Category Archives: Natural Theology

Contra the Tradition Produced God of Natural Theology

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

The Character of Barth’s Kantian and Feuerbachian Critique of the Metaphysical gods

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Ludwig Feuerbach

Karl Barth is often identified as a neo-Kantian, or just straight up Kantian in his theological orientation (and methodology). It seems too facile to me to maintain that Barth was somehow a slavish servant of Kant, especially materially. Maybe formally, Barth could be understood to be a Kantian in certain qualified ways. But in the air he breathed to be “Kantian” or neo-Kantian would be like saying that John Calvin et al. was an Aristotelian, or Scotist for that matter. The point being, often, formalities are not the all-encompassing thing in the theological project. Ultimately, what is at stake is what gets produced materially. In other words, it is surely possible for the theologian to be influenced by some intellectual tradition, and at the same time, under the Christian revelational pressures of thought, indeed, trinitarian pressures, to retext the form (in this case, the Kantian one) in a way wherein the kerygmatic reality becomes the conditioning and driving factor even behind the form itself.

The above is rather abstract, indeed. In order, to incarnate my points with a little more flesh and blood, let’s now refer to Eberhard Busch’s discussion on these matters, as that pertains to Kant’s and Feuerbach’s deliverances of a Barthian theology and knowledge of God.

. . . In Barth’s view, what Feuerbach “rightfully objected to” was that in human religion the one who prays, the pious individual does not “get beyond what he himself has thought and experienced,” that all his “attempts to bridge the gap. . . take place within this world.” The interpretation that leads Barth to entertain Feuerbach’s critique of religion is clearly in line with Kant’s critique of the assertion that the knowledge of metaphysical truth is on the same level as experiential knowledge. Once again it is Kant in whose thought Barth finds the intellectual possibility of overcoming Feuerbach’s critique of religion. He does this by advancing the thesis that God is not a hypothesis (of man) only when he is conceived of per se as the “presupposition” (of man). Therefore “God” is not untouched by Feuerbach’s critique when he is generally understood as a metaphysical reality beyond all human hypotheses, but only when he is understood as “the origin of the crisis of all objectivity devoid of all objectivity.” After all this we may assume that Barth is especially influenced by Kant, deepened by Neo-Kantianism but also by Feuerbach’s critique, when he insists in his Epistle to the Romans that God cannot or only supposedly can be recognized as an object of experiential knowledge. And we may further assume that the same influence is in play when Barth now separates himself from Schleiermacher and his own earlier position with the thesis that God can only be “recognized” as the critical boundary of human experience.[1]

Busch, in context, is referring to the earlier younger Barth, and yet, he is also notating that the form of Kant remained continuous throughout Barth’s theological project; indeed, to the very end. So, Barth surely was a Modern theologian under these terms. But as Bruce McCormack has rightly pointed out elsewhere, Barth, just as Busch has inchoately pressed here, flipped the Kantian project on its head by thinking it through the noumenal and phenomenal being grounded in the enhypostasis of the anhypostatic Son becoming flesh in the singular person of Jesus Christ; as such, removing the odor the type of projectile dualism Kant’s theology suffered from.

Conversely, and for the purposes of this post, I think it is interesting to hear some of Busch’s commentary on Barth and his respective positioning within the modern German/Swiss theological and philosophical milieu of his day (at formative points in his own intellectual development). Further, I also think Busch’s clarification on how Barth deployed Feuerbach, even by creatively sponging the Feuerbachian critique of religion through the Kantian possibility for true transcendence, to be very helpful. I have often referred to Barth’s appeal to Feuerbach and Feuerbach’s critique of religion as self-immanent-projection; and as far as that goes (because it cannot go all the way), it is a helpful acid to place on the unhealthy aspects of a pietistic venture. But just as Barth understood—because he was a Christian of no small stature—Feuerbach and Kant were only useful propaedeutics, insofar that they could be deployed as foils against the manmade gods of the philosophers, and even the scholastics.

