important things; including some intriguing historical nuance relative to the Jewish situation in Nazi Germany.

As we have covered more than once here Thomas F. Torrance sees a fundamental place for the nation of Israel, a perduring and irreversible place for the nation of Israel as Yahweh’s covenant people who mediate salvation to the nations (Romans 9–11). As such the Jesus we get is not an abstractly conceived human, but a particular human for all humans (pro nobis) from within the concrete and cultic matrix provided for in the history and making of the nation of Israel. This aspect is in Barth’s theology as well; Mark Lindsay explicates that this way as he gets into Barth’s CD IV/1 and Barth’s development of reconciliationisraelbarth:

The Jews in the Far Country

The first major section of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation in which he discusses Israel is §59.1, the subject of which is the divine condescension (exinanitio) of the Son of God. We are faced, then, with the particular history of Jesus of Nazareth. More exactly, perhaps, we are faced with the ‘aspect of the grace of God’ according to which, while not ceasing to be God, God—in Jesus Christ—‘goes into the far country, into the evil society of this being which is not God and [which is] against God’ [CD IV/1, 158].

In earlier Reformed dogmatics, a distinction was made between Christ’s exinanitio  and humiliatio, the former treating Jesus’ ‘birth and burdensome life’, with the latter referring more specifically to Christ’s death and subsequent descent into hell (descensus ad infernos). In Heppe’s volume, the humiliatio is accorded far weightier significance than Jesus’ birth and life. For Barth, however, the emphasis is reversed. Barth’s overarching theme is that, in the condescension of the Son of God, God became ‘flesh’. Far more illustrative of Christ’s humiliation than any descent into hell is that the Son of God assumed ‘the concrete form of human nature and the being of man [sic] in his world under the sign and form of Adam—the being of man as corrupted and therefore destroyed, as unreconciled with God and therefore lost’ [CD IV/1, 165]. But Barth goes further to argue that, within this context of the assumption of human nature, ‘there is one thing we must emphasise especially … The Word did not simply become any “flesh” …It became Jewish flesh’ [CD IV/1, 166].

The Church’s whole doctrine of the incarnation and atonement becomes abstract and valueless and meaninglessness to the extent that [Jesus’ Jewishness] comes to be regarded as something accidental and incidental. The New Testament witness to Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, stands on the soil of the Old Testament and cannot be separated from it. The pronouncements of the New Testament Christology may have been shaped by a very non-Jewish environment. But they relate always to a man who is seen to be not a man in general, a neutral man, but the conclusion and sum of the history of God with the people of Israel, the One who fulfils the covenant made by God with this people. [CD IV/1, 166)

For Barth, it is central to the Christian message that a Jew stands at the heart of the kerygma. Only as a Jewish man does Jesus also come into the world with a message for the world. It is only from within the sphere of Israel that Jesus can truly be what Israel’s vocation was always to be, that is, a ‘light to the nations’ (Is. 42:6). This is why Barth is so strongly critical of Marcion, the Socinians, Schleiermacher and Harnack, all of whom, in their own ways, tried to de-Judaize the humanity of Jesus and thus the essential Jewishness of the gospel, ‘to the great detriment…of this very heart of the Christian message’ [CD IV/1, 167].[1]

Far from being a supersessionist who believes that the church in Christ has superseded Israel, Barth sees ethnic Israel, as God’s covenant people, as inimical to the particularity of Jesus’ mission as Savior of the world. Thomas Torrance emphasizes the same thing in regard to the centrality of Israel’s vocation in mediating the Son of God, Jesus Christ to the world as its prophet, priest, and King (triplex munus). Torrance writes, and fleshes the implications of this out even further:

Thus the knowledge of God, of Christ, and of the Jews are all bound up inseparably together, so that when at last God came into the world he came as a Jew. And to this very day Jesus remains a Jew while still the eternal Son of God. It is still through the story of Israel, through the Jewish soul shaped by the hand of God, through the Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament and the Jewish scriptures of the New Testament church, the gospel comes to us, and that Jesus Christ is set before us face to face as Lord and saviour. Apart from this Old Testament prehistory and all the biblical revelation through Israel, we would not have the tools to grasp the knowledge of God; apart from the long history of the Jews we would not be able to recognise Jesus as the Son of God; apart from the suffering and agony of Israel we would not understand the cross of Calvary as God’s instrument to atone for sin and to enact once and for all his word of love and pardon and grace. Apart from the covenant forged in sheer grace with undeserving and rebellious Israel, and the unswerving faithfulness of the divine love, we would not be able to understand the mystery of our restoration to union with God in Jesus Christ. Apart from the context of Israel we could not even begin to understand the bewildering miracle of Jesus. The supreme instrument of God for the salvation of the world is Israel, and out of the womb of Israel, Jesus, the Jew from Nazareth — yet he was no mere instrument in the hands of God, but very God himself, come in person in the form of a servant, to work our from within our limitations and recalcitrance, and to bring to its triumphant completion, the redemption of mankind, and our restoration to fellowship with the very life of God himself.[2]

For Torrance and Barth the nation of Israel has significance for always and eternity; from the beginning to the end; from the Alpha to the Omega. Without the nation of Israel, in the theology of Barth and Torrance, Jesus would be nothing more than an accident of history, a demiurge or instrument of the ethereal and abstract who showed up to point people to a God concept; something like we see in Gnosticism and now neo-Gnosticism (think of much of what we see in so called ‘Jesus studies’). With the nation of Israel, though, there is an intelligibility, a theological acuity and context for Jesus to enter into in the fullness of time (Gal. 4). Jesus has a salvific context, what the old Reformed triplex munus captures in the Prophet, Priest, and King triad. With the nation of Israel, Jesus as her son has real reach into the vastness of the universe as God’s regent in bringing salvation to the nations and all of creation (Rom. 8).

As Lindsay hits on over and again, with reference to Barth (but he does bring up both David and Thomas Torrance), the nation of Israel is not just some theological locus that Barth posits to make his doctrine of election work. No, the nation of Israel is a concrete people who as all of humanity find their place, significance and vocation in Jesus Christ. But as Lindsay argues, and Barth emphasizes, the people of Israel are a particular and peculiar people in God’s unfolding plan that cannot and should not be metaphysicalized or made into an abstract idea. What an astounding reality, the Apostle Paul thought so,

33 Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! 34 “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has become His counselor?”  35 “Or who has first given to Him And it shall be repaid to him?”  36 For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.[3]

 

 

 

[1] Mark R. Lindsay, Barth, Israel, and Jesus: Karl Barth’s Theology of Israel (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 93.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 53-4.

[3] Romans 11:33-36.

It was once the Companion Controversy, now it is the Barth Wars; but what is it?

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Maybe like me you have grown weary of what was originally called the Companion Controversy, but because of a recent First Things article by Phillip Cary has been relabeled bartharmyuniformas the Barth Wars. This controversy first started (in print anyway) when Bruce McCormack, of Princeton Theological Seminary, published an essay in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth entitled: Grace and Being: The role of God’s gracious election in Karl Barth’s theological ontology. In this essay he lays out what he believes Barth intended or should have intended by way of his reformulation of Calvin’s doctrine of election, and how that reformulation implicates Barth’s doctrine of God. At base McCormack believes that Barth in Church Dogmatics IV reverses the usual order of things in regard to a doctrine of God. In other words, McCormack believes that election precedes Trinity, which is inverted from classical metaphysical understanding.

