Category Archives: Bruce McCormack

Is Thomas Torrance Really a Thomist?

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Bruce McCormack argues, contra Hunsinger’s reading of Barth, that Hunsinger’s reading of Barth’s Trinitarian theology is in fact modulated through TF Torrance’s reading of Barth. McCormack further argues that TF Torrance’s approach is in fact Thomist, particularly when it comes to thinking a doctrine of God, and thus represents an inaccurate lens through which to read Barth, who of course is not Thomist.[1] In light of that it is interesting to read the way that Gilles Emery, OP describes Thomas Aquinas’ speculative approach to thinking God from the ad extra or economy of God’s life. But before we see what Emery has to say, let’s reread a summary offered by Ben Myers of TFT’s approach towards a knowledge of God; it is known as his ‘stratified knowledge of God’ theory (which TFT articulates most directly in his book The Christian Doctrine of God). Here is Myers:

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 intuitive 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.[2]

And here is how Emery distills Aquinas’ approach:

In sum, Thomas finds in the action of the Trinity, as brought into focus by Scripture and received by faith, the revelation of the divinity of the three persons, their personal existence, and their relations. This rapid survey shows us the path on which Thomas will leas us through Trinitarian theology. The spring of Trinitarian theology is the reception of the revelation of the Trinity in the economic actions of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian teaching in the Summa Theologiae will seek to present this same reality which the action of the persons discloses: their unity and their distinction. And, in studying the eternal mystery of the three persons who are one God, speculative theology will equally seek to show the depth of the creative and salvific action of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.[3]

If Emery is right about Aquinas the ground for knowing the triune God is the economic Self-revelation of God in the incarnation. Similarly, as noted by Myers with reference to TFT, the economic revelation of God is the evangelical ground for thinking God in a stratified way. Both Thomas A. and Thomas T. maintain the primacy of the antecedent or immanent Trinity, thus avoiding the collapse of the processions of God in the inner life (in se) into the missions of God in His outer life (ad extra) for us. The difference between the two comes from how a theological ontology is conceived. That is, what is the relationship between a theory of revelation (so theological ontology), and a theological epistemology, insofar as that relates to a natural theology? In other words, does TFT maintain that nature has an integrity of its own in the sense that all it requires to become total is a perfecting of nature by God’s grace? Or rather, does TFT maintain that outwith the condition of God’s re-creation for the creation that creation has no capacity of its own to see or know God in any way? Thomas Aquinas maintains, per his dictum, that ‘grace perfects nature.’ As such, at a theological-anthropological level, he holds that in the fall humanity didn’t lose the intellectual capacity to think and see God’s effects in the created order. For him, as a result, while creation outwith the incarnation’s reality is diminished because of the fall (noetically), it is not fully dead; it simply requires its missing link to ascend to full capacity (so ‘perfecting grace’). Torrance rejects this, along with Barth, and believes along with Athanasius, that humanity was plunged into a subhumanity as a result of the fall, and thus it requires God to become incarnate if humanity has any hope of living, in an elevated way, into the reality of what it genuinely means to be human coram Deo.

There are some similarities between Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Torrance, but in the end, they are ultimately equivocal in the sense that they operate from different theological ontologies, and thus theological epistemologies and anthropologies, respectively. For TFT the entrĂŠe to genuinely knowing God is principally conditioned by concentrating on Christ alone, as God’s center of Himself for us, to know and worship Him through. For Aquinas, Christ comes in as the bright knight on a shiny white horse salvaging ‘Eden lost,’ and restoring it to its once stellar place in the created order. While Aquinas has language like “re-creation” in his lexicon, it really cashes out to be more of a “re-storation,” and this is what differentiates Thomas from Thomas. Aquinas operates with a protological emphasis, whereas TFT works from an eschatological focus in regard to a knowledge of God (Aquinas has the original creation driving his ontology, whereas TFT has re-creation conditioning his). These have substantial points of departure, and thus McCormack’s claim that TFT is really a Thomist doesn’t follow. Just because TFT thinks from the notion that there is an anteriority of God, that is prior to His Self-revelation in the economy, does not necessitate or reduce TFT to being a Thomist, per se. It just means that TFT, if anything, isn’t all that Hegelian (and I don’t actually think Barth is either).  

 

[1] See Bruce McCormack, “Election and the Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger,” Scottish Journal of Theology 63 (2): 203-24 (2010).

[2] 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.

[3] Gilles Emery, OP, The Trinitiarian Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17 [emboldening mine].

1/ Reviewing Bruce McCormack’s: The Humility of the Eternal Son

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I am going to attempt to write a series of blog posts that will be sections of what potentially could be turned into a review essay on chapter 7 (the final chapter) of Bruce McCormack’s book The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon. Chapter 7 is where McCormack presents his constructive proposal on what he considers to be the needed ‘repair’ of Chalcedonian Christology. As the reader will see, he doesn’t abandon Chalcedon, he constructively engages with it offering an interesting proposal that I believe might be a way forward for thinking the Divinity and humanity of the eternal Son together in the singular person of Jesus Christ. I plan on sharing what I take to be key passages from McCormack’s chapter 7 and engaging with his thinking from there. The first passage presents McCormack’s general proposal, which he develops throughout the rest of the chapter.

