Category Archives: Classical Theism

The Instrumentalization of the Christ//God’s Being Predicated

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I have left some context out of the following, but based on what you have read from me thus far (on the blog in general and over the years etc.), how would you translate my rather technical phraseology? Maybe you don’t think it makes sense. If so, where does it fail in regard to its theological premises and mutually implicating ideas? (I wrote this as a quick off the top thought on X and Facebook)

What folks don’t realize it seems, even at higher levels, is that when considering the decretal system and God, when it comes to the incarnation, Christ is understood in purely instrumentalist terms; thus making Him the organon of salvation, but not the person (the Theanthropos) of salvation. In other words, the person of Christ (who is the eternal Logos) is so wrested from the work of Christ, in the decretal schemata, that the Christ merely becomes a token and conduit of God’s work; thus, making God a predicate of creation (if in fact the attempt is made to still see Jesus’ person as eternally Divine).

The Goliath god of the Philosophers Versus the Father God of the Son

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. . . It is not a loud and stern and foreign thing, but the quiet and gentle and intimate awakening of children in the Father’s house to life in that house. That is how God exercises authority. All divine authority has ultimately and basically this character. At its heart all God’s ruling and ordering and demanding is like this. But it is in the direction given and revealed in Jesus Christ that the character of divine authority and lordship is unmistakably perceived.[1]

This follows from knowing God first as Father of the Son mediated through the Son by the Holy Spirit. And this is to the point and heart of an Evangelical Calvinism Athanasian Reformed mode of theological and Christian existence. The Son, the eternal Logos conditions the way we approach the Father, just as the Son has eternally indwelt the bosom of the Father. There is no discursive routing here and there on a way up to God to be taken. There is only the Son descended (exitus) to the point of death the death of the cross, and new humanity ascended (reditus) on the healing wings of the Holy Spirit as He in Christ takes us to the glory the Son has always already shared eternally with the Father. Indeed, it is in this oikonomia (economy) that God has freely chosen to make Himself known to and for the world, in the face of Jesus Christ. God’s exousia (authority) is not an authority of an abstract monad back yonder in the ethereal gases of the philosophers; such that He is some type of Goliath God. Nein. God’s authority, His sovereignty, His power is that of a gentle father with his children; it is a filial familial authority.

This is the interminable perduring seemingly unquenchable battle of the God of Jerusalem versus the God of Athens. God is Father of the Son, as Athanasius has intoned, or he is simply an abstraction plastered onto the God of the Bible; as if some type of graffiti that would seek to draw attention to its own self-projected beauty rather than the beauty of God’s manger and cross in Christ. Choose you this day who you will serve.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58 [100] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 97.

The ‘Father-Son’ Theory of the Atonement V PSA as the Frame

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Penal Substitution Atonement (PSA) theory has been in the news again lately (online/social media). As an Evangelical Calvinist (see V1&V2 of our Evangelical Calvinism books, and my articles-mini-essays on the topic) I have pressed what TF Torrance refers to as the ‘ontological theory of the atonement.’ Many evangelicals and Reformed folks think that PSA in fact is the Gospel simplicter. And so, to deny PSA would be to deny the Gospel itself. But as I have demonstrated over and again at the blog, the background to PSA theory isn’t as prima facie biblical as its proponents make it sound. The ‘theological’ framework that fomented what we think of as PSA today is largely rooted in the Federal (Covenantal) theology of the early Reformed theologians. It has humanity placed into a relationship with God that is necessarily framed by a forensic premise (i.e., the covenant of works). This forensic premise, or covenant of works, according to Federal theology, is ultimately fulfilled for the elect of God, when Jesus comes and meets the conditions of the covenant of works (that Adam and Eve) broke, thus restoring the legal connection to God that heretofore had been lost to humanity since after Eden. And it is this Federal (Covenantal) relationship that is given metaphysical orientation by the scholasticism Reformed commitment to what Richard Muller identifies as a Christian Aristotelianism. Suffice it to say, in nuce, PSA represents a theory of the atonement wherein humanity is genetically related to God based on a metaphysics of a Divine-Law-World relation; indeed, which requires that in order for fallen humanity, and the elect therein (think decretum absolutum ‘absolute decree of election-reprobation’), to be justified by God, that the Son of Man must become man, die on the cross, extinguishing the wrath of God, paying the legal penalty for sin, and allowing the elect humanity to come into a right and legal standing relationship with the triune God; particularly, the Father (whom the PSA proponents emphasize as the ‘Law-giver,’ per their juridical system).

