Category Archives: Eberhard Jüngel

‘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.

God’s Annihilating and Evangelical Word: With Reference to Eberhard Juengal

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Eberhard Juengal is engaging with the address of God, and the role that language plays in that address. He is appealing to Heidegger and others with reference to how certain language games have functioned in the profane world, in regard to anthropologically and socio-linguistically situating people as people; both within their inner-lives, and as that relates to what it means to be a human being in the world at large. After he develops things along these lines for a bit, he gets to the payoff. He receives these types of profane frameworks, particularly within there existentialist hue, and then reifies them from within a Christian theological frame of reference. He shows how God’s address, God’s language towards us, has an eschatological character to it that resituates us in a right and new relationship with Godself. Juengal writes:

The eschatological character of man’s distancing from himself has an eminently critical dimension. For, to the extent that this distancing surpasses everything which is, everything which is for itself is made nothing. Every word which addresses man about God is, in that sense, a negating or destroying word. It brings about an annihilation in that it surpasses not only our being-here, but also our past and our future. But distanced from himself in such a way, the man addressed about God is brought into a new, ultimate nearness to himself. That is, to be sure, a nearness of the ego to itself which includes its being before God. The New Testament understands this as the presence which is eschatologically oriented through the guarantee of the Holy Spirit.

The word of God which addresses man about God, has, then, an annihilating effect, for the sake of something new. Evangelical theology may not remain silent about the fact that it is destructive. But, and this is what evangelical theology must chiefly speak of, it is destructive only on the basis of the positive fact that God addresses us about himself in such a way that he promises himself to us. One should not understand it in such a way that God would permit what exists to be made nothing in order then to be able to begin all over again from the beginning, so to speak. The reverse is true: because God, in addressing us about himself in such a way that he promotes himself to us, always creates something new, that which is old becomes nothing.[1]

Juengal elaborates further, particularly with how it relates to the respective theologies of Karl Barth and Friedrich Gogarten, in footnote 6 with reference to the above second paragraph:

Thus sin passes away only when it is forgiven; but the forgiveness of sins is always more than the passing away of sin. And in exactly the same way the godless person passes away because he is justified, not in order that he can be justified; the justification of the godless is always more than the passing away of the godless. The actual contrast between the theology of Karl Barth and Friedrich Gogarten appears to me to consist of this contrasting definition of the theological relationship between the passing away and becoming, of death and life, of judgment and grace. See on this the analysis of Gogarten’s writings with special attention to the Luther statements which he cites in W. Hüffmeier, Gott egen Gott; Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zum Gottes- und Todesverständnis Friedrich Gogartens unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Luther-interpretation (Tübingen dissertation, 1972). On this relationship between Barth and Gogarten I refer to the insightful investigation presented by P. Lange in Konkrete Theologie? Karl Barth und Friedrich Gogarten “Zwischen den Zeiten” (1992-1993); Eine theologiegeschichtlich-systematische Untersuchung im Blick auf die Praxis theologischen Verhaltens (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1972). Karl Barth’s dogmatic approach, to define the judgment of God on the basis of grace, that is hermeneutically to say that on the basis of the new the old has become old and passed away (II Cor. 5:17), has been taken up chiefly by Ernst Fuchs and independently developed further hermeneutically.[2]

This hearkens me back to what more contemporarily is being identified by folks like Philip Ziegler, Jamie Davies et al., as Apocalyptic Theology. Essentially, the idea is what I take to be the Pauline idea of God’s disruptive grace (to borrow language from George Hunsinger); that is, that when God addresses us by the Word of God, Jesus Christ, He takes us from our present and visible circumstances, and places us into Himself, in the new creation and resurrected life of Jesus Christ. The result being, that the old is ‘annihilated,’ as it were, as the new has come (and continues to come, and will finally come at the second advent of the Christ). Peter refers to this type of theologizing in this way:

10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.

11 Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, 12 looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt with intense heat! 13 But according to His promise we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells.[3]

As Juengal has underscored for us already, while there is a ‘taking away’ there is also a ‘bringing anew’ that is greater than not less than what has been annihilated in the death of death in Christ. This might remind us of Paul’s thinking when he writes, “17 things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.”[4] So, accordingly, there is a passing away of the shadows, which in themselves couldn’t handle the weight of what was coming as the antitype of its stead. It isn’t that the original and now fallen creation isn’t real, but that its inner reality had always already stood before it, as it was first created for its second recreation in the incarnation, resurrection, ascension, and advent of Jesus Christ. That is to say, the first creation, we might say, the first Adam, was something of a placeholder for the coming of his intended reality, in the archetypal, second and greatest Man, Jesus Christ; indeed, for the first Adam, and for all of the world therefrom.

These, are heavy teachings; who can hear them?!

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf&Stock [reprint], 1983), 175.