Karl Barth was right, I think, to translate two “natures” into understandings of the “divine” and the “human” that arise out of close attention to “the history of God in his mode of existence as the Son.” Both “divine” and “human” being are “defined” by this history, for this history constitutes the “essence” of each. And so, in the place of two discrete (substantially conceived) “natures” subsisting in one and the same “persons,” I am going to posit the existence of a single composite hypostasis, constituted in time by means of what I will call the “ontological receptivity” of the eternal Son to the “act of being” proper to the human Jesus as human. “Ontological receptivity,” it seems to me, is the most apt phrase describing the precise nature of the relation of the “Son” to Jesus of Nazareth as witnessed to in the biblical texts we treated.

I am going to argue further that it is the Son’s “ontological receptivity” that makes an eternal act of “identification” on the part of the Logos with the human Jesus to be constitutive of his identity as the second “person” of the Trinity even before the actual uniting occurs. This is what I believe to have been missing in Jüngel and Jenson. The “Son” has as “Son” an eternal determination for incarnation and, therefore, for uniting through “receptivity.” He is, in himself, “receptive.” To say any more than this at this point is impossible in the absence of a more thorough reconstruction of Chalcedon, so I will stop for the moment. Suffice it to say that “ontological receptivity” on the part of the Logos does all the heavy lifting that the genus tapeinoticum would have done (had the Reformed accepted it). And it does this without requiring acceptance of the classical metaphysics that made both the genus majesticum and the genus tapeinoticum to be (logical) possibilities. In any event, the reconstruction that follows will in no way violate the fundamental commitments of classical Reformed Christology. It will, in fact, extend essential commitments while breaking with non-essential commitments.

What is essential to any genuinely Reformed Christology is (again) the emphasis placed upon the integrity of the divine and human elements in their uniting. And I will secure that emphasis. The unimpaired integrity of the divine will be secured by means of the stress laid on a determination for incarnation that is essential to the eternal Son. The unimpaired integrity of the human will be secured by the Son’s receptivity that prevents instrumentalization of the human. What emerges will be in the spirit of Chalcedon even if it is not according to the letter.

So much by way of introduction.1

I have been reading Bruce for a long time. When I read his ‘repair’ or proposal it doesn’t fall on fresh ground. In other words, I have heard this from him, and some of his students, for decades now (one in particular, Darren Sumner; see his work Karl Barth and the Incarnation: Christology and the Humility of God). These first inklings of what McCormack is only bringing together now (in this book, and we can assume the following two forthcoming in this trilogy) I was first introduced to in McCormack’s essay/chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, “Grace and Being: the role of God’s gracious election in Karl Barth’s theological ontology.” This chapter from McCormack represented, at that point, a type of watershed moment, which ended up being known quaintly as the “Companion controversy,” and/or the “Barth Wars.” Without getting into that, the controversial nature of what McCormack was proposing then in certain ways seems to be the seedlings of what is now blossoming in his ‘repair of Chalcedon.’

The critique has always been (by George Hunsinger, Paul Molnar et al.) that McCormack’s reading, and “revisionist” appropriation of Barth’s themes works against the grain of Barth’s textual theological offering. Be that as it may, that hatchet, for McCormack has been buried; he has moved on, and is developing here, not an intentionally “Barthian” account of things, instead, his is simply an offering of constructive Christological imagination. If the reader is familiar with modern theology, what the reader senses, if they do, and they’d be right, is a type of so-called postmetaphysical or post-Barthian analysis by McCormack. The reader might pick this up merely by reading the passage I offered from McCormack above. But if the reader had indeed read McCormack previous to this final chapter, they would have understood that McCormack is distancing himself from unqualified post-Barthian readings of the Christological history of ideas. He proffers what he along with his colleague Alexandra Pârvan identify as a ‘psychological ontology,’ which fits well with what he describes for us above as ‘ontological receptivity,’ to which we now turn.

When McCormack writes the following, “I am going to argue further that it is the Son’s ‘ontological receptivity’ that makes an eternal act of ‘identification’ on the part of the Logos with the human Jesus to be constitutive of his identity as the second ‘person’ of the Trinity even before the actual uniting occurs …,” one gets the type of ‘narratival’ feeling you might get when reading Robert Jenson’s own “Barth” inspired oeuvre. I would suggest that it is this thesis offered by McCormack that serves most controversial for his proposal, and yet I find it rather compelling in certain ways (which I will have to address in a later post). It is this theory, in regard to ontological receptivity, that has been inchoately present in McCormack’s thinking (at least in published form) since at least his ‘Companion’ piece. The controversial aspect of this comes back to the fear that McCormack is engaging, at the christological level, in some form of adoptionism or Ebionism. But McCormack attempts to elide this charge by emphasizing, as we see in the second paragraph above, the notion that the eternal Son has always already been Deus incarnandus (God to become flesh); which fits with McCormack’s understanding of Barth’s doctrine of election, to a point (McCormack does not think Barth’s doctrine of election goes far enough to allow McCormack to speak in the ways he now is with reference to “ontological receptivity,” which you can read about here).