Alternatively to that, one of the Fathers of us Evangelical Calvinists, John McLeod Campbell, a Scottish theologian of the 19th century, kicked back against the premise of the PSA position vis-à-vis the nature of the atonement, and against the Westminster theology that had codified the theological framework that funds the PSA position, particularly as that was being pushed in his context in the Church of Scotland (before he was excommunicated), as he gives us re-framing of atonement theory where the relationship between God and humanity ought to be framed first as thinking of God as Father rather than Law-giver. It was this re-framing that ended up getting Campbell kicked out of his beloved Church of Scotland, and which led him to minister elsewhere, as an independent of sorts. When you see what his view was, in a nutshell, as we will visit that now, as George Tuttle recounts that for us, you might be shocked to think that this would have the type of doctrinal gravitas required to get someone officially banned from their own denominational and local church. Tuttle writes of Campbell’s framing on the atonement:

Herein lies one of Campbell’s major objections to founding a view of atonement on the concept of justice —whether distributive or rectoral. Both systems visualize what he calls purely legal atonements, that is atonements, the whole character of which is determined by our relation to divine law. The real problem of atonement, however, is not merely to discover a way in which we may stand reconciled to God as a law-giver. The question contemplated in scripture and to which the Gospel is an answer is not how we can be pardoned and receive mercy, but how it could come to pass that the estranged can be reconciled. God’s intention is, as St. Paul declared, ‘to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.’ (Gal. 4:5). The relation between a judge or a governor and the accused subjects is vastly different from that of a parent to erring children. To distinguish the former from the latter is to move from an artificial atmosphere of impersonal display of benevolence to a warm and living relationship of love, Campbell therefore could not rest in any conception of the atonement which involved, as he says, ‘the substitution of a legal standing for a filial standing as the gift of God to men in Christ.’ This is not to say that Campbell denies the truth of a legal standing any more than he denies the inexorable demands of divine justice. Just as justice is brought with the concept of God as love, so the validity of a legal standing is brought within that of a loving relationship. Justice has its ultimate source in the love of God. When the loving God is honoured, justice is honoured also.

                The atonement is thus revealed retrospectively as God’s way of putting right the past, and prospectively as introducing us to a life marked by a filial relation to God eternally. Both are celebrated by believers, both must be included in their thought concerning the nature of the atonement.[1]

One might think this ought to be unremarkable. And yet in the face of meddling with the Westminster God of consensus, the Aristotelian-formed God who relates to the world through a metaphysic of a decree of law (e.g., covenant of works etc.); who must remain the ‘unmoved mover’ of monadic adoration; it is this very meddling, even if all the theologian is doing is attempting to shift the mind’s eye to the fact that God is first Father of the Son before He is ever a Law-giver/Creator, that will get you canned like Campbell was.

Some might imagine that the Campbell thesis was a minority report. In his particular environ it was at his time. But outside of his particular ecclesial and geographical environ (and even amongst it, among some other key theologians and pastors like himself), his view became a dominate one. Even overcoming many of the places and people who were initially against his alternative and kerygmatic reading of Holy Scripture. Even so, today, by the retrieval of many in the evangelical and Reformed sphere, we are only getting the Westminsterian Report. This simply wasn’t the case, even historically (which I have demonstrated elsewhere).

In the end what matters, though, isn’t whether this or that doctrinal position was the majority or minority report in the history. What matters for the Protestant Christian, is whether or not a position corresponds more proximate with the witness of Scripture. I would contend, and have done so vociferously over the years, that the Campbellian theory of the ‘Father-Son-Atonement’ framing is indeed the most biblically correlative and theologically resplendent view presented. If you don’t to hold it: repent!

[1] George M. Tuttle, So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell On Christian Atonement (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1986), 82-3.

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

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

I protest, and so does Eberhard Jüngel:

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

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

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

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

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

Contra the Tradition Produced God of Natural Theology

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Natural theology separates God from his Word, and in the Reformed context this separation requires that another mechanism be constructed in order for God to enact relationship with the world; i.e. through the 𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑢𝑚 𝑎𝑏𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑢𝑚, or through a determining decretal system that inter-links God’s power and being to the rest of the world all along keeping God untouched by the world or the creatures who inhabit it (all in an attempt to sustain the philosophically developed loci known as simplicity, immutability, impassibility, infinity, etc.). The problem, if not recognizable, is that in this ‘classical’ system of theology proper God is taken captive by a set of conditions and categories that have nothing to do with God encountering us in his Word, Jesus Christ. How could it?! If the God produced by natural theology is necessarily uncoupled from his Word for us, the Son, Jesus Christ then how can we ever really say that we have encountered the living God? This is a serious dilemma. Why would I entrust my eternal well-being to a God that history or tradition has produced; wouldn’t this mean that I am really entrusting myself to the producers of the history and the tradition instead?

