Category Archives: Natural Theology

On a Knowledge of God: Natural Theology and its Antichrist Nature

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I wrote the following three years ago. This locus remains my primary point of theological interest. That is, how the Christian claims to know God, under what pressures, has the greatest theological, political, sociological, and ethical implications we could fathom. As you will see, beyond the programmatic entailments engaged with in the following, natural theology, and adherence to it, has clear and present impact on the daily lives of real-life people; whether personally or collectively (as a society). If it is maintained that God and His ways can be known in an abstract ground latent in human reason, consciousness, or brute nature itself, then this will frame the way the Christians under this specter develop their respective ethics and politics; indeed, in light of their ostensible theological soundings. This is why, for Barth, this was all so pressing; particularly as he inhabited the range of two World Wars. In the Reich context it was evident for all to see how a form of natural theology could be deployed for the evilest of ends. In my view, there is no way to massage natural theology into a form that magnifies the name of Jesus Christ. Thus, along with Barth, I believe that the analogia entis (as a subset of natural theology) is Antichrist! We can see how so-called Christian leaders today are equally committed to natural theology, and how that is allowing them to capitulate to the global politics of the day; particularly as that is focused on the politicization of the “health crisis,” so-called “climate change,” and the deployment of critical race theory. All of these things fall under the rubric of natural theology. Confidence in the natural human capacities leads people to the conclusion that we have the powers to manipulate “naked” ideas, or brute natural forces, just the same, to our own beneficial ends. All we end up doing under this sort of posture, though, in my view, is to take by force what alone belongs to God; who alone searches the hearts and minds of all humanity.  

With the aforementioned, we now turn to the body of this post.  

How do we know God? There are traditions for answering that very question; I follow a particular tradition in contrast to another prominent tradition. This post will explore this question by providing some lengthy description of its unfolding in 20th century modern theology. We will read along with David Congdon, at length, as he describes Karl Barth’s relationship to the analogia entis tradition, and the alternative that is situated in Barth’s dialectical theology. After we have read along with Congdon we will bring what Congdon has surfaced for us in Barth’s theology into a brief discussion on a doctrine of creation in general. I recognize that I write about this issue frequently and often here at the blog, and this should alert you to the importance I see in it. 

In the process of developing Barth’s (and Bultmann’s) style of dialectical theology Congdon breaks off in a section and gets into the issue of knowledge of God vis-à-vis the infamous analogy of being; most commonly associated, in medieval theology, with Thomas Aquinas, and in modern theology with Roman Catholic theologian, Erich Przywara. The version of analogia entis that Barth is most animated by is the version of his German theological counterpart, Przywara. Barth’s reasons for being so animated are indeed contextual to the Third Reich milieu he was situated within, and the way that the Volk (national) church deployed things like the analogy of being, and natural theology in general, towards their evil ends. Some want to relativize or marginalize Barth’s animus towards the analogy of being by arguing that that was only a consequent and development per his idiosyncratic situatedness. Thus the marginalization goes, Barth’s stance against the analogy of being may have served his purposes towards an attempt at assassinating the Nazi conflation of church and state, but for our current purposes, theologically, such animus would be misdirected. But what this critique fails to appreciate is that the forces Barth was contesting are the dark forces and principalities and powers that have always already been present in this space-time continuum. In other words, there is nothing idiosyncratic about Barth’s stance against the analogy of being or natural theology in general that aren’t just as prescient and present in the 21st century—look around, we are currently in a corporatist oligarchic globalist state wherein the principalities and powers are just as heavy upon us (in their own expressions) as they were in the Deutschland of Barth and the Confessing Church of Bonhoeffer. 

In the following David Congdon helps elucidate what in fact this whole debate is about; in particular in Barth’s contest with Przywara (and then by application to the German civilization and Emil Brunner). You will also see the way Condgon, per his thesis, ties this particular debate into a theology of mission (which ties into colonialism and nationalism). We will leave that particular discussion to the side (i.e. mission) to focus on Barth’s problem with the analogia. Congdon writes (in extenso): 

The year 1932 marks the climax of the confrontation between Barth and Erich Przywara. Three years earlier, in February 1929, Barth invited Przywara to Münster to participate in his seminar on Thomas Aquinas. In December 1931, Przywara visited Barth again in his seminar on “The Problem of Natural Theology” while at Bonn. These debates, together with Przywara’s request in April 1932 that Barth review his book, Analogia Entis, and the rising political unease in Germany, resulted in Barth’s famous statement in the preface to KD 1.1 that the analogia entis is “the  invention of the anti-Christ.” It was the 1929 meeting that really set the stage for their disagreement, and in particular a comment Przywara made on the morning of February 6. According to the student protocols of the seminary, Przywara began by defending his position regarding the manifestation of God’s revelation in history, including in human consciousness. In his defense he cited the Thomistic axiom “gratia non destruit se supponit et perficit naturam” (grace does not destroy but supports and perfects nature). Przywara understood grace to be both created and uncreated, both native and alien. The justification of the sinner does not annul but rather brings to fulfillment the grace already present in us by virtue of our creaturely participation in the being of God. 

Within weeks after this seminar visit Barth delivered his response to Przywara in the form of his lecture in Dortmund, “Schicksal und Idee in der Theologie.” While Przywara is not mentioned, he is the “silent conversation partner throughout.” This is especially clear when he addresses the Thomistic axiom directly: 

“Gratia non destruit, sed supponti et perficit naturam.” Analogia entis: thus each existing being as such and also we human beings as existing beings participate in the similitudo Dei. The experience of God is for us an inherent possibility and necessity. . . . The word of God does not mean for human beings a confirmation and reassurance of the naïve confidence that the experience of God is, but rather . . . in contrast to the whole range of possible experience it says something new and not merely more strongly and clearly what people could know anyway and even experience elsewhere. Indeed, this is how things always stand between God’s word and human beings, in that it proclaims something new to them and comes to them like light in the darkness. It always comes to them as to sinners, as forgiving and thus as judging grace. . . . Therefore that ability and necessity, that capacity for experiencing God, cannot be understood at any rate as something “natural”—meaning something given with our existence as such or subsequently associated with our existence as such, nor can it be understood by an appeal to a “gratia inhaerens,” by virtue of which the knower and known would simply and in themselves be in the relation to God of the analogia entis. 

Barth explicitly rejects the very axiom to which Przywara appealed to support his position. Grace, Barth says, neither has a basis in nature nor does it become subsequently part of nature. The grace of God is always a judging and forgiving grace, and for this reason it never becomes a “given” (datum) that lies at our disposal. It remains wholly nongiven even in the concrete event of Christ wherein God gives Godself to us. Grace always confronts us as a new event. 

Keith Johnson makes this astute observation that much more is at stake here for Barth than simply the old Protestant-Catholic debate over justification, though that is certainly at the heart of the dispute. What concerns Barth is, in fact, the same colonialist logic of the gospel’s cultural captivity that prompted his dialectical revolt against liberal theology fifteen years earlier. 

The link between humanity and God [Barth] recognized in 1929 followed the pattern he had seen in 1914 when his former teachers enlisted God in support of their own cause by giving their blessing to the war. Barth’s theology, from that moment on, had been driven by his goal of overcoming this mistake. In Przywara’s analogia entis, he discovered a sophisticated version of the same error, and in the Germany of 1932, the political winds were stirring in much the same way they had in 1914. 

Barth’s remark in 1932 about the analogia entis as the “invention of the anti-Christ” is therefore “a direct function of his context. . . . The political turmoil around him had to be on Barth’s mind, and in his view, the church appeared to be complicit in the events that were unfolding.” In other words, the danger in Przywara’s thinking was that he provided a robust theological framework capable of justifying the nationalist propaganda and colonialist endeavors of the German nation. The fact that Przywara’s theology had such a strong internal consistency and grounding in the tradition made if far more dangerous than the liberalism of Barth’s teachers and Protestant contemporaries. It is for this reason that Barth was compelled to sound a clear and unequivocal denunciation of the analogia entis. 