For McCormack, thus far, he believes that Godself’s choice or election to be enfleshed in Christ, makes His reception in the man from Nazareth the most fitting and organic outcome that Godself eternally pre-destined for Himself as the fundamentum or foundation of the Divine identity. One could argue that this escapes adoptionism insofar that in this choice to be incarnate, God has always already been the eternal identity, or the inner-reality for which creation itself had been fitted in its own independently contingent and ordered way. As such, the Christological heresy of adoptionism has no air to breathe insofar that the type of abstract creation required for such a notion to exist never obtains; that is, the condition for an abstract notion of humanity apart from its predetermination to be what it is vis-á-vis God is a counterfactual with no factual basis in the economy of God as revealed in His history for the world in Jesus Christ. This might seem to lend itself towards a failure to secure a proper Creator/creature distinction in a God-world relation, thus resulting in some type of panentheism through a christological malaise. But McCormack will attempt to rebuff this error by appeal to a robust reposition on a Pneumatological-Christology forthcoming. If the Divine identity is contingent on God’s life for the world in Christ, the Spirit will need to do the type of “heavy-lifting” that McCormack is wont to stress as “ontological receptivity.”

Even as I write this, I am still processing whether I can co-sign with Bruce, and say amen. His reception and constructive engagement with Barth’s doctrine of election has always been intriguing to me. His Christological proposal in this book is no less intriguing; indeed, it seems to take his form of thinking, in regard to his constructive imagination with Barth, to another level. To be sure, his proposal here is not intended to be a “Barthian” proposal, per se; McCormack makes this clear throughout the book. His primary modern interlocutors are Karl Barth, Robert Jenson, Eberhard Jüngel, Sergius Bulgakov, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is not slavishly committed to any of his ‘teachers,’ but the reader can see bright pieces throughout, informing his ‘repair’ work as he attempts to harvest the best from them and imaginatively bring them into a concerto of his own rhythmic orchestration.

 

1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 252-53.

 

God is Love. God-in-the-Other in the Far Country According to a Constructive JĂźngel

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God is love. This is a seemingly simple, but a most profound statement made of God; and it comes to us in a small letter, written to a small people in the whole realm of the Roman Empire. The implications that arise from this reality are rife with a depth dimension that far surpasses the mind’s eye on its own; it requires the sight of faith, the faith of Christ in order to begin to envisage the ineffable scope of it all. God is love. He is this precisely because He is a tri-unity of hypostases in such a way that the interpenetrative relationship inherent to the ‘persons’ shapes the unicity or ‘oneness’ of the ousia of this God. God’s being as One is a being shaped by multiplicity rather than absolute simplicity, as the philosophers would have it. And so, the Christian theologian thinks this God as He has Self-revealed/exegeted Himself for the world in Jesus Christ. It is from this Self-exegesis that the Christian has come to know God as love; as Father of the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. From here, the Christian seeking for intelligibility comes to the development of a particular grammar in order to attempt to understand how it is that God is one and three / three and one in correlation with the notion that this relationship in oneness constitutes what in fact love is. That is to say, in order to think ‘God is love’ entails an elucidation of how God’s inner Self-differentation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constitutes love as the very esse of who God is.

In one modern effort to bring elucidation to the notion that God is love, Eberhard Jüngel presents a rather phenomenological distillation, such that ‘God is love’ might entail an emphasis on how receptivity for the other-in-the-One might be the ground and grammar for giving the intelligibility that the Christian might desire in their pursuit towards knowing God. In the following Bruce McCormack offers a sketch of Jüngel’s treatment, and then provides some constructive critique of his own:

We return to the identity statement “God is love.” This is a true statement because it is in and through God’s act of identification with Jesus that “the being of God realizes itself as love.” It is to be noted just how are removed Jüngel’s conception of divine being is from the idea of “being itself.” It is a relational concept, clearly. More importantly, it refers to a relation that is realized in history, in the event of the cross and resurrection. For this reason, both Jüngel’s Christology and his doctrine of the Trinity find their ontological root in that event. The question of where the being of God is to be found must precede (logically) the question of what the being of God is.

According to Jüngel, God can be love only where God is both “the lover and the beloved at the same time.” To say this much is to suggest that the act of “identification” on the part of God is an act that differentiates God. “God is thus one who loves himself. But this love cannot be misunderstood as the self-love of an I. God differentiates himself in that he loves himself. . . . In John’s language, he is God the Father and God the Son.” 

We have reached the point where the “preunderstanding” of love achieved by Jüngel’s phenomenology begins to fall short as a description of divine love. The uniqueness of the love that God is begins to emerge. The love of the Father for the Son is a sending of the latter into this world “to a certain death.” Why? Because the still greater selflessness of the love that is God cannot be contained. It overflows, so that the Father’s love for the Son is intrinsically, by its very nature, a love for others. Indeed, it is God’s love for these others that motivates the self-differentiating love of God. “God would then be love in that he does not desire to love himself without loving his creature, that absolutely other who is his counterpart. That is the eternal and divine motivation of God’s self-differentiation, apart from which his identity with the man Jesus would not be conceivable.” In any event, the uniqueness of the love God is lies in the fact that it leads to a “separation” of Father and Son in an event in which the Son remains “closer” to the Father “than he is to himself.” “God has himself only in that he gives himself away. But, in giving himself away, he has himself. That is how he is.” So understood, the love that God is, is a love that is self-communicating and self-emptying — even to the point of suffering a death that separates Father and Son.1

The final clause offered by McCormack in regard to the ostensible separation between the Father and the Son that inheres on the cross (at the point of death) takes us further than concerns us in this moment (suffice it to say, BLM gets into that in the following paragraph and beyond). For our purposes what is of interest is the emphasis Jüngel, according to McCormack, places on the inherent Self-differentation between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; one that obtains more classically we might say with reference to the processions or ‘origins of relation’ within the inner-life of God. That is to say, what we see in Jüngel is a classic orientation, but one that focuses on the correlation between the ad extra or outer economic revelation of God as reflective of the antecedent character of God that has always already been the reality.

