Category Archives: Natural Theology

Thinking God After God Not Before: A Critique Towards Apologetics Culture and Natural Theology

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I recently wrote the following on Facebook: “When we argue for the existence of God apart from Christ, we end up with a God without Christ.” Let me unpack that a bit further by appealing to Douglas Campbell as he articulates this in his own way:

If Christians think that they can prove the existence of God acting in Jesus independently of God’s revelation of Godself, using some higher truth or argument or position that everyone acknowledges, they pay a heavy price. These attempts might be convincing to the faithful, but they tend to collapse under the withering scrutiny of modern philosophers.[1] And a culture that has been told loudly that God can be proved but has found that God cannot be proved then feels justified in turning decisively away from God. The only thing that seems to have been proved is that God does not exist. God is rejected as an unproved hypothesis without anyone confronting the place where that God has in fact chosen to become known, which is personally, in Jesus. A key result flowing from the pretension that we can judge the truth about God for ourselves has consequently been the creation of a culture that confidently affirms God’s impossibility and hard-heartedly resists the good news. We have reaped here what we have sown, and it is a bitter harvest.[2]

I think Campbell overstates things a bit, almost to the point of contradiction. He seems to declare that God cannot be proven, but then presumes that He may have been without proper grounding in Jesus Christ. In other words, he seems to be saying that philosophers might be able to prove a ‘god-concept,’ but that without principially grounding God’s reality in His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ, that the god-concept proven remains so abstract that in the end it has no real capacity to personally confront the people it is intended to touch most: i.e. skeptics. So, I think Campbell is saying: that even if God could be proven, that outwith its personal reality in the face of Jesus Christ, it goes nowhere, and thus, to use the language of Barth, gives us a No-God.

That said, in the main, I agree with Campbell in regard to the primary point he is attempting to drive home. He wants God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and nothing else, to be the exclusive place where people meet God; since this is the only place the triune God has chosen to show Himself to the world (and for the world). In order to develop this theme further, Campbell writes:

If we press on boldly with our foundationalist project, anxious that if our system collapses, then our faith does as well, we tend to end up—and arguably necessarily only ever end up—with “the god of the philosophers.” This is because when we construct our foundation, we are invariably deriving some universal principle or dynamic from our own reality as our truth criterion and extrapolating or developing it in a way that will hopefully lead us to God. This key principle will have to be something very broad and universal and abstract. It must be known by everyone. So we will be reflecting on the inner nature of all reality in terms of an essence, or on the sense that we often judge things to be beautiful or not, or on the inner logic of history, or some such. But our conclusions will then a long way away from the recognition that God was fully present in a Jewish person who was shamefully executed around 30 CE. We find and worship the God who is the essence of all reality or beauty or history or whatever else we managed to infer from, which is clearly rather different. And the further critical problem emerges.

By supposing that this is the way to the church’s truth, we then, in all good conscience, oppose those who try to approach it in other ways, including, and perhaps especially opposing, the poor people who simply claim that the crucified Jesus is Lord and attribute that claim to the Lord. (There is something offensive about this foolish claim to the fundamentally learned and intelligent approach of our alternative system.) We are defending the way to the truth, which is perforce the only way. Are we not in the last remaining lifeboat on a stormy secular sea? Moreover, we have probably invested so much time and effort in developing our magnificent system that we will be reluctant to abandon it, and if we think that our belief in God depends on this system, we will be very reluctant to abandon it. Perhaps our impressive careers within the institutions advocating this system even depend on our not abandoning it. But the end result of all this investment will be the determined obstruction of the very truth that we are supposed to be reaching—that God was fully present in Jesus and speaks this truth to the church in whatever way God wants to. Not only will our magnificent systems fail us then by proving untrue and generating atheism; they will block the way to the very objective that they are supposedly trying to establish. They will stand guard as authentic theologies barring the way to Jesus himself—a block that we have called the second horseman.[3]

If you know Barth, if you know TF Torrance, then what Campbell is iterating will sound very familiar to you. He is referring us to the so called ‘scandal of particularity.’ Philosophers prefer universal truths, a priori realities that they can discover, prior to attempting to get into particularities. Christian theologians, I will suggest strongly, ought to be about just the opposite. We are people of the Christ, as such we ought to prefer the particular reality of God’s Self-exegesis in Jesus Christ; we ought to prefer a posteriori reality as we are confronted with the flesh and blood of God in Christ on the cursed cross.

