Category Archives: David Kelsey

The Captivity of God: Against Scholastic and Philosophical Theology

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Just to reiterate, once again, the way scholastic theology, particularly with reference to Thomas Aquinas directly, and the scholastic trad after Thomas (whether Catholic or Protestant) indirectly, affects the way contemporary orthodox theologians do theology, let me share a passage from David Kelsey as he sketches the entailments of scholastic methodology vis-à-vis the ‘revelation’ found in Holy Scripture. In this instance it is with reference to the way that Aristotelian metaphysics are deployed in an effort to explicate the loci deposited in Holy Scripture. What is of import for our purposes is to notice how God’s Self-revelation becomes a predicate, by way of explanatory apparatus, of a purely philosophical construct developed by way of the human powers of reflecting on “being-as-such.”

The first question Thomas takes up in Part 1a of the Summa concerns the distinctive nature of theology or “sacred doctrine.” There is a “science” whose subject matter is God, viz., “divine doctrine.” What is distinctive about that “science” is that it argues from first principles that are scripturally revealed. Such “divine doctrine” is fundamentally different from the philosophical science of metaphysics whose subject matter is not God, but being-as-such. The first principles of metaphysics are discovered, not in revelation, but by rational analysis of the most general features of the concretely actual instances of “being” that human experience encounters. It can study God only indirectly as the “first cause” implied by the existential contingency of all concretely actual instances of “being” that we experience. God does not fall under “being-as-such,” i.e., is not one sort of “instantiation” among others of “being-as-such.” That is why the science of metaphysics cannot study God directly. On the other hand, the questions about God that follow the first two questions in Part 1a of the Summa are directly about God, i.e., are “divine doctrine” and not “metaphysics.” That holds true even though, based on scripturally revealed first principles, they nonetheless freely make analogical, use of the conceptuality that is developed in the “science” of metaphysics to analyze “being-as-such.”[1]

It is an interesting set of gymnastics one must engage in in order to finally arrive at the punch line: in the end sacra doctrina becomes an explicate of a humanly discovered metaphysics. Even though, as Kelsey notes, because the theologian feels compelled to, God cannot ultimately be known by way of a naked metaphysics, and yet, the theologian, in their frailty, must use the next best thing towards speaking and thinking God; i.e., the discovery the profane philosophers have ostensibly made in finding the ‘first principles.’

This continues to be the way evangelical, Reformed and Lutheran theologians attempt to renew the Protestant churches. They place an ad hoc value on what has come before, as if it is the only orthodox way possible for the churches to be refreshed in the good news of the Gospel. And yet, as Kelsey illustrates through his sketch, by way of implication, God’s Self-revelation is held captive to the discoveries of the pagans; i.e., that is in regard to thinking ‘being’ as actus purus (‘pure act’). As a Bible reader I don’t recognize the god discovered by the philosophers as the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ; as God who is my Father.

I understand that the machine known as Protestant orthodoxy will never go away. But it is important, at least from my lights, to continue to call it out, and offer alternative ways to think and speak God directly from His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; from the “rationality” inherent to the Gospel Hisself; from the concrete actualism that we in fact have been provided with by God through His Self-given cruciformed life for the world in Jesus Christ. If guys and gals want to do philosophy of religion and scholastic theology, great. But don’t deceive yourselves and others into thinking that it comes close to touching the surface, with providing an actual point of contact between the living God and humanity. The only concrete place of that happenstance is found in the hypostatic union of God and humanity in the Man, Jesus Christ. It is His life that sets the terms, the categories, the emphases by which the Christian can come to truly (kataphysically) and  evangelically know the triune God.

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law. –Deuteronomy 29:29

[1] David H. Kelsey, Human Aguish and God’s Power (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 215–16.