I’m afraid this whole post has been rather abstract. The necessary context for this offering is reliant on the reader’s own familiarity with these things. Even so, here’s the reduction: knowledge of the genuine Christian triune God is purely contingent on this God Self-disclosing Himself to and for us in the face of Jesus Christ. It is possible, as Barth illustrates, to even use pagans against the appropriation of pagan categories for thinking God. This is what Barth did by using a retexted Kantian form, and a Feuerbachian critique, against “Christian” appropriations of God, categorically, that are too contingent upon speculative discursive reasoning, and the “discoveries” of the various natural theologians throughout the millennia, respectively; going back as far as Genesis 3, into the Antique Greek philosophers, and the whole stream following. Let God be true and every man a liar.

[1] Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth & the Pietists, trans. by Daniel W. Bloesch (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 119-20.

Reading Romans 1 Against Natural Theology

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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. –Romans 1.18–22

The above pericope has been used as the locus classicus for those who want to argue for a ‘natural theology,’ in regard to a theological methodology. That is, for anyone interested in promoting the idea that the triune Christian God can be liminally known simply by reflecting on the effects of nature; indeed, as those are reasoned back to their first cause (in a chain-of-being knowledge and casual schemata), in the cause of all causes, who just is God. But New Testament exegete, Jason Staples, argues something much more biblical,

In contrast to the standard Jewish polemical argument that Israel has been set apart from the theologically ignorant pagans by the reception of the Torah, the account of Rom I: I8–32 “offers a completely distinct explanation.” In Paul’s account, Kathy Gaca explains, the idolaters are “not theologically blind outsiders but something far more reprehensible in biblical terms. They are knowledgeable about God . . . yet have become rebels.” This is not a minor change. Right from the start, the alert reader familiar with traditional Jewish polemics will be startled by the assertion that “what is knowable about God is revealed among them, for God has revealed it to them” (I:19). Since when has the knowledge of God been revealed among the pagans? Is not the knowledge of God granted through the Torah the very thing that has set Israel apart?

Unlike Wisdom’s ignorant idolaters who failed to realize the knowledge of God through extrapolating from creation to creator, Paul tells a narrative in which the explicit revelation from creator to creation is realized but rejected. As such, like Adam, the subjects of Romans are “without excuse” or “indefensible” . . . precisely because they knew better and rebelled against the revelation of God. Not only did they have access to divine revelation, the “understood” . . . the “unseen things.” . . . Rom I:18–32 does not speak “of people who should have known God’s attributes through the creation around them” but rather of people who did know God’s attributes through the revelation God gave them. By implication, the knowledge of God and divine revelation is not in fact a safeguard against impiety and sin as Wisdom suggests (I5:2) but rather is the very reason the revels of Rom I stand without excuse for impiety and injustice. In Johnathan Linbaugh’s words, “Wisdom’s polemics targets idiots; Paul aims at apostates.”[1]

Staples’ argument is much more involved than the passage I just shared from him. But it serves our purposes precisely at the point that it signals an alternative, and more biblical way, to exegete Romans 1. It isn’t and thus shouldn’t be used as THE prooftext for giving natural theology the biblical ground it so desires; that it so needs, to be hip to the “catholic” groove. On this occasion Paul is making a particular argument vis-à-vis the relationship between the Jews and the Church (as given further development and climax in chptrs. 9—11). The underlying point of Romans 1, in Staples exegesis, is that it isn’t a naked creation that holds the vestiges by which the Christian God can be known; even if only discursively. Instead, as Staples shows latterly, Romans 1, as apiece with the following context in chapters 2—3, is written in order to reinforce the judgement that the Jew (which in itself is a complicated designation in the Pauline theology), and that the world, mediated by the ones who should have known through God’s Self-revelation as attested to in Holy Scripture, in the Torah, in particular, should have come to know and submitted to.

Staples’ argument resonates deeply with my own sense on this passage, relative to the notion that God has only ever really been known personally, and even generally (because how else would a personal God be known?), through God’s intentional and personal revelation first presented to the Jews in the Torah. To the Jew first, then the Greek.

[1] Jason A. Staples, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 118–19.

