Category Archives: Bruce McCormack

The Seed of the Classical Theistic God Given Blossom in the god of Modern Atheism

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I have been an oft critic of the ‘classical theistic’ god. The classical theistic God is typically known by actus purus, ‘pure being.’ I have argued that this conception of Godness as Monad comes to us from the ancient Greek philosophers, and not from God’s Self-revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ. Some would say that my argument is modern, but that would simply be the chronological snobbery fallacy. Truth has no provenance; that is, truth is truth no matter where or whence it comes. Bruce McCormack describes this sort of critique this way (here his comments are in the context of his treatment on Eberhard Jüngel’s explication of Barth’s doctrine of God):

The term “essence” in its origins is a class term, descriptive of what is common to all members of a class. As such, it is an abstraction from all exemplars belonging to that class in their lived existence. Applied to God, the qualification was traditionally added: “but, of course, God belongs to no class. God is unique.” But the qualification came too late for it did not qualify the definition of divine essence that had been devised by means of negations alone without reference to God’s existence. Jüngel shows that the classical ambivalence in holding and, at the same time not holding the claim that essence and existence are one in God gave rise in the early modern period to Descartes’ insinuation of the cogito (the “thinking human subject”) between divine “essence” and divine “existence” — thereby creating “a contradiction which disintegrates the being of God: namely, into a highest essence over me and into its existence through and with me.” Ibid., p. 126. From there, it was but a short step for modern thinkers to remove the contradiction through surrender of this highest essence. In this way, the ambivalence of classical treatments of the relation of essence and existence in God made a substantial contribution to the rise of modern atheism.1

Usually, it is the evangelical opponents of modern theology in favor of their retrieval of classical theism who decries anything modern; like Jüngel’s critique of the classical theistic god. Yet, if Jüngel is right, and McCormack’s commentary on him is to the point, then it is these evangelical retrievers of classical theism who, if anyone, should be ‘demonized’; insofar that the God they are introducing the churches to reduces to the god of modern atheism. Just because the evangelical suitors of classical theism (indeed, they have created that designation) assert that modern theology is demonic, doesn’t make it so. The greatest irony here is that in fact it is the god of classical theism who reduces, quite easily, into the “thinking human subject”; or the god of the modern atheist.

In my experience, nobody really wants to bite the bullet on these things. Most evangelical theologians today (of the Reformed provenance) simply live in a posture of denial. They feel the pressure to think God from antique roots, because they seem to think God spoke more clearly then than now, but then when a modern theologian[s] shows that the way this God was synthesized with Hellenic conceptualities results in the No-God of modern atheism, they simply deflect and claim that it is the modern theologian who is the devil. Both can’t be right. I’ve never seen an evangelical counter the sort of critique made by people like Jüngel, McCormack et al. There are guys like Craig Carter, Matthew Barrett, Scott Swain and Michael Allen, who are continuously pushing the classical theistic god for the massa of evangelicals out there. But again, this simply glosses past critiques like those made by people like EJ.

1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 170-71 n.41.

*Repost from almost exactly two years ago. I think this is one of the better posts I’ve written with reference to drawing multiple connections together vis-a-vis a doctrine of God. This post implicates, classical theisms, of all types, along with modern atheisms and evangelical theologies of the 21st century.

What Does it Really Mean to be “Christocentric?”

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Dovetailing with the last post, I wanted to pick up further with Bruce McCormack as he offers what it means to be Christ concentrated or Christocentric in Barth’s hermeneutical and theological deployment. What will be noticed, as McCormack develops this, is that for Barth his arrival at a Christ concentrated focus took time of maturation; viz., it wasn’t an immediate thing in his theological formation. For me, this is why I have so resonated with Barth over the years: to have a Christ concentrated focus, in my eyes, is to have the focus of the Holy Spirit (see Jn 14—16). The Holy Spirit’s ministry is to magnify the work and words of Jesus in the lives of His bride. When the Christian is genuinely of the Spirit, they only see the world, and everything else, through the eyes of Jesus Christ; indeed, as this ultimately magnifies the Father. For me, this is what it means to be a genuinely Christian theologian, or Christian proper: i.e., to think everything from the foundation that always already has been laid for us in Jesus Christ (see I Cor 3.11). This is why when I have come up against other theological approaches, no matter what their periodized pedigree, I have always found most of them wanting. Sure, yes, Jesus’ name is always bandied about among any theologian worth their salt, who in fact professes to be a Christian. But typically, the way Jesus functions for these theologians is as an abstract principle, not as the person that He is for us in the God-world encounter. For many so-called Christian theologies out there, Jesus is appealed to more as an instrument of a theology founded somewhere else (by way of speculative means), rather than from a center in God’s life for us in Jesus Christ (and thus impersonally).