[2] Ibid., n. 6.

[3] II Peter 3.10-13, NASB95.

[4] Colossians 2.17, NASB95.

‘The Father’s Theology’: An evangelical theology versus a philosophical theology

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I am a proponent of an evangelical theology. ‘Evangelical’ in the sense that the starting point for theology, I contend, ought to be the Evangel or Gospel Hisself. This is contrary to the philosophical, or hard metaphysical theologies that have characterized much of the Western tradition’s theologizing for centuries (i.e., we could think of Thomas Aquinas all the way into Nietzsche et al.) An ‘evangelical theology’ is a kerygmatic theology; particularly when we understand that the kerygma is the pronouncement and announcement that Jesus is Lord. It is a theology of the Father who declares, “this is my dearly beloved Son, hear Him!”

Eberhard Jüngel gets at these matters in the following way:

These two tasks, to learn to think God and thought anew, cannot be separated from one another theologically. It is therefore all the more important from which of the two tasks one approaches the other one. This question, which requires initial clarification, is in actual fact the issue of the self-understanding of theology itself. The first decision to be made will have to do with the difference between philosophical and evangelical theology. A theology which is responsive to the gospel, meaning a theology which is responsive to the crucified man Jesus as the true God, knows that it is fundamentally different from something like philosophical theology in this one thing: single-mindedly and unswervingly, based on its specific task, it attempts to think God from the encounter with God, and thus to think thought anew. For Christian theology, the decision about what thought means is to be made in relation to the possibility of thinking the God who is an event. The possibility of thinking God is, for evangelical theology, not an arbitrary possibility, but rather a possibility already determined by the existence of the biblical texts and claimed already by faith in God. Theology must think God in the concrete context of a history which, beyond the momentary aspect of the “I think,” implies experiences of God which have happened and are promised.

Evangelical theology is distinguished from philosophy in that it does not desire to be lacking in presuppositions, but rather implies certain decisions in its approach to being evangelical theology. A dialogue with philosophical theology, which is really conceivable only as an argument, or a disputation with atheism, must begin accordingly with the exposition of these hermeneutical decisions of evangelical theology. Only in this way does it proceed in a precise and scientific fashion. And above all, this is the only way for it to be honest.

Evangelical theology explicates its basic decisions immediately as decisions of thought, and not solely as decisions of faith. There is a difference whether faith believes or whether thought also understands this. When thinking becomes involved with faith, it will also understand that God cannot be thought without faith. That is the initial point from which evangelical theology proceeds.[1]

Ultimately, as Juengal intones, a genuine evangelical theology is really grounded in the concrete and blood of the cross of Jesus Christ; it is a theology of the cross versus a theology of glory (i.e., philosophical theology). This is the type of theology I am a proponent of. It makes a decision to be grounded in the “hard teaching” of Jesus Christ, and to begin its theologizing only after God has spoken, and not in some sort of artifactual antecedents discovered by a profane humanity and history (i.e., philosophical theology). So, it isn’t a theology of inherent self-possession, as if postlapsarian humanity has the vestiges of an analogy of God left to them. An evangelical theology understands and takes seriously the reality that humanity, after the fall, lost all capability to think and speak God. It understands that a theology that attempts to think God, prior to encountering God in the face of Jesus Christ, can only conclude in constructing a notion of God that is ultimately a projection of the fallen self; a Superman even. Further, it understands that its theology is one of dispossession and ecstasy, in the sense that it is fully contingent upon God, unilaterally, encountering us, as event, afresh anew, by the Holy Spirit’s fresh breath hovering over us with the re-creation power of the resurrection. The only stability in an evangelical theology is grounded in the subject of theology, who is the Christ and the triune God. Evangelical theology has a vulnerability to it that is willing to be considered foolish and weak; that is based in a God willing to be misunderstood as a mere mortal, hidden in the flesh of a man from Nazareth.

I commend to you an evangelical rather than a philosophical theology. The Gospel is the power of God. The Gospel disrupts and reorientates humanity’s telos towards the God who has spoken in Jesus Christ. The Gospel is dynamic, organic, and relational. Just be an evangelical theologian already, and leave the philosophy to the philosophers.

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf&Stock [reprint], 1983), 154.