A Rejoinder to the Credo Alliance on Natural Theology

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

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

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

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

Disallowing Secular Unbelief to Dictate the Terms of God

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Secular, worldly unbelief. I think Christians often allow the bar to be set much too low. Much of Christian theology, for example, especially those that have taken shape in the natural theology forest, allow the skeptic’s unbelief to dictate the types of questions the theologians seek to answer. Primary of which are observed in Thomas Aquinas’ Prima Pars (first part) of his Summa Theologiae. Here, Thomas seeks to answer the questions of God’s existence, and whether or not it is coherent to believe that God exists (like a generic God; albeit, in Thomas’ context this would be applied to the Christian God simplicter, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case for him). Once Thomas felt that he had sufficiently answered the skeptic’s arguments, about what God is; he then proceeded onto other matters—which would entail the Trinity, the Church, Justification and all other theological matters. It isn’t really the order of theology, per se, that is problematic with Thomas’ method (although I would qualify and say: that the order is bereft because it starts with a Monadic conception of God; even so, it starts with God, just from the wrong place). But the fact that he feels compelled to first prove “a God’s” existence, and then only after that apply this “proven God’s” existence to some of the more Dogmatic questions of the Church has a highly disordering effect after all.

So, the above is an example of how I believe, at a high level, theology can take its cues and categories from the wrong unbelieving people; and then, of course!, end up with the wrong theological and biblical conclusions. But I think this happens to each and everyone of us, as Christians (at least those attempting to walk as intentional Christians), as we are constantly bombarded with the wares of our Secular Age. As the Apostle Paul counters, even as he is referring to the false teachings and antagonisms of the Pseudo-Apostles in Corinth:

Now I, Paul, myself urge you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—I who am meek when face to face with you, but bold toward you when absent! 2 I ask that when I am present I need not be bold with the confidence with which I propose to be courageous against some, who regard us as if we walked according to the flesh. 3 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, 4 for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. 5 We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, 6 and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete.

I am looking at the principle embedded in the emboldened section in particular. Wherever these “speculations” are coming from, whether it be from Joe Pagan at work, or if it be Plato in the heavens, we are to discern such things for what they are, and “take it captive” unto Christ. The simple point I am drawing on is that it is a spiritual battle to ensure that the way we think God, as Christians, is only taken from, and in an immediate way, from God who has spoken to us (and speaks to us) in His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Even if there are hallowed traditions, some might call it the Great Tradition of the Church, without any further explication (i.e., it just is), these traditions themselves are always subservient to the reality of Holy Scripture, the theology of the Word, Jesus Christ. And this is the battle we face, on the daily, as Christians. This applies to all Christians, in one way or the other. We are faced with unbelief all around; that’s what this evil age entails. But we are to be more vigilant than theologians of glory, who seek to synthesize the wisdom of the world with the wisdom of the cross. Indeed, we are to be theologians of the cross; and by the wisdom of God, which is the cross of Christ, we are to recognize these false speculative and flighty ideas about God, even if they have many solid layerings and accretions of traditions behind them, in the name of the Church, and test them, in the face of Christ and the triune God, to see if they be so.

This is a prayerful way though.

‘At any rate, it is not at all clear that He controls dogmatic thinking concerning Himself.’

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It is time to break my blogging fast. It is fitting, the topic of this post, because I am nearing the end of my Philosophy of Religion class at the University of Oxford (next week is the last). There is one unit left, it is on Faith, Prayer, and the Spiritual life. The class is largely populated by atheists and agnostics. The text we used for class (which was augmented by many other readings and lectures) was written by an Oxford philosopher named T. J. Mawson, Belief in God. He is a Christian theist, but a panentheist who holds to a Christian universalism. What became stoutly reinforced to me was that the god of the philosophers (or the no-god) has no correspondence with the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. Mawson is arguing for the existence of a philosophical Monad; a Pure Being; an Unmoved Mover; Pure Act (actus purus). Indeed, he is arguing from within an analytic philosophical key; but, nevertheless, this key is still funded by the Hellenic Monad of the classical philosophers.