But since I want to communicate McCormack’s thesis as clearly as possible in this post (and thus the point of this post), and since I am currently reading Paul Molnar’s book Faith, Freedom and the Spirit: The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology, I thought I would quote someone that Molnar is engaging with in his book. Yes, Molnar does engage with McCormack, but more notably he is responding to (and quite militantly) Ben Myers’ critique of Molnar’s reading of Barth (from Molnar’s earlier book). Myers is in company with McCormack, and as such offers a very clear presentation of the points that distinguish McCormack, himself and others from folks like George Hunsinger, Paul Molnar, D. Stephen Long et al (the other side of the Barth coin who read Barth as if he is more of a “classical” or “metaphysical” theologian). So I thought it would be helpful to share how Myers frames this, and as a result we will have a better understanding about what drives the so called ‘Barth Wars’. Here’s Myers (cited by Molnar):

(1) “The second person of the Trinity is a human being—or rather, the divine-human history enacted in Jesus”; (2) The “logos asarkos … represents … ‘some image of God which we have made for ourselves’”; (3) “from all eternity, there is really no ‘second person of the Trinity’, but only the divine-human history of Jesus of Nazareth”; and finally, (4) “God’s deity is constituted—through God’s own eternal decision—by the way God relates to this particular human being.”[1]

This is the conclusion that Myers derives from the McCormack thesis that Barth in CD IV reverses Trinity and election in a doctrine of God; i.e. that God elects his own being (inner life) as Trinity, and that this election is ontologically defined by God’s choice to not be God without us (i.e. humanity), but with us. As such there is no other being of God other than what is revealed in the history and event of God’s life in Jesus Christ; and history itself (as a result of God’s election) becomes ontologically determinative for who God is in an exhaustive manner—the resurrection being a capstone of this determination. Paul Molnar further summarizes this as it relates to Myers’ position; Molnar’s summary comes just after he has described what he believes to be Barth’s view of divine freedom and how that relates to what he thinks Myers, McCormack, et al. are attempting to do in what he believes (along with Hunsinger) is a revisionist reading of Barth’s theology. Here is Molnar on Myers (and company):

The above-cited very traditional statements about the freedom of God’s love in himself and in the incarnation have been questioned recently. For example, relying on Rowan Williams and Bruce McCormack, Benjamin Myers claims that Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity offers not just one doctrine of the Trinity but two. And from this he concludes that “God’s being as God is constituted by God’s self-determined relation to the human Jesus” and ultimately that “Jesus is not merely epistemologically significant [which is Molnar’s position], as the one who makes God known; he is ontologically significant, as the one who (so to speak) makes God God.” All of this follows, he claims, from the fact that Barth’s doctrine of God was radically changed with his doctrine of election in II/2, and that the doctrine of the Trinity that he presented in I/1 was formally based on revelation while the new doctrine presented in IV/1 was based on Jesus Christ as, in his mind, making God to be God! Now, from within any reasonable reading of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, it should be quite obvious that these claims not only obviate God’s freedom for us, but they destroy God’s freedom as eternal Father, Son and Spirit precisely by making God’s essence dependent on the historical existence of the man Jesus.[2]

If it isn’t clear yet, Molnar believes ultimately that Myers, McCormack, et al. collapse God into his creation by making God’s inner-life (in se) contingent upon (in a constituent way) his outer life (ad extra) in the humanity of Christ; furthermore, Molnar believes that christologically this leads to Arian or Adoptionistic heresies.

Conclusion

This is the crux of what drives the Barth Wars; whether God elects for himself to be Triune in the incarnation, or whether because God is Triune and gracious in his antecedent and eternal life he elects, as coordinate with that kind of life, to not be God without us; with the understanding that God could have remained who he was as Triune without electing humanity for Godself in Christ.

Hopefully, if you have been wondering about the Barth Wars, that this makes things a little more clear (maybe I have muddied it further, I hope not). I mentioned in the beginning of this post how this was originally termed as the Companion Controversy, but I think it has legitimately expanded into what has now been called the Barth Wars; primarily because it isn’t just McCormack and Hunsinger anymore (which was where the original rift was here in North American English speaking Barth studies), but with lines drawn and castles being built, folks have started to take sides (and I do think this is primarily a North American English speaking battle – as I recall Barth scholar Darren Sumner noted somewhere that this battle is not present in German Barth studies [they simply take the McCormack view as the only possible read], but is just here in the States for the most part).

[1] Paul D. Molnar, Faith, Freedom and the Spirit: The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology (Downer Groves, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2015), 141-42.

[2] Ibid., 134-35 [brackets mine].