Against Speculative Scholastic Theologies: For Confessional Cruciform Theologies

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Being a genuine Christian theologian starts at the point that we become Christians. The same confession made to become a Christian, is the same confession that remains as the ground of our theological witnesses as Christians. The fact of our sin never leaves us. We are constantly sinning, and the person who says otherwise “is a liar and the truth is not in them.” But the Good News, indeed, is that we have an Advocate with the Father; we have a Savior, and His name is Jesus Christ! This is the ground of all Christian theologizing; the only other ground is unbelief. And as Jesus chides the Pharisees of in the Gospel of John, it is seeking the praise of others, rather than God’s praise, that is the core of unbelief. And so, for the true Christian theologian they will always remember that they sin daily, and thus are in need, afresh anew, moment-by-moment, of the fresh in-breath of the Holy Spirit as He brings Christ’s power of resurrection into our lives as the reversal of what would intend to keep us in belief; of what would intend to makes us atheologians rather than genuine theologians (of the cross). Eberhard Jüngel says it this way:

8. Unbelief — inability to speak, and our cry for deliverance

One of the problems of being sinners turned in on ourselves is that we lose our ability to speak our faith. Our guilt makes us dumb. Instead of talking to God, we talk about him. Of course, we can hide our speechlessness behind vapid chattering. The fact remains that we have nothing to say about God. By refusing to utter the one thing we have to says as sinners, our confession of sin, we have nothing at all to say before God or about God. By remaining silent at the wrong time, we are forced to remain completely silent. We can find no words that are true. The sin of unbelief is matched by sinners’ inability to speak before God.

Such speechlessness is the passive dimension of that active urge to relationlessness of which we spoke. It comes home to roost when sinners find themselves unable to speak. And with that inability, sinners suffer the whole lack of substance and insecurity of their sin. They suffer it while alive in the form of a shadow constantly cast over them by death. And they suffer it in death because the silencing of sinners in death is final.

Sinners can only be released from this state of speechlessness by the power of the resurrection. They can only be saved by the vitalizing Spirit of Truth and the Word of Truth bringing forgiveness from guilt. For the Spirit of Truth testifies and the Word of Truth proclaims the encouraging news of forgiveness and blotting out of sins, so that where sin increases, the grace of God abounds all the more (Rom. 5:20b), so much so that it sets sinners free to confess their sin.

A confession of sin of this sort will, of course, not be satisfied with what Peter said: ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man’ (Luke 5:8). Sinners could not have a more foolish reaction. The abundance of divine grace towards the excess of our human need and guilt rather suggests that we pray: ‘Lord, come in to us, for we are sinners!’ Where such a prayer is prayed, in a world full of death and darkness the Christian church emerges, drawing its life from God’s compassion and sharing it with others.

Such a prayer is the only way. It is, in fact, the way which has been given to us to participate in the overcoming of sin, to work together with the grace of God as συνεργοί θεοῦ. Given this one, this unique way, we cannot be synergistic enough. By crying out for forgiveness of sins, for deliverance from evil, for that matchless fellowship with God the Redeemer, sinners are doing the only thing  they can to become justified sinners. To cry out for forgiveness of sins and deliverance from evil, despite the apparent simplicity of such an action, is the one great thing that human beings can do to contribute to their justification by faith alone.[1]

Much to consider, but for our purposes I want to hone in on one aspect that Juengal touches upon: viz., the idea that if the base of our theologizing is not the crux of the Gospel itself, insofar that that crux is ‘He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him,’ then what other theologians speak of is indeed only idle chatter. When the theologian attempts to think God from a theological methodology rooted in speculation, as scholasticism does for example, all said theologian is doing is pretending to talk about God rather than with God. As Juengal rightly identifies, the genuine theologian is one who dialogues with God; the genuine theologian is the one who prays out loud for others to hear; the genuine theologian is the one who, as they speak to God, and as He speaks Himself in Christ back to them by the Spirit, proclaims this Good News con-versation with others. Speculative theologians, and theologies don’t, indeed, cannot do this.

You see, all of this comes back, really, to a theological anthropology; or lack thereof. If a person operates from a Thomist intellectualist anthropology, one wherein the intellect is understood as the definitive component of what it means to be human—indeed, after the notion that God is the Big Brain in the sky—all that the retainer of such anthropology can do is attempt to imagine God, as if God is corollary with their own creatednesss; albeit, by analogy (think, analogia entis). Juengal rightly notes, that such theologizing is only straw ready to be burned at the Bema judgment seat of Christ.

May we be theologians of the cross, rather than theologians of glory. May we do theology as we speak to theology proper in Jesus Christ by the breath of the Holy Spirit. May we repudiate vain speculations and imaginations about God, as if such speculations could be anything other than the self-projections, and thus self-impositions upon a cipher-god that we attempt to force into the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. There is no power in speculative theology, only in the concrete theology pulsating through the veins and flesh of the risen Christ. It is here, at the Right Hand of the Father where genuine Christian theology is done; Christ, living to make intercession for those who have confessed their sin, and from this ground the theologian articulates a theology that is worth shouting from the rooftops!

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (UK: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 145-46.