Unfortunately, too much of that “key” has been pressed into the development of Christian theologies; both antique and modern. This has always been at the basis of my critique of what I have called classical Calvinism (as a riff on classical Theism). Too much of the ‘being’ that can be proven is synthesized with the God of Christian revelation, such that the God produced is something of a hybrid notion of God wherein God functions more like a philosophical monad rather than a personal and relational God of triune Self-given love, one-in-the-other as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The god of the philosophers has no place with the God who we have come to know in the face (prosopon) of Jesus Christ.

Karl Barth, observes the same thing as that has largely taken place in the ‘older orthodox theology’ of the Protestant Reformed of the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively. Indeed, what is imbibed by the orthodox, it could be said, is simply just the re-gestation of a mediaeval theology as that developed on the ‘Western front’ of the Latin church. Barth writes:

The weakness of the older orthodox theology was that in all its doctrine of the divine providence, and of the creation and man, and earlier of God and the election of grace, it believed that it could dispense with this relationship either entirely or almost entirely. It thought and spoke about the divine ruling as an idea. With all of its divergence from individual philosophical systems, its development of the concept was far too like the philosophical development of a concept. In spite of the testimonies from Scripture, it was content with what was basically a quite formal and abstract consideration of the subject. It did not make it at all clear to what it ought really to be looking at as a Christian theology, and more often than not it did not even look there, but somewhere else. This was the root of all its uncertainties and deviations, of all the dangers to which it more or less openly exposed itself as it proceeded, and above all of the insipidity or colourlessness of all its thinking to which we drew attention at the outset. The One who is described as King in Holy Scripture is acknowledged to be such, but He does not act as such. At any rate, it is not at all clear that He controls dogmatic thinking concerning Himself. At many points He seems in fact not to control it. What does control it, and what is passed off as the authority which controls the whole universe, seems rather to be the concept of a supreme being furnished with supreme power in relation to all other beings. And the credibility of what is ostensibly said about the rule of God seems to depend upon the existence of this being. With regard to this, we may say: 1 that the existence of such a supreme being is itself highly doubtful, and therefore the credibility of a doctrine of God’s rule cannot be a Christian doctrine because the God of Christian teaching is certainly not identical with that supreme being. If we are still under the shadow thrown by this twofold difficulty, it is high time that we moved away from it.[1]

I clearly concur with Barth’s last clause (and the whole passage!): “. . . it is high time that we moved away from it.”

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §49 [176] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 180.

The Accidental God and the God of Logical Possibility

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Questions we are engaging with for this week’s philosophy of religion class. Part of this, the last part represents its own separate forum for the class; it is supposed to be a debate forum.

Creator of the world

Does the theistic view that God created the universe imply that the universe must have had a beginning? What might the implications of the answer to this question be?

Yes, the theistic view, in particular, the Christian theistic view entails that the universe had a beginning. I’d go so far to say that it entails the creatio ex nihilo (created out of nothing) position. What this implies is that all of reality, including knowledge, is contingent on God speaking (revealing) Himself for us.

Creator of value

Is something good because God wills it or does God will it because it is good?

Euthyphro’s Dilemma can be avoided if we posit what can be called a Trinitarian actualism (versus essentialism, which is the Thomistic way out of the dilemma). A trinitarian actualism entails a notion of God wherein God’s being is in becoming. That is to say, like essentialism attempts, that God just is. But in the actualistic sense, God just is his personal relation to the world; contingent upon nothing else but who he is in his inner-personal freedom as the triune God. Something is good, therefore, because God is good in himself; but he has freely chosen for himself that his goodness becomes what it is as he graciously and dynamically becomes us that we might become him (not by nature, but grace). More to clarify, but this will have to suffice for my sentence long response 😉.

Revealer

Does the fact that there’s such disagreement between theists over what exactly it is that God has revealed provide a reason to suppose that God hasn’t revealed anything? What would follow from this conclusion?

No. It isn’t this relative. It may be this relative for the outsider looking in. But if the work is done, like through comparative religions, for example, and we engage in an abductive exercise, so to speak, it is clear that not all “revelations” are equal. So, I think the question itself is non-starting in this sense.

Offerer of eternal life

Can an intelligible and plausible account of ‘eternal life’ be given?