Noticing Some Tone Deafness in David Kelsey’s Reading of Barth’s Election

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I have plenty of direct engagements with Karl Barth’s doctrine of election here at the blog. But I also like to hear from various other commentators, and how they attempt to distill Barth’s theological oeuvre. The following commentary comes from theologian, David Kelsey. Kelsey isn’t of the Barthian stream, in fact he is situated more comfortably among contemporary classical theologians like Katherine Sonderegger, John Webster et al. The passage from him below is his brief sketch of Barth’s doctrine of election, and how it finds its ultimate purposiveness in the singular will of God. Kelsey will be critiquing Barth (with Aquinas write alongside Barth et al.) on the notion that God only has one overarching purpose (we might say, will) for creation; Kelsey argues that God has many purposes, and thus they should not be reduced to one totalizing purpose. Kelsey writes:

For Karl Barth in the twentieth century, the overall goal of God’s various ways of relating to all else is to actualize God’s eternal decree to enter into covenant relation ad extra with a particular “other,” the particular humanity of the eternal Son of God Incarnate, Jesus Christ. The overall movement to that goal — except for the impossible possibility of sin — is the unfolding of the logical implications of that one eternal decree: Because Christ’s humanity is intrinsically social, the creation of fellow human beings is required. Because fellow human creatures are bodied, the creation of the physical world is required. Because God has eternally decreed to be in covenant fellowship with the Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ must be born into that world whether or not creatures have “fallen” (Christological supralapsarianism). Because in the fall Jesus’ fellow human creatures are estranged from God, Jesus’ reconciling death is unavoidable. Because God eternally decrees that God’s covenant fellowship with Jesus and his human covenant partners be actualized and manifested in an eschatological consummation, the resurrection of the crucified Jesus is required. This is a logical, not a chronological, sequence although it is played out in time as a “history.” For Barth “the eternal covenant which God has decreed in Himself as the covenant of the Father with His Son as the Lord and Bearer of human nature is the “inner basis.” [sic] not only (as Barth explicitly has it) of creation, but of every other moment in the economy moving toward the actualization of God’s eternal decree, except sin.[1]

Rather than focusing on what Kelsey will be critiquing in Barth vis-à-vis the singular and totalizing purpose of God, I want to respond to the way that Kelsey characterizes Barth’s understanding of the decree.

Kelsey, when referring to God’s decree in Barth’s theology, makes it sound too abstract; as abstract as the classical decretum absolutum (absolute decree of predestination and election) that Barth vociferously critiques in longform over and again throughout his Church Dogmatics. This might seem like a subtle thing to harp on, but it’s precisely because it is so subtle that I want to harp on it. It isn’t that Kelsey ultimately misses the gist of Barth’s thinking on election, and God’s telos for the world therein; it is that Kelsey fails to speak of the decree in the types of relational and personalist ways that Barth does. Barth thinks of election not through an abstract decree, in the tone we hear in Kelsey, but, again, in the Trinitarian and relational ways that Barth thinks God from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Let me end this with Barth himself:

§33

THE ELECTION OF JESUS CHRIST

The election of grace is the eternal beginning of all the ways and works of God in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ God in His free grace determines Himself for sinful man and sinful man for Himself. He therefore takes upon Himself the rejection of man with all its consequences, and elects man to participation in His own glory.