Barth, according to McCormack’s reading and referencing, offers the way I am persuaded towards; in regard, to theological methodology and Christian living. I don’t think these two things should ever be thought apart, only as apiece, mutually implicating and conditioning each other: i.e., our Christian lives, in the vicarious life of Christ for us, as the basis for the way that ‘our theology’ is carried out—whether that be considered as intellection, practically, affectively, or what have you (and these are never really that partitive, as daily life, and all of its components, are a complex). Here is McCormack on Barth’s Christocentrism:

In his 1939 contribution to the ‘How my Mind Has Changed’ series, Barth provided the answer to the first half of our question ‘in these years I had to learn that Christian doctrine, if it is to merit its name and if it is to build up the Christian Church in the world as she must needs be built up, has to be exclusively and conclusively the doctrine of Jesus Christ—of Jesus Christ as the living Word of God spoken to us men and women. . .. I should like to call it a Christological concentration . . .’. “Christocentrism”, in Barth’s case then, refers to the attempt (which characterized his mature theology) to understand every doctrine from a centre in God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; i.e. from a centre in God’s act of veiling and unveiling in Christ (which Barth understood in terms of a highly actualistic, a posteriori Chalcedonianism). “Christocentrism”, for him, was a methodological rule—not an a priori principle, but a rule which is learned through encounter with the God who reveals Himself in Christ—in accordance with which one presupposes a particular understanding of God’s Self-revelation in reflecting upon each and every other doctrinal topic, and seeks to interpret those topics in the light of what is already known of Jesus Christ. Clearly, this methodological commitment marks an advance over the dogmatic method outlined in each of Barth’s prolegomena (including CD I/1 and I/2). It does not in the least set aside that method; but at the point where Barth would seek to correct critically Christian proclamation in the light of a fresh hearing of the Word of God, the “christocentrism” so described provides a further concretization of what Barth thought that criticism would most likely entail. The practical consequences of the employment of this rule—to give just two examples—is that there could be no independent doctrine of creation and providence (i.e. a doctrine of creation which is fleshed out without reference to the covenantal purposes of God which ground God’s creative activity); and no independent anthropology (independent, that is, of reflection upon the true, restored humanity disclosed in Christ). The questions which such an advance raises for a genetic study of Barth’s development are: when did this modification first occur? And what brought it about?

The answer to be given here is that this final adjustment came about in the summer of 1936, under the impress of a lecture given by a Parisian pastor, Pierre Maury, on the subject of election. More than any other influence in Barth’s life, it was Maury who deserves credit for opening the way to that form of “christocentrism” which became synonymous with the name of Karl Barth.[1]

If we don’t stop, slow down, and reflect upon these matters this way, the quick response might be: “of course, the Christian way of doing theology is Christ concentrated.” But in reality, as the above ought to help clarify, there are different ways to be Christocentric (which I have also written about here). In my view, after Barth et al., what it means to be ‘Christ concentrated’ in method really means: to be in a life-giving interchange that is constant, afresh anew, as we encounter our Savior moment-by-moment through the Spirit’s mediation, bringing our mutterings into a doxological and intelligible conversation, dialogue with our triune God. So, in this sense, to do theology is really to simply live coram Deo (before God), being constantly given over to the death of Jesus that His life might be known through the mortal members of our bodies (see II Cor. 4.10). In this type of Christological theology, there is a martyrological underpinning, wherein indeed, the death of Jesus, also becomes our life in Him, as He resurrects and ascends us with Him to the Right Hand of the Father. It is in this cruciformed life that the Christian theologian can genuinely come to start bearing witness to the Lord of life, insofar that this Lord of life is indeed the life of the Lord for us in Jesus Christ. amen amen

 

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 454–55.

The Prayer-ful Hermeneutic Found in the ‘inner-text’ of Holy Scripture

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Depth Dimenson, that is the language TF Torrance uses when referring to an engagement with Holy Scripture’s deep context. He reifies the sacramental language of thinking Scripture as the signum (sign), and its res (reality) as Jesus Christ and the triune God that Christ mediates to the Church and world. The reification comes for Torrance as he thinks all things from the patristic homoousious and/or the double consubstantial (both fully God and human) person of Jesus Christ. It is from this analogy that Torrance thinks the relationship between Scripture’s broad canonical context, and the meaning that funds that context in Jesus Christ. So, for Torrance, the depth dimension of Scripture is none other than the Christ. It is within the context and space of God’s life for the world in Jesus Christ wherein Scripture, for Torrance, gains critical gravitas; meaning, that, for Torrance, Scripture’s inner-theo-logic must become the informing frame by which exegetical and interpretive conclusions are arrived at as the biblical exegete attempts to interpret Holy Scripture. If this isn’t the context, the fund for Scripture’s meaning, according to TFT, then all that one is left with is a literary piece of Ancient Near Eastern and Second Temple Judaic relevance. Scripture outwith the frame of its Christ conditioning, for Torrance, merely becomes an interesting piece of archaeological and artifactual history that the likes of an Indiana Jones might risk his life for, but not much more.