As we’re interested in both the truth and meaning of this question you may want to break this down into the following:

    • Could personal identity endure after bodily death? Can any of the accounts that Mawson discusses be defensible? Why/why not?
    • In what way would ‘eternal life’ be a good?

You may want to begin to answer this question by offering a definition of ‘eternal life’, and its relation to bodily death.

I must answer this is as a Christian theist (of the Trinitarian variety) first; and attendant with that, refer to the only one who has provided a concrete answer for that question.

Eternal Life

Eternal life is God’s triune life in relation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no other eternal life available. This life, entered into humanity (‘he who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him [Jesus]), and made God’s eternal life available to all of humanity by taking all of human life, as he is archetypal human life, putting it to death (the sinful, separated heart of humanity from God), rising again (on the third day)—and in turn, raising all of humanity with his—which has thus forged a way for all of humanity, if they will, through his willing for them first, to participate in his eternal and ascended life with the Father forevermore; indeed, by the Holy Spirit.

A Raw Syllogism

P1. The triune God alone is eternal life.

P2. Human beings can participate in God’s triune eternal life, if God makes a way for them to enter that type of life.

P3. God has made a way for human beings to participate in God’s triune life, through uniting humanity to his humanity in Jesus Christ.

P4. Human beings can participate in God’s triune life, in the humanity of Jesus Christ, if they choose to do so.

P5. Therefore, human beings who choose to participate in God’s triune life, in and through the humanity of Jesus Christ, can experience God’s triune and eternal life that he alone is.

It seems as if Mawson is attempting to purely think of eternal life as the perdurance of human life, albeit in the presence of God. I don’t think this quite follows. The only perduring life and eternal life, in the theistic frame, is God’s life. As such, the discussion must be oriented by how it is that a human being might come to participate in God’s eternal life. I tried to tease that out above. I think Mawson hinders himself by presupposing that all of the so-called “Abrahamic faiths” are “essentially” referring to the same God. But that is, at the very least, a very debatable premise.

The motion we will be debating is: ‘This house believes that it is logically possible that there be a God.’

There is nothing inherently illogical in believing that a god exists. It is possible, as Mawson et al. has done, to construct a notion of godness that is self-referentially coherent vis-à-vis this god’s properties; whether, essential or accidental properties. But just because this notion of godness can be constructed in a self-referentially coherentist manner, does not in itself, lead to the conclusion that this god must necessarily exist, per se. It only leads one to the conclusion that such a god could exist (which seems to be the minimum being sought by the theistic philosopher).

So, alternatively, as a Christian theist, what I present as a thesis, in regard to a god necessarily, or even tacitly existing, is that we expand our horizons, categorically. I propose that in order for us to concretely know that God exists, that we adopt an orientation that sees revelation claims as the necessary ground by which the seekers might come to know that God exists. This might entail that the God we encounter through a revelation claim is not concordant with the self-referential and coherentist account of God that Mawson presented and argued for. It might mean, that if we were to encounter such a “revelational God,” through his self-revelation, that we might be asked to go beyond what a purely philosophical accounting of a god provides us with.

So, I would argue that merely presenting the seekers with a purely self-referential coherentist account of a god, as a logical possibility, while coherent, sets the would-be knower of God up for potential failure; in the sense that false expectations have been given over against the categories and emphases that a god outside of our “immanent frames” might present us with. Logical possibility vis-à-vis God’s existence is something that human agents might attempt to construct in an a prior fashion. But there is no guarantee that the god so constructed is corollary with the God who might potentially show up through self-revelation. In other words, I would argue that simply constructing an argument for the logical possibility of a God’s existence simply sets the would-be knower of God up with a procrustean bed. In which case, the logical possibility for there being a God might in fact bring the would-be knower of God to miss encountering the real God if he discloses himself in his self-revelation in such a way that ends up transcending the would-be knowers already developed notion of godness. At best, this would-be knower, upon encountering an ostensibly self-revealed God, might attempt to shape this self-revealed God into the form they had already constructed for this God to logically fit. But then, this might result in the seekers’ ultimately rejecting the logical possibility for a God’s existence; insofar that the philosophical construct and revelation claims end up being so discordant, that the seeker simply throws their hands up in frustration and disbelief.