At the end of the matter, what Jüngel rightly emphasizes, per my lights, is that our knowledge of God as love is, is indeed the ground of our knowledge of God in toto. In other words, according to Jüngel, we only know God as God is freely for us. God is only freely for us as He is for us in the Son in Jesus Christ. It is here where we exclusively have access to know who God is, just as sure as we understand where He comes from in the inner-life of God; and we only know God in this way such that He has come to us, in the ‘far country,’ as the other for us in God’s life. Jüngel, according to McCormack, understands this encounter with God as the only basis by which the Christian might know God. And what this encounter necessarily imposes on the knower that God is love, is precisely because He shows up to us in accord with who He is in His inner-life as the God defined, in his singularity, as the God-in-the-other as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 173-74. 

 

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.

The Great Peace of the Barth Wars: McCormack’s Recanto to Hunsinger and Molnar

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Maybe you’ve heard of the ‘Companion Controversy,’ which later came to be called The Barth Wars, by some. I have been published, a wee bit, on this here; as far as some commentary. In nuce, it entails an embroilment within Anglophone Barth studies; that is, between, in particular, Bruce McCormack and George Hunsinger/Paul Molnar respectively. It has to do with the way McCormack reads Barth’s doctrine of election as a sort of organizing dogma for his doctrine of God; in a highly actualistic sense. Hunsinger/Molnar demur and claim that the ‘textual’ (Hunsinger’s word) Barth, and his doctrine of God, has an antecedent reality (which is the classical position), and as such the economic God cannot be fully read back into the immanent (in se) God, as McCormack proposes. That’s a very rough sketch of the matter.

In general, Hunsinger’s critique, in particular, has been that McCormack offers a revisionist Barth; and thus, doesn’t actually offer Barth’s theology at all—at least when it comes to a doctrine of God proper. McCormack has maintained that he has been offering something of the logic of Barth’s doctrine of election vis-à-vis God proper, even if Barth didn’t follow through with the logic itself. Even so, at the end of the day, McCormack has claimed to be reading the grain of Barth’s theology faithfully; more so than his ‘opponents,’ Hunsinger/Molnar. And now, in his most recent work,1 McCormack seems to finally admit that he is doing something different than Barth when it comes to Barth’s textual doctrine of election (although read me below, as I’ve been thinking this through, even as I write this, I’m developing). In other words, as I’ve been reading McCormack’s new book (which is excellent thus far), a rather striking thing gets communicated. He acknowledges that he disagrees with Barth, or that Barth’s doctrine of election represents “the limit of how far I [McCormack] can follow him.”2

Here is the full passage from McCormack:

Looking back at Barth’s early appropriation of Calvin’s exegesis of Phil. 2 in support of a Reformed Christology, which laid its emphasis upon the preservation of the “natures” of Christ in their original integrity subsequent to their union, Barth’s understanding of the divine kenosis in his later Christology clearly points in the direction of providing an explanation for the susceptibility of the eternal Son to the human experiences of suffering and death. His way of upholding divine immutability was to anchor the existence of the Logos “in the form of a servant” in the divine election — understood as a “primal decision” (Urentscheidung). Barth’s later Christology thus became the epistemological ground of our knowledge of election. Election then was posited as the ontological ground of Barth’s later Christology. Clearly, he wanted to understand the human experiences of suffering and death as essential to God in his second mode of being. Whether his doctrine of election was fully adequate to this task is debatable — which marks the limit of how far I can follow him.3

So, what is rather interesting about this development is that McCormack seems to be affirming his reading of Barth’s doctrine of election, the one that Hunsinger says is a revisionist reading, but then coming to the conclusion that he cannot follow Barth down this path; i.e. of reading human suffering and death into the second mode of being of the triune God into the essential or ‘eternal’ or in se being of God. As I reflect on this, even in this moment, it almost seems as if McCormack says he cannot follow Barth here; and yet on the other hand Hunsinger/Molnar are saying you don’t have to, because you never were to begin with. In other words, it’s almost as if McCormack is de facto agreeing with Hunsinger/Molnar, in the sense that if one were to follow through on McCormack’s “revisionist” Barth, that that theologian would be the pantheist, or panentheist that Hunsinger/Molnar have said “McCormack’s Barth” indeed reduces to. So instead of admitting that he has been misreading Barth’s doctrine of election, which would be a sort of recanto to Hunsinger/Molnar, he continues to maintain that he has indeed read Barth’s doctrine of election correctly, but that he cannot follow Barth in that direction. He seems to be making a “classical turn,” potentially, albeit one that seeks to repair Chalcedon’s Cyrillian misstep with the resources that he seems to have found in a burgeoning ‘Spirit Christology’ (I’m still reading, so we’ll see).