This type of theme, as being detailed above, is also present in Karl Barth’s approach to Holy Scripture (surprise!)—not to mention in much of the tradition of the Church. It is a confessional hermeneutic that starts with a confessional doctrine of Scripture wherein the belief is that Scripture is indeed God’s Holy Word. For Barth (and TFT et al.) of course, Scripture has a layered “ontology” as it finds its order first and foremost in God’s eternal Logos, Jesus Christ. Scripture is living and active precisely because of its deep reality in Jesus Christ and the triune God (which is just as true for all of creation, cf. Col. 1.15ff). Without belaboring these points further, let me refer us to Bruce McCormack’s rendering of how this all looks in the thought of Karl Barth.

Now because the ratio fidei (the Credo) is not identical with the ratio veritatis (the Word), conformity with the ratio veritatis will not be a simple matter of reading and understanding the outward text of the Creed. Revealed truth has an ‘inner text’ which must be grasped if the outward text is to be rightly understood. What is required is a special movement of thought which goes beyond mere reading. The outward text has to be read in relation to the inner text. But the inner text is not readily accessible. If the reader is to penetrate through the outer text to the inner text, she must be grasped through the reading of the outer text from the other side. It is not in mastering the object but in being mastered by it that the interpreter achieves a true comprehension of the ontic ratio of the object of faith, and the intellectus that is sought takes place. That means that the attainment of the ratio intellectus that is in conformity with the ratio vertatis hidden in the ratio fidei depends upon a divine decision, and therefore upon grace. That means further that the way to be taken in knowing God begins in prayer and faith.[1]

For those who know the Protestant Reformed history vis-à-vis the Scripture principle they will immediately recognize the type of riff that has been taken by Barth (as distilled by BLM) with reference to the thinking on the perspicuity of Holy Scripture (as that pertains to its inner and outer clarity). Neither Barth or Torrance is thinking too far away from the Protestant Reformation, in fact as Reformed theologians, they are constructively receiving it, and pollinating it with the categories and emphases of the conciliar past; that is, they are receiving the categories of the Protestant Reformation, and reifying them, as we already know, within a Christ concentrated frame. But no matter what they are doing, the point remains that for them, and for many others in the annals of church history, the biblical exegete has no point of reference to interpret Scripture from unless they are doing so from the fact that Scripture’s “depth dimension” is founded upon its ‘inner text’ who is Jesus Christ.

But the above stumbles some, especially the analytically typed. This is why I emboldened the last clause of the passage from McCormack. A depth dimensional reader of Scripture is doing so as a prayer, and from the tilt of the faith of Christ for us. That is, the depth interpreter is reading Scripture in dialogue with its reality as they are participants with Him in the triune life of the living God. This picks up on the Calvinian theme of faith as knowledge of God, and a knowledge of God in a Christ concentrated frame is a con-versant and growing knowledge as the disciple, the biblical interpreter is in constant discussion with the reality of Holy Scripture. It isn’t as if the genuinely Christian exegete is engaging with a relic to be bridged from now to back then. The genuinely Christian exegete knows the “bridge” of all of history, all of salvation reality, all of supranatural reality in the risen and ascended Christ. The Christian exegete speaks to the reality of Scripture, and allows that reality to confront and contradict them, as needed, as the Christian is being transformed from glory to glory. We have a speaking God who continues to speak to us in these last days by His Son. The depth dimensional interpreter takes full advantage of this access we have to the living God through the veil of the broken and glorified body of Jesus Christ. This is its concrete reality, not the secondary means of engagement that the exegete uses with reference to the literary, grammatical, historical components of Scripture. Those are components which have no orientation, and no meaningful place, without Scripture’s ontological reality as founded in Jesus Christ. Selah

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 430 [emboldening mine].

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

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As the epitomised expression of this truth, the homoousion is the ontological and epistemological linchpin of Christian theology. It gives expression to the truth with which everything hangs together, and without which everything ultimately falls apart. The decisive point for Christian theology, and not least for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, lies here, where we move from one level to another: from the basic evangelical and doxological level to the theological level, and from that level to the high theological level of the ontological relations in God.[1] In that movement a radical shift in the basic fabric of theological thought takes place along with a reconstruction in the foundations of our prior knowledge. This is evident not least in the fact that in formulating the homoousion of Christ in connection with both his creative and redemptive activity, Nicene theology laid the axe to the epistemological dualism latent in Greek philosophy and religion that threatened the very heart of the Gospel; and as such it gave powerful expression to the indissoluble connection in Act and Being between the economic Trinity and the ontological Trinity, between 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. 12 For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.[2]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Religion as the Tower of Babel

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“Human righteousness, in whatever form it is found, is a Tower of Babel.”