Christians are not those who are about building foundations, God does that for us in Christ (I Cor 3.11). We are a people who rest on the foundation God has given us in Him, and build and cultivate upon that gifted ground for us in Christ. So, we bear witness to the given reality of God’s free election to be for and with us in Jesus Christ. We aren’t about ‘proving’ God’s existence; we are about confessing His reality as that comes for us and the whole world in the incarnation. This doesn’t seem very “theological” to many in the guilds of the theological class, I’m sure. They have been trained to think analytically, scholastically, technically, and speculatively about God’s essence and reality. As such, given their vesting, it becomes indomitably difficult to engage in the sort of ‘repentant thinking’ that the Gospel itself requires. It may well sound much too pedestrian and uneducated to think God in the terms Campbell is describing, that is if you’ve spent ten years earning a PhD learning to think just the opposite about the ways of God.

In the end, if we follow the procedure that Campbell lays out, we will not end up ever thinking God apart from Christ; we will only think Him directly from Christ. This is the way of what I take to be a genuinely Christian mode for doing the theological work that the churches are in such dire need of. Youth are walking away from Christ, after spending years in youth groups, by the droves. They are often exposed to the apologetics culture in these churches, and yet this doesn’t hold up. If they are unable to confound their antagonist professor in the classroom, if they cannot sustain the arguments for God’s existence they have learned from their learned apologetics teachers (via the curriculum they may have been exposed to), then God may well be dead indeed for them. These are pressing and real life matters.

[1] Let me just say that I don’t fully agree with Campbell on this point. I think that in the realm of the philosophical theism can be proven versus atheism in regard to the existence of ‘godness.’ Even Campbell acknowledges this in a footnote, so his articulation up to this point can sound a little misleading. I don’t think God can be proven (in fact I think we need to be proven by Him), but I do think that as far as the philosophical realm goes, that generic theism, even on philosophical terms is more “provable” than is atheism; many philosophers agree with that these days.

[2] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 40-1.

[3] Ibid., 41-2.

Theology on The Way to Damascus: Revealed Theology is Personal / Natural Theology is Impersonal

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I take the following from the Apostle Paul to be the methodological sine qua non of how Christian theology ought to be done:

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

Surprisingly, many (even most) Christian theologians these days, at least on the conservative side, reject this sort of ‘apocalyptic’ understanding of God’s Self-revelation, and the theologizing that can be achieved from this vista. Most theologians interested in the so called ‘theology of retrieval’ believe that we must slavishly repristinate, even if in ‘constructive’ dress, classical theism; particularly of the mediaeval and Thomist sort. As such, they reject the sort of Pauline existential model that Paul himself declares about his encounter with the living God in Christ; and instead they opt for the pedigree of school theology that definitionally works from the via negativa or negative way of discursively thinking God from what finitude is not.

I contend, and have for years, that Barth’s so called ‘analogy of faith’ or ‘analogy of relation’ is much more in line with the Pauline way of thinking and doing theology versus what has become the common mode for doing theology “classically” (which has become code and synonymous with doing theology “catholically”). I think this is so just for the reason that Paul presupposes upon in his Galatia correspondence; that is, that because Jesus Christ is so utterly unique, and without analogy, that his knowledge of the true and living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob came not with philosophical buttress, but only through a mind-independent revelation of God Himself. For Paul, to know God, is something not discovered but ‘received’ through a revelation that comes without contingency upon humanity’s ability to conjure an image of godness from their own powers of observation and inference. Douglas Campbell agrees as he writes:

Without affirming the absolute oneness of Jesus with God—his complete unity—we lose our grip on where God has chosen to be revealed fully and completely: namely, in Jesus. If Jesus is not God “all the way down,” then we are still lost in our own world with all its fantasies and illusions; we have no direct contact with God. We are hemmed in by our limited creaturely existence, now further corrupted by sin, and we do not know what God is really like. We are reduced, the theologians would say, to analogies, which means to inevitable and largely uncontrolled gaps in our understanding of what God is really like. God is like a sunset, but in what sense? Is he warm? or glowing? or fading? Clearly, none of this is quite right. God is like a mother, but in what exact sense again? Does he wear my mother’s distinctive clothes or directly biologically breast-feed us or speak in a southern drawl about picking us up from soccer? Again, clearly none of this is directly applicable [sic], although we sense that something insightful is going on. But if we want to press on these claims and be really precise, we don’t know quite how to do so. This limitation arises because we are trying to understand a transcendent being who is fundamentally different from us, as creator to our createdness, by way of limited, emphatically nontranscendent things that this being has made, which are by the nature of the case different from him. There is a gap here that we just can’t bridge unless God has graciously bridged it from his side of the divide and become one of us and lived among us. What a gift! So we should really avoid mitigating or avoiding this gift or watering if down in any way, which means to avoid adding other potential candidates alongside in any sort of equality. God is definitively known only in Jesus. This is where God is present with us fully, and nowhere else—not in a book, a tradition, a piece of land, a building, or even in a particular people (unless, that is, he has taken up residence in one of them fully). We worship and pray to none of these things; we worship and pray to Jesus because Jesus is God, and so we know God fully and completely only as we know Jesus.[1]

If you have read Karl Barth or Thomas Torrance at any length (even my blog for awhile) what Campbell just iterated will be very familiar to you. I think though that Campbell elevates an important aspect of revealed theology (versus natural theology) in the sense that he emphasizes how important it is to realize what understanding Jesus as God ought to do to our understanding of what ‘doing’ theology entails. In other words, it is precisely because of the uniqueness of the hidden God (Deus absconditus) made revealed in Christ (Deus revelatus) that the human condition is FULLY reliant upon this God revealing Himself to us. Any other theological models, particularly ones that portend of classical pedigree, need to be willing to be corrected by the fact that unless God reveals Himself personally, then all the theologian is left with are non-personal ways for thinking God. This is the point that is so often lost on those who are slavishly committed to natural theology. They don’t seem capable, or at least willing to consider that if God’s revelation is discoverable in nature that such revelation, in abstraction from God’s triune Self-revelation in Christ, will necessarily give a hue of God that ends up being ‘natural’ and impersonal. But this flies in the face of the God that the Apostle Paul encountered on the way to Damascus. Maranatha

[1] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 15-16.

Apostolic Succession as Natural Theology: How Can Protestants Who Are Proponents of Natural Theology Remain Protestant?

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The thing about natural theology is that it is natural. Proponents of natural theology, particularly on the Protestant side, are okay with natural theology if it has to do with a doctrine of God, but when it comes to ecclesiology they quickly slam the door shut. This seems to be a serious methodological inconsistency in the Protestant’s natural theological approach. They are okay with appealing to our capacity to discover God’s attributes in nature, but they are un-okay with finding the attributes of the Church in the natural order of things as those have unfolded in the halls of history. In other words, why does the Protestant natural theologian feel okay with affirming natural theology when it comes to developing a doctrine of God (the proper of theology), but when it comes to subsequent doctrines like a theory of the Church and her authority, the Protestant natural theologian immediately rebuffs natural theology in that application.