 

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

2 Ibid., 121. 

3 Ibid., 120-21. 

Christological Objectivism::Not Dogmatic Christian Universalism

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The Incarnation implies the actualist salvation of all of humanity; or at least so goes the logic of Karl Barth’s ‘Christological objectivism.’ I believe that this is indeed the logic of the Incarnation; viz. that all of humanity has been objectively (extra nos) justified (‘saved’) before God. This is the case precisely because humanity, at a primordial level, I would contend, is Christ’s vicarious humanity; His humanity is humanity. As such, what it means to be human before God, as all humans now are, is what it means for Christ, our high priest, to stand before God for us, as the imago Dei. Some believe that the logic I am forwarding, qua Barth, necessarily leads to a dogmatic Christian universalism, wherein all will finally be saved. I will respond to this latterly, but first let’s hear from Bruce McCormack as he describes Barth’s Christological objectivism vis-à-vis a soteriological frame:

I have already hinted at a major conclusion of my own research on Barth that will have bearing on what is said in the remainder of this section of the current chapter. A final significant development (one of may even speak of an ever-so slight “turn”) took place within the bounds of the Church Dogmatics that would force a recapitulation of all that went before and even a few retractions. The final modulation took place in the revision of election and its most significant result was what I would like to call Barth’s “Christological objectivism” — that is, the understanding that God’s work of reconciliation and redemption is fully accomplished and already effective “for” all human beings even before an awakening to faith makes it effective “in” any particular one of them. What is accomplished by God in Jesus Christ is the reality of reconciliation and redemption, not merely its possibility — a possibility to be made actual later by the work of the Spirit. No, the work of the Spirit in awakening an individual to faith and obedience does not make Christ’s work effective; it simply brings Christ’s work in its efficacy to conscious awareness so that the individual is redirected, reoriented to a future of which they had been unaware. Ex opere operato is a phrase well-suited to describe Barth’s mature understanding of Christ’s work.1

This sits well with what I have highlighted in my sidebar from TF Torrance; he writes:

God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.2

First, we have an explication of how Barth came to understand the objective nature of salvation in Jesus Christ, as described by Bruce McCormack. Second, we have an iteration of this type of Christological objectivism as that found its way into the inklings of Barth’s greatest English speaking student, TF Torrance. I wanted to share TFT’s rendition of this doctrine because I think it is important to see how such deep theology has real-life practical implications towards thinking and proclaiming the Gospel.

But certain theologians might spy a Christian universalism in all of this. Indeed, there is a biblical universalism at play here, but it isn’t of the sort of mercantile or causal type that causes these theologians to panic. That is to say: the only way something like Barth’s (and TFT’s following) Christological objectivism leads to a dogmatic Christian universalism is if the theologian applies something like an Aristotelian causal theory to the kerygmatic logic being deployed in the thinking of Barth/TFT. But if the theologian were to simply think from the logic determined by the sui generis Gospel itself, the theologian does not conclude at a dogmatic Christian universalism; such as the aforementioned theologians fear. That is how this works in the theologies of Barth and Torrance; they are not metaphysicians, they are Christian theologians. As such, they think from the theo-logic inherent to the Gospel. As Torrance might qualify: the Christian needs to operate from the kata physin (according to the nature of) of the Gospel itself. As if the Gospel creates and recreates reality, and out of this reality the theologian comes to have the fertile soil needed to think from the foundations which no one else has laid but God Himself. That is, the theologian needs to allow the pure Gospel, rather than some discursive notion of a pure nature to supply the categories by which the theologian thinks God, in a God-world relation.

So let it be written so let it be done.

 

1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 104-05. 

2 T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 94. 

God’s Eternity and Infinity Thought in Terms of God’s Time in Jesus Christ

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I am reading Bruce L. McCormack’s (BLM) new book The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon currently. This is the first volume of three forthcoming. BLM has been one of my teachers along the way, in regard to Barth studies in particular, and the constructive theological effort that necessarily follows; BLM, is a premiere voice in constructive theological work After Barth. That said, BLM is not simply a Barth commentator, as this volume portends, he is a constructive theologian in his own right. Indeed, he sort of models the sort of theologian I aspire to be.1 The following will be an excerpt from BLM’s introduction wherein he gives a brief sketch on what it means to think theological proper loci like eternality and infinity from within a center of God’s life for the world in Christ, rather than from the abstract peripheral of the philosopher-theologian-kings. What BLM here treats reflects the sort of narratival biblicist theology that I believe represents a genuine Protestant theology; a theology intensively grounded in the Protestant Scripture Principle, which finds its lifeblood in and from a radically conceived theology of the Logos. McCormack writes:

What that means, among other things, is that terms like “infinity” and “eternity” do not define the being of God; it is rather the being of God in God’s relation to the world in Christ that defines them. To think about the being of God out of a center in God’s lived relation to the world in Christ is to forsake each and every abstractive tendency to treat, for example, the relation of eternity and time as strictly oppositional rather than committing oneself to thinking about God’s eternity as God’s irreducible otherness in God’s relation to time. It is to think of time not as alien to the innermost being of God but as taken up in Jesus Christ into God’s inexhaustible life without detriment to God so that time itself is transformed into the new time of a coming world in which death is no more and the experience of time—and, indeed, of “change”—is no longer controlled by the inevitability of dying. It is to think of eternity not as the negation of time but as both its ground and goal, as its origin and as its redemptive completion.2