“Religion—and Barth is here speaking pre-eminently of Christianity—is at its heart, an exercise in self-delusion.”

-Bruce McCormack, on Barth’s theology[1]

 

This is hard teaching, who wants to hear it? The first clause (above) conditions the second in Barth’s theology. He is referring to the role that human subjectivity plays in the construction of religion. We create expressions, settings, bells and whistles, verbiage, pews, cathedrals, flying buttresses, smiles (even while in agony), so on and so forth. In the end, do any of these things bring us close, or closer to the living God? As Barth would rightly say: Nein. The only reality that brings us into union with the triune God is indeed the triune God for us in Jesus Christ. These other constructs, while part of sociological reality, in themselves have no bearing on whether or not we have become participants with Christ in the bosom of the Father. They reflect instantiations of various periods of culture and development in the history of the Church, but in themselves are not the Way, the Truth, and the Life. They might give us a sense of individual and even corporate transcendence, vis-à-vis God, but these are feelings, that apart from the concrete ground of God’s life for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ, are simply ethereals floating around in our navels, and potentially as high as the clouds above our collective heads.

 

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 133.

The ‘Internal History of Jesus’ and the Gospel According to Wilhelm Herrmann

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In the following Bruce McCormack sketches out, what Wilhelm Herrmann believed about the ‘historical Jesus as the ground of faith.’ Herrmann was Barth’s teacher while Barth studied at the University of Marburg. As you read this, from your own perspective as a Christian, do you find anything objectionable about the way Herrmann conceived of Jesus and salvation therefrom? If you know anything about the school that Herrmann represented in his day, then you will understand that there were some attending problems with his theology; as Barth later would come against himself. But as a stand-alone representation of Herrmann’s thought on this locus, let me know what you think:

(iv) The Historical Jesus as the Ground of Faith

How is the experience of revelation in which new life is bestowed upon a person related to the historical person called Jesus of Nazareth? For Herrmann, the historical Jesus is the revelation of God, the uncontestable saving fact in which our faith in God is grounded. But of course, When Herrmann spoke of the “historical” Jesus, he did not mean Jesus as he might be known with the tools of historical-critical research. Historians, in so far as they seek to reconstruct what really happened, work merely with external features; with events and teachings, with facts and forces. Historians deal only with external history. To that extent, the “object” of their scrutiny falls under the generative laws which govern all theoretical knowing (as described by Cohen). But for Herrmann, there is also an internal history—a history of spiritual effects to which the historian qua historian has no access. The locus of divine revelation in Jesus lies not so much in what he did and said as it does in his “inner life”, which is hidden to view. The incomparable moral purity of that inner life exercised a redemptive power on Christ’s first disciples by which their lives were transformed. The effectiveness of their witness in turn, lay not so much in what they said but in who they were; in the lives they led. And so it comes about that, two thousand years later, we first catch a glimpse of that inner life of Jesus through the effect it has had on other believers in the Church. The become to us a source of revelation, helping us to see that it is possible to live a truthful, authentic existence. Through their witness, we are enabled to come to the Gospel accounts with eyes that have been opened to the reality which lies hidden there. We see the picture of a man who lived in perfect surrender to God, who was able to love all people without exception, and who knew himself to be without sin. We are so startled by this incomparable phenomenon that we are only able to attribute it to the power of God. In that we do so, we too experience that power which Jesus experienced. We come to understand that His Father will not reject us in spite of our failures, but rather, accepts us as children. It for this reason that Jesus alone is the revelation which grounds our faith in God.[1]

There is mention of Cohen, by McCormack, in the above sketch. As is typical of any theological developments they are always in conversation with others. Herrmann’s theological viewpoints were no different than anyone else’s in that sense. Cohen represented a particular school within the philosophical-theological milieu of Herrmann’s day; which in the Protestant world was shaped primarily by Ritschl and Schleiermacher and Kant. Herrmann, according to McCormack, stood out from these schools in his own independent way; even while being in-formed by them, as he was responding to them and attempting to potentially correct them.

Even so, as the sketch goes above, what do you think; could you affirm what McCormack’s Herrmann thinks in regard to Jesus and salvation?

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 61-2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

McCormack continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Ibid., 16-18.

What is An/ -Enhypostasis? “It asserts then that true man is a predicate of God’s gracious action.”