In other words, in my view a natural theologian, whether Catholic or Protestant needs to be consistent in their commitment to natural theology. If they want to posit in an ad hoc way that God is discoverable in nature, because God in His providence has decided that that be the way, then they need to carry this through all the way down. Apostolic Succession [Apostolicum] is a seminal concept that developed early on; even as far back as patristic sources. It developed over time to the point that the Pope was seen as having the capacity to speak excathedra for God. It developed in such a way that the authority of the Church became magisterial for the Church’s understanding of the faith. And this reality was something that was present in the shape of the Church for centuries prior to the 16th century Protestant Reformation. As evangelically reformed Christian theologians are retrieving a doctrine of God from the Great Tradition of the Church, and such a doctrine that rests upon a natural theological mode, then, if consistent, how can these same theologians assert that Apostolic Succession isn’t just as discoverable as a doctrine of God? I mean, if God in His providence saw fit to regulate and shape Christ’s Church by the papacy, then how can any natural theologian deny that and remain consistent with their commitment to natural theology simplicter? If natural theology entails looking back at how doctrine developed through the centuries of the Church’s development, then how can the natural theology reject Apostolic Succession in any meaningful way? If God saw fit to use Apostolic Succession as the fundamentum of the Church’s existence for centuries, then how can the natural theologian deny that and not attempt to retrieve that alongside a doctrine of God?

In my view, if the theologian claims to be committed to any form of natural theology then they really have no basis for remaining Protestant; they might as well repent, and swim the river Tiber. Natural theology, as it is deployed in the halls of Protestantism, is a leftover from its roots in Catholicism. In other words, Protestants, in the early stages, failed to reform its way out from the natural theology inherent to the Catholic theology they sought to reform. I am suggesting, firmly, that the Protestant, in order to be consistently committed to a radical theology of the Word, of the sort that led the Protestants away from the authority of the Church, must repudiate any commitment to natural theology. Natural theology works well for the Roman Catholic Thomist, but not well for the Protestant Christian; at least not if the Protestant is committed to the authority of the Word. The authority of the Word comes from the Word’s reality in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is revealed not discovered in the annals of historical development. Jesus Christ is given, not taken. Jesus Christ breaks in on us, moment by moment; we don’t break in on Him through speculating our way through nature in order to know Him and His attributes.

I realize my observations fall on empty ears. Even so, there are some serious holes in the 21st century Reformed Protestant’s theological approach. They constantly appeal to natural theology and the Great Tradition of the Church, but then snipe at the idea that they are inconsistent in their appropriation of natural theology. Seems to me that if you are going to praise the wonders and beauties of natural theology when it comes to a doctrine of God, then you need to be consistent with that. If  you aren’t going to be consistent with that then your theological methodology is suspect, and doesn’t warrant a lot of serious consideration. But if the Protestant natural theologian were to take their ostensible commitment to natural theology seriously they would cease being Protestant and become Roman Catholic. This, at least for me, is how radical the implications of all of this are; yet it seems lost on most Protestant theologians of this ilk.

If There is No God Behind the Back of Jesus / There is No Natural Theology

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Often the response to Barth’s claim that natural theology is anti-Christ is that Holy Scripture refutes Barth’s claim. People will claim that the Bible itself endorses a natural theology; I have heard this rejoinder a million times myself. And if I have heard it, you can be sure Barth heard it as well; more than myself, I’m sure. In fact, because he heard this retort so often, he offers response to it in CD II/1 §26. He gives a very full and developed response to this objection towards his position, and one that I think (of course) is spot on. I have just received some responses from Wayne and Anthony to my last two posts, both from their own orientation, and with respectful tone, have pushed back against Barth’s anti-natural theological mode by appealing to some of the classic texts used to do that (i.e. Ps 19; Rom 1 etc.). It isn’t that such push-back isn’t warranted at some level. I can see how these texts and others might sound like an endorsement for some sort of natural theology, or classical ‘two-books’ theory of revelation. But I think if we think with deeper penetration, appeal to these texts themselves only reveals (pun intended) that Scripture itself has an ontology (as John Webster might say). In other words, if we have a proper doctrine of Scripture, we will understand that Scripture itself is an aspect of a grander theology of the Word; a theology of the Word that is grounded in the eternal Logos of God who is known as Jesus Christ (cf. Jn 1.1). David Fergusson has written: “The world was made so that Christ might be born,”[1] and it is with this orientation, this doctrine of creation, this protological consideration, I suggest we ought to think the Word of God, and a doctrine of Scripture as the special aspect of God Self-revealed in Prophetic and Apostolic intonation. What I am trying to say is that Scripture, and appealing to it as a proof for the reality of natural theology is unwarranted, since Scripture itself is a species of the scandalous and particularist Self-revelation of God from the canon of God’s eternal choice to be us that we might be him by the adoption of grace in union with Christ.[2] It is in this union that knowledge of God comes, and whereby Scripture is illumined with God’s Light wherein we come to see His light (cf. Ps 36.9). The primary point is that there is no independent revelation of God apart from what God has given particularly in His Word in Christ. There is no cosmic remainder that ‘stands behind the back of Jesus’ (cf. TF Torrance and Barth for this language). Barth says all these things more eloquently this way:

The representatives of a “Christian” natural theology, may, for example, lay great stress on the 19th Psalm, interpreted in their sense. But even so they cannot deny that if we take the Gospel of the Psalter as such and as a whole (as indeed the second half of the 19th Psalm shows, thought this is usually forgotten or dismissed on literary critical grounds), its starting point is the declaration of the glory of God by the Exodus, by the election of the patriarchs, by the sending of Moses, Joshua and the Judges, by the founding and upholding of the royal house of David, and not directly, at any rate, by “the heavens”; even allowing that it does undoubtedly say here: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” Or again, they may emphasise strongly, for example, Rom. 1.19f. and 2.12f. (likewise interpreted in their sense). But even so they cannot deny that no matter what Paul says in these places and no matter what their meaning may be, he certainly did not intend the Gospel of his Roman Epistle to be gathered from what the heathen too can know about God. On the contrary, he grounded it exclusively on what the first chapter of this Epistle calls God’s ἀποκάλυψις. Therefore, the fact that the leading and decisive strand in the biblical Gospel goes back to the knowability of God in His revelation, and not to a knowability of God existing for man in the cosmos as such, does not need to be argued here. The rationalistic interpretation of the Bible at the end of the 18th century transposed even those statements about a special revelation which belong to the main biblical strand into statements about a general revelation of God in nature, history and human reason. But (at least for the time being) this has long since been abandoned even in those quarters where the full implications of this distinction are not understood. Among thoughtful exegetes there can be no question that at its heart and decisively the Bible intends to speak from no other source than a particular revelation of God as distinct from a general revealedness—or from revelation itself as distinct from the knowledge of man in the cosmos as such.[3]

It is hard for me to see how this can be argued with. If we are thinking consistently as Christians we will confess that we have no knowledge of God without knowledge of God as our personal Lord and Savior (cf. I Cor. 12.3). That is, as Christians, we are confessionally rooted in the reality that we have come to a knowledge of God because we have simultaneously by the Spirit, come to know God as Lord. We had no possible way of having a genuine knowledge of God prior to this reality encountering, confronting and contradicting all of our heathen notions about ‘God’ and ourselves. If this is the case, it is not clear to me how the Christian can argue for and from an abstract creation (which of course includes the whole cosmic order) wherein a background knowledge of God is ostensibly available for anyone curious enough to look into such things. This is not what the Gospel proclaims; in fact the Gospel proclaims just the opposite. The Gospel preaches that we were dead in our trespasses and sins and at enmity with the living and true God (cf. Eph 2.11f.). The Gospel proclaims that we were once dead, and in enslavement to idols: “For they themselves report about us what kind of a reception we had with you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, that is Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath to come” (I Thess. 1.9-10). If there is no cosmic remainder behind the back of Jesus, then it is hard to understand how the Christian could ever offer a coherent argument for a natural or speculative theology of any kind.

[1] David Fergusson, Chapter 4: Creation, 76-7 in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, edited by John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance.

[2] See Irenaeus, “Preface,” in Against