Eberhard Jüngel on the Humanity of God

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Eberhard Juengal on the humanity of God in Christ:

. . . The event of God’s justifying the ungodly teaches us to recognize his divinity in the act of selfless self-commitment by God. The New Testament calls this selfless commitment by God love – and in particular – love directed towards people. In this selfless commitment, that is, in his love to people, God is righteous, he is ‘OK’, he is consistent with himself. God’s humanity is the clearest expression of his divinity, not a contradiction of it (otherwise, talking of God’s humanity would be a paradox). God does not contradict himself when he is human. Rather, he is consistent with himself when he justifies the ungodly. So, when all is said and done, the subject of the doctrine of justification is the human God.[1]

So, when God acts for us in Christ, as the Man from Nazareth, He is not acting against who He is, but actively expressing who He has always already been as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That’s why Jesus responds, “when you have seen me you have seen the Father.” He is the hidden God made visible in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. It is fitting then that God freely chose to become human for us, insofar that what it means to be human by grace, is coordinate with who He is by eternal nature. He made us as counterpoints to worship and share in His effervescent plenitude of eternal and filial love. Jesus, for us, is the archetypal image of that, image of God, in whose image we have been re-created in, in the resurrection and ascension and coming to come.

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (UK: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 79.

The Christian God is without Proof

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“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

No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him. -John 1:18

For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. 12 For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. -Galatians 1:11-12

16 For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. 17 For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to Him by the Majestic Glory, “This is My beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased”— 18 and we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. -II Peter 1:16-18

The theme of the above passages ought to be apparent: the Christian God is absolutely a revealed God. Knowledge of the Christian God is not grounded in speculation, as we get from the philosophers about the actus purus (‘pure being’). The Christian God, particularly as we encounter Him in the burning book, the Bible, just is. In Holy Scripture Deus dixit (‘God has spoken’), and because He has first spoken, those with eyes to see and ears to hear, have a God who just shows up, and thus we have someone to respond to. We aren’t reliant on an active intuition, or an active intellect in our knowledge of God; we don’t epistemically precede Him only to come to know His ontology as a matter of self-discovery; we don’t speculate like Thomas Aquinas does in his Prima Pars with reference to proving God’s existence five different times. No, we are fully reliant upon the God who simply shows up without explanation; He speaks and does, and thus we have a God to respond to; a God who is allowed to explain who He is for us and with us. Like Job, we simply sit there in our pain and squalor and are confronted with the God who just shows up without explanation. This becomes the Christian’s way, and mode of existence all the days of their lives; viz. we wait on God to speak, and we respond to His speaking by the Spirit in Christ. Eberhard Jüngel captures the sentiment this way:

Regardless of this logical problem, however, Christian theology cannot ask the isolated question about the existence of God. For Christian theology is the explanation of what faith sees itself to be. So it presupposes faith in God and, of course, the existence of God. That is what distinguishes it from philosophy. Schleiermacher was right in demanding that dogmatics match the Scripture and the symbolical books, which ‘do not prove but simply assert’ the existence of God. ‘Dogmatics must therefore presuppose intuitive certainty or faith; and thus, as far as the God-consciousness in general is concerned, what it has to do is not to effect its recognition but to explicate its content.’ The faith which is presupposed by dogmatics is, however, by definition faith in God, revealed in Jesus Christ and revealed as a gracious God.[1]

This kicks against many an apologetic and theological effort to find God in the vestiges of the created order. But if the Christian is going to have a genuinely Christian notion of God it will wait and listen to God as He comes to us afresh anew over and again in the face of His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. This runs counter to the analytically and scholastically minded, whether antique or modern. Nevertheless, this always already is how the genuinely Christian God has been known; that is, through His Self-exegesis in Jesus Christ. Any other attempts at knowledge of the Christian God will necessarily flounder and end up with syntheses that present us with a Feuerbacherian god of self-projection, no matter how hallowed its traditions are.

The industrial theological complex is bent on proving God’s existence as the preamble to their theologizing. It is determined to affirm a natural law, and natural theology wherein its centripetal movement is shaped by its own machinations and genius to think God abstract from God, and then name this abstraction the Christian God after the theologians and philosophers of religion have had adequate time to synthesize this abstraction with the God they finally get to in Holy Scripture. This is not the way, and it should be repented of post-haste.

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (UK/USA: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2001), 46.

Luther against the god of the Philosophers and Descartes on God Knowledge per Juengel

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Knowledge of God and its bases has never been an uncontested thing in theological development and discourse. The Apostle Paul, of course, famously addresses the issue of knowledge of God in Romans 1 which has become the locus classicus for proponents of an ostensible natural theology:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

To appropriate this text as if it just does teach a natural theology, or way of thinking God in a form like Thomas Aquinas’ analogia entis entails—which would be a subset of a natural theology simpliciter—isn’t justified. Those who would simply assert such need to present an argument that Paul is intending to teach that who and what God is, is latent within something like the vestiges of creation.