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The Eunomians, following the Arians (and Arius) maintained that there was a time when the Son was not. In other words, they maintained that the Logos of God was a creature; an exalted creature, but a creature nonetheless. So, when we see Jesus, we don’t actually see the Father in the face of the Son, we only see an exalted emissary of the singular (monadic) God of pure being. In a similar line of heresy, known as adoptionism, the Ebionites maintained that Jesus was just a man, already existent, that God adopted for His purposes to be His prophet. TF Torrance provides definition: “Ebionism — the view that Jesus was not God but an ordinary man, adopted to become Son of God.”[1] Ultimately, adoptionism applies to most Christological heresies wherein, as the central feature, Jesus isn’t God, but simply adopted into God’s purposes as a Prophet (akin to an exalted version of an Old Testament prophet, or the final prophet in the line of the Prophetic school—ironically this is exactly the way Muslims see Jesus, as a mere man and prophet of God—also ironically Mohammed spent significant time with his uncle, an Ebionite “Christian”).

In contrast to this heresy of adoptionism, the orthodox Church fathers introduced an important dogmatic teaching with reference to the personhood of Jesus Christ. They argued, from the inner-logic of Scripture and its reality in the analogy of the incarnation, that Jesus had no personal independence from the second person of the Godhead in the eternal Son. So, they contended, the ground of the singular person of Jesus Christ, the personalizing, personating reality, was the person of the Son who has always already eternally been the Son of the Father, as the Father has been the Father of the Son in the eternal bond of koinonia and self-given love provided for by the unioning work of the Holy Spirit. Torrance explains the significance of this at length:

(i) The humanity of Jesus has no independent reality

The first thing we have to note here, is that, taken together with anhypostasia, for the two are not to be separated, the enhypostasia asserts that the incarnation is an act of pure grace alone, and repudiates any form of adoptionism, that is the adoption of a preexisting man to become Son of God. It asserts then that true man is a predicate of God’s gracious action. When the Word was made flesh, God and man were so related that Jesus came to exist as man only so far as he now exists as God. In other words, there is only one Christ, one mediator, one Lord, only one person in Jesus Christ the incarnate Son of God. This one person means that his human nature had no independent subsistence or hypostasis, no independent centre of personal being. If there had been a human person to whom a divine person was added, there would have been an independent centre of personal being in Jesus over against the person of the Son of God; but the human nature of Jesus never existed apart from the incarnation of God the Son. At the first moment of the existence of his human nature, it was in hypostatic union with his Godhead. That is, the human nature from the first moment of its existence had its hypostasis or personal subsistence in the personal subsistence of God the Son. That is the meaning of en-hypostasis.

(ii) The humanity of Jesus has full reality in the person of the Son

But when we have said that, we have to add that although there was no independent personal being called Jesus apart from the incarnation, that does not mean that in the incarnation there was no particular individual called Jesus existing as a particular human being, with a rational human mind and will and soul; and therefore it does not mean that he did not completely possess human nature. Jesus had a fully human mind and human soul and human will; he lived a fully human life in hypostatic union with his divine life, and in that union with his divine life, his human life had manifested the most singular and unique personality as man. That is the emphasis of enhypostasia. It preserves the acknowledgement of the full humanity of Jesus, and indeed of his historical person as a man among others, and as one of mankind, a true man. The anhypostasia stresses the general humanity of Jesus, the human nature assumed by the Son with its hypostasis in the Son, but enhypostasia stresses the particular humanity of the one man Jesus, whose person is not other than the person of the divine Son.

Therefore from the enhypostasis we have to go back again to the anhypostasis and say this: while the Son of God assumed our human nature, and became fully and really like us, nevertheless his full and complete human nature was united to God in a unique way (hypostatically in one person) as our human nature is not, and never will be. Therefore he is unlike us, not unlike us as to the humanity of his human nature, but in the unique union of his human nature to the divine nature in the one person of God the Son. (This is the baffling element in the virgin birth, which tells us that while it is our very human nature he assumed, he did not assume it in the way we share in it, because he took it in a unique relation with his deity). But it is upon the unique, hypostatic relation of his human nature to his divine nature, that the truth of our human nature depends, for it is as we share in his human nature, which is hypostatically united to God, that we are in union and communion with God.[2]

The next time you come across someone who denies the deity of Jesus just say: anhypostasia/ en-hypostasia! Then explain to them that Jesus has no independent existence as a human being apart from the personalizing personhood of the eternal Son of God. That Jesus’ singular person as both fully human and fully God is funded by, grounded in the eternal Logos’ person as the second person of the divine Monarxia (Godhead). Tell them further that to genuinely think biblically materially about these matters follows the lead of the patristics who posited this aesthetically pleasing doctrine of an/ -enhypostasis. That is to say, to attempt to think biblically about who Jesus was/is requires the conclusion that the Son enfleshed in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ; and that without this free and gracious action of the Son in concord with the indivisibility of the triune life, that there never would have been a man from the Galilee whose name was Jesus Christ. Tell them this is the unique sui generis reality of Jesus Christ: that is, that He is Theanthropos the Godman, or He isn’t at all. Tell them that the adoptionist notion, with reference to the man, Jesus, is driven by an over-reliance on a rationalistic philosophical maneuver wherein the miracle of the ineffable God become human is so domesticated, so gated-in by the dusty mind of little men and women, that it ends up being a fantasy of the human imagination; that it becomes a way to cope with the unfathomable, and make it fathomable—make it small enough to be generated by thinking from a sense of human pure nature (that is an independent human nature that is not contingent upon God’s Word, but theirs).

