Category Archives: Modern Theology

Barth, Bobby, and a Trinitarian Pietism

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… This means that in spite of all his undeniable efforts to move away from Pietism, Barth was clearly too closely attached to it to be able to attack the innermost bastion of Pietism held by his reviewers. In the following section we will elaborate on the decisive point where he was still closely attached to Pietism in spite of everything.”

-Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth & the Pietists, trans. by Daniel W. Bloesch (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2004), 65.

This is probably another reason I have so resonated with Barth over the years. My background, of course!, as an evangelical in North America, is indeed, Pietistic. But Pietism, of a certain ilk, has some “Enlightened” problems; particularly, as that involves a turn to the subject (a navel-gazing spirituality). And yet, Pietism, insofar that it thinks of God as Father of the Son in the bond of love by the Holy Spirit, it is this kind of trinitarian Pietism that indeed has the right relational (and catholic) focus. I think Barth operates with this type of trinitarian Pietism, as I also attempt to.

Barth’s Leibniz on an Anthropology and Nothingness

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As I continue on with my linear read through of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics I have come across a small print section in CD III/3 §50, 30 wherein Barth is engaging with a doctrine of nothingness/sin. In this particular section he is commiserating with that Teutonic, Leibniz’s understanding on such matters. Without providing the necessary context I am simply going to drop some of my reflection on this following:

Leibniz’s anthropology, according to Barth’s reading, was highly monistic in regard to what it means to be human vis a vis God’s perfections. Indeed, a rather dreary prospect for the Eschaton. In the sense, that humanity by its necessary constitution must always live with the negation of privation within themselves in order to remain creaturely. But this would mean that a genuine participation or beatific vision in the eschatological life would never obtain. Because for Barth’s Leibniz, if such obtainment were to occur this would mean that humanity has crossed the Rubicon of divinity; viz., humanity would not just be like the Son, the eternal Logos, by grace, but by nature. So, true perfection, in Leibniz’s frame, always must remain out of reach insofar that what it means to be human for him, to be creaturely, is to always already have an in-built imperfection of the good as the primary component of what it means to be human.

Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled.

The Dysteological Spirit as Parody of the Holy Spirit

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Telford Work in his chapter on mapping a modern view of the Holy Spirit offers a really nice index of how that gets expressed under the pressures of secularism. Let me share how he sketches that; this is under a section he calls a Dysteological Pneumatology (think something like a Dystopian doctrine of the Spirit).

For Nietzsche these spirits are individual wills vying for power. For Freud they are the dark psychological forces that drives single minds and whole civilizations. Among humanity’s countless groups and subgroups they are the countless human structures that Paul calls stoicheia or “elements” of the world (Gal. 4:3) and that Walter Wink associates with the New Testament’s powers and principalities. For neo-Darwinians, who posit a never-ending biological flux in a world of change and adaptation, they can be the ephemeral species themselves, their ecosystems, the whole evolving biosphere, genes, or individual specimens.

The world’s spirits are thus embedded in an eternal struggle with one another and with the world that creates and destroys them. The cosmology of dysteological modernity is pluralist, pagan, and ultimately nihilist. Ambition, shame, and envy rule the lives of individuals, families, empires, oppressed peoples, cultures, gangs, parties, and businesses—not because of original sin, because that has been dismissed out of hand, but because it is simply how things are. The power of this vision is as immense as its varieties are innumerable. Only a few prominent ones need mentioning: Social Darwinism makes “survival of the fittest” into a social ethic, to the point of imposing empire upon and even sterilizing the weak. National Socialism elevates the honor of a Volk (a people or race) above all human decency. Corporatism forges alliances between ruling parties and business, labor, and advocacy groups. Environmentalism weighs the conviction that ecological destruction ill serves humanity against its suspicion that the reality problem is humanity itself. Prejudice marginalizes whole groups in order to privilege others; meritocracy tries to defuse it by setting achievers against one another in a competition for access to power; affirmative action and then multiculturalism have turned the tables on the old winners in the name of justice.[1]

The secular has been so tightly woven into the fabric of global society that it can be difficult to disentangle this thread from that, and recognize just how diffuse these fallen Nietzschean and Hegelian spirits are throughout the sectors of the world; even our churches. But these are the spirits, who started out as the Holy Spirit (that is by way of the notion that the devil seeks to emulate in his perverse way), who we are contending with each and everyday in our society at large. Whether the spirit is diluted into the waters of the seemingly mundane of day-to-day life, or more extravagantly, into the shakers and movers of geopolitical maneuvering, they have a certain dark and even demonic yield that stands behind them. The demonic, or even more pointedly, the satanic nature of it all can be observed in its parody. That’s how the satan works; he is not an original thinker, so he attempts to take the Holy, parody it into more palatable visions—palatable to his already secular empire—and sell it to his squads of people in either romantic historical dress, or in just straight up brute materialist in your face reality.