To make matters even more interesting, Przywara developed his account of analogy for missionary reasons. He understood the analogia entis as a “missionary principle” whose purpose is to prompt the church to positively engage German culture as the place where God is presently at work. The analogia entis accomplishes this task because “it attempts to meet the world on its own ground rather than insist that the world move to its ground.” We have to recall that, during these years of conversation with Przywara, Barth was simultaneously engaged in a debate with Brunner regarding the “point of connection” between nature and grace. And like Przywara, Brunner also viewed his account of the Anknüpfungspunkt as a missionary concept. A pattern quickly began to emerge. In each of these three situations—the liberal capitulation in 1914, Przywara’s analogia entis in 1929–32, Brunner’s Anknüpfungspunkt in 1929–35—Barth faced a theological position that claimed mission as its ground and aim, and on the basis of this appeal to mission sought to find a point of connection or continuity between God and humanity. The liberal theologians found it in German civilization, Przywara in human consciousness and experience, Brunner in the faculty of reason. In each case the will and work of God became continuous with what is already given and native to human beings in their creaturely existence, and so in each case Barth rendered a decisive verdict in the form of, respectively, the “No-God” in Der Römerbrief (1922), the “invention of the anti-Christ” in KD 1.1 (1932), and the famous Nein (1934).1 

After this lengthy and enlightening treatment offered by Congdon, I think the primary point of reduction comes to the issue orbiting around a “point of connection” (Anknüpfungspunkt) between God and humanity. As Congdon underscores this has taken various expressions through the centuries, whether that be with Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Przywara, the German nation (of the third reich), or Brunner; it is the issue of ‘the point of contact’ between God and humanity that is significant. It is significant, particularly in Barth’s context, because of the ethical and theopolitical implications this locus entails. 

If God can be thought from nature (or natural capacity), if the boundaries between God and humanity, God and the nations can be forcefully brought together by identifying an inherent capacity with nature itself that is gestationally waiting for God to activate and give it birth, then who’s to regulate this sort of grounding between God and humanity; the theologians, the politicians? Barth says Nein. He seeks to take away this seduction for the ‘natural’ human heart, and place the ground for “the point of connection” within the life of Godself in the hypostatic union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ. This is why the type of analogical knowledge of God that Barth supports is grounded in what he calls an analogia fidei/relationis (analogy of faith-relation). Barth recognizes the role that analogy plays in the correspondence of our knowledge of God with God’s knowledge of Godself; but again, even as Barth recognizes the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between God and humanity, and precisely because of that, the shape of analogy he can support is one where it is objectively grounded not in a faceless apophatic God, but only in and from a center in himself that is for us in Jesus Christ. For Barth, within the Calvinian frame, faith is knowledge of God, and faith itself is the bond that God alone in the humanity of Christ has in se but for us as he transcends the ditch between himself and us within a creational nexus wherein all of creation has always already been attenuated and teleologized by Christ who is the Supreme and Firstborn of and for Creation. 

I said at the beginning of my post that I was going to also get into a doctrine of creation. At the close of my paragraph above I start to hint at that discussion, but because of the length of this post I am going to close it now. I hope you can at least appreciate what is at issue in this discussion as a result of reading this post. Indeed, Barth had a context, but so has all of theological development; even so called catholic or ecumenical developments. The contextual and conditioned nature of theological development doesn’t negate its global availability or reduce its force to the period or circumstances of its locational unfolding; instead, the merit and weight of various theological developments, such as Barth’s anti-natural theological / anti-analogia entis posture, are weighed strictly by their proximate value in bearing witness to the res (the reality) and power of God’s Gospel who is Jesus Christ. I hope you’ll consider that if you are prone to writing Barth’s position off simply because Barth wrote his theology in the context and shadow of Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. Just maybe Barth’s theology, even though his heretic was partly German nationalism instead of Arius, has angel’s wings under it; in such a way that it might be a ministering spirit to the thirsty souls adrift in the 21st century evangelical theological wasteland (and I’m referring to the lacuna of Christian Dogmatics for the evangelical world). 

 

 1 David W. Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 292-95.

Barmen, Barth and Agamben in Contradiction to BigMedicine as the State Church

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What is the relationship between the state and church? This question was thrown into intense relief at the outset of the so-called Nazification of the church in Germany back in the thirties. Because of this serpentine evil pressed against the people, and thus the German church, leaders in both the Lutheran and Reformed communions came together to form what would become known as the Confessing Church. Its most well-known participants were Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The leaders in this emerging church felt compelled to offer a declaration that would galvanize their respective position against what they discerned to be an overstep (understatement) of Hitler and his state church. The Confessing Church leadership believed, and rightly so, that the state had no business interfering with the church’s business; equally, they were convicted that the state itself had its own God-ordained integrity, to maintain order and law in and among the broader population. They articulated what they believed, with reference to these matters, in what came to be known as the Barmen Declaration. It is composed of various theses, under which explanation, both positive and negative is given. The thesis that particularly focused on the relationship between church and state is found in thesis 5; it reads as follows:

    1. “Fear God. Honor the Emperor.” 1 Pet. 2:17

Scripture tells us that by divine appointment the State, in this still unredeemed world in which also the Church is situated, has the task of maintaining justice and peace, so far as human discernment and human ability make this possible, by means of the threat and use of force. The Church acknowledges with gratitude and reverence toward God the benefit of this, his appointment. It draws attention to God’s Dominion [Reich], God’s commandment and justice, and with these the responsibility of those who rule and those who are ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word, by which God upholds all things.

We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the State should and could become the sole and total order of human life and so fulfil the vocation of the Church as well.

We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the Church should and could take on the nature, tasks and dignity which belong to the State and thus become itself an organ of the State.1

Christiane Tietz in her recently released book, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict, offers the following commentary and context for thesis 5:

The fifth thesis describes the relationship between church and state. The state is to provide justice and peace, the church is to remind the state of the kingdom of God and make the state aware that it must answer before God’s commandment and righteousness. There are two statements of rejection expressed under this thesis: the doctrine of the “totalitarian state” that seeks to dominate all areas of life, including the church, is rejected, as is the teaching that the church should take over the tasks or characteristics of the state. Barth later noted that a strong and vital church would have needed to judge the abuses of the Nazi state even more strongly. Even for these statements however they had to summon all their courage. In light of the ideology of that era the theses were “an immense contradiction.”2

Because my audience is varied, and probably not generally in-step with me on discerning our times, I want to provide further elaboration on what I think is actually happening in the state; and then how that is related in sinister form to the church at large. In order to help me elucidate my own perspective I will share a passage from Giorgio Agamben where he discusses the collapse of state directed medicine into a religion of its own. He writes:

The medical religion has unreservedly adopted from Christianity the eschatological appeal dropped by the latter. Capitalism, by secularising the theological paradigm of salvation, had already eliminated the idea of the end times, replacing it with a permanent state of crisis without redemption or end. ‘Krisis’ was originally a medical concept which designated, in the Hippocratic corpus of texts, the moment when the doctor decided whether the patient would be able to survive the disease. Theologians reprised the term to indicate the final judgement that occurs during the last day. If we look at the state of exception which we are now experiencing, we could say that the medical religion combines the perpetual crisis of capitalism with the Christian idea of the end times, of an eschaton where the extreme decision is constantly ongoing and where the end is simultaneously rushed and deferred in an incessant effort to govern it, without its ever being resolved once and for all. It is the religion of a world that feels itself to be at its end, and yet it cannot—like the Hippocratic doctor—decide whether it will survive or die.3

Lots of rich insight and perspective provided for by Agamben, but for my purposes what serves instructive is the link that is made between the medical superstructure, particularly as that is supported by the state (ie FDA, CDC, BigPharma, WHO etc.), and how this has sought to displace the church’s role as the church. Attendant to this sublation, of the church by the state, the medicine-state as religion now seeks to baptize all of its elect (even by the sword if necessary) with their ‘means of grace’ administered through the various holy waters on offer; whether that be mRNA based, or not. But without getting into those details further, suffice it to say, the church now is in just as precarious of a situation, and even greater than, what the Confessing Church was facing in the natural theology being promulgated by the state church of the Third Reich and Hitler. Things have been sophisticated since the 1930s by way of technology, and new communicative strategies and platforms for mass media and propaganda; but the sinister nature, and unholy ingress of the state into the sphere of the church is at an all-time high.