In the end: I think Mawson and other theistic philosophers can present and develop an argument for the logical possibility for a God to exist. But ultimately, this could be a self-defeating venture; insofar that this God’s existence, circumscribed by the philosophers’ wits as it is, might cause seekers for God to miss the real God, if in fact the real God appears differently than the philosophers had imagined him to necessarily, or even to tacitly be.

Maimonides on Divine Simplicity: With Christian Relief

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More from the philosophy class. As I reread this just now I didn’t really answer the whole question. Although, I amended it since in the class forum.

What does it mean to say that the concept of God is simple? Can this claim be held together with the claim that God has attributes? If so, how? If not, is this a problem for theism?

The concept of God as simple simply entails that the God conceived of by folks like Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides et al. is a Monad. I.e., a non-composite being who is not made up by its parts or properties in addition, but a singular substance who is also identified, within this complex as an actus purus (‘pure act’), pure being, unmoved mover so on and so forth. It is this construct, as in this case, exemplified and articulated in the tongue of Maimonides, that all of the so-called Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) can have a shared starting point in their respective God-talk.

As noted by Maimonides, his knowledge of God, after Aristotle and the philosophers, is arrived at by a process known as the via negativa (negative way). This speculative process is undertaken, as Maimonides develops, within an apophatic frame for thinking the ineffable God. That is to say, that God is so necessarily hidden in this frame, that all the would-be knower of God is left with, at a basic or primordial level, is to engage in a process of negating the seen, the “known,” like the negation of nature in general, or even human being in particular, and to think God’s perfections or attributes, from these speculative means; as the philosopher works their “way up” the supposed chain of being; whose first cause, is indeed the unmoved mover, the monad known as God.

Christian theism alternatively—and I use that language in a particular way, noting a trinitarian way for thinking God—I would argue is necessarily a kataphatic (versus apophatic, in a sense) religion. That is to say, Christian theism thinks God first, not from a negation of human being, or nature in general, but from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. John 1:18 says: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.” The word translated as ‘explain,’ in the koine Greek is exegesato, to exegete, to “read-out.” Indeed, even in this passage there is a sense of apophaticism in God, that is to say that He indeed is a hidden God. But to the point, on the Christian account, God freely chose to Self-reveal and explain Himself in the face of His Son, Jesus Christ. This is why Christians first think God not as a faraway pure monadic being, but as our Father (as Athanasius emphasizes: “Father of the Son, Son of the Father”). A genuine Christian theology works from a via positiva (‘positive way’) towards thinking God. That is, from revelation rather than speculation.

In the end, classical theism, and as that has been appropriated by certain traditions within Christianity, does take on the type of thinking that Maimonides articulates in regard to divine simplicity; and “its” methodology. And yet there are other traditions, like the one I affirm, within Christianity, who think God from within only positive, Self-revealed terms; indeed, as the base of a theological methodology itself. And yet all orthodox Christians, at some level, will affirm that God is simple (non-composite). Even so, there are other more relational ways to engage with that notion. My teacher, Karl Barth, evangelizes the concept and re-terms it as ‘Divine Constancy.’ But that requires further development, and more space than available at the moment.

In the Rut of General Theism: Against Neutral Theology

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Christians don’t believe in an abstract ethereal god. Christians believe in the triune God who has Self-revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. Period. This should be an unremarkable assertion. There should be zero pushback to this. But in the so-called Great Tradition of the Church, and those who are ostensibly “retrieving” it, this isn’t the case. Classical theism, so-called, as a contemporary way to identify certain expressions of the antique past, especially with reference to a theology proper, have so synthesized, say, the Aristotelian categories with an ecclesiastical doctrine of God, that it is nay impossible to make a distinction, in substance (pun intended), between the philosopher’s unmoved mover of pure act, and the God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. In other words, there is such a conflation between the god of the philosophers, and the Christian God in this instance, that the god of the philosophers in fact becomes the Christian God in substance. Indeed, most of contemporary theology today, especially on the Latin side (i.e., Catholic and Protestant), traffics on the highway that the philosophers, and their theologians, respectively, have constructed for them. That is to say, contemporary theology, especially in certain iterations of Protestant theology, have so imbibed the cathedral of the Protestant development, that is primarily through the ‘schoolmen,’ or the scholastics, that to do theology, for them, requires a straight repristination; an outright and absolute reception of whatever the Protestant fathers said; a total gleaning, a harvesting, if you will, of whatever golden apples the oldmen of Protestant yesteryear planted in their gardens of theological delight.