BLM, if you know Barth’s Church Dogmatics, is clearly riffing on Barth’s doctrine on ‘new time,’ but in a way that will go beyond Barth (potentially against Barth in certain ways). What BLM writes above is the sort of theological endeavor that I believe leaves so much of the so-called ‘classical’ theology behind (insofar as that is reified by mediaeval categories of synthesis). That is not to say that what BLM is doing here leaves ‘orthodox’ or ‘conciliar’ theology behind, but it is to say that he is having a different [constructive] theological discussion that itself is regulated, even conditioned by a concentrated focus on the Christological categories that ground, what is in my view, a properly conceived theological proper. That is to say, what BLM is presenting, while acknowledging the hard work of the classical theologians, even building on it in particular ways, ends up eliding the ongoing debates in regard to retrieving and receiving say Protestant and/or Catholic scholastic theologies. As the above excerpt reveals, for BLM (and I’d say for me following), to think about God’s eternity or infinity apart from God’s Self-revelation and ‘lived’ life for the world in Jesus Christ is an inconceivable game of theatrics.

Per the material implications of the above quote: when eternity and infinity are thought from ‘a center in God’s lived relation,’ what ends up happening is that the theologian no longer has space to speculate about a ‘God behind the back of Jesus’; that is to say: there is a concreto ground for thinking about God that ironically transcends the philosophers’ efforts to do so abstractly. And as BLM underscores, this ground in God’s life for us, is an eschatological ground that gives time and space its telos from its ultimate reality as that is funded by God’s superabundant life of triune Love.

On the personal side: what this has done for me, that is when I think about God as He has freely chosen for me to do so, from the face of His Son made flesh, is that I no longer get lost in the twists and tangles of speculating about a notion of Godness that I may have artificially conceived of as I peer up at the seemingly limitless heavens. I have a face (prosopon) to look at when I think God; a face that looks like mine, but is distinct from mine, even as the Creator is distinct from the creature. I can look at the veil of God’s hiddenness, in the flesh of the Son’s humanity, and by a Spirit-formed faith, can see the depth reality of the flesh of Christ as that is provided for by His life as the eternal Logos (an/ -enhypostasis). Indeed, I was just recently able to comfort my 21-year-old daughter with this type of thinking as she is struggling with issues surrounding reality and God. God wants us to know Him, He wants us to experience His time, which is grounded in the new time actualized in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

 

1 That said, he and I are poles apart when it comes to socio-cultural-politico matters.  

2 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 22-3. 

Barth Wars

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Just started reading yet another book, Mark Lindsay’s God Has Chosen: The Doctrine of Election Through Christian History. Just finished the first chapter, and in one of the footnotes, Lindsay offers a very nice and precise description of the entailments that makeup the so-called ‘Barth Wars’ (or as they were known in the Princeton circles, early on, ‘the Companion Controversy,’ with reference to Bruce McCormack’s controversial article on ‘being’ in Barth’s theology). I have written on this issue here and elsewhere over the years. But I thought I would share Lindsay’s sketch on this, and then let you know where I line up on this continuum. Lindsay writes:

Much of the recent “Barth Wars” that have bombarded the “playground of (modern) theologians” have been shaped by an assumption, at least on one side of the debate, that there is a necessary distinction between freedom and will, such that God’s will to be graciously for us can be and is qualified by his freedom not to be for us. So, Paul Molnar insists that God’s being is eternally triune antecedentally to his decision to be and act for us in the person of Jesus Christ, whereas Bruce McCormack argues that such a view (a) “temporalizes” the process of divine decision-making into an illegitimate (and indeed nonsensical) “before-and after” and (b) thus inserts a change in God in which God becomes for us in a way that he had not been previously. On the contrary, argues McCormack, “There [must] be no metaphysical gap between God’s being and his acting. . . . [Therefore] in that God chooses to be for us in Christ, he is giving himself the being he will have for all eternity. . . . [In other words] God’s freedom is the freedom of love that God is to set itself in concrete relationship to that which is other than itself.” See B. L. McCormack, “Trinity and Election: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger,” in Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology, ed. M. T. Dempsey (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 135; and P. Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 131-205.[1]

I contend that McCormack’s approach to this locus reflects a thoroughgoing, what we might call: Barthiano-scholasticism. In other words, there is such a strong desire to slavishly follow what might appear to be an implication of Barth’s theo-logic, vis-à-vis erasing any notion of metaphysics, that McCormack makes Barth the post-metaphysical theologian par excellence. I prefer to think, along with Molnar and Hunsinger, and Thomas F. Torrance before them, from the MYSTERIUM Trinitatis. If we allow for the idea that there indeed was a before in God, as Torrance and the Tradition itself affirms, this does not mean that we must conclude with a ‘God behind the back of Jesus’; indeed, TFT repudiates such a notion. If a person reads the ‘textual Barth’ (Hunsinger’s language) for themselves, they won’t find the absolutely actualistic God that McCormack et al. present us with vis-à-vis his reading of Barth’s theo-logic.