When state tyranny infringes on the people in general, and the church in particular, it is the church’s rightful place to say a resounding and holy, Nein! The church is here to bear witness to the reality of God’s life for the world, and the truth that comes with that kind of life as the ground and grammar of everything. When the state conflates itself with the church as the church, when it has ministers on the payroll, as they do in America through COVID relief, so on and so forth, this is the time for the Confessing Church of the 21st century to yell out a resounding, No! The Confessing Church is like the sons of Issachar who had “men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do (I Chronicles 12.32) . . . .” When the church discerns a tyrannical state using the name of Christ to grow its tyranny, particularly as it does that in the place of and as the church, then it is time for the churches, and any semblance of an emerging Confessing Church to take the mic and say, No!

Unfortunately, most mainstream evangelical pastors, and other church pastors of various movements and traditions, have failed to call out the statism as churchism currently underway in the world. They have failed to recognize, unlike Agamben, that there is a new religion in the world, and it is BigMedicine as a proxy for the state. Until pastors and theologians in the mainstream come to this realization, they will continue to bow the knee to Caesar, not realizing that they are even doing so. They will continue catechizing their people with notions that the ‘loving’ thing to do is to be baptized into this new religion, and bear witness to the fact that salvation has come to the masses in and through this new form of baptismal regeneration. Indeed, here is a learned pastor, I know, who just yesterday posted the following on Facebook:

Regardless of whether or not a government has the “right” to mandate vaccinations, masks, and social distancing, and regardless of whether or not I as an individual have the “right” to refuse, because I am a follower of Jesus called to love my neighbor, I have been fully vaccinated, I wear a mask and practice social distancing in public, and I avoid crowds. I’m not afraid of COVID-19. I love you enough to do whatever I can to protect you. If I catch SARS-CoV-2, I’ll likely recover fairly quickly because I am fully vaccinated, but I could still transmit it to someone who isn’t or to someone with a compromised immune system. As a follower of Jesus, I’m called to lay down my “rights” and serve. I don’t want you or any of your loved ones to wind up on a ventilator in an ICU. I’ve been in too many ICUs to wish that on anyone. Nor do I want you or your loved ones to die from a deadly pandemic. I’ve officiated at far too many funerals to ignore that possibility.4

This is a perfect example of how the state has reached into the church, and in the name of health and safety, presented ministers of the Gospel with a new law-code and Great Commission to be followed. It is couched in subterfuge and misinformation, and on this pastor’s part, received without any critical investigation whatsoever. As a result, he has become an unwitting tool in the hands of the angel of light, declaring health and safety over the masses in the name of an elixir that self-proclaims itself as the current means of salvation for the world.

The Confessing Church of the 21st century needs to cry out, Nein!, over and over again; and to do so as the sons and daughters of Issachar: viz. with understanding!

 

1 Barmen Declaration.

2 Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 235 kindle.

3 Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now?: The Epidemic As Politics (Lanham: Rowman&Littlefield, 2021), 53.

4 Anonymous, accessed 09-13-2021.

 

 

Heidegger’s Techno-Cult is Nigh Upon Us

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Michael Gillespie continues to do a masterful job in treating what he calls ‘the ground of history’ in the thought of both Hegel and Heidegger. In this instance (what we will be reading from him below) we will engage with his development of Heidegger’s critique of modernity; particularly as that gets fleshed out in what we might call a technocracy. I want to share Gillespie on Heidegger at length because I think that what Heidegger thought, in regard to history’s reduction to technological determinism vis-à-vis human enablement and projection, is highly pertinent for what we are seeing unfold before our very eyes in the broader culture and global societies now. Let’s read along with Gillespie on Heidegger, and then I will offer some concluding comments following.

The will to power, according to Heidegger, is the penultimate form of modernity. In it the distinction of subject and object dissolves. As Nietzsche puts it: “this world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!” The will to power thus makes possible the universal objectification of everything, for objectification becomes nothing other than the subordination of the will to itself. The end of the will is the subjugation of man and nature, i.e., power. This power, however, has as its end only the security of the will to will. The will to power is thus implicitly the will to will. As such it is merely the means to further means with no end beyond itself and thus fundamentally nihilistic. The will to power, which rests upon the recognition that God is dead, thus passes over into the all-encompassing and all-establishing will (Ge-Stell) of an irresistible world of technology.

The advent of will to power as the will to will opens up the possibility for the unlimited exploitation of everything. This occurs through the universal establishment of everything not merely as objects but as pure instrumentalities (Bestände) and through the subordination of all subjectivity and freedom to the overarching necessities of the will implicit in technology. Man is organized on a global scale by political, social, and economic agencies for production and consumption, and the earth itself becomes nothing but a reserve of energy and raw materials that are brought forth and directed by a technology that aims only at its own continuation and growth. The absolute technical state itself serves only to guide the total mobilization of human and natural resources for the unlimited exploitation and consumption of the earth. Politics along with all other institutions thus becomes an appendage of technology. In this “planetary imperialism” of technical organization subjectivity and modernity reach their end.

With the advent of world technology freedom is extinguished. The general conception of technology as a tool in the hands of a self-determining humanity is in Heidegger’s view a fundamental misunderstanding, for technology has a logic and necessity of its own that passes beyond human control. All men are governed by economic and technical necessities: the competition for the unlimited exploitation of the earth requires the objectification and subordination not just of some men to others but of all men to the world task. Man thus becomes human to the extent that he constitutes himself as raw material that has no determinate characteristics, or as a pure instrumentality that can be used as momentary necessity dictates. Man becomes an interchangeable part.

In the midst of this technological frenzy of production and consumption of subordination and exploitation, man fails to recognize, according to Heidegger, that it is the very subjectivity and freedom he regards as the essence of humanity that uproots him and casts him into uncertainty, insecurity, and alienation. Hence he does not recognize that all his striving only more completely obliterates his place in the world and his true humanity. Indeed, man and the world are thereby so transformed that the very possibility of a place, of an ethos, and hence of an authentic ethics and politics is extinguished. Man who had a home in the world in the context of the polis and traditional life is at home in the modern world everywhere and nowhere: as a pure instrumentality man can adapt himself to anything as homo faber man becomes mass man.

Man’s reaction to this universal homelessness and alienation in Heidegger’s view is not a thoughtful hesitation and reflection upon his own being but an overly hasty decision to fabricate a place for himself, i.e., to objectify himself and his tradition in such a way that every place becomes a necessary place, determined by the inevitability of historical development. The science that achieves this is History (Historie). As the science of the res gestae History is the objectification of what has occurred. Insofar as it is an objectification, however, History is severed from history (Geschichte) itself, from the tradition of which it was a part and in which it had a place, and hence can be made and remade according to the momentary necessities of power and technological development. In this manner History not only fails to establish a secure place for man but indeed itself becomes an, if not the, crucial weapon in the struggle for power and thereby more thoroughly fosters human insecurity and alienation. History thus serves only as an apologetic and polemic for the various conflicting forces concerned with unlimited objectification and exploitation and thereby becomes entangled in this conflict itself.