But what if they were simply squished by their sitz im leben (situation in life); what if they were just doing the best they could with what they had available to them, intellectually, at that time? What if what they did was rather imaginative and forward thinking for their times, respectively, but in the end wasn’t the last or final word? I’m here to say it wasn’t; it wasn’t the last or final, or not even the best word. Karl Barth writes the following in his own analysis of those theological times. What you will find is that he agrees with me (or more correctly, that I agree with him).

Unfortunately the connexion between the belief in providence and belief in Christ had not been worked out and demonstrated theologically by the Reformers themselves. Only occasionally and from afar, if at all, had they seen the problem of natural theology and the necessity of a radical application to all theology of their recognition of the free grace of God in Christ. In their case, to be sure, we almost always feel and detect, even though it is so seldom palpable theologically, that when they speak of the world dominion of God they are in fact speaking with Christian content and on the basis of the Gospel, not abstractly in terms of a neutral God of Jews, Turks, pagans and Christians. And this is what gives warmth and force to the matter in P. Gerhardt. But if in him there is an unmistakable movement away from the Word of God to the experience of the Christian subject, this was to some extent a reaction against the dominant and self-evident abstraction with which the orthodoxy of his day followed another self-evident rut in these matters. This was the rut of a general theism which, apart from the mention of the Deus triunus [triune God], occasional quotations from the Bible and references to Church history, lacked any distinctive Christian content, being primarily concerned to distinguish itself from atheism, and limiting its consideration of the Gospel to the establishment and development of Christology and resultant doctrines. As if this were the real way to treat that primarium caput fidei et religionis [chief cornerstone of faith and religion].[1]

Surely, what Barth is explicating is the more sure word; relatively speaking. The Christian God is not neutral, He is not general, and He is not discoverable in some leftover vestiges of His presence in the fallen created order. That is to say, the fallen heart and mind of the fallen humanity has no access into the inner sanctum of God’s eternal life; that is, not without God first becoming us that we might become Him in Christ (by grace not nature). Isn’t there an infinitely qualitative distance between God and humanity?, as Kierkegaard so rightly identified. Aren’t human beings, us, born dead in our trespasses and sins with an ugly ditch between us and the holy God of triune wonder? This is all Barth is getting at. This is all I’m getting at, with reference to Barth. Selah

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §48 [032] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 31.

‘Epistemological Inversion’: God Knowing Us First So We Might Know Him

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I remember when I was in Bible College, studying apologetics vis-à-vis worldview class, an axiom of sorts was presented to us in regard to a God-world relation: 1) God is prior to us ontologically, 2) humanity is prior to God epistemologically. Does the reader spy a problem with this arrangement; maybe an inherent dualism wherein there is seemingly both an abstract God from humanity, and an abstract humanity from God? When I first heard this axiom it intrigued me, but didn’t sit all that easy with me either. It took me awhile, like years, including going through seminary, and then further study following. I finally saw the inherent theological error to this mode of theorizing a knowledge of God; i.e., that it is de jure entirely nonChristian to think about God and humanity in a competitive way. That is, it is antiChrist to presume that ‘we,’ as a people, can ever come before God in any way. The very first verse of the Bible says so: e.g., ‘In the BEGINNING God . . ..’ Further, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Even more, “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained [ἐξηγήσατο exegasto exegeted] Him.” And the Apostle, “For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation [ ἀποκαλύψεως apocalypsis apocalypse unveiling] of Jesus Christ.” This small smattering of passages, from both the Old and New Testaments ought to suffice in making the point; for the Christian knowledge of God doesn’t come prior to God, from an inherent sparkle of knowledge in the human; knowledge of God, according to Scripture, comes from God Self-revealing, Self-exegeting Himself for us in the Theanthropos GodMan, Jesus Christ. Accordingly, it follows that in order to have an actual ‘theological’ knowledge of God, this must come first through an ‘evangelical’ knowledge of God. That is to say, that in order for a fallen human being to have a genuine knowledge of the triune God, they must have union, participation with God, through the mediatorial and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ: for He alone is the center of God for us (pro nobis).