On a different basis, but as corollary with something like Aquinas’ analogia entis, Rene Descartes attempts to present a certain knowledge of God from his methodological skepticism; thus, doubting everything as a basis for knowing until he gets to himself (so his cogito ergo sum). Descartes is offering his own form of an analogia entis, thinking godness from his idea of God that he has more certainly established by conniving God an epistemic ground founded in his own thinking as a prius to God.

Martin Luther yells a resounding Nein (as does Karl Barth in his own way). Eberhard Jüngel presents an insightful commentary on how Luther differs from Descartes on a theory for a knowledge of God. He writes:

Remaining at the level of rational knowledge of God, for Luther too there is a fundamental cognitive difference between the “that-being” and “what-being” of God, between the ‘existence’ and the ‘essence’ of God: There is “a vast difference between knowing that there is a God and knowing who or what God is.” See Luther, Lectures on the Minor Prophets II: Jonah, Habakkuk (in Luther’s Works, vol. 19), ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1974), p. 55. Whereas Descartes begins with the ‘essence of God’ which is comprehended in the ‘idea of God’ and moves to the ascertainment of the ‘existence of God’ through the ego . . . , Luther takes another route: “Reason . . . knows that there is a God, but it does not know who or which is the true God.. . .” And it is the misfortune of reason overstepping its boundaries that it wants to move from the knowledge that there is a God somehow to the knowledge of who God is, as Luther says: “Thus reason also plays blindman’s buff with God; it consistently gropes in the dark and misses the mark. It calls that God which is not God and fails to call Him God who really is God. Reason would do neither the one nor the other if it were not conscious of the existence of God or if it really knew who and what God is. Therefore it rushes in clumsily an assigns the name God and ascribes the divine honor to its own idea of God. Thus reason never finds the true God, but knows the former [scil. that God exists]—it is inscribed in everybody’s heart; the latter is taught only by the Holy Spirit.. . .” This difference does not obtain for faith. For faith knows that God is in that it experiences who or what God is.[1]

Luther concedes that natural humans have an abstract notion of Godness, but this is where such knowledge of God terminates. Ultimately, it could be inferred, that if this was the basis for a knowledge of God in conclusion, what people would end up with, in regard to filling out this abstract knowledge of Godness, would end up being merely a self-projection of the self onto this ‘natural’ schematizing towards a knowledge of God. For Luther, as Juengel helpfully distills, a genuine knowledge of God is only one that is grounded in the eye of faith. Which if this is the case, and I think it is, presupposes that first the hidden God (Deus absconditus) must come down to us and be with as and be the revealed God (Deus revelatus) for us. This is nothing short of what Barth (and TF Torrance) pick up on, and develop into, in Barth’s case, what he identifies as an analogia fidei/relationis (‘analogy of faith/relation’). But sticking with Luther contra Descartes, per Juengel, reason is incapable of knowing who and then what God is. And we could surmise from this if natural reason is incapable in precisely this way, then constructing a theology proper based upon categories provided for by the [classical] philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle represent, ends up being fool’s errand—a fool’s errand because this method can only lead the seeker of God into an abyss of idolatry (as Ludwig Feuerbach understood so presciently in his own modern context).

On a negative note, I present this to you so that you can more critically read what certain evangelical, Reformed and Lutheran theologians are attempting to recover in the name of an orthodox doctrine of God. They are recovering notional categories for thinking God from the direct heirs, in both the “orthodox” realms of Reformed and Lutheran thinkers, to Thomas Aquinas; and we might add, tangled into this, something like Descartes’ thinking in regard to a certainty towards knowing God. I would strongly recommend to avoid this approach in attempting to think rightly, and thus orthodoxly about the living God. As Luther knew, such intellectualist machinations about God, again, can only finally terminate in a conception of godness that is only able to repose in the notion that some ‘unknown god,’ an abstraction of the human-knower, must certainly exist. And if this ‘ratiocination’ about God is followed, what is left, is for said rationales to say both what and who God is; with an emphasis on the former, as we see fruiting in both Descartes and Thomas.

On a positive note, take heart, for those who seek to know God, as Luther so brightly understood, from the faith of Christ, it is here where the seeker stands on solid ground; as the Apostle has written: “For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” When the Christian builds upon this foundation, the one seen with the faith of Christ, it is thence that the knower of God can genuinely be called such. When we aren’t building cathedrals of knowledge of God that wait upon ‘revelation perfecting reason,’ and instead allow God’s Self-revelation to impose Himself upon us, afresh anew by the Holy Spirit in Christ, it is here that the Christian can confidently proclaim that they see the face (prosopon) of God in Jesus Christ. This is the foundation, God’s being-in-becoming for the world in Jesus Christ that God has freely elected as the basis for the would-be knower of God to genuinely know who (and thus what) He is. And this is the all-important conclusion: that God is the one who has laid the foundation for knowing God in and from Himself, for us in Jesus Christ. He hasn’t left the Christian to be an orphan, or archaeologist attempting to discover God under the rubble of the artifacts of paleo pagan thinkers of a purported ultimacy. No, God has deigned that we know God from God alone in Christ alone by grace alone through faith alone; indeed, the faith of Christ.