The resulting disagreement about the Historical interpretation of history in Heidegger’s view leads not the abandonment of History but to a relativism that rests upon the recognition of the subjective element in all History. However, this does not resolve the question about the character of history but only gives rise to a thorough confusion, which further obliterates the truth of tradition and man’s place in the world. This Historical confusion about history in Heidegger’s view is Historicism. Modernity’s response to Historicism, however, is not a return to or a reconsideration of the traditional but rather an ever more vehement attachment to a particular Historical interpretation and an increasingly comprehensive attempt to persuade and indeed to force others to recognize and accept its manifest truth. History thus becomes ideology and replaces philosophy, politics, art, etc., as the determinative explanation of human life.[1]

With the advent of the superclass, the oligarchs and technocrats, as they make their parousia (presence) known to the world, at least for those with eyes to see, what Heidegger (according to Gillespie) ‘prophesied’ in regard to the “masters’ of the universe” seems nigh upon us. When humanity abstracts itself from its ground in the humanity of the triune God pro nobis (for us) in Jesus Christ all that is left is a negated-self. This self must chart out in brave new ways in an attempt to construct a reality of its own making; particularly as that must be done against what seems to be an insurmountable and untamable natural order. As this self gains an ostensible mastery over the created order (per its own perception), it takes its self-assigned ‘freedom,’ which it has acquired by its conscious differentiation from nature simpliciter, and sublates it to this nature as that takes shape in technological machinery and apparatus. In this process the self hands over its self-constructed notion of freedom, and gives it to the technological commodities it becomes enslaved to in order to continue to advance and exist in this sort of monsterized and artificial world. In other words, the ‘man’ becomes the machine (nature simpliciter) out of pure survivalistic necessity; and as Heidegger divinized the distinction between raw-nature and humanity dissolves into a unitive abyss. This is the nihilistic way of the world order currently.

This reality transcends all party and social demographics. In America, for example, it doesn’t matter if you’re for Trump or Biden, on the left or the right, this sort of nihilistic technocracy as understood by Heidegger is the inescapable reduction of a humanity shorn of its groundedness in God’s extra life of triune love. Globalized humanity, which we already are, has been reduced back to a technologized people of Bab-el. We have divested ourselves, at least those who have not repented, of any semblance of what it means to be genuinely human coram Deo. There is only one ground of existence that does not finally dissolve itself into a techno-occultic liturgy of worshipping creation; and that ground, of course, has been gifted to and for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. The ground that God has graciously provided for us is nothing less than the indestructible reality of His life, which is mysterium Trinitatis. There is no other possibility for salvation from the inevitable dystopic technocracy that this world has plunged itself into. God in Christ is it; this is the Way.  

[1] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 128-29.

On Nationalism and the Christian Religion

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Karl Barth writes the following as he is tailing off on a development on God’s power: “’The Almighty’ in abstracto [in the abstract] has probably more to do with that revolutionary and tyrannical spirit than with God. The constitution of the Swiss Confederacy is right when it begins with the words: ‘In the name of God, the Almighty.’”[1] Barth is identifying the problem of conflating divine power and right with state power and right; and he is right. We don’t want to engage in any sort of natural theology that would divinize the state, and evacuate God of His rightful place as God Almighty. I see people sloppily worrying over nothing in this regard. They seem to think that Americans who are pro-Trump and nationalist/populist in orientation have engaged in the sort of natural theology that Barth rightfully is decrying. Barth is decrying the sort of nationalism that we see in Hitlerism, ultimately. But that is not what is happening in America currently; even if leftists, ironically, would like to construct this sort of psychedelic vision. Trump is not Hitler, the globalists are.

The fact that educated people, and it is typically educated people, cannot make this all-critical distinction illustrates the sort of education they are receiving. They aren’t learning how to think critically; instead they are learning to think by way of indoctrination. Many of us can see this, but they mostly cannot. I am educated, and I can see this; and there are others who are so-called, educated who can see this. But the sub-culture of the educated is the culture that has been targeted for cooptation by the very sinister coup currently underway in the world; largely driven by the CCP and their globalist collaborators. This tells me that many in this sub-culture are more concerned with being part of their group rather than with the truth. This is particularly troubling when it comes to the Christian educated. Theologians, pastors et al. are supposed to be the vanguards for truth in the world, pointing people to the kerygmatic truth of Jesus Christ, and all the entailments of His life as that implicates all truth in this world. But by and large, even among these folk, there is an abject silence; or there is a knuckling under to the mainstream narrative that has no correspondence whatsoever to the preponderance of evidences.

I simply wanted to register this distinction for folks. Fighting for the fidelity of our nation as Americans is not, of necessity, a matter of natural theological idolatry. Instead, it is an attempt to bear witness to the truth insofar as that can be discerned in the complex that nations represent in toto. I am not violating Barth’s critique of national socialism; instead I am affirming it by making the proper identification of who in fact is embodying the national socialist mode—viz. the globalists, the leftists, the oligarchists, the crony-corporatocratists, antifa&BLM, and the go-along-with-the-group-people. This, in fact, is why I am so passionate about all of this. I am anti-natural theology to my core, and I see the globalists attempting to make the “state,” their globalist utopia, as Lord. They want to prop up the system of the Beast in a Babel sort of way wherein they identify themselves as the gods and masters of the universe. Does it make sense to you now? Can you see why I am pro-Trump? It isn’t about Trump so much, as it is about defeating a grotesque form of natural theology that absolutely is Antichrist. Is Trump antichrist? I don’t ultimately know. But maybe despite himself he has ironically become the figurehead of a movement that is wrought on defeating a darkness in the world that has gained an insidious reach, even as an angel of light, into the lives of billions of people worldwide; sadly, even into the lives of many non-discerning Christians. Just know that if you read here you will always get a theology that is funded by an anti-natural theological position.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §31: Study Edition Vol 9 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 88-9.

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.

Modifying the Theology Proper of the Declaration of Independence for a More Coherent Stance Against Tyranny

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Anti-natural theology and small non-intrusive government go hand-in-hand. Anti-natural theology emphasizes God-possessed freedom, and as a counterpart, our participation by grace therefrom. In diffuse: when applied to political theory, the ground of political oversight is not vested to a hierarchical chain of commanders, but is grounded in the very liberty of God’s life. Because He is for us, our sense of liberty and governance comes not from men, but directly from and by Him in the humanity of Jesus Christ. Ironically, the Declaration of Independence is grounded in natural theology; a collapse of divine attributes into humans and their ability to infer the divine from within and back up the chain of being. But this gives too much place for demiurge-commanders to step in and attempt to speak as vicars of Christ in ex-cathedra intonation.

The aforementioned comes from a Facebook post I just published. I mentioned the Declaration of Independence (DI), an important document for us Americans; well, for some of us. I agree, de jure, with the principles of freedom and government, with the political theory embedded in the DI; but I am critical, as noted in the FB post, of the natural theology underwriting it. Here’s the pertinent language that I am critical of: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This is natural theology, simplicter; i.e., the idea that ‘these truths’ are ‘self-evident’ does not cohere with a properly oriented understanding of Christian theology. And just as significantly, because the DI attempts to refer to the ‘Creator,’ in this context the Judeo-Christian understanding of the divine, it then leaves itself open to the sort of critique I am tacitly attempting here.

Natural theology, particularly of the Christian sort, claims as a preamble that the Christian (or even, non-Christian) person has an innate or intact capacity to think the divine based simply upon ‘self-evident’ truths built into the created order by the Creator. They maintain that the ratio and taxis of creation , as such, allows for the curious soul to reflect upon the various attributes of nature, primarily those found in human being (so the theological construct of analogia entis), and think its way back to God, through the interconnected chain of being of cause and effect left discoverable therein. Steven Ozment offers a helpful description of how this looks, particularly as that was developed in the theology of medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas:

The assumption that real relations existed between God, man, and the world made possible Aquinas’s confidence in a posteriori proofs of God’s existence; finite effects led necessarily to their origin, because they were really connected with it. The same assumption underlay Aquinas’s distinctive views on the “analogical” character of human knowledge and discourse about God. According to Aquinas, one could speak meaningfully of one’s relationship to God by analogy with one’s relationship with one’s fellow man because a real relationship existed between the values of people shared and those God had prescribed.[1]

For our purposes it is important to focus on how God is wedded to nature and human being in this framework. While God remains distinct from creation, God’s reality, or human knowledge of that, becomes contingent upon human capacity to discern God and His freedom from nature rather than grace. As I noted in my FB post, when we think God in terms of first cause and secondary causes, when we think God from His effects (us) and in negation arrive back at who God is, nature supplants God’s grace for us, and allows us to coopt His authority, His freedom, for ourselves. Barth notes:

For has he not now exercised his mastery? Has he not won his battle against grace? If grace is alongside nature, however high above it it may be put, it is obviously no longer the grace of God, but the grace which man himself ascribes to himself. If God’s revelation is alongside a knowledge of God proper to man a such, even though it may never be advanced except as a prolegomenon, it is obviously no longer the revelation of God, but a new expression (borrowed or ever stolen) for the revelation which encounters man in his own reflection. If the miracle acknowledged by man—perhaps an inspired Scripture or an infallible Church—is included in his own reckoning, if it is placed by him alongside the other phenomena of his world, it is obviously no longer the miracle of God, but an astounding element in man’s view of the world and of himself. No supranaturalism which man can choose on this higher rung can hold its own against the fact that in the last resort, as chosen by man, it is only a higher, though masked, naturalism. God’s real revelation simply cannot be chosen by man and, as his own possibility, put beside another, and integrated with it into a system. God’s real revelation is the possibility which man does not have to choose, but by which he must regard himself as chosen without having space and time to come to an arrangement with it within the sphere and according to the method of other possibilities. By treating it as if it does not do the choosing but is something to be chosen, not the unique but just one possibility, Christian natural theology very respectfully and in all humility re-casts revelation into a new form of its own devising. But for all that its behavior is so respectful and forbearing, for all that it subordinates itself so consciously and consistently, natural theology has already conquered it at the very outset, making revelation into non-revelation. This will certainly show itself in what it does with the revelation that has been absorbed and domesticated by it. For the naturalism which already exists in the systematisation of the two possibilities will not leave permanently unmolested the supranaturalism of this higher stage which is at first respected and foreborne.[2]

This is what natural theology, of the sort that we find in the Declaration of Independence allows for. It allows for human beings, in a chain of hierarchical being, to assume levels of authority, insofar as they are in societal statuses of authority (like Caesars, Popes, Kings, state Governors, Kaisers etc.), and on an ‘upper rung’ of the interconnected chain of being between God and humans. But this is exactly what the Declaration of Independence (when read in full) wanted to defeat.

This is why Barth was anti-natural theology in his context. He understood how the collapse of grace into nature, as natural theology inherently does, can result in political powers and regimes like he saw with Hitler’s Nazi regime. Barth understood that this knot between nature and grace in a chain of being, between God and humanity, needed to be superseded by understanding that God’s relation to humanity comes directly to and for us as the immediate result of God’s free election to be with and for and in us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This is the alternative Barth offered to the natural theologies of his day, and those of the medieval and early modern past. And by implication, when applied to political theory, I suggest that being anti-natural theology provides a much more coherent basis for what the Declaration of Independence had hoped to achieve in regard to guaranteeing ‘God given’ freedoms for the American Republic. To ground the American sense of human freedom in natural theology rather than in the anti-natural theology proper of God revealed in Jesus Christ, when internalized and put into practice, can only result in a sense of freedom that ends up being mediated by those in stations of power ostensibly granted by God and the people.

More to say, but this represents the beginning of a thought line I’d like to develop further. We can currently see the sort of tyrannical power rogue governors, mayors, and city magistrates in the US (and elsewhere) are assuming; the very sort of tyranny the Declaration of Independence sought to destroy. The ‘powers’ have natural theology and the God thereof in their corner. They can appeal to divine sanction for their power, and declare with fiat, that people must simply submit to their will insofar as they have the status they have as government officials. Even so, while the DI has this sort of errant natural theology underwriting it, de jure, the principles it articulates, as far as freedoms from tyranny, it has gotten things right; it just needs the sort of modification I am referring us to in this post. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people can only rightfully be vouchsafed when the God given freedom it hopes for comes directly for them from God’s life with them in Jesus Christ. This is the sort of liberty that defies all forms of tyranny, and has the genuine power of the God of resurrection behind it. But it also suffers from the scandal of particularity, which I’m sure the framers of the DI and Constitution hoped to avoid in the pluralist experiment they were attempting. The god of natural theology can remain generic and abstract; the God I am referring to, the anti-natural theology God, is particular and concrete. And so America is left with a concept of the divine, underneath its documentary existence, that in the end is discordant with the freedoms they had hoped to guarantee the Republic. Even so, even with this flaw, we must assert the principles it was still able to produce as the foundation-stone for defeating tyrannies from without and within. We can work on providing a more sound theology proper, for its basis, later.

 

[1] Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250-1550, 49.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 136.

Masters of the Universe, COVID19, and the Great[est] Depression: A Christian Response

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I am attempting to process all that is going on in the world as a result of so called COVID19, and the economic fallout (Greatest Depression) it is producing (I am about to lose my job, or be furloughed from my job because of it). The absolute death and destruction this fiasco will cause is of biblical proportions, there is no doubt about that; for all with eyes to see and ears to hear (and I again am referring to the economic depression we are only just beginning to enter into as a result of the fear of this “plague”). My last post was quickly conceived, I wrote it in about fifteen minutes; but I wanted to at least unburden myself of some of the angst I’ve been experiencing from all that I have been seeing in the world. This post will likewise be in that vein, but hopefully it will have a little more substance to it than even my last one (although my last one, I think, had lots of undeveloped biblical substance to it). In this post I want to engage with the Barmen Declaration, and the natural theology that declaration is intent on confronting. After reflecting a bit on the Declaration, I will apply some of that to how I believe the leadership of the world, and here at home (in the USA) fits into what Barmen attempts to contradict by its slavish appeal to Jesus Christ, and the theology of the Word thereof.

But even before we jump into all of the aforementioned I want to share a word from a senior Lutheran theologian, Paul Hinlicky, who I’ve come to know more personally (via online), and his insights and sort of prophetic exhortation in regard to what the government’s response to the FEAR of Sars-Cov-2 has indeed produced; and more, what the Christian’s response should be to it. Hinlicky writes (vis a Facebook post):

I don’t like to play a gloom and doom Jeremiah, but I see so few facing reality. As usual, it seems, the stupid polarizations of our politics are at play once again – highly partisan arguments: as if widespread and rational fear of an uncontrolled contagion were not going to depress indefinitely commerce, as if the cure of economic lockdown were not as deadly or more as the coronavirus disease. It is a deadly conundrum. How many people will an American-led global depression kill?

The ugly truth is that the economic disaster has already happened. No matter how control of the pandemic turns out in the USA: with 26 + million currently unemployed, state and local governments especially those with unfunded pension liabilities nearing bankruptcy, hospitals, churches and universities and other nonprofit and charitable institutions profoundly distressed financially, and the federal deficit having grown by 4 trillion+ in a month’s time, adding to the 22 trillion already in deficit. And I just read that Social Security and Medicare will be unable to pay current claims after 2035.

We can neither grow our way nor tax our way out of this disaster. We are all going to suffer. And will the churches have anything to say about this except the usual pablum about God being with us no matter what? God as hapless pain, writ large – that is, hapless pain divinized – such is the false consolation and religious ideology of a culture unwilling to face its own greedy complicity in putting us on a course that a child could’ve seen was unsustainable. Our science and technology will eventually put an end to the pandemic, but it won’t, without cultural-spiritual change, put an end to our eminently predictable vulnerabilities in which the human race remains embedded in natural processes and not its transcendent master.[1]

And to further explicate the above, in the comment thread following this post, in response to an interlocutor, Hinlicky explicates his aim with his post this way:

I’ve spent a theological career . . . battling for the pathos of God as costly grace. How quickly however the pathos of God becomes the pablum of cheap grace that I’m talking about! – an idea, rather than the person of Jesus Christ crucified and risen presented in word and sacrament so that we die to sin and rise to newness of life. What I was intimating in the post is that through the unraveling of the dogmas of our secular culture being affected by the pandemic, theology must discern the wrath of God, i.e. that God is against us who have set ourselves up as masters of nature in place of God rather than stewards of nature under the dominion of God.[2]

There is much wisdom in Paul’s words; and a willingness to be forthright, and not dilly-dally about what in fact is happening and has already happened as a result of the bewildering response that has been made to ostensibly counter a ‘flu-like’ coronavirus. The picture he paints is rightfully dire, but what I want to pick up on is how he gets us into a discussion on natural theology. In particular it is these clauses that stand out most to me: “without cultural-spiritual change, put an end to our eminently predictable vulnerabilities in which the human race remains embedded in natural processes and not its transcendent master. . . .” and this: “What I was intimating in the post is that through the unraveling of the dogmas of our secular culture being affected by the pandemic, theology must discern the wrath of God, i.e. that God is against us who have set ourselves up as masters of nature in place of God rather than stewards of nature under the dominion of God.” So, the idea that we as humanity are the masters of the universe rather than the living God. It is this insidious and pervasive belief, particularly as that shapes the power structures of the world governments, and all of her acolytes, that I believe is at issue even now.