1. JESUS CHRIST, ELECTING AND ELECTED

Between God and man there stands the person of Jesus Christ, Himself God and Himself man, and so mediating between the two. In Him God reveals Himself to man. In Him man sees and knows God. In Him God stands before man and man stands before God, and is the eternal will of God, and the eternal ordination of man in accordance with this will. In Him God’s plan for man is disclosed, God’s judgment on man fulfilled, God’s deliverance of man accomplished, God’s gift to man present in fulness, God’s claim and promise to man declared. In Him God has joined Himself to man. And so man exists for His sake. It is by Him, Jesus Christ, and for Him and to Him, that the universe is created as a theatre for God’s dealings with man and man’s dealings with God. The being of God is His being, and similarly the being of man is originally His being. And there is nothing that is not from Him and by Him and to Him. He is the Word of God in whose truth everything is disclosed and whose truth cannot be over-reached or conditioned by any other word. He is the decree of God behind and above which there can be no earlier or higher decree and beside which there can be no other, since all others serve only the fulfillment of this decree. He is the beginning of God before which there is no other beginning apart from that of God within Himself. Except, then, for God Himself, nothing can derive from any other source or look back to any other starting-point. He is the election of God before which and without which and beside which God cannot make any other choices. Before Him and without Him and beside Him God does not, then, elect or will anything. And He is the election (and on that account the beginning and the decree and the Word) of the free grace of God. For it is God’s free grace that in Him He elects to be man and to have dealings with man and to join Himself to man. He, Jesus Christ, is the free grace of God as not content simply to remain identical with the inward and eternal being of God, but operating ad extra in the ways and works of God. And for this reason, before Him and above Him and beside Him and apart from Him there is no election, no beginning, no decree, no Word of God. Free grace is the only basis and meaning of all God’s ways and works ad extra. For what extra is there that the ways and works could serve, or necessitate, or evoke? There is no extra except that which is first willed and posited by God in the presupposing of all His ways and works. There is no extra except that which has its basis and meaning as such in the divine election of grace. But Jesus Christ is Himself the divine election of grace. For this reason He is God’s Word, God’s decree and God’s beginning. He is so all-inclusively, comprehending absolutely within Himself all things and everything, enclosing within Himself the autonomy of all other words, decrees and beginnings.[2]

The reader at this point might be thinking, so what! If we were to uncritically take Kelsey’s tone in regard to Barth’s doctrine of election we might be tempted to miss the whole project that Barth has attempted to construct. That is, we might place Barth alongside the post reformed orthodox theologians, or even someone like Theodore Beza. But this would eradicate the whole point of Barth’s reformulation of election, and the relational impulses funding said reformulation. We might be tempted to think, along with Kelsey, that we could speak of the decree of God in abstraction from God’s subject in election, in His beloved Son, Jesus Christ.

[1] David H. Kelsey, Human Anguish and God’s Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 169-70.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 §32-33: Study Edition (New York, New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 99-100.

God’s Trinitarian Sovereignty

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There is constant argument in regard to how God is ‘sovereign,’ with reference to His control in the affairs of the created order. The history of interpretation, in the main, all agree, of course, that God is the Creator; that He is the ‘governor,’ the ‘conserver,’ and the concursus Dei who works alongside creation in ways that surpass our puny understanding. But beyond these general agreements there is still discordance in regard to a theory of causation. Classical Calvinism famously operates from what Barth often refers to as the decretrum absolutum, which others might call ‘causal determinism,’ or maybe logico-causal necessitarian determinism, as TF Torrance does. Whatever coinage one wants to use, this tradition on a theory of causation is largely Aristotelian in nature. We see this theory dominant in much of mediaeval theology; we see it even, at points in Luther and Calvin; and we definitely see it as the normata of the Post Reformation Reformed orthodox theology that developed, respectively, in the 16th and 17th centuries. At a more popular level, today, we can see these sorts of discussions obtaining between 5 point TULIP Calvinists, evangelical Arminians, and what some are calling Provisionism. 

As an alternative to the classic fare on this locus David Kelsey offers a theory that we might call ‘Trinitarian-dynamic-relationalism’ (my phraseology). He writes:

In further support of Wood’s proposal, it is worth noting that there has been some disagreement among translators of the Greek Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed into English about how to translate pantocrator in the first article of the Creed. Perhaps the most common translation is “omnipotent,” following the Latin translation of the term into omnipotem. However, for example, in his classic collection of ancient Christian texts, Documents of the Christian Church, Henry Bettenson translates it as “All-sovereign.” That obviously comports well with Wood’s suggestion.

In “holding all things together,” the Triune God is “prior” or “prevenient” in that it is God who always takes the initiative. In being “prior,” God “takes the lead” in providing for creatures’ well-being by bringing and “holding” together the resources for their well-being available within the limits of the ways in which they are situated in their present circumstances. That priority in “holding together” is one sort of “sovereignty.”