I won’t directly address the Romans 1 passage, per se. I will leave that to the reader, and see if they can infer how I “exegeted” that pericope throughout the body of this post. (I have also written other posts that deal directly with that passage vis-à-vis a purported natural theology reading)

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, OR: Wipf&Stock, 1983), 124 n. 53.

Luther’s Kerygmatic God Versus the Speculative god of the Thomists

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The Christian world needs a revival! It needs to come to a genuine knowledge of God. Not a speculative knowledge, as those retrievers of Aquinas would have it; but a concrete known knowledge of God gifted to us in God’s Self-exegesis in Jesus Christ. When God becomes a predicate of a notional ‘godness’ that ‘we’ (think the philosophers) connive, God simply becomes a projection of our own faces (Ludwig Feuerbach knew this well). But this is the God that the evangelical Reformed types these days are introducing people to. Not the God of the Bible revealed in Jesus Christ, but the god of the philosophers, whether that be of Aristotle, Plotinus, or Descartes. The reformational types, if they are going to retrieve anyone, it ought to be a Protestant par excellence, like Luther, rather than the Catholic par excellence, Thomas Aquinas (and the whole mode of philosophical speculation about God that followed).

In the following Eberhard Jüngel offers an insightful comparison between the speculated god of Rene Descartes versus the biblical and concrete God of Martin Luther. As the reader will see, the God of Luther is the kerygmatic God in Jesus Christ.

Remaining at the level of rational knowledge of God, for Luther too there is a fundamental cognitive difference between the “that-being” and “what-being” of God, between the ‘existence’ and the ‘essence’ of God: There is “a vast difference between knowing that there is a God and knowing who or what God is. . . .” Whereas Descartes begins with the ‘essence of God’ which is comprehended in the ‘idea of God’ and moves to the ascertainment of the ‘existence of God’ through the ego . . . , Luther takes another route: “Reason . . . knows that there is a God, but it does not know who or which is the true God. . . .” And it is the misfortune of reason overstepping its boundaries that it wants to move from the knowledge that there is a God somehow to the knowledge of who God is, as Luther says: “Thus reason also plays blindman’s buff with God; it consistently gropes in the dark and misses the mark. It calls that God which is not God and fails to call Him God who really is God. Reason would do neither the one nor the other if it were not conscious of the existence of God or if it really knew who and what God is. Therefore it rushes in clumsily and assigns the name God and ascribes divine honor to its own idea of God. Thus reason never finds the true God, but it finds the devil or its own concept of God ruled by the devil. . . .” For “Nature knows the former [scil. that God exists]—it is inscribed in everybody’s heart; the latter is taught only by the Holy Spirit. . . .” This difference does not obtain for faith. For faith knows that God is in that it experiences who or what God is.[1]

Knowledge of God is, of course!, key to all Christian existence and its theology. Get knowledge of God wrong, and everything subsequent is askew. If knowledge of God isn’t grounded in God’s Self-knowledge given for the world in Jesus Christ, then all that we are left with is a knowledge of God based upon our own whimsical machinations about what godness must be like. If we are left to this mode, the latter iteration, then, in the end, we haven’t been thinking about and talking to the genuine and living God whatsoever; indeed, all that we would have been doing is speaking to ourselves in self-assigned sacrosanct ways. This, I contend, is precisely what the god of Thomism presents the Church with. While this matter is a complex, given intentions and periodization, nonetheless, at an ultimate end what matters is that the Christian gets God right. And the only way to do that is to rely on the God who breaks the philosopher’s god’s back with the weight of His glory as revealed at the cross. Jüngel writes further: “The Cartesian God on the cross—and the cross would collapse! The ‘infinite substance, independent, omniscient, and omnipotent’ is too heavy. And that is its weakness.”[2] Jüngel’s, clearly, is a critique of a Cartesian notional God; I am applying his critique, clearly, to the contemporary Thomists, more broadly. The point of the matter holds true across all philosophers, and their respective notions of godness: they all start with an abstract human reflection about what godness must entail, and then attempt to synthesize the God of the Bible, the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ, with that. But as Jüngel (and Luther et al.) rightly underscores, this presents us with an irradicable contradiction. The God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ breaks the philosopher’s genius by presenting it with an otherworldly sui generis reality that can only be accounted for by the categories of faith as presented in a logic of Grace.