There are other significant implications of this doctrine, particularly when we get to a doctrine of pre-destination and election/reprobation. We won’t pursue those here. Further, and recently in his book The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon Bruce McCormack critiques the patristic, and Barth’s reception of the doctrine of an/ -enhypostasis as not adequate to the task of thinking the personhood of Jesus Christ. In its place McCormack constructively offers his alternative which he identifies as ontological receptivity. We will have to pursue that further at a later time as well (although I have broached BLM’s book here).

[1] T. F. Torrance, ed. Robert T. Walker, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008).

[2] Ibid., 229-30.

On Orthodoxy and Heresy and a Theology of the Word of God

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It is unnecessary to jettison all of creedal Christianity in favor of a supposed ‘naked Scripture’ (scriptura nuda). And yet there are many, whether that be on the popular or academic sweep, who maintain that this is in fact what being a Protestant Christian ultimately entails. I have someone in particular in mind with this post (who will remain unnamed), but it has general application too. To be a creedal Christian doesn’t necessarily entail that you ascribe absolute ecclesiastical authority to the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches; indeed, this runs exactly counter to what someone like Martin Luther would have maintained as the original, or at least the most infamous, Protestant reformer. Indeed, Luther, infamously, at the Diet of Worms exclaimed the following:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture or by clear reason, for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves, I am bound by the Scriptures that I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot to do otherwise. Here I stand, God help me.

Some might take this as the naked Scripture mode I referenced previously, but that would be mistaken. Luther is simply identifying an order, an “ontology of authority” as that relates to his submission to the living Lord. His conscience is ultimately bound to Holy Scripture, and its reality in Jesus Christ. If Church councils or Popes or Metropolitans contradict the clear teaching (think Luther’s analogia fidei in contrast to the Catholic’s appropriation of the antique regula fidei) of Scripture, then as Luther exclaimed at Worms, he will go with Scripture every single time. Here Crisp indexes what I take to be something that Luther himself would affirm, in regard to a theory of authority vis-à-vis God:

  1. Scripture is the norma normans, the principium theologiae. It is the final arbiter of matters theological for Christians as the particular place in which God reveals himself to his people. This is the first-order authority in all matters of Christian doctrine.
  2. Catholic creeds, as defined by and ecumenical council of the Church, constitute a first tier of norma normata, which have second-order authority in matters touching Christian doctrine. Such norms derive their authority from Scripture to which they bear witness.
  3. Confessional and conciliar statements of particular ecclesial bodies are a second tier of norma normata, which have third-order authority in matters touching Christian doctrine. They also derive their authority from Scripture to the extent that they faithfully reflect the teaching of Scripture.
  4. The particular doctrines espoused by theologians including those individuals accorded the title Doctor of the Church which are not reiterations of matters that are de fide, or entailed by something de fide, constitute theologoumena, or theological opinions, which are not binding upon the Church, but which may be offered up for legitimate discussion within the Church.[1]

This seems like a rather straightforward ordering, or hierarchy, as that relates to understanding how a Protestant would think about authority. Scripture is the ‘norming norm’ which all following developments become, at best, normed norms. That is, Church councils, so on and so forth have a relative, we might say, “eschatological” value to them in the sense that they should never be taken absolutely, but only as proximate thinking as that relates to a proper understanding of Scripture’s teaching vis-à-vis its reality in Jesus Christ. Bruce McCormack helpfully states it this way as he reflects on Barth’s understanding on the development of Christian theology:

I say all of this to indicate that even the ecumenical creeds are only provisional statements. They are only relatively binding as definitions of what constitutes “orthodoxy.” Ultimately, orthodox teaching is that which conforms perfectly to the Word of God as attested in Holy Scripture. But given that such perfection is not attainable in this world, it is understandable that Karl Barth should have regarded “Dogma” as an eschatological concept. The “dogmas” (i.e., the teachings formally adopted and promulgated by individual churches) are witnesses to the Dogma and stand in a relation of greater or lesser approximation to it. But they do not attain to it perfectly—hence, the inherent reformability of all “dogmas.” Orthodoxy is not therefore a static, fixed reality; it is a body of teachings which have arisen out of, and belong to, a history which is as yet incomplete and constantly in need of reevaluation.[2]