‘The Hallucination of Divine Immutability’ and Prayer

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God’s “Constancy,” as Barth refers to his preferred term for Immutability, is a key doctrine in regard to God’s constant steadiness of ousia (being), as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (hypostases). But when a notion of immutability is derived from the classical Greek philosophers rather than what is Self-revealed in God in Christ, we end up with a notion of godness that ends up having no correlation between the living God and a god of phantasm. Below, Barth is driving this point home as he relates it to a theology of prayer.

The objection that God cannot hear man’s prayer without as it were “losing face,” without abandoning Himself in some sense to the creature, fades into nothingness when seen in this light. If ever there was a miserable anthropomorphism, it is the hallucination of divine immutability which rules out the possibility that God can let Himself be conditioned in this or that way by His creature. God is certainly immutable. But He is immutable as the living God and in the mercy in which he espouses the cause of the creature. In distinction from the immovability of a supreme idol, His majesty, the glory of His omnipotence and sovereignty, consists in the fact that He can give to the requests of this creature a place in His will. And does He not do this in profoundest accord with Himself by doing it precisely where in the creation He is concerned with Himself, His beloved Son and those who are His? It obviously takes place in complete faithfulness too Himself when He lets the creature, in its unity with Himself, participate in His omnipotence and work, in the magnifying of His glory and its own salvation, by commanding it to ask and hearing its requests, and when He truly gives it a place at His side in the kingdom of grace and the kingdom of the world. God cannot be greater than He is in Jesus Christ, the Mediator between Him and man. And in Jesus Christ He cannot be greater than He is when He lets those who are Christ’s participate in His kingly office, and therefore when He not only hears but answers their requests. And therefore it is not an insolent but a genuinely humble faith, not a particularly bold but simply and ordinary Christian faith, which is confident and assumes that God will grant what it asks, indeed that He has already done so even as it asks. This faith is not, then, an additional and optional achievement for religious virtuosos. It is absolutely obligatory for all those who want to pray aright. Any doubt at this point is doubt of God Himself, the living God who in Jesus Christ has entered into this fellowship and intercourse with His creature. Any vacillation or questioning is the horrible confusion of God with that immovable idol. The worshipper of the idol must not be surprised if he calls upon it in vain. But true reverence and humility before God, and real submission to His will, are to be found when man adopts his allotted place in that fellowship with God, when he enters into that intercourse with Him, when he takes quite seriously acceptance of His command and promise, and therefore when he is no less certain of the hearing of his request than of the God to whom he turns. For this God is not only occasionally but essentially, not only possibly and in extraordinary cases but always, the God who hears the prayers of His own.[1]

The so-called ‘classical theist’ (a very modern term, by the way) would kick hard against these goads. Even so, the case remains that the living God will not be circumscribed by the profane categories of human machination. If the Christian is genuinely committed to the ‘Scripture Principle,’ and its attested reality in Jesus Christ, then what Barth is saying should resonate deeply with the Christian heart of hearts. We worship the God who is Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit’s bonding fellowship of eternal koinonia and Self-giving, one for and in the Other, love. Not only has God spoken, and doth speak, but He also listens to and hears our prayers, as if ascending incense wafting over His triune nostrils. If He won’t listen to us as our Father, who really will? What a hope the Christian has. We are never alone. Our God, as Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit who He is, will never leave or forsake us! amen

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §53 [109] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 102–03.

The Antecedence of God in Procession Before Mission: Avoiding the Socialization of God

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TF Torrance is discussing the impact that dualistic Hellenism has had upon Western-thought-forms; namely the precedence that classical thought has given to the optical mode of thinking and verification (so the obsession with empiricism, etc.). TFT is highlighting the impact that this methodology and epistemology can have upon our construal of God’s “Father-hood” and “Son-hood,” and how Christian/Patristic theology, primarily through Athanasius’ influence, eschewed this “Hellenizing” effect by reifying it through a Christian ontology.

The contrast between Christianity and Hellenism could hardly be greater than at this fundamental level, where biblical patterns of thought governed by the Word of God and the obedient hearing of faith (υπακοη της πιτεως) conflict sharply with those of Greek religion and philosophy. The issue came to its head in the Arian controversy over the Father – Son relation at the heart of the Christian Gospel. Are the terms ‘father’ and ‘son’ to be understood as visual, sensual images taken from our human relations and then projected mythologically into God? In that event how can we avoid projecting creaturely gender into God, and thinking of him as grandfather as well as father, for the only kind of father we know is one who is son of another father? To think of God like that, in terms of the creaturely content of images projected out of ourselves, inevitably gives rise to anthropomorphic and polymorphic notions of deity and in fact to polytheism and idolatry. However, if we think from a centre in God as he reveals himself to us through his Word incarnate in Jesus Christ, then we know him as Father in himself in an utterly unique and incomparable way which then becomes the controlling standard by reference to which all notions of creaturely fatherhood and sonship are to be understood. ‘God does not make man his pattern, but rather, since God alone is properly and truly Father, we men are called fathers of our own children, for of him every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named.’ Unique Fatherhood and unique Sonship in God mutually define one another in an absolute and singular way. As Athanasius pithily expressed it in rejection of Arian anthropocentric mythologising: ‘Just as we cannot ascribe a father to the Father, so we cannot ascribe a brother to the Son’.[1]

[1] T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 69-70.