Conceiving God’s providential sovereignty as God’s “holding together” what goes on among creatures is quite different from conceiving God’s “sovereignty” as God’s “controlling” what goes on. “Control” is exercised extrinsically, from “outside” the creatures that are “controlled,” by power that is externally applied to them to cause them to change and interact in ways determined by the agent that exercises the power. As we saw in Chapter 3, construed as analogies for providence as God’s control of creatures, terms like “sovereign,” “kingly,” and “Lord,” too easily allow for, even invite, inferences that are highly problematic. However, those inferences are blocked when God’s “sovereignty” in providential care is understood as sovereignty of God’s “holding all things together” in ways ordered to creatures’ well-being in both absolutely general and particularly differentiated ways.

The sense in which the Trinity is “sovereign” in providential care when the latter is characterized in terms of the pantocrator can be further nuanced by a more detailed reflection on the implications of the claim that is none other than the Triune God that is the pantocrator. Here, we reverse a traditional pattern of theological reflection on God’s providence. The traditional move was to explain providence first, often in terms of the concept of the cosmos’ arche. Only after that had been accomplished did it introduce the doctrine of the Trinity. It, thus, introduced the doctrine of the Trinity as a theological topic entirely extrinsic to providence. It ascribed providence, already fully explicated without reference to the Trinity, to the first “Person” of the Trinity. It did so simply because creative blessing is also ascribed to the first “Person” (cf. the Nicence Creed’s opening “I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth”). I want to explore here, in contrast with that pattern of thought, how Trinitarian doctrine of God can serve as the context within which to nuance further the sense in which the Trinity’s sovereignty in providential care is the Triune God’s prevenience, God’s taking the initiative in working for creatures’ well-being in their kinds.1

I am still in the process of reading Kelsey’s book; in fact, I am up to the point of the quote in my reading. We will see how he fleshes these things out further. But what is evident is that he is focusing on what has been called the concursus Dei, or ‘God’s coming alongside,’ in the created and re-created reality, as that is understood with reference to Jesus Christ for us (my spin). He identifies what readers here might be familiar with, primarily because I have focused on this myself with some fervor. That is the all-too-common way of the negative approach to theology to speculate about godness without simply thinking Godness as that has been spoken and revealed for us in the Son, Jesus Christ. Kelsey is clearly going to attempt to tackle the dilemma of God’s ‘sovereignty’ by eliding the inherent problem of abstracting God’s oneness (de Deo uno) from His threeness (de Deo trino) as classical theisms post-mediaeval theology are prone to do. So, Kelsey, at least inchoately, seems to be moving forward from within what some have referred to as the Trinitarian Renaissance of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. I simply take the so-called ‘renaissance’ to be a look back to Nicene theology in general; a look back past the pitfalls associated with the mediaeval via negativa and its apophatic theology. His premise, at the outset, seems promising.

However, Kelsey concludes, for my money, what is important is that the theologian thinks God from God as revealed in Jesus Christ. This is the classical Trinitarian and Nicene way of theologizing. It is a way that is at odds with a majority, if not all of the Post Reformed orthodoxy; that is in regard to the way they respectively thought the singularity of God in abstraction from His multiplicity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It must be from within this frame, I would argue, that the way we think God’s relationship to the world, to creatures, must be thought. If this is how God eternally has related within Himself, in se, then it only follows, since He is the Creator, indeed, that our relationship to Him, as that is grounded in Jesus Christ, would likewise be filial and relational; as such our relationships with others would likewise be relational and dynamic in this way. How that actually looks has some sense of the mysterium Trinitatis associated with it; which is seemingly the way Kelsey is approaching this. It will be interesting to see how he works his understanding of God’s sovereignty out in these sorts of Trinitarian ways; not to mention, how that then cashes out when applied to ‘human anguish.’