Some might read this and think this militates against valuing a creedal Christianity, but just the opposite is the case. If we take McCormack’s identification in Barth’s understanding of Dogmatic development as a jumping-off point, what is being affirmed is the value, the ‘relative’ value of the catholic creeds of the Church. It isn’t an abandonment of the pronouncements and the rich theological grammar developed therein, au contraire!: it recognizes that the church then when confronted with certain internal and external pressures responded in a way that set a trajectory for the Church to think God, to think Christ in ways that would be ultimately definitive as a baseline for thinking God and Christ in ways that Christians everywhere might build upon, receive and develop in orders that might go beyond, but never leave behind at their base level. McCormack continues in a different but related context:

. . . Every period in the history of theology has had its basic questions and concerns that shaped the formulation of doctrines in all areas of reflection. In the early church, it was Trinity and Christology that captured the attention of the greatest minds. In the transition to the early Middle Ages, Augustinian anthropology played a large role—which would eventually effect a shift in attention from theories of redemption to the need to understand how God is reconciled with sinful human beings. The high Middle Ages were the heyday of sacramental development, in which definitions of sacraments were worked out with great care, the number of sacraments established, and so on. The Reformation period found its center of gravity in the doctrine of justification. In the modern period, the question of questions became the nature of God and his relation to the world. Basic decisions were thus made in the areas of creation, the being of God and his relation to the world, and revelation, which were to become foundational for further development in other areas of doctrinal concern….[3]

I think the above considerations from McCormack are helpful in regard to situating the way we think about the role of a creedal Christianity insofar that they frame a genuinely Protestant way into thinking about Church authority. As McCormack and Crisp, respectively, identify, the sole authority, or the ultimate authority by which all other iterations of subsequent ecclesiastical reflection take form comes from Holy Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ (who indeed is the Church’s Head). It is helpful to think these things eschatologically, as both McCormack and Barth do, insofar that Scripture’s reality, just as creation’s in general, is found in and from Jesus Christ. But the way the Protestant, along with the Catholics and Orthodox, think who Jesus is, at a grammatical level, comes from what the early Church councils promulgated; viz. in regard to articulating the inner-theo-logic of thinking the natures of Jesus Christ as both fully God and fully human (the Theanthropos) etc.

Hopefully, at minimum what is gleaned from the above is that there is no reason whatsoever for the Protestant Christian, even if you consider yourself Post Protestant, to abandon a conciliar Christianity simply because you cannot imagine how that type of Christianity can be reconciled with being an adherent of a purported ‘naked Scripture.’ It was never the Protestant way to think away from its Catholic (and I even mean Roman in a sense) roots, it was simply an attempt to think from a deep theology of the Word of God as the authoritative basis for thinking God, and a God-world relation. Yes, there is space to develop further the grammar provided for by the creeds, indeed the conciliar grammar was merely negative language, something like minimal parameters set in order to protect the sheep of the Church from those wolves who would take Jesus and the triune God captive by overly relying upon pagan, and in that context, Hellenistic philosophies that were improperly evangelized that would not allow them to be put to use in retextualized ways, and thus within a kerygmatic frame. In other words, heresy has always been a thing, even now.

If you find yourself feeling genius, that what it means to be Protestant is to chart out in original and unconstrained (by any sense of reception from the past) ways is to develop your own original Christian Philosophy I’d ask you to reconsider. The history is littered with these attempts, and one thing is for sure: such contenders end up in the same cul-de-sac of isolation and disfellowship that such attempts of “originality” always lead to. What ends up almost always obtaining in these adventures of originality is the person inevitability ends up denying, or at least downgrading the divinity of Jesus Christ; which of course leads to a further denial of the Trinity itself. Being a genius or original thinker isn’t worth the pain and destruction of what being antiChrist ends up entailing. I would simply ask such contenders to repent, and be genuinely Protestant by affirming a robust theology of the Word with proper recognition of its explanation through the centuries under the concursus Dei of God’s providential working. Indeed, this shouldn’t stifle creativity and constructivity, in fact it ought to fuel it by providing fruitful and rich developments of Christological and Theologically Proper grammarization that the communio sanctorum (‘communion of saints’) have fellowshipped with, around, and from for millennia.

 

[1] Oliver Crisp, god incarnate, (New York: T&T Clark International, 2009), 17.

[2] Bruce L. McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 16.

[3] Bruce L. McCormack, “Introduction,” in Kelly M. Kapic and Bruce L. McCormack eds., Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2012), 11, 14 scribd edition.