I hope others will come to grasp the gravitas of these things, and stand against the tide of Thomist and other philosophical retrieval being done in the name of Christ and orthodoxy. There is no orthodoxy ‘but Christ and Him crucified,’ and the logic that the ‘wisdom of the Cross’ is suffused with as if from a new logic that contradicts the old. There is a better constructive way to be an ‘orthodox’ Christian while not selling out to the mainstream of revisionist retrieval being done by most evangelical theologians today; and this, on one hand or the other. Show me someone’s prolegomena, and “what” or “who” their God is will become immediately clear. Let’s be good Protestants, anyway.

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock [Reprint], 2009), 124 n. 53.

[2] Ibid., 123.

The Lutheran Connection with TF Torrance: The Kerygmatic Christ as the Concentration

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The Gospels of the New Testament witness all present Jesus via His historicity, and the facts of His life as they unfolded in particular frames of reference. John the evangelist ended his Gospel with the quip, “And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen.” Clearly, Jesus was a historical personage, but this is not how the Christian has come to know Him at a first order; nor is it the way that the Evangelists of the Gospels present Him. They, all along the way, were hard pressed to see past the ‘veil,’ so to speak, of Christ’s humanity; indeed, His “historicity,” His “flesh-and-blood-ness” made Him so vulnerable to be mis-taken, that His disciples themselves mis-took Him for most of their time with Him. There were those rare moments, Matthew 16, and Peter’s confession, and Matthew 17, the Mount of Transfiguration, come to mind, where they seemed to be ‘getting it,’ but then His kenotic flesh hid His glorified personhood from them once again. It wasn’t until after the Spirit came, who Jesus said would bear witness to Him, and teach them many things (cf. Jn 14—16; 20 etc.), about just who and what Jesus was, and remains as the Son of David and the eternal Logos. The Spirit taught the Evangelists that Jesus, in His person, is the Deus absconditus (hidden God) who is Deus revelatus (revealed God). In other words, the Evangelists’ offer a depth-dimensional interpretation of who Jesus is and what He is about in regard to the eternal purposes of God made historical and concrete in the particularity of the scandal of God’s cross.

Thomas Torrance offers a profound word on this reality, in regard to the “Jesus of faith” as that relates to the “Jesus of history.” He points out that to know the Christ, for the Christian, is to first know the Son of God made human (and thus historical) for us. He presses the notion that when we are confronted with Jesus, we are confronted with a way to think both history and eternity together, but to think it from the eternity of God for the world such that that eternity is freely shaped by His election to be God with us (Immanuel) rather than against us. Torrance writes:

All this means that any Christological approach that starts from the man Jesus, from the historical Jesus, and tries to pass over to God, and so to link human nature to God, is utterly impossible. In fact it is essentially a wrong act: for it runs directly counter to God’s act of grace which has joined God to humanity in Christ. All Attempts to understand Jesus Christ by starting off with the historical Jesus utterly fail; they are unable to pass over from man to God and moreover to pass man to God in such a way as not to leave man behind all together, and in so doing they deny the humanity of Jesus. Thus though Ebionite christologies all seek to go from the historical Jesus to God, they can make that movement only by denying the humanity of Jesus, that is by cutting off their starting point, and so they reveal themselves as illusion, and the possibility of going from man to God is revealed as likewise illusory.

No, it is quite clear that unless we are to falsify the facts from the very start, we must face with utter and candid honesty the New Testament presentation of Christ to us, not as a purely historical figure, nor as a purely transcendental theophany, but as God and man. Only if we start from that duality in which God himself has already joined God and man, can we think God and humanity together, can we pass from man to God and from God to man, and all the time be strictly scientific in allowing ourselves to be determined by the nature of the object.[1]

Interestingly, it isn’t just the Reformed, like Torrance who thinks this way about the approach of the Christian vis-à-vis the Christological reality as that relates to a knowledge of God, and thus everything. Both Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, as Eberhard Juengal identifies, offer similar thinking with reference to thinking God in Christ not purely as a datum of history, but a dandum of God’s free gift of Himself for the world. Luther writes:

He gives utterance not only to things [res], but also to the use [usus] which things are to be put to. For many preach Christ, but in such a way that they neither recognize nor express his ways and his miracles . . .  as do most of those preachers who only preach the stories of Christ, when they are preaching at their best. But it is not Christian preaching when you preach Christ only from a historical point of view; that is no proclaiming the glory of God. But this is: when you teach that Christ’s story refers to its usefulness for us as believers unto righteousness and salvation. That is [then], that he accomplished all not for himself, but for us by the will of God the Father, so that we may know that everything that is in Christ belongs to us.[2]

The connection between what Luther is getting at and Torrance isn’t one-for-one, but the basic premise between the two is significant. The point: that attempting to think Jesus Christ from a purely historicist angle simply fails precisely because of who Jesus is, and thus remains to be for us. He isn’t a relic of history, He was never history’s accident, instead He is the risen Christ who has kerygmatic thrust, evangelical power for us now; ‘if this be not true we are of most people to be pitied.’