 

1 David H. Kelsey, Human Anguish and God’s Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 140-41. 

The Christian God is not the Archimedean Point::The Christian God is ‘Son of the Father’

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What happens when we think of God under the pressure provided for by Greek or ‘Hellenic’ categories; do we end up with the emphases we get of God when we think Him from His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ? David Kelsey describes how the Greeks informed early and even mediaeval grammars for thinking God thusly:

. . . The Triune God’s “oneness,’ [sic] ie, God’s unity and singularity, is explained in terms of one strand of the economy. God’s providential care of creation (which is entailed by God’s creative blessing). God’s “oneness” is the logically and ontologically necessary singularity of the cosmos’ “prime cause,” the arche, of providential care. In that singularity God is absolute and alone.

By that move, however, the “oneness” or singularity of the Triune God is not explained in terms of the further assertion of the singular God’s tri-unity. It is not explained in terms provided by affirmation of God’s three-foldness that is itself warranted by a different strand of the economy than creation-providence, viz., God’s relating in making and keeping liberative promises, specifically in all that Jesus Christ does and undergoes. A Trinitarian doctrine of God plays little or no role in the traditional explication of God’s providential care of creatures framed in terms of the cosmological arche. Instead, one element of a Trinitarian doctrine of God alone is framed in terms of the arche: the first “Person” of the Trinity, the “Father,” to whom relating to creatures in providential rule is ascribed, is characterized in terms of the concept of a cosmic arche. “Father”is used analogically to characterize God’s relation to the created cosmos, not to characterize the first “Person” of the Trinity’s eternal relation to the second “Person,” the “Son.” The “Father” relates to all else as creator in the way the cosmic arche relates to all else. The “Father’ is the cosmic mon-arche, absolute and alone.1

My oft critique of classical Calvinism, and other classical theisms, mutatis mutandis, gets to the very point that Kelsey above is highlighting for us. When the material deployed for thinking God is unduly evangelized, and thus remains in its pagan mode, what we end up with is a projected god; a god of the ‘hills and the valleys.’ When we follow this line of grammarizing God we sublate the God of Self-revelation in Christ by the god constructed through the fertile imaginations of the philosophers. God becomes a syncretization, and thus the no-God of the philosophers. God in this instance, when an attempt is made to synthesize Him with the Hellenic grammar, becomes the arche, the literal Archimedean point by which the abstract human knower might make sense of an otherwise chaotic cosmos. The “Father,” when sublimated by the arche, becomes an Odin (Thor’s father) rather than a loving lover who is in intimate relationship with His Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

And yet, tragically, this is exactly who most Western Christians know God to be. A brute beginning-point that explains how the world comes to have order. But this isn’t the God the Christian knows as Father; that is if the Christian is under sound dogmatic thinking. The Christian isn’t looking for an explanation with reference to the source of order in the world, per se. Indeed, the Christian, prior to becoming a Christian, or a fetus for that matter, isn’t looking for anything other than themselves, as the case may be. It took the Father’s and the Son’s loving and unilateral initiative to freely elect fallen humanity’s status, in the humanity of the Son, so that the would-be Christian might actually become a Christian. And this is to the point: the first order need of this fallen world, and the fallen humanity therein, is for a re-freshed, indeed, a re-created relationship with the God who is first Father of the Son, rather than with a God who is Creator, per se. The fact that God is creator isn’t simply a brute fact in regard to who God is. Who God is, is first Son of the Father (as Athanasius says so eloquently2) by the Holy Spirit; and it is out of this overflow, of a life defined by the Other that God graciously creates. He doesn’t create because He is simply the arche; He creates because He is the Triune God of eternal filiation.

Until classical Calvinism, and other iterations of the various classical theisms on offer, come to recognize this basic point in a doctrine of God, they will continue to offer a notion of God, and thus ‘spirituality,’ that is less than the genuine God of Christ offers. This has been a mantra of mine for a decade and a half now online. One wonders if this mantra will ever make headway with the machina. The machina I am referring to is with reference to the theologians, and thus theologies, that insist that forwarding a Christian Aristotelianism as the only orthodox way for the Protestant revolution. But this surely cannot, and has not been the case. The machina thinks from a revisionist understanding of the history of Christian ideas. There have always been theologians, who have thought God in filial rather than arche terms. The Nicene theologians, by-and-large sought to evangelize the Greeks to the point that the Greeks only became a pre-text by which the re-text of God’s life for us in the re-created humanity of Jesus Christ subverted the no-God the philosophers fabricated in their own virtuoso reflections.