The Monad’s Banqueting Table: On Classical Theism’s Affectionless God

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Classical theism is once again a hot-topic. If you scroll through theo-Twitter you will find an in-house debate on the entailments of a classical theism. But this isn’t just reducible to the debate between the Reformed Baptists, and the impact that Thomas Aquinas has had upon the development of their respective types of Reformed and/or Calvinist theology. This debate is ongoing amongst philosophical theologians like Ryan Mullins, Steven Nemes et al., and whatever their alternative offering might be—whether that be an ‘open theistic’ understanding, or something more phenomenal. And then of course we have the charge against folks like Barth, Torrance, and even me, that we are modern theistic personalists; that is, that we construe God in a way wherein he has passions, feelings, emotions, affections, so on and so forth. Theistic personalists, in certain ways, could be construed by way of appeal to a spectrum. The classical theists who pejoratively charge people like me with being theistic personalist, see us on the same spectrum alongside the open theists, and anyone else who isn’t stridently classical theistic in thickly Thomistic ways.

All of that is fine and dandy, but what in fact do these so-called classical theists see as their hallmarks in regard to thinking God? Let’s allow post-Barthian, Bruce McCormack to give us a nutshell summary of the entailments of a classical theism:

Classical theism presupposes a very robust Creator-creature distinction. God’s being is understood to be complete in itself with or without the world, which means that the being of God is “wholly other” than the being of the world. Moreover, God’s being is characterized by what we might think of as a “static” or unchanging perfection. All that God is, he is changelessly. Nothing that happens in the world can affect God on the level of his being. He is what he is regardless of what takes place—and necessarily so, since any change in a perfect being could be only in the direction of imperfection. Affectivity in God, if it is affirmed at all, is restricted to dispositional states which have no ontological significance.[1]

The above reflects Thomas’ [Aquinas] synthesis of Aristotelian categories with the sacra doctrina of the Holy Church. R. Michael Olson comments with reference to Aristotle’s thinking of God as the ‘Unmoved mover’:

Aristotle conceives of God as an unmoved mover, the primary cause responsible for the shapeliness of motion in the natural order, and as divine nous, the perfect actuality of thought thinking itself, which, as the epitome of substance, exercises its influence on natural beings as their final cause. These two aspects of God reflect the two defining aspects of Classical Greek Philosophy: the experience of the intelligibility of the natural order and the search for the first principle(s) responsible for its intelligibility, on the one hand, and the experience of nous both as the capacity to behold nature’s intelligibility and as the source of order in the human soul, soul itself being a source of shapely motion in the natural order. This article comments on each of these aspects of Aristotle’s conception of God, indicating that he finds evidence for his speculative-metaphysical conception in the experience of the rational soul.[2]

The point being that the Aristotelian God, or its Thomist iteration, even as that is received by the Post Reformed orthodox theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries, and as that has funded the thinking of the Westminster Reformed, and as that is now being recovered by various Reformed Baptists, particularly those committed to the London Baptist Confession of Faith (the Baptist version of Westminster), is a God who reposes in monadic pure being (actus purus) and actuality (i.e., ‘Actual Infinite’).

For an example of how this type of classical theism has been received and articulated by a Post Reformed orthodox theologian, here we have William Perkins speaking to God’s election vis-à-vis His “affections,” or, as the case is, lack thereof:

Object. Election is nothing else but dilection or love; but this we know, that God loves all his creatures. Therefore he elects all his creatures. Answer. I. I deny that to elect is to love, but to ordain and appoint to love. II. God does love all his creatures, yet not all equally, but every one in their place.[3]

Further:

I answer that affections of the creature are not properly incident unto God, because they make many changes, and God is without change. And therefore all affections, and the love that is in man and beast is ascribed to God by figure.[4]

No matter, whether you’re a Westminster Federal Calvinist, or a Reformed Baptist who affirms the London Baptist Confession of Faith, the above, as reflected in Perkins’ thinking is how you must speak God. God has no affections in the classical theistic schemata. This is what classical theists claim corresponds univocally with the God of the Bible, the God Self-revealed and exegeted in the Son of Man, Jesus Christ.

Some folks are okay, even jubilant, triumphant about proclaiming the Good News of the Monadic god of the scholastics and the philosophers. You will find them fretting about, moving to and fro with haste all over the interwebs; especially these days on Twitter. If you’re okay with worshipping the Unmoved mover, believing in the Actual Infinite of pure being, then you might want to look this type of classical theism up. They will freely receive you, with an abundance of affection, even if their god won’t. But the above is the naked reality. I don’t think many initiates have really gone down history enough to grasp what in fact they have signed up for. Some have, surely the theologians who are peddling this notion of God have; but I think many of them even have simply been led like innocent lambs to the Monad’s banqueting table, not ultimately realizing there are better ways to be theologians of the Word (or more simply, Protestant).

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, ed., Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2008), 186-87.

[2] R. M. Olson (2013), “Aristotle on God: Divine Nous as Unmoved Mover” in: Diller, J., Kasher, A. (eds) Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities (Springer, Dordrecht https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5219-1_9).

[3] William Perkins, Golden Chaine 1. 109, cited by R. N.  Frost, 62.

[4] William Perkins, God’s Free Grace 1.723, cited by Frost.