What should stand out though, as we engage with Work’s work, is that the seedlings behind the secular are not areligious, atheological, or aChristian. They are highly religious, highly theological, even highly Christian by way of original orientation. And so, it ought to betake the Christians, of all people, to have the capacity and vivacity, to spot these false spirits, parading as the Holy Spirit, and exorcise them for what they are; indeed, the spirit[s] of antiChrist.

[1] Telford Work, “Pneumatology,” in Kelly M. Kapic and Bruce L. McCormack, eds., Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2012), 236–37.

‘Once he doubts himself, the abyss yawns’: The Clash of the Gospel with the Enlightened

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It is true that on the Deist view, God can also help us in another way. The very contemplation of his goodness in his works inspires us, and energizes us to do his will.

Thus as the calm and most extensive determination of the soul towards the universal happiness can have no other centre of rest and joy than the original independent omnipotent Goodness; so without the knowledge of it, and the most ardent love and resignation to it, the soul cannot attain to its most stable and highest perfection and excellence. [Frances Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, p. 217]

The strength that this can impart to us is not negligible, and perhaps most people will recognize the need for some source like this. But having got this far, it is not clear why something of the same inspiring power cannot come from the contemplation of the order of nature itself, without reference to a Creator. And this idea has recurred in exclusive humanisms.

And so exclusive humanism could take hold, as more than a theory held by a tiny minority, but as a more and more viable spiritual outlook. There needed two conditions for its appearance: the negative one, that the enchanted world fade; and also the positive one, that a viable conception of our highest spiritual and moral aspirations arise such that we could conceive of doing without God in acknowledging and pursuing them. This came about in the ethic of imposed order (which also played an essential role in disenchantment), and in an experience with this ethic which made it seem possible to rely exclusively on intra-human powers to carry it through. The points at which God had seemed an indispensable source for this ordering power were the ones which began to fade and become invisible. The hitherto unthought became unthinkable.[1]

 

The world continues to live out the fallout produced by the so-called Enlightenment that took place in the 17th and 18th centuries. This new ‘come-of-age’ Gospel has spread far and wide, conquering in many ways, both the West and East. As Charles Taylor likes to say, the secular age is the age of ‘disenchantment’; he identifies this as a major feature of the rise of modernity, post-Enlightenment, which has heretofore led to the current cultural malaise of noxious normative relativism we currently are confronted with on a day-to-day basis. So, this is true; we do inhabit such a world, a world that has ostensibly been exorcised of all of its superstitious ghouls, goblins, and demons; a purely reductive-physicalist and materialist world-explanation.

People in the world today, inclusive of many un-critical Christians, like to think hard-and-fast from the periodization, the slicing and dicing, the Lessing’s ditch of history in such a way that we can tightly conscribe each period of history to some sort of linearly profuse and evolutionary progress of, indeed, coming-of-age. But in reality, to think this way is really only a function of the modernization of the human intellect in the 21st century (and other prior centuries). The Christianly way to think is to think coram Deo, and to understand how God has read and diagnosed the world-situation. To think Christianly, of course, is to think the world from the wisdom of the cross of Jesus Christ. This was God’s pronouncement on all of human postlapsarian history. It required a death, burial, resurrection and ascension of a re-created humanity, in the vicarious humanity of God for us in Jesus Christ, in order to disrupt a human order truly devoid of the Holy Spirit. In this light the Apostle Paul calls the Christian, whether in 1st century Graeco-Roma, or in 21st century globalist society, to do the following: “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”[2]

With the aforementioned tantalized, let’s hear from Karl Barth as he describes how this ‘coming-of-age’ of 18th century Enlightenment optimism clashes with a genuinely lived Christian existence before the living God:

The classical man of the 18th century has this self-confidence, or he believes that he should behave as if he had. The optimistic thesis stands or falls with his absolutism (I am the state). For its sustaining it does not really need either the universe or God. It is valid a priori. Its only primary and essential need is man, who as such stands on the same level with the universe and God, who is able to treat with both on equal terms, and who therefore takes it upon himself to declare the world good in the light of his own goodness. Does he need God in this task? Obviously, only in the second place. The optimists did make use of God, and to their annoyance and disgust the atheists did not. But the optimists, as the system of Wolff reveals,, made use of Him only as an afterthought and not essentially. At a pinch human perfection could be content to be reflected only in the perfection of the world. God could be used but He was not essential. For in spite of all the superlatives there was not to be found in the perfection of God anything basically new or different from that of man. It is undoubtedly the central weakness of the optimistic thesis that it is undertaken in this sovereignty of man it must really be sustained in the same way. It cannot possibly be presented on the basis of divine power and authority, but at best only with a maximum of human self-confidence. Trusting confidently in himself, regarding his five senses and reasoning intelligence and emotional sensibility as his only and secure guide, optimistic man was bold to take the step which according to his philosophy he had to take on this basis, not only distinguishing between good and evil, salvation and perdition, life and death, but also co-ordinating all things, defining and proclaiming the superiority of the one to the other, the victory of light over darkness, and thus rolling away the stone from the entrance to the tomb. That the whole darker side of life consists only in a lack of that which is perfect in itself, that its essential insignificance can be recognized ever more plainly in the freedom of growing knowledge—this triumphant assertion had to be maintained and proved and lived out on his initiative and in his own strength. Nothing could be expected from the Bearer of the divine name, for He had played only an incidental and non-essential role in the framing of the assertion. We recall that in face of the world and man His position is only that of a clockmaker rejoicing in his craft. He has nothing to do directly with the changes in the world within which the life of man is lived. It is a part of the perfection of man and the world that God should be content with a minimum of direct participation in the historical process. Why did not Wolff say point blank that God will refrain from any direct participation? There is certainly no compelling reason to count on it, nor can any promise be given of divine participation in the world of becoming. All that man can be told is that he must use his reason, express his feelings and exercise his will. In fact, the Gospel of optimism can be preached to him only as a system of Law. God will help him only as and to the extent that he helps himself. He is placed in a position of fearful loneliness. For whether he believes in God or not, his relationship to the world is poised on his self-confidence. Existence is rational as and to the extent that he himself is rational. Once he doubts himself, the abyss yawns. From this standpoint we can understand the puppet-like respectability of this man, his stiff rectitude, the outward constraint and narrowness which are so little in keeping with his inner absolutism, the artificial dignity of his bearing. In all these things there is plainly betrayed the anxiety which inevitably accompanies his fundamentally godless self-confidence and its audacities. The scorn and ridicule which the “Sturm und Drang” and the Romantics later heaped upon this attitude were quite uncalled for. Liberation from the conventions of fathers and grandfathers was one thing, but what about the underlying anxiety which had made these conventions necessary? And what about the godless self-confidence which was the real root of this anxiety? But however that may be, the Christian affirmation of the goodness of creation is not menaced by anxiety, and does not need to express itself with this rigidity, because it has nothing whatever to do with that sort of self-confidence. It is based unequivocally on the judgment of the Creator God. It simply expresses that which in obedience to His will must be expressed in relation to His self-revealing activity in the created world. It is not spontaneous exclamation of man proving the world, himself and the world to be grounded. For the God whom it invokes is not the supreme being who may or may not be drawn into the reckoning and referred to, but the free Lord of man and the world who makes Himself responsible for their character, and has disclosed Himself as the Bearer of this responsibility. It is on this basis of His revealed decision that in Christian faith Yes is said to the world, a Yes which is deeply aware of the No, the No being contradicted as the nothingness which it is recognised to be. It may well be that ultimately the optimists of the 18th century meant to echo this divine Yes, this divine overcoming of the No by the Yes. In so far as that was the case, they unconsciously and involuntarily proclaimed an imperishable truth. But in any event they did so most confusedly. And to that extent the Christian affirmation stands out in marked distinction.[3]

Selah

[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2007), 233-34 kindle.

[2] Romans 12.1-2, NASB95.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §42 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 404-06.

Playing God in the Place of God

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I think perspective is one of the most important components towards thinking rightly about God and self. We can’t, as Calvin has rightly emphasized, have a right perspective of ourselves and all of created reality without having perspective from God’s eyes in Christ. And it is an aspect of this kind of perspective that I think Karl Barth provides for us as he simply sketches some of the history that has led us to where we are in the Western world today. Here is Barth highlighting the situation of 18th century man, as a man who seemingly has the world at his fingertips, and yet as a man who really is only, in the end, grasping at the wind; here is Barth:

We have considered the political problem presented by the eighteenth century in particular detail because it is from the political angle that the eighteenth century can be seen most clearly as a whole. Let us now proceed to the attempt to comprehend it under two other aspects which present a less definite picture—the inner and outer forms imparted to life by man as he lived at that time.

By that external form which life has in any age I meant that particular element in its cultural aims and achievements which is evinced fairly consistently throughout its various expressions. Consequently it is possible to identify, with some precision, from the documents of any one of the expressions of this element, the tendency, nature and spirit of its other expressions, and so of the culture of the time as a whole. If there is such an external cast for the eighteenth century, and one that we can identify, it is perhaps most allowable to comprehend it in terms of a striving to reduce everything to an absolute form. Inanimate nature especially, in all its realms, but man’s somatic existence too, the sound that could be spontaneously called forth, with all the possibilities for coloration and different rhythmic patterns which it presented, human language in all its adaptability as a means of expression, social intercourse, individual development and the individual in relation to society—all this abundance of things provided is in the eyes of eighteenth-century man a mass of raw material, of which he believes himself to be the master. This material he confronts as he who has all the knowledge: knowledge of the form, the intrinsically right, fitting, worthy, beautiful form for which all the things provided are clearly intended to be the material, for which they are obviously crying out, and into which, as is plain, they must be brought with all the speed, artistry and energy man has at his command….[1]

I think the thing that stands out most to me from the quote is Barth’s point about man being master over creation. This is different from being a steward, or Thomas Torrance’s ‘Priest’ over creation. It is different because in this account, the one Barth is sketching of eighteenth century man, man believes himself to be autonomous, standing on his own two feet, without any help from a so called god.