Let me end this with a quote from Thomas Torrance in regard how there is a ‘before’ for God in Christ in the eternal decree of election:

Eternal election becomes temporal event confronting people in Jesus

Once again, we cannot now pursue this further into the doctrine of the church, which is the doctrine of the corporate election moving into history as the body of Christ. But at this point we must look back again at the incarnate life of Jesus Christ in light of the threefold mysterion, prosthesis and koinonia. The eternal prothesis of God has become incarnate in Jesus Christ, has become history. In Jesus Christ, the prothesis became encounter, became decision in the living temporal relations with which we men and women have to do in our interactions with one another. Election is the person of Christ, true God and true man in one person, the union of the Father and the Son in eternal love incarnated in our flesh, and bodied forth among sinners. And so men and women in history, in their temporal actions and relations, in the midst of their temporal choices and decisions, are confronted by the Word made flesh, with the eternal decision of God’s eternal love. In Jesus Christ, therefore, eternal election has become temporal event.[2]

There are more explicit statements from TFT on God ‘becoming Creator’ as something ‘new’ for Him (out of His freedom), but this one represents a nice illustration of how that doctrine gets applied and economized in the incarnation of God. McCormack collapses this antecedence of God into the creaturely event of incarnation itself, but of course he attempts to salvage this collapse by dialectically referring to Divine freedom. Insofar as a person reads Barth directly, I contend that they will never find McCormack’s Barth; a radicalized Barth taken further than Barth ever went himself (but these are matters of hermeneutics, aren’t they?).

[1] Mark R. Lindsay, God Has Chosen: The Doctrine Of Election Through Christian History (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020), 35 n.68.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 179-80. See this post from whence this quote was originally embedded, here.

God’s being-in-election: How Divine Freedom Keeps Barth’s God From Modally Collapsing

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Does Barth’s conception of God fall prey to what theologians (and philosophers) call modal collapse, as some claim? Bruce McCormack, of Princeton Theological Seminary, in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, entitled Grace and being: the role of God’s gracious election in Karl Barth’s theological ontology, he opened up a reading of Barth that people like George Hunsinger and Paul Molnar claim produces a modal collapse in God’s being. In other words, crudely, McCormack’s reading of Barth ostensibly makes God’s choice to be for us in Christ (election) contingent upon the pro nobis (for us); the contention is that for God to be God, in the way Hunsinger et al critique McCormack, is that God has chosen to not be God without the resurrected humanity that obtains as the result of the Son’s election to be human. Molnar claims (and argues) that McCormack’s understanding of Barth makes Barth’s God a God who no longer can distinguish between His inner-processions (immanent), and His outer-missions (economy); thus, for Molnar, McCormack’s (and Ben Myer’s following BLM) constructive reading of Barth ends up giving us a God who does indeed modally collapse (i.e. a God who necessarily makes His being contingent upon and predicated by the creation).

But I’m not necessarily persuaded that McCormack’s Barth must fall into a modal collapse. I realize that Hunsinger and Molnar will both be aware of the passage I am going to share from Barth directly (at the very least, they’ve read it). But as I read the following, it is something like this that McCormack could appeal to, and He does in His own way. It is the way Barth himself, as Hunsinger might call it, the ‘textual Barth,’ who explains how God’s election to be human in the Son could be so intrinsic to God’s being as God, and yet not become captive to the charge of ‘modal collapse.’ Here is the man, Barth:

Our emphasis in defining the concept must not in any circumstances fall upon this negative aspect. To be sure, this negative side is extremely significant not only for God’s relation to the world, but also for His being in itself. We cannot possibly grasp and expound the idea of divine creation and providence, nor even the ideas of divine omnipotence, omnipresence and eternity, without constantly referring to this negative aspect of His freedom. But we shall be able to do so properly only when we do so against the background of our realisation that God’s freedom constitutes the essential positive quality, not only of His action towards what is outside of Himself, but also of His own inner being. The biblical witness to God sees His transcendence of all that is distinct from Himself, not only in the distinction as such, which is supremely and decisively characterised as His freedom from all conditioning by that which is distinct from Himself, but furthermore and supremely in the fact that without sacrificing His distinction and freedom, but in the exercise of them, He enters into and faithfully maintains communion with this reality other than Himself in His activity as Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer. According to the biblical testimony, God has the prerogative to be free without being limited by His freedom from external conditioning, free also with regard to His freedom, free not to surrender Himself to it, but to use it to give Himself to this communion and to practise this faithfulness in it, in this way being really free, free in Himself. God must not only be unconditioned but, in the absoluteness in which He sets up this fellowship, He can and will also be conditioned. He who can and does do this is the God of Holy Scripture, the triune God known to us in His revelation. This ability, proved and manifested to us in His action, constitutes His freedom.[1]

It is the emboldened part that is most pertinent to our discussion on modal collapse. We see how Barth, even before he comes to his reformulation of election in CD II/2, has already developed a doctrine of divine freedom (and aseity, which is a related category, of which I have a dope quote from Barth on just a few pages later from the above; we will visit that in another post) which can allow for Barth’s God to be so with us, and yet remain distinct from us as the a se and triune God who He is in His inner life.

We see, in the above passage from Barth, also his various motifs of actualism and objectivism. It is important to bear in mind that Barth’s theology attempts to only think from God’s Self revelation in Christ; in case you didn’t known that already. As such, Barth is going to refer to ‘biblical testimony’ and the ‘acts’ of God quite frequently in the way he theologizes. He will not refer to philosophical apparatus in order to develop something like his doctrine of divine freedom or aseity, even if the philosophical tradition has a parallel grammar in these instances.