Whether or not the response to Sars-Cov-2 has been made in ‘good faith’ or not, it has clearly been ill-founded and conceived in regard to the proportion of the response and the fallout it would produce. It is as if the world leaders, including Trump, all reacted in a way that had no prudence and only superfluous reaction with no concept of what death and destruction would be unleashed by literally destroying the global economy. I personally believe there are much more sinister powers at work in all of this, and if the money is followed it is not hard at all to discern much of what that all is. But in order to not get too sidetracked on the details, let me simply say this: to plunge the whole wide world into an abyss of economic destruction, at the levels that it has been, for a virus that fits into the categories of illness we already deal with at an annual rate, is wicked, evil, and anti-Christ of the most deplorable sort. As Hinlicky has rightly noted, it reflects a ‘wisdom of this age’ that has already been formed by a sense of an apotheosis of materialism and consumerism the world over. In other words, the sort of mentality that could, and would plunge the world into the dire straits it has, completely out of proportion and thus not counterbalanced by a multitude of counselors (or modelers) as it should have been. It reflects an irrationalism shaped by a slavish commitment to the almighty Mammon, for many decades of time, rather than to commitment to the living God. In other words, to think that we could simply shut the world economy down for two months, and pop out on the other side just fine, to think that we can simply digitize trillions upon trillions of dollars and add that to the 22T we already had in-debt, can only come from a psyche that believes humanity has a power of nature that in fact only belongs to God. When that is the mentality, it produces all sorts of quick and wrong and destructive steps; the current global scenario illustrates this in unfortunate spades.

We are not the Masters of the Universe, we are not He-man or Shera; our frames are but dust, we are not God, nor in command of nature. As Hinlicky has rightly alerted us to, we are supposed to be in submission to God, and thus stewards of the creation God has given us dominion over. But it is to be under God, not under a humanity who is submitted to a crass materialism and sense of nature it believes it has at its command. To think that we can simply do what we have done, and not cause a blight never imagined, is unimaginable to me. Our only hope is to repent, and turn to God; there is no way out of this, but God, and reliance upon His wisdom. Not a prosperity version of God, but the God revealed on the old rugged cross of Christ.

When the Barmen Declaration was written, by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the context was clearly different; but the demonic spirit it was attempting to confront was just the same we are now confronting in this COVID event. The world is captivated and shaped by a bondage to a consumerist materialism that fosters an [im]morality and mind of its own sinister and deleterious making; it always results in imprudence, whether that be malicious or not, and consequences that it has no ultimate control over. This can lead to political policies, laws, and actions that places materials over people; and because of the seditious mind it creates, it can rationalize its actions by thinking that what it is doing is for the ‘greater good’ of humanity—even if that only represents 500M people rather than 7.6B. But materialism, always has a select group of people who believes they are the masters, and the masses are the slaves used to manipulate the material to the master’s wanton desires and aims for the world. Hitler had this aim with a focus of ridding the earth of the non-Aryan masses, and initiating a third Reich (millennium) for the masters of the race and created order who deserved it; for whom the world was destined. We can see this same impulse shaping the “developed world” over against the “developing and third worlds” currently. Even as the developed world has lived off of the slave labor of the developing and third worlded peoples, even within the developed world there is an ultimate übermensch-class of people, some refer to them as the 1%, who literally run the world order according to their desired ends, and what they vision for the plight of humanity; viz. them as its Lords.

So, we have this ongoing current in the world, we might identify its first notable illustration in Nimrod and the pervasive “Babylonian” kingdom that swerves all the way through redemptive-history all the way into the present. The modern world couldn’t deny this spirit as it became embodied in Adolf Hitler and his minions; and once again, currently, even though it now appears as an Angel of Light, this same ‘spirit’ is waging war and destruction on the masses in the name of the ‘greater good.’ For the Christian, as part of our witness, we are not ‘ignorant of the satan’s devices, and thus when we discern them, as they attempt to wreak death and destruction, we are to rise up with the intensity of resurrection, and expose the darkness with the light of Christ. This is what Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the whole German Confessing church did in the Reich’s Germany. Here is the pertinent part of the Declaration for us:

8.10 – 1. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” (John 14.6). “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. . . . I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved.” (John 10:1, 9.) 8.11 Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. 8.12 We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.[3]

If you are a Christian, and you do not see the sinister forces that Hinlicky, myself, and other Christians see at work, then none of my post applies to you. But if you do see these things for what they are, if you are willing to step out of the shadows cast by the Angel of Light, then us Christians are called to bear witness to the very Light of God in Jesus Christ. God’s οργή (wrath) contrary to a rebellious planet in full-tilted nature worship (cf. Rom 1.18ff) will be actively vented, at various levels of intensity, until He finally says enough is enough and puts the last enemy, which is death (and all of its fallout) under the feet of Christ. Christians are to bear witness to this reality, particularly when we know the human heart’s capacity to elevate itself over the God of creation, as see itself as creation’s very telos or purpose. This sort of evil attends what we are currently experiencing in the world; and it is God who says enough is enough: you are not God, I am God, and the cattle on a thousand hills belong to me. If you think that what I am saying is over-wrought, then I don’t really think you are inhabiting Scripture’s reality, nor its cruci-formed logic for all its worth. There are malevolent and dark forces at work in the world, both actively and passively (the latter being those who are unable to recognize the former, thus submitting to them even in the name of Christ). These forces believe that they are Lord, that their way is the Way, and that their forked-word is God’s Word. The Christian’s witness is to resist this malignancy and say No, even while it proclaims the Yes of God for all of humanity. This is the moment I see us inhabiting, and I call you, Christian, to recognize these realities along with me. Pax Vobis

 

[1] Paul Hinlicky, Facebook Post, accessed 04-27-2020.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Barmen Declaration in toto.

‘Let God Be True and Every Man a Liar’: The Christian Thing To Do:: Stand for the Truth Contra the Liar

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‘Let God be true, and every man a liar!’ (Rom 3.4) This is one of my favorite passages in Holy Scripture; I know it was one of Luther’s too (I wonder why?). If we ever needed to live with this perspective, this is the time. Let the truth reign supreme, and every knee bow, and tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. There is no politician, immunologist, epidemiologist, statistician, Bill Gates, or anyone else who is true; save the living God. He is true. In His truth, in His Light we can come to discern the truth from the lie. In these days of delusion, and outright fear-mongering the Christian’s witness can best be served by bearing witness to the truth of the risen Christ. Embedded in this reality, all other truths are encompassed and have the capacity to be seen as truth or lie / light or darkness. There is so much darkness right now that unless someone is pointed to the light of Christ, they may well fall prey to the angel of light who seeks to kill, still, and destroy. The world is being sleuthed into a dark abyss by dark and shadowy figures who say they are for the people, when they are really only for themselves and their demonic interests. Let God be true, and every man a liar! We have data, not from China, but our own country. The truth is, is that this whole thing has been a horrific lie and hoax (which anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear from very early on could see with bright colors). It is hard for me to understand, as a Christian, how other Christians, people of the truth, can’t see through the lies that would elevate themselves over and against the knowledge of the living God in Christ. That’s what lies do; any lie. If Christ is the truth, then there is no lie in Him. If God is God, He cannot lie. But we know that this is the absolute modus operandi of the enemy of our souls; that’s who he is according to Jesus: the satan is the deceiver and ‘father of lies.’ Let God be true, and every man a liar! Anyone not for Christ, anyone who lies, and practices lying (among other things) is of their father the devil, according to Jesus. Who are the biggest liars in our country right now? It isn’t those aligned with the real data, it is those continuing to use unfounded fear to condition and control the masses for some nefarious purposes (I have ideas of what those might be). The Christian thing to do is to recognize that, and call it out for what it is. It is not the Christian thing to do to submit to a lie. When the sanctity of human life is at stake, it is better to obey God rather than the principalities and powers of our age. And yes, it isn’t so called COVID19 that is the killer, it is the outright scorched earth economic and psychological destruction it has only just started to cause the world over!