We live in a world filled with people seeking to be the masters of their domain—whatever that domain might be—and it is in this pursuit that man becomes entangled with the concerns of this world (and not God’s) in such a way that he or she skips off of the true glory of God (death to self), and instead magnifies his own projected arrogance that he or she thinks defines their existential value in this world.

The bottom line is that we are either for Christ, or against him. If the latter, we will replace the living God and master with the mastering voice of our own head, and our own perceived image. Without God in Christ breaking into this vicious myopic circle, man would be hopeless, left in his sins. We are not the masters.

 

[1] Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 40-1.

 

Balaam’s Ass and Ludwig Feuerbach: Critiquing the Idol-God

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Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher (if his name didn’t give it away), offered a critique of religion, particularly the Christian religion, that ought to have weight as we self-criticize our own understanding of God. Karl Barth took Feuerbach’s critique to heart as he saw in it a critique of natural theology. Here is a key passage from Feuerbach that synopsizes his critique:

Religion, at least the Christian, is the relation of man to himself, or more correctly to his own nature (i.e., his subjective nature); but a relation of it, viewed as a nature apart from his own. The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective—i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.[1]

For Feuerbach God is simply a self-projection of the inner-man. Ironically, what people like Feuerbach et al. are doing is simply living out the metanarrative of Genesis 3, and the original serpentine lie. That we can be like, or construct God or gods.

But here’s where this becomes relevant, particularly for Christians in the main. Insofar that Christians attempt to imbibe the culture, even if in the name of Jesus, they end up, like the culture at large, under the influence of someone like Feuerbach; self-projecting a notion of God who confirms them in their inner-desires. In other words, they are living the life of an idolater, even in the name of Jesus Christ (which is the actual way the LORD’s name is taken in vain). Further, when people abandon the Christian faith it is because they recognize or ‘feel’ (subconsciously) that the God they have been worshipping is no longer needed, since He already affirms all of their wants or desires anyway; or, because the God they are presented with comes from the self-projections of the philosophers, and thus cannot actually live up to what the Gospel claims to be as the power of God.

Barth was right to appropriate Feuerbach, since all Feuerbach was doing, from his materialistic vantage point, was confronting the idolatry of the human heart. If God can speak through Balaam’s ass, He can speak through Ludwig Feuerbach.

[1] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 14.

The Hellenic, the Neo-Thomist Origins of Modernity

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When Divine grace is separated from its reality in God, when grace becomes a thing, a substance, a quality infused into the accidents of humanity, it is only one small step removed from being integrated into the essence of what it means to be human. If this step is taken, and it has been in the ‘modern-turn,’ the turn-to-the-subject, the Gifter of grace no longer remains necessary, in a transcendent sense, as grace becomes materialized, immanentized, horizontalized into an ‘immanent frame,’ as Charles Taylor grammarizes. Indeed, Taylor writes with reference to what it means to be human in a frame wherein grace has become the possession, the generative reality of what it means to be a self-determined, self-constructed modern person in the 21st century:

There is another facet of this narrative of secularity which it is worth mentioning here, because of its ubiquity and importance in the “closed” spin on immanence. The story line here is this: once human beings took their norms, their goods, their standards of ultimate value from an authority outside of themselves; from God, or the gods, or the nature of Being or the cosmos. But then they came to see that these higher authorities were their own fictions, and they realized that they had to establish their norms and values for themselves, on their own authority. This is a radicalization of the coming to adulthood story as it figures in the science-driven argument for materialism. It is not just that freed from illusion, humans come to establish true facts about the world. It is also that they come to dictate the ultimate values by which they live.1

Once the secular person came to imagine, through their new ‘social imaginary’ (cf. Taylor) that in fact the classical God was really just a projection of their own imagination, an inner to outer extrapolation of their best selves onto a cipher by which they might live and adjudicate life, they were able to bring diremption for themselves and determine that in fact they were God and thus gods after all. What secularism ultimately brings, this ostensible ‘come of age’ moment, is really just another expression of polytheism, a serpentine belief that humanity itself possesses godness, and thus are the creators of their own reality and existence (in a world where existence and essence have become a singular reality).

As I suggested at the beginning there is a theological origin story behind the secular-turn. Ironically, this turn has a Christian source, albeit as that source has been dressed down by a synthesis of Christian theology with speculative philosophical categories; such categories derived from the classical philosophers like Aristotle et al. The abstraction of grace from the giver or reality of grace, God, takes form most notably in the Catholic theology of Thomas Aquinas. Here we finally get a codification of a burgeoning philosophical frame baptized in the Holy water of the Church. It is the notion of ‘quality’ that takes decisive stage, or in fact ‘substance’ within an Aristotelian frame whereby Divine grace comes to lose its Divine character, at least in the sense that its reality is necessarily grounded in the triune being of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Once this move is made, as I asserted earlier, we are only a few small steps, a few small centuries away from ‘coming of age,’ among other contributing factors during and post-Enlightenment. But I find this abstraction of grace from the Divine life to be an interesting development towards modernity, ironically, even as that is given dye within the early mediaeval and Catholic sitz im leben of Thomas Aquinas (and those who received him, whether Catholic or Protestant Reformational). Helmut Thielicke describes the scenario this way:

We can see clearly at this point that what takes place in man, and not merely what happens to him, has become the object of theological observation. It is again evident, as was clear already with respect to the concept of the imago Dei in man’s original state, that the ontic element in the human ego pushes itself into the foreground. Then the theme of theology is not just the relation between God and man; on the contrary, theology then includes as an independent concern a treatment of “anthropology.” Here is where the fault lies.

The crack, or better, the cracks are themselves produced by the belt of tension which necessarily arises where men attempt to combine ontological and personalistic thinking. The greatest strain and the most evident rupture are undoubtedly to be found at the place where grace ceases to be a divine attribute and becomes an effect distinct from the divine attribute from which it emanates, ie, where grace ceases to be a personal relation to man (the “gracious God”) and becomes something which is ontically infused into man and which is thus present in man, demonstrably present. For it is precisely this distinction between the gracious God and the grace given [gratia data] which is the starting point of the distinctively “Roman” development of the doctrine of grace. To put it epigrammatically and therefore with tongue in cheek, what men want is not primarily God himself, but “divine powers which may become human virtues and qualities” (von Harnack). At this point where grace “visibly” passes into man in accordance with certain well defined practices, eg, sacramental operation, it ceases to be exclusively a subject and becomes a material object, “medicine.” This materialization expresses itself in a variety of ways . . . .2

It would surely be reductionistic to blame Thomas and Aristotle for the modern-turn to the self, and what Taylor identifies as ‘the coming of adulthood story.’ That is not my intention. I am simply noticing a Christian turn made at least within the lifetime of early mediaeval developments, that can plausibly help explain how this ‘enlightened-turn’ finally came to fruition. There are many other contributing ideational and socio-culture pressures that finally brought this turn to consummation, but I think it is notable that we already see these fault lines developing as far back as the Hellenic period of the classical philosophers; and then developed more Christianly with the arrival of Thomas and the Romans.

I am only minimally attempting to illustrate how secular ideas can be traced back to a Christian lineage. Charles Taylor, Michael Gillespie, my personal friend, Derrick Peterson, among others have done further work, more substantially, to demonstrate that my point is not ill founded. Christians have as much to do with the secularity of society as anyone else. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that what it means to be a secular-atheist in the 21st century is really just an expression of a Christian heresy that has attended the Church catholic by way of various expressions; whether those expressions be understood within the Church proper, or in society-at-large as the theater of humanity’s glory, albeit, devoid of the Spirit. Ultimately, when grace is abstracted from God and made a quality capable of being understood purely from the immanent frame of the ‘flatlander,’ it is at this point that Genesis 3 once again receives breath to breathe and make another attempt to elevate itself with zigguartic flare to the ‘high places’ of the living God.

 

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 580 kindle.

2 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 238.

 

 

Collapsing the Risen Jesus into Mini-Me jesuses: Why Modern Humans Fear the Truth

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Modern philosophy, modern humankind is afraid of the Truth, according to Hegel. It’s because modern humanity is oriented by a turn-to-the-subjectivism. Of course, this fear has an antecedent source that transcends all periodization (cf. Gen. 3); it is humanity’s lapsed fear that an external reality (extra nos) will confront them in all their ‘godness,’ and tell them that they are No-God; and that the gods they worship are just self-projections of their deepest and most innate desires. Hegel, of course, was working between the antinomies set forth by Kant et al. wherein there is a rupture between the subjectivity of the phenomenal, and the objectivity of the noumenal. Hegel’s was an attempt to broach this dualistic impasse by thinking noumenal and phenomenal worlds together into a dialectic relief mediated by his notion of Geist (or spirit). But I don’t want to go down that rabbit trail too much, instead I simply want to highlight a thought that Michael Gillespie has, as he develops Hegel’s thought, more broadly, and in the process underscores how and why modern people fear the truth. In a nutshell: they don’t want their self-constructed worlds disrupted by something or someOne they didn’t have a hand in developing:

Why then does modern philosophy fear the truth that provides the basis for such a reconciliation? One might assume that this fear is the result of the real or perceived danger that religion and religious zeal or fanaticism pose to social and political peace. Hegel, however, discounts such an interpretation. The real danger to man lies not in the fanaticism of religion but in the fanaticism of revolutionary freedom and the tyranny of nature in bourgeois society. Modern philosophy fears the truth in Hegel’s view not because the truth is dangerous but because the truth upsets the world of satisfaction, i.e., the real of subjectivism that finds everywhere and always only what it wants to find, the world in which all standards are established by the individual himself, the world governed by unfettered natural desire or the emptiness of the categorical imperative and public opinion. Modern philosophy fears the truth in Hegel’s view because the truth means absolute knowledge and hence absolute standards that cannot be overturned by the caprice of passions and opinions. Modern philosophy is thus perhaps distraught by the lack of a real ground, but it fears an absolute science more than the abyss of diremption and alienation. Modern philosophy thus remains fundamentally subjectivistic and relativistic.[1]

More theologically we could cast what Gillespie is describing, under the Hegelian mantle that he is, as an intellectual Pelagianism. It is the desire of human beings to be the masters’ of their universes and destinies. Even in so-called collectivist communities, like we ostensibly find among the disenfranchised who make-up neo-Marxist communios, ultimately, the vision people have is driven by an inner-self-constructed reality that the individual, even in collectivist mode, constructs ex nihilo out of their own fertile imaginations. This is the stuff of critical theory. The idea that human beings have the ontological and noetic capacities to discern what went wrong, and how to fix it; without recourse to an ‘absolute’ notion of truth—and definitely without recourse to the living and Triune God. Ironically, as Gillespie has argued in another one of his books—Theological Origins of Modernity—all that humanity has done, which Christians know from Genesis 3, is methodologically collapse the attributes of the Christian God into themselves. Ultimately, they haven’t constructed anything, they have simply attempted to rip-off God’s glory, and attribute that glory to themselves. It is out of this vacuum, this rupture wherein the modern person has humorously, but tragically thought themselves the standard of all that is right and holy in the cosmos. The point: they haven’t imagined anything, they have simply stolen the material God genuinely constructed ex nihilo, and attempted to recreate a world out of that matter—this is natural theology.

All the chaos we see in the world can be explained by this intellectual (and spiritual) phenomena. It is the world attempting to be their own particularized jesus christs, motivated by the belief that they, by themselves, even in collection, can construct a situation wherein they, in themselves (in se), are the telos (purpose) of all that is and will be. It is an immanentization of God’s extra-eschatological life, fortified by the belief that humanity and the gates of hell were able to prevail against the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the source of the anarchy, and chaos we see attempting to disjoint the world as we thought we knew it. Don’t worry though, an Antichrist is on its way.

Now the serpent was shrewder than any of the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Is it really true that God said, ‘You must not eat from any tree of the orchard’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit from the trees of the orchard; 3 but concerning the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the orchard God said, ‘You must not eat from it, and you must not touch it, or else you will die.’” 4 The serpent said to the woman, “Surely you will not die, 5 for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will open and you will be like God, knowing  good and evil.” 6 When the woman saw that the tree produced fruit that was good for food, was attractive to the eye, and was desirable for making one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some of it to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. –Genesis 3.1-7, NET

 

[1] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago&London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 67-8.

Escaping ‘Malign Priestcraft’: The Post-Secular’s Ironic Dependence on the Christian Grammar and Past

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Maybe you have noticed this among your coworkers, certain family members, and even in yourself; there is a constant drip of ‘doubt’ when it comes to the things of God, or even His reality. What people don’t understand, I think, is that we don’t doubt in a vacuum; in other words, the way we doubt has an informing history in the ‘history of ideas.’ At a theological and ultimate level, as Christians, we know that people who engage in skeptical doubt, to the point of remaining in a state of unbelief, do so for a moral reason; because they ‘love the darkness rather than the Light’ (cf. Jn. 3:17ff). It is this moral ‘foundation’ that has led to a history of ideas that is constantly attempting to erect something like a tower of Babel wherein humanity reaches up to the heavens by projecting outwards their own sense of self-possessed godness. This is the modern project: to collapse the classically Christian attributes of God into humanity at large, and then assert oneself, as an instance within the greater humanity, as a god who has the power to move mountains and create a world where their way is the way. This way, while telling itself, definitionally, that it has matured beyond the superstitions and prognostications of the religious past, has ironically imbibed said religious past into their own sense of being as ‘enlightened’ individuals in the secular and now post-secular age.

In order to illustrate how this skeptical mode of doubt and self-assertion took shape in the history of ideas let’s read along with Tom Holland’s sketch of such developments as they were birthed in the heartland of the Enlightenment:

Such blasphemies—while profoundly shocking to Christians—were to some a summons to battle. The letter in which Voltaire was hailed as the Antichrist had been written not by an opponent, but by an admirer: a philosopher and notorious free-thinker by the name of Denis Diderot. It was tribute that that the great man received as his due. There could be no place for any modesty or self-abasement in the war against fanaticism. Fame was a weapon and self-promotion an obligation. Influence such as Voltaire had come to wield in the courts and salons of Europe would only be wasted if not exploited to the full. This was why, fusing conviction with invincible self-regard, he insisted on his status as the patriarch of an entire ‘new philosophy’. Voltaire was far from alone in his contempt for Christianity. Diderot’s was, in anything, even more inveterate. Ranged alongside them were a whole host of philosophes—metaphysicians and encyclopaedists, historians and geologists—whose scorn for l’ infâme was often no less than Voltaire’s. Whether in Edinburgh or in Naples, in Philadelphia or in Berlin, the men most celebrated for their genius were increasingly those who equated churches with bigotry. To be a philosophe was to thrill to the possibility that a new age of freedom was advancing. The demons of superstition and unwarranted privilege were being cast out. People who had been walking in darkness had seen a great light. The world was being born again. Voltaire himself, in his more sombre moments, worried that the malign hold of priestcraft might never be loosened; but in general he was inclined to a cheerier take. His age was a siècle des lumières: ‘an age of enlightenment’. For the first time since the reign of Constantine, the commanding heights of European culture had been wrested from Christian intellectuals. The shock of Calas’ conviction was precisely that it had happened when la philosophie had been making such advances. ‘It seems, then, that fanaticism, outraged by the progress of reason, is thrashing about in a spasm of outrage.’[1]

We have ostensibly moved beyond the ‘age of Volataire’ in our age of PostModernity (PoMo) or the so called Post-Secular. Supposedly, and at some level, this seems to be the case; the sort of bodacious self-assertion of humanity’s ability to transcend the revelational religions and gain access to ‘universal truths’ on its own has gone to seed. In other words, this sort of machismo arrogance about humanity’s capacity to divine the essence of reality in totalizing ways has been abandoned for the more humble attitude that humanity doesn’t really have this capacity after-all; at least not in the universalizing ways it once thought. In our age the spirit of Voltaire remains, but with the caveat that our access to reality is limited to ‘our own particular truth’ and sense of the world; this is enough for the PoMo sensibility. Ironically, and this is why I used the word ‘ostensible’ to start this unit of thought out, the PoMo, or normative relativist spirit that is operative today, is really nothing other than the Enlightenment spirit redivivus; it is just that today people are less confident about the idea that they have tapped into totalizing conceptions of reality at all—except for the fact that their belief itself ends up being totalizing about humanity’s inability to not have a totalizing access to reality.

At the end of the day what remains is the fact that no matter what people think about the world and themselves, they continue to imbibe the Christian confessional reality and its grammar as its way to negotiate their self-constructed secular universes. In other words, the doubting-skeptical people of the 21st century, those who believe, along with Voltaire et al., that they have moved beyond the superstitions of the religious past, have in fact internalized that past into their own world-identities. The moral: the post-secular person’s identity, and the way they doubt at both a grammatical and conceptual level, is contingent upon the confessional religious past that they say is full of superstition and self-delusion. The conclusion: they haven’t moved beyond the Christian past, they have simply collapsed that into themselves and attempted to construct the Christian reality into their own images (see Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion, it is apropos to both the post-secular as well as the Christian among us); as if the universe, at least their sense of the universe, is contingent upon what they say rather than what God says.

If the aforementioned sounds eerily similar to another story you might have heard, look no further than the Serpent’s forked-tongue:

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. –Genesis 3.1-6

[1] Tom Holland, Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 390-91.

A Short Defense of Modern Theology: A Challenge for the Evangelical Churches and Theologians

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A small point towards a defense of so called modern and other theological developments: It continues to be a seemingly popular belief among evangelical theologians to maintain the idea that the modern (i.e. post-Enlightenment) theological turn needs to be corrected to the point of abandonment. That modern theology took a turn for the worse when the Divine was collapsed into the creature; when the absolute power of God in eternity was disjoined from the ordained power of God in history; when the subject became Lord rather than the Lord being Lord. These are some of the major premises many believe thrust Christian theology into a ruinous trajectory of doing anthropology as theology, and that our only hope is to turn back to the pure being theology of the scholastic schoolmen (i.e. via antiqua). Note John Webster as he speaks to this issue in the context of theology of retrieval:

‘Retrieval’, then, is a mode of theology, an attitude of mind and a way of approaching theological tasks which is present with greater or lesser prominence in a range of different thinkers, not all of them self-consciously ‘conservative’ or ‘orthodox’. Although here we concentrate upon strong versions of this approach, it can be found in less stringent forms and in combination with other styles of theological work. A rough set of resemblances between different examples of this kind of theology would include the following: these theologies are ‘objectivist’ or ‘realist’ insofar as they consider Christian faith and theology to be a response to a self-bestowing divine reality which precedes and overcomes the limited reach of rational intention; their material accounts of this divine reality are heavily indebted to the trinitarian, incarnational, and soteriological teaching of the classical Christianity of the ecumenical councils; they consider that the governing norms of theological inquiry are established by the object by which theology is brought into being (the source of theology is thus its norm); accordingly, they do not accord final weight to external criteria or to the methods and procedures which enjoy prestige outside theology; their accounts of the location, audience, and ends of Christian doctrine are generally governed by the relation of theology to the community of faith as its primary sphere; and in their judgements about the historical setting of systematic theology they tend to deploy a theological (rather than socio-cultural) understanding of tradition which outbids the view that modernity has imposed a new and inescapable set of conditions on theological work. For such theologies, immersion in the texts and habits of thought of earlier (especially pre-modern) theology opens up a wide view of the object of Christian theological reflection, setting before its contemporary practitioners descriptions of the faith unharnessed by current anxieties, and enabling a certain liberty in relation to the present. With this in mind, we begin by considering the study of history as a diagnostic to identify what are taken to be misdirections in modern theology, and then the deployment of history as a resource to overcome them.[1]

As much as I like Webster, I don’t agree with him here; particularly the emboldened aspect. Do I think there are serious problems with the premises that fund “much” of modern theology? Yes. But I also don’t think they are any more sinister than premises that have percolated throughout the history of ideas and theological development for centuries. In other words, every period of theological ideational development will have pros and cons. To suggest that the whole of a period is simply a dung-heap that needs to be abandoned and corrected to the point that we simply start-over is really only a bad case of chronological snobbery. Unfortunately, Webster’s sentiment has been internalized by a whole generation of up and coming and have come theologians.

I seek to work from different grounds as a theologian; grounds that constructively look for God in Christ in whatever sector and period of the Church that can be fruitfully gleaned. David Steinmetz, as he segues into a sketch of Nikolaus von Amsdorf’s person and theology writes this:

The role of a religious conservative is rarely a popular one, especially when this conservatism is combined with an intolerance of all theological innovation. There is something pinched and one-sided about the mentality that holds that a decisive theological breakthrough has taken place in the past but denies (or is at least distrustful of) the possibility of new and original insights in the present. That the church has been led into truth in the past does not exclude the possibility of the discovery of new truth in the present, even if the new insight is only a deepened participation in the meaning of the old.[2]

Steinmetz’s point is well taken, or it should be! And yet so many ‘conservatives’ of our day, which is where Webster ended up going in his latter theological ministry, take the notion that he finally did to heart. Some, like Webster, spend so much time in the modern ambit that they grow weary of it. But maybe this weariness, rather than resulting in an abandonment project, ought to simply be the source for a time of reprieve and perspective building. Instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water and essentially saying that the modern needs to be fully abandoned or, at best, corrected; maybe the theologian, as Steinmetz notes, ought to be open to the idea that new and even innovative insights can be gained by modern thinkers in and for the Church just as much as the premodern thinkers were able to gain.

Travel in the theological circles that I do, and all of modern theology is essentially junked; except for careful and incidental quotes here and there of Barth or some other like figure. This is to the Church’s and theologian’s loss. When we cut ourselves off from the modern we cut the ground right out from under us and fail to recognize that this is an impossible task to begin with. Surely we can constructively retrieve and listen to the past for the present, but this need not entail a full on abandonment of what we can’t abandon to begin with: i.e. our own modern locatedness and epistemic formation. Why not admit that all theology the 21st century thinker engages in is by necessity, Modern? Why not, if this is the case, attempt to critically engage with the categories we have been given and understand that those can be cross-pollinated by the past; thus allowing new vistas and innovations to open up for the Christian imagination and doctrinal development, that outwith will and cannot happen? Why not abandon the “fear” of the present, and recognize that we are part of an ideational lineage that does not ultimately allow for it to be cast off? When we admit this, we are more free to hear the voice of the living God whether that be spoken anew and afresh for us in the 21st century, or from the 16th century. But this pervasive bias, by evangelicals, against anything ‘modern’ is a fools-errand of thought that needs to be repented of and abandoned itself.

 

[1] John Webster, “Theologies of Retrieval,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology,edited by John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford/NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 584-85.

[2] David C. Steinmetz, Reformers In The Wings: From Geiler von Kayserberg to Theodore Beza, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 70.