In conclusion, for the moment, I think McCormack actually does have a way out, in regard to the way that he thinks God’s being in the theology of Karl Barth. I don’t think even McCormack’s Barth must fall prey to the critique of modal collapse, precisely because of the material Barth himself supplies in the above quote. It is actually hard to see, as we read such conceptual matter from Barth, how people would conclude that McCormack’s Barth, of necessity, must militate against Barth the man. What should stand out most, in this regard, is that McCormack is right to emphasize divine freedom as the basis through which he can read Barth’s doctrine of God through a heavy lens of God’s being-in-election.

Next time we will visit a passage from Barth that is related to this one, as I mentioned. It is a magnificent passage where Barth describes God’s aseity; it is the sort of passage that reminds me why I like doing theology; a passage that makes me want to get lost in the inner life of God, and worship all the days of my weary life.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §28 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 47 [emphasis mine].

Is Thomas Torrance a Thomist or a Barthian?

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Bruce McCormack in his essay/rejoinder Election and the Trinity: Theses in response to George Hunsinger, as I recall (I don’t currently have it to hand) identifies Thomas Torrance’s theological approach, and indeed, Hunsinger’s approach to Barth (following, largely, TFT’s approach) as Thomist. I think McCormack detects, at the least, a quasi-natural theology in Torrance, and in Hunsinger; but I want to focus on Torrance.

The thing is, I don’t fully disagree with McCormack. When you read books from TFT like his Ground and Grammar and Theological Science, we are confronted with his theological methodology; what he calls kata physin, or ‘according to nature.’ Here we come to see the sort of ‘critical realism’ that drives Torrance’s theological project. As we consider this, and cross-reference it with the approach of Thomas [Aquinas], it sounds eerily similar in orientation. I think we might adduce that TFT, on a sliding scale, slides towards scholastic [Aristotelian] realism, while it might be maintained that Barth is more at home in the nominalist world of covenant and language as that is driven by the ‘realist’ nature of the incarnation. But it is hard to discern some of these things in a neat and tidy way. TFT has sufficient Barth mixed in, particularly as that is focused by Barth’s reformulation of election and how that impacts a theory of revelation, that it makes it difficult to say that TFT is a Thomist in an absolute or even incidental sense.

Etienne Gilson, in his book The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas offers a description of Thomas’ approach to faith and reason, and how that approach implicates his understanding on how knowledge of God obtains. Gilson writes:

All possible demonstrations of this thesis aim ultimately at throwing into relief the disproportion between our finite understanding and the infinite essence of God. The line of argument which leads us perhaps most deeply of all into the thought of St. Thomas is drawn from the nature of human knowledge. Perfect knowledge, if we accept Aristotle, consists in deducing the properties of an object by using its essence as the principle of the demonstration. Accordingly, the mode in which the substance of each thing is known to us, determines ipso facto the mode of the knowledge which we can have of the thing. Now, God is a purely spiritual substance; our knowledge, on the contrary, is only such as a being composed of soul and a body can reach. It originates necessarily in sensation. The knowledge which we have of God, is therefore, only such as a person starting from sense-data, can acquire of a being which is purely intelligible. Thus, our understanding, resting upon the testimony of our senses, can indeed infer that God exists, but it is evident that a mere examination of sensory objects, which are the effects of God and therefore inferior to Him cannot bring us to a knowledge of the Divine essence. There are, consequently, truths about God which are accessible to Reason, and there are others which exceed it.[1]

Compare the above with Thomas Torrance as he comments on Barth’s method:

Barth found his theology thrust back more and more upon its proper object, and so he set himself to think through the whole of theological knowledge in such a way that it might be consistently faithful to the concrete act of God in Jesus Christ from which it actually takes its rise in the Church, and, further, in the course of that inquiry to ask about the presuppositions and conditions on the basis of which it comes about that God is known, in order to develop from within the actual content of theology its own interior logic and its own inner criticism which will help to set theology free from every form of ideological corruption.[2]

Here we get a sense, not just of Barth’s own approach, but more pointedly, Torrance’s. We see the ‘kataphysical’ realism that attends Torrance’s theology as he refers to ‘the actual content of theology its own interior logic and its own inner criticism.’ I would contend we also see a sort of Thomist realism operative, maybe only insofar as Torrance agrees with Aquinas in the sense that the object under consideration ought to be allowed to determine its own categories and emphases of inquiry.

Where I think Torrance avers from Thomas is not so much in method, insofar as an a posteriori realism is present, but in the sense that Torrance, following Barth, emphasizes a relational-personalism in place of the brute substance/quality language that conditions Aquinas’ theologizing. So, this is where I am tentatively concluding at the moment: I think Torrance probably does slide Thomist in certain respects, but he reifies Thomism under the pressures of personalist and relational language such that he ends up sounding much more like Barth than he does Thomas. In other words, at a superstructural level, I think I actually do agree with McCormack (if I recall him correctly, which I think I do), and see Torrance more as a Thomist and less as a Barthian in some significant respects. [This has the makings of a PhD thesis]

 

 

[1] Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Dorset Press, 1986), 41.

[2] Torrance, Theological Science, 7.