For the Christian, our motto ought to be LET GOD BE TRUE, AND EVERY MAN A LIAR! Will we allow this axiom to control our movements in these perilous times? I pray so. May the Word of the Lord endure forever, verbum Dei manet in aeternum, and the lies of men whither away with the grass. Come quickly, Jesus; even so come!

What Hath Thomist-Intellectualist Anthropology To Do With Barthian Anti-Natural Theology?

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For me, natural theology continues to be one of the most significant theological loci that the Christian thinker must (and ought to) consider. If you have read me for any length of time you know that I am severely opposed to natural theology; in particular, so called: Christian natural theology. If I ever actually get to write my PhD, I’m thinking it will finally be something oriented around this issue; with particular focus on a theory of revelation (as the broader consideration). This is a matter of what is called prolegomena. When the reader opens up a typical systematic theology book, the author of that book will have laid out the method, rationale, and structure she or he seeks to follow as they develop their theology. Most often, when reading evangelical and Reformed systematicians, and their respective theologies, they will have adopted the classical theistic mode of natural theology (Thomas Aquinas is their homeboy, most typically).

Very simply, if you don’t know by now, natural theology is the belief that a generic god concept can be discovered (by just about anybody), and then deployed, by way of synthesis, as the shape and grammar by which whatever god the theologian is seeking to explicate as their chosen god. For the Christian, of course, it is the triune God who is synthesized with these natural categories for knowing God. My contention, along with Karl Barth’s et al., is that this sort of synthesis gives us a tertium quid God, who neither represents the God Self-revealed in Christ, nor the philosopher’s god that the theologian is attempting to synthesize with the Christian God.

Beyond this, Christian theologians who operate in this natural theological mode are making an anthropological move; in regard to the capacity they believe people in general have to think godness. They are presuming upon (either consciously, or not) what Norman Fiering has identified as a Thomist Intellectualist anthropology. Since I don’t have Fiering’s work at hand, I’ll have to rely on Jeffrey Waddington’s summary of Fiering’s description of what this sort of intellectualist (faculty psychology) anthropology entails. Waddington writes, with reference to Fiering:

Historically, this kind of thinking (i.e., where the intellect is given priority over the will) can be seen in what Norman Fiering has labeled “Thomistic-Intellectualism.” The Thomistic-Intellectualistic school, which has typically been traced back to Thomas Aquinas, held that the will was blind and followed the last dictate or judgment of the “practical intellect.” In other words, it is the intellect or judgment that shows the will what is to be accepted or rejected. As such, the will can never be guilty of moral error or corruption. “The will itself is never culpable in the case of moral error, since it only follows the judgment of the intellect. The will as the rational appetite is supposed to govern the lower sensitive appetites, although it may happen that unruly vehement appetites from below will obscure rational judgment and thus influence choice wrongly.” Accordingly, without information from the intellect, “the will is not the will, but a confused appetite.” To summarize the Thomistic-Intellectualistic tradition, we can say with regard to the relationship between the intellect and the will in the human soul, there is a primacy of the intellect in the absolute sense since the will is itself blind. The will, then, must be ruled, governed, or directed by the faculty of the understanding. There is, then, an implied denigration of the will and the other powers.[1]

For our purposes what is important is to recognize the role the intellect plays in defining what in fact the human being is. In Thomas’s schema the intellect didn’t completely fall at the fall. He needs this aspect of humanity to remain intact because it is what he sees as the touchstone between God (as the Big Intellect in the sky), and God’s creatures made in his image. If the intellect would have completely fallen, in the Thomist schema, then the very essence of humanity itself would have been utterly lost; and there would have been no humanity for the Christ to assume in the incarnation; or no humanity to redeem. The intellect, in this schema, as we’ve seen through Fiering’s and Waddington’s analysis, has pride of place as the faculty that controls all others (i.e., will and affections).

Why would I draw this point out in this discussion? Because it speaks to the rationale of why so many retrieving theologians in the 21st century simply recover the natural theology of someone like Aquinas without a thought. They are committed to, whether they acknowledge it or not, this sort of Thomistic-Intellectualistic anthropology that posits that it is within the human being, even if they are fallen and “effectually” unredeemed, to discover and even see ‘God’ embedded within the ratio of the created order. The point: such intellectually capable people have the capacity to make ‘contact’ with truths about God without revelation. It is this schema that funds the flaming approval of natural theology by most of the evangelical and Reformed theologians of our time (although not all Reformed folks affirm natural theologian; there are the Van Tilians, like Waddington and his comrades from Westminster Theological Seminary, who reject natural theology for other reasons). Embedded deep within the fabric of the theologian’s mind, those who are engaging in the “constructive” recovery of the “classical” [Thomistic] theology of the Church, is this belief that the intellect has ‘natural’ powers untouched by the lapse that we read about in Genesis 3.

This brings us to the critique I’ve been attempting to get to throughout this post. Karl Barth has critique galore of this sort of natural theological trumpet blowing being currently engaged in by the evangelical and Reformed theologians of our time. Here he is writing about the seduction, and even the dominance, that natural theology has had for the Church for centuries. As you read this, bear in mind what we just covered in regard to theological anthropology. We pick up with Barth in his Church Dogmatics II/1 §26 in a section entitled: The Readiness of Man. You will notice that Barth is referring to the competition the theologians are in with God’s confronting grace; when they affirm and practice natural theology. He writes:

For has he not now exercised his mastery? Has he not won his battle against grace? If grace is alongside nature, however high above it it may be put, it is obviously no longer the grace of God, but the grace which man himself ascribes to himself. If God’s revelation is alongside a knowledge of God proper to man a such, even though it may never be advanced except as a prolegomenon, it is obviously no longer the revelation of God, but a new expression (borrowed or ever stolen) for the revelation which encounters man in his own reflection. If the miracle acknowledged by man—perhaps an inspired Scripture or an infallible Church—is included in his own reckoning, if it is placed by him alongside the other phenomena of his world, it is obviously no longer the miracle of God, but an astounding element in man’s view of the world and of himself. No supranaturalism which man can choose on this higher rung can hold its own against the fact that in the last resort, as chosen by man, it is only a higher, though masked, naturalism. God’s real revelation simply cannot be chosen by man and, as his own possibility, put beside another, and integrated with it into a system. God’s real revelation is the possibility which man does not have to choose, but by which he must regard himself as chosen without having space and time to come to an arrangement with it within the sphere and according to the method of other possibilities. By treating it as if it does not do the choosing but is something to be chosen, not the unique but just one possibility, Christian natural theology very respectfully and in all humility re-casts revelation into a new form of its own devising. But for all that its behavior is so respectful and forbearing, for all that it subordinates itself so consciously and consistently, natural theology has already conquered it at the very outset, making revelation into non-revelation. This will certainly show itself in what it does with the revelation that has been absorbed and domesticated by it. For the naturalism which already exists in the systematisation of the two possibilities will not leave permanently unmolested the supranaturalism of this higher stage which is at first respected and foreborne.[2]

Even though we won’t arrive at Barth’s doctrine of election until CD II/2, we can already see how that is taking form even in this single paragraph from him. Natural theology, by definition, is natural; that’s what Barth is saying. Natural theology confronts God; this is anti-thetical, for Barth, to revelational theology. Revelational theology confronts humanity in the flesh and blood incarnation of God in Christ.