Just Be a Philosopher Already: On Being a Thomistic Theologian

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For me I only have the capacity to follow a Dogmatic or Systematic theology insofar that I believe it is sticking to the theo-logic inherent to the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. This is what keeps it Biblical. This is what keeps it from adulterating and going beyond the 𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡; that is, by going to its inner and upward reality in the Godman (Theanthropos), Jesus Christ. In other words, speculative theologies, ones that reason from the being of humanity to the being of God; ones that reason discursively about nature vis-à-vis God, as if nature holds vestiges of God; are balderdash to me! If that is all I had to go with theologically I would fully walk away from the theological endeavor. The Biblical witness, the Biblical attestation to its triune reality in the God revealed (Deus revelatus), can be the only line of theological reasoning the Christian can really take. Not in assertion, as if just claiming loudly, over and over again, “that we follow the Scripture Principle,” but in concrete fact; i.e., that Scripture indeed is the only source and ground of the theological engagement.

These theologians constantly touting Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle as the bee’s-knees of theological performance might as well do it right. They might as well become professional philosophers of religion, and at least learn how to think philosophically in nuanced and correct ways if they are going to elevate a philosopher-king as their theologian, rather than the actual Biblical witness. Instead, they lazily lay claim to the whole of church history, as if the Patristics, for example, were simply doing what Thomas Aquinas was doing with Aristotle in mediaeval times. Indeed, they sublate their bad philosophical takes as theology takes, as if they are ultimately takes provided for by Biblical exegesis.

A Rejoinder to the Credo Alliance on Natural Theology

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

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

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

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

Barth on Philosophy and Theology and Nothing

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The relationship between philosophy and theology remains a varied thing, at least for me. In the Barth[ian] tradition there are a variety of takes on this relationship just the same. Barth himself sees a relative value to having an understanding of the various philosophies blowing about, whither and thither. But in the main, for Barth et al., an untoward appropriation and deployment of any philosophy vis-à-vis a Christian theology, ends up presenting a highly delipidated theology that bears no resemblance to the genuine article as Self-revealed in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ. Of note, as Barth is engaging with a doctrine of God and Nothingness, here we have an example of how he thinks of the Catholic’s deployment of the Aristotelian philosophical categories in the grammarization of their respective theology. As you read the following passage from Barth you will also notice him referring to these ‘modern thinkers,’ in regard to their respective impact upon the unfurling of an Enlightened and post-Enlightened theological offering (he is referring, in context, to his treatment of Heidegger and Sartre on a metaphysic and doctrine of nothingness per their respective existentialist [atheistic, in a way] theological offerings). So, a lot going on here: but as an evangelical calvinist I am wont to press Barth’s comment on the impact of Aristotle on the doing of Latin theology in general; he sees it as fallacious, as do I (as I/we have detailed with our Evangelical Calvinism books, and my blog posts here over the decades).

. . . And the position which Roman Catholicism gives to Aristotle as the philosopher par excellence was and is a very remarkable but also a very questionable matter. In theology, at least, we must be more farsighted than to attempt a deliberate co-ordination with temporarily predominant philosophical trends in which we may be caught up, or to allow them to dictate or correct our conceptions. On the other hand, there is every reason why we should consider and as far as possible learn from the typical philosophical thinking of the day. As we have listened to Leibniz and Scliliermacher [sic], so now we listen to these modern thinkers at a point which is particularly important for them and in which they may be able to teach or warn us in our own understanding of the theme.[1]

The theme, as already noted, has to do with a doctrine of nothingness (rather than somethingness). But again, what I wanted to draw our attention to was simply the way that Barth thinks a relationship between theology and philosophy. He doesn’t see no value in understanding the philosophers of the day, whatever period, and how their respective inklings might create a cultural milieu, which in turn might impact and even distort a reception of a genuinely conceived Christian theology. Indeed, it is primarily in this negative type of a way, even as it might contribute to the construction of a positively framed Christian theology, wherein Barth sees a legitimate placement and engagement with philosophy. Even so, in the end, what stands primary for Barth is the Word of God.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §50–51 [334] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 44.