Melanchthon, Luther’s colleague, writes something very similar, in spirit, to both Luther and Torrance:

Thus the faith which makes us pious and righteous in the eyes of God is not just this, that I know the history, how Christ was born, suffered (the devils know this too); no, faith is the certainty or the sure, strong trust in the heart that with my whole heart I take God’s promises to be sure and true, by which are offered to me without any merit of mine forgiveness of sins, grace and full salvation through Christ the Mediator. And so that no-one can say it is simply a matter of knowing history, I will add: faith is this, that my whole heart accepts that same treasure. This is not my doing, nor my gift or offering, not my work or preparation. It is [simply] that a heart takes for its consolation and trusts in the fact that God grants and gives to us, not we to him, that he pours all the riches of grace upon us in Christ.[3]

We are visiting different contexts, at least with reference to Torrance in juxtaposition with Luther and Melanchthon, but the main premise is present in all three: viz. that to know Christ is to not to know a relic of religious history and phenomena, but to know Christ is to know Him presently in our midst, as the ground of our life and being in all things.

It is this ‘Christological confessionalism’ that has always attended the liveliness of the Church’s vitality in the world. Insofar that the Christus praesens (to riff a phrase) is not the reality; insofar that the risen Christ is merely thought of in ‘secular’ or profane terms, this is where the Church ceases being the Church, and instead slips into being another social club in the culture writ large. When Christological concentration is not the focus of the Church’s teaching and theologians, when her disciples fall into a following of a Christ of history, without first understanding that He is the Christ of God’s faith for us, it is at this point that the Church becomes just one more platitude of human self-projection; it is at this point that the Church becomes an idol wherein its people come to see their reflection as their idol’s, a christ of an abstract and desolate history. In order for the liveliness of the Church to be always present, she must repose in the strong reality that Jesus Christ is indeed risen, present, and active as the eternally present for us Theanthropos, Godman.

We would do well to follow the leads of Torrance, Luther, and Melanchthon in their respective Christological concentrations. In the end, the Eschaton, the Christian, if they hadn’t prior, will come to recognize that this is the focus that dominates all of heaven, and at that point the entirety of all creation, including the rocks, will cry out that Jesus is King!

 

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation, edited by Robert Walker, 10.

[2] M. Luther, Operationes in Psalms, 1519-21, WA 5, 543, 13-21 cited by Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2001), 29.

[3] Philip Melanchthon, Apology of the Augsburg Confession, cited by Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2001), 29-30 n. 46.

 

Self-Justification as the Warp and Woof of Edenic Ejaculation

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The notion of ‘being justified’ is an inherently Christian notion, at least in the West (but I’d argue, globally). Our grammars for thinking life, the secular/sacred divide is no matter, come to all of us through a Christian lens. But even prior to that, in a chronological (and logical) sense, the desire to be ‘justified,’ one way or the other, presupposes someone we are seeking to be justified before, even if that someone reduces to ourselves. Nonetheless, I find this ethos, this pathos even, to be rather stunning when paused upon for reflection. Eberhard Juengal writes:

Wanting to justify yourself is one thing; having to justify yourself is quite another. The fact that people want to justify their conduct, their behaviour, their past life and their claim to a future life is linked with the fact that people require recognition. It is essential for people to be recognized. Their personhood depends on it. As human beings we demand recognition of ourselves. The wish for justification has its source in this basic human need for recognition.[1]

The thirst for recognition abstracted from its proper taxis or order vis-à-vis God results in what we see all around us in the world, in an increasing manner. People will reach to all manner of heights and depths in an attempt to rationalize and thus justify their actions before others; but in particular people are really attempting to justify themselves to themselves. This is the ultimate turn-to-the-subject of Edenic orientation. Humanity is awash in concupiscence, to the point that self-love terminates in all mechanisms of unimaginable self-destruction and its institutionalization as the fabric of the societies.

I simply wanted to register this rather obvious, but often overlooked fact that humans, by nature—as that nature has ultimately been given telos in the humanity of Jesus Christ (who is the imago Dei for us)—are driven to find justification or recognition by someone else; typically, someone outside of them, in order to find solace and validation in their own sense of self-justification. Human beings have taken their own Edenic self-theosis to its logical conclusion. We see ourselves, outwith Jesus Christ’s intervention by the Holy Spirit, as the terminus, as the end of all that is and will be (for us). As such, we end up inhabiting these vicious circles of self-manipulation, convincing ourselves that no matter what our own particular tastes and dastardly proclivities might be, that we are “okay,” in fact we are justified!

The only antidote to the turn to self-justification is to repent!; to recognize this one eternal and everlasting reality: viz. God is God.

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2001), 6-7.