The reader should also notice how Barth is pressing the seductive nature of a Christian natural theology. Indeed, it is so seductive that its proponents are simply taken in by it, based on the supposition that natural theology is subordinate to the superordinate reality of what has been revealed by God of Himself. As Barth so eloquently identifies: the natural theologian will make this sort of claim all along, but because of their prior commitments to an already capacious and active intellect in the human being, the theologian, under this pressure, is in point of fact, able to surmise God simply from their own natural powers. Once this fatal step has been made, such theologians can no longer make a critical heads or tails of what is special and what is natural; indeed the special has become subordinate to the natural, insofar that the Catholicium or so called ‘Great Tradition’ of the Church has pressed out a concept of godness in its own natural image.

You might see why I think this is such a big deal.

[1] Jeffrey C. Waddington, The Unified Operations of the Human Soul: Jonathan Edwards’s Theological Anthropology and Apologetic (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 158. I was first alerted to Fiering’s work by my former seminary professor and mentor, Ron Frost. He develops even further, in his own doctoral work, how the Thomistic-Intellectualistic anthropology suffused most of what we now call the Post Reformation Reformed Orthodoxy of the 16th and 17th centuries, and her scholasticism reformed theologians.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 136.

The ‘Golden Calf’ of Foundationalism and Natural Theology: No Other Foundation Laid, But Christ

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“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” I Corinthians 3.11

How seriously do Christians take the above Pauline reality when applied to the ‘discipline’ of epistemology, or the discipline that engages with ‘how we know what we know?’ Often, theologians will speak of general revelation and special revelation, as if the former is an adjunct and even a foundation of the latter. They will assert (as a basic belief) something like: ‘all truth is God’s truth.’ This axiom, as far as it goes, may be true. But, from the Christian perspective it doesn’t necessarily take into account the damage that the ‘fall’ of humanity in the garden has done to the noetic (knowing) capacities in human beings. In other words, it presupposes upon a certain intellectualist anthropology (typically Thomist, or more generally: Aristotelian) that believes that humanity, in order to remain humanity, even after the fall, had to retain some intellectual equipment that would allow it to still see the good God in the created order.[1] This is the intellectual, and intellecualist basis that theologians are presupposing upon in order to presume that such a thing as ‘general revelation’ is actually discoverable in the created order; revelation that is anterior, logically, to being confronted by God’s special revelation revealed in Jesus Christ. So, from this framework, theologians and thinkers who follow this line of thinking, have an external basis that comes as a prius to Christ, that serves as the baseline for supplementing and even identifying the Christ as the eternal Son of God. It is this framework that believes utilizing the god of the philosophers is a legitimate practice, as far as ‘grammarizing’ (providing tools for God-speak) God goes.

I, as an Evangelical Calvinist, am thoroughly opposed to the above practice. If we were to label this practice philosophically it would be called ‘foundationalism.’ I reject such a practice because I believe that no matter how it is qualified it always ends up imposing foreign and prior categories and criterion onto God that are not themselves predicated by God, per se. In short: this is why I reject natural theology so vociferously; along with Karl Barth I consider natural theology, and foundationalism, as a sub-set, as anti-Christ—and I mean this! If we claim to have some prior “general” knowledge of God ever before being confronted by God in His own Self-asserted Self-revelation in Jesus Christ (cf. Jn 1.18), in my estimation, along with Douglas Campbell’s, we are idolaters feasting at the banqueting table of the pagans. I just mentioned Campbell, he follows in line with what TF Torrance calls theological science, kataphysin, and epistemological inversion; or in line with what Karl Barth identifies as analogia fidei (analogy of faith), or as Eberhard Jüngel refines this further in Barth’s theology, as analogia relationis (analogy of relation). At base, all mentioned, along with others (including myself), maintain that the only ground or ‘foundation’ for knowing the eternal and triune God is strictly and exhaustively found in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ! If this Self-attested revelation is not the foundation and parameter for knowing who God is then we have no basis for genuinely claiming or maintaining that we have met the real and living God; that is if we base it on prior self-developed constructs that we claim to have discovered in the natural order (taxis) about the attributes of God. As Torrance presses this, as he describes Barth’s theological approach:

Because Jesus Christ is the Way, as well as the Truth and the Life, theological thought is limited and bounded and directed by this historical reality in whom we meet the Truth of God. That prohibits theological thought from wandering at will across open country, from straying over history in general or from occupying itself with some other history, rather than this concrete history in the centre of all history. Thus theological thought is distinguished from every empty conceptual thought, from every science of pure possibility, and from every kind of merely formal thinking, by being mastered and determined by the special history of Jesus Christ.[2]

As corollary with Torrance’s helpful description of these things in Barth’s theology (as well as a helpful summary of TFT’s own approach after Barth), Douglas Campbell writes the following in critique of what he simply identifies as ‘foundationalism’:

A more technical name for the procedure whereby we elevate our own truth criteria over the truth that is God, ultimately to judge God’s truth or falsity, is “foundationalism,” which denotes here our provision of a different foundation for truth from the one that God has laid for us in Jesus, and hence a structure that we ultimately build for ourselves. Foundationalism has a more technical, although related, meaning in modern philosophical discussion, referring primarily to the desire of many thinkers post-Descartes to construct an indubitable basis for knowledge—a foundation in this specific sense. So clearly there is some overlap here. Any such philosophical attempt to construct a perfect foundation for all thought and knowledge is indeed a form of foundationalism. In the light of the revelation of the Trinity, however, we can see this exercise in human hubris exists in many more forms than philosophical foundationalism alone, and each of these needs to be identified and resisted. Especially since the Enlightenment, Christians have often themselves employed this way of reasoning—for example, by trying to prove the truthfulness of the Bible on the basis of historical records, reason, appeal to universal moral intuitions, or the like, before explaining what the Bible teaches (an effort labeled “evidentialist apologetics”). Yet, every such effort is also, at bottom, an exercise in idolatry. To build a foundation for the truth ourselves is to reject the truth and to build our own version of the truth, which we then make the judge of all truth, and so the lord of truth, at which moment in effect we bow down before it and proclaim it as our new lord. So epistemological foundationalism, however sophisticated, is, at bottom, nothing more than another golden calf.[3]

If you have been a reader here for any length, these are not strange teachings to you. In fact, this has been the bread and butter of much of what I’ve written over the years. The problem we are identifying touches upon primal realities when attempting to engage in the theological task. We are seeking to know how it is that we might delimit the ways, or way, for claiming that we have a genuine ‘point of contact’ with the living and triune God. As should be clear, by now, I maintain, with gusto, that the only foundation for knowing God has been laid by God Himself; not in some sort of ‘general’ fashion, but in a scandalous and overt manner wherein the ‘hidden God’ (Deus absconditus) becomes the revealed God (Deus revelatus) for us in Christ.

If we are keen to think God from an ostensibly formed general conception of God, prior to the special understanding of God provided for in Christ, then this will impact the way we do the rest of our theological thinking and living; since who we think God is impacts all subsequent theological developments. Likewise, if we think God, at a slavish level, from a special conception, as revealed in Christ, this will affect the way we theologize and live out our daily Christian lives. The former (general) way will, by programmatic form and definition, be contingent upon our savvy to continuously reflect upon the self-discovered attributes of God as those who have supposedly been left on display, at a foundational level, in the natural or created order. The latter (special) way will, by design, be dependent upon a continuous diaological, doxological, and prayerful reliance upon the Word of God who we afresh and anew encounter, through the medium of the written and God-spirated Word of God known as Holy Scripture.

An important and related theme, particularly as this relates to Protestant and Reformed theological loci, is the theme of: election. In fact, I would contest that the doctrine of election is the radix or ‘root’ aspect for understanding how these disparate ways for knowing God (or theories of revelation) take shape within the variant theological systems. I will try to develop this suggestion in a later post; maybe you’ll figure that out on your own. Blessings in Christ.

[1] See this post on Thomist intellectualism and anthropology.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910-1931, 196.

[3] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 37-8.