 

1 David H. Kelsey, Human Anguish and God’s Power (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 114-15. 

2 Athanasius, Contra Arianos 1.9.34. 

The Father, First; The Son, Second; The Holy Spirit, Third: Against Subordinationisms

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The Father is understood to be the first person in the Divine Monarxia (Godhead); the Son, second, and the Holy Spirit, third. This isn’t indicative of a latent subordinationism, but simply notes how an origin of relation works within the eternal relating (and procressions) of the Triune God. This is what Athanasius was pressing when he wrote Contra Arians:  

  1. Therefore it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call HimUnoriginate. For the latter title, as I have said, does nothing more than signify all the works, individually and collectively, which have come to be at the will of God through the Word; but the title Father has its significance and its bearing only from the Son. And, whereas the Word surpasses things originated, by so much and more does calling God Father surpass the calling Him Unoriginate. For the latter is unscriptural and suspicious, because it has various senses; so that, when a man is asked concerning it, his mind is carried about to many ideas; but the word Father is simple and scriptural, and more accurate, and only implies the Son. And ‘Unoriginate’ is a word of the Greeks, who know not the Son; but ‘Father’ has been acknowledged and vouchsafed by our Lord. For He, knowing Himself whose Son He was, said, ‘I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me;’ and, ‘He that has seen Me, has seen the Father,’ and ‘I and the Father are One ;’ but nowhere is He found to call the Father Unoriginate. Moreover, when He teaches us to pray, He says not, ‘When you pray, say, O God Unoriginate,’ but rather, ‘When you pray, say, Our Father, which art in heaven Luke 11:2.’ And it was His will that the Summary of our faith should have the same bearing, in bidding us be baptized, not into the name of Unoriginate and originate, nor into the name of Creator and creature, but into the Name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. For with such an initiation we too, being numbered among works, are made sons, and using the name of the Father, acknowledge from that name the Word also in the Father Himself. A vain thing then is their argument about the term ‘Unoriginate,’ as is now proved, and nothing more than a fantasy.1 

When Athanasius refers to ‘Unoriginate’ he is working against the explicit subordinationism of someone like Arius, and his followers; and even against a softer form of that as seen in the homoiousios thinking of someone like Euseubius of Caeserea. In line with Athanasius, David Kelsey has recently penned the following: 

Most fundamentally, the one referred to in John as “Son” and “Word,” understood to have “become flesh” in the life-trajectory of Jesus of Nazareth, is understood to be the definitive self-expression of God in the economy. So, although placing the “Father” in the lead position in the formula for the Trinity’s relating in creative blessing underscores God the “Father’s” priority in the order of reality, adding that creative blessing comes through the “Son,” who, “taking on flesh,” is the Triune God’s definitive self-expression, underscores Jesus Christ’s priority in the order of human coming to understand and speak of God — to the extent that they can. Indeed, as variously narrated in the four canonical Gospels, it is the very structure of Jesus’ life-trajectory that warrants framing an account of what and who God is in Trinitarian terms. Thus, the Triune God’s relating in creative blessing involves God relating, not only ontologically transcendentally to all that is not God, but also relating self-expressively as one who can be one among many that are not God.2 

We see Kelsey going a step further, at least in this instance, and in step with TF Torrance’s appropriation of Athanasius, and the Nicene theology in general, by identifying the Christ as both the ontological and epistemic ground upon whom God-knowledge is obtained. It just so happens that when God-knowledge is grounded thusly we come to the realization that God is the Father of the Son, and the Son of the Father; and that this whole mysterion reality comes by the hovering over by the Holy Spirit. Not the reality of the Godhead, per se, but our knowledge of the Godhead as that is first given conception by the seed of the woman. Soli Deo Gloria 

 

1 Athanasius, Contra Arianos 1.9.34. 

2 David H. Kelsey, Human Anguish and God’s Power (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 90. Â