Thomas F. Torrance agrees with the above, and identifies this type of knowledge theory as an ‘epistemological inversion’ (kataphysin). That is, contra the classical theistic way of knowing God, an epistemological inversion sees an order to knowing God as that is, as a prius, grounded in God’s being in becoming for us in Jesus Christ. So, for Torrance, there is an order to being-order to knowing relationship between God and humanity that starts in God being for us; then moves in actualization in God becoming us; resulting in our becoming Him, by grace not nature, through union with Jesus Christ (unio cum Christo), by the faith of Christ. There is nothing abstract, but only concrete in this theory of Christian knowledge of God; it is grounded in ‘God’s grace all the way down.’ In this frame, there is no dangling creation running amok, thinking God or not thinking God on its own terms. For Torrance, and me, there can be only one way, one starting point, for knowing God, and that is in and from the triune and perichoretic interpenetrating life of God which is eternal Love. This ground, necessarily negates the possibility for an abstract humanity having an inherent ‘pure’ capacity to conjure the true and living God. This reality, necessarily defeats the notion that a naked humanity could speculate themselves into the heavenlies and come back with a more accurate knowledge of the true and the living God (indeed, isn’t a naked humanity what got us into this mess to begin with?).

So, TFT:

Inevitably we have already had to discuss some of the specific requirements of theology as a science in order to distinguish the way in which general scientific activity takes place in theology from ways appropriate to other sciences, but we have now to examine more closely the distinctive characteristics of theological activity. Some repetition is therefore inevitable. All of these requirements arise directly out of respect for and devotion to this unique Object, God in His Revelation, or rather all are required of us from the side of the Object, as adaptations of our rationality in modes of activity congruent with it.

The primary thing we have to note is the utter lordship of the Object, its absolute precedence, for that is the one all-determining presupposition of theology. Theological activity would not be scientific if it did not yield to it its rightful place. This prescribes for theology a unique form of inquiry in which we ourselves altogether and always stand in question before the Object. We know only as we are known, and we conduct our research only as we are searched through and through by God. The main point we have to single out here is that knowledge of God entails an epistemological inversion in the order of our knowing, corresponding to the order of the divine action in revealing Himself to us.

In all our knowing it is we who know, we observe, we examine, we inquire, but in the presence of God we are in a situation in which He knows, He observes, He examines, He inquires and in which He is ‘indissoluble Subject’. He is the Lord of our knowing even when it is we who know, so that our knowing is taken under command of the lordship of the Object, the Creator Himself. We can only follow through the determination of our knowing by the Object known who yet remains pure Subject. This relation, in which the ultimate control passes from the knower, who yet remains free, to God who is known in His knowing of us, is an important aspect of what we call faith. Faith entails the opening up of our subjectivity to the Subjectivity of God through His Objectivity. Faith is the relation of our minds to the Object who through His unconditional claims upon us establishes the centre of our knowing in Himself and not in us, so that the whole epistemological relation is turned round—we know in that we are known by Him. His Objectivity encounters our objectivity and our objectivity is subordinated to His and grounded in His. But it is precisely in knowing us, in making us the objects of His knowledge, that He constitutes us subjects over against Him, the lordly Subject, and therefore gives us freedom to know Him even while in our knowing we are unconditionally bound to Him as the Object of our knowledge. Here our effort to subdue everything to our knowledge is halted and obstructed by God, for He is the one Object we cannot subdue. We can know Him only as we are subdued by Him, that is, as we obediently rely upon His Grace.[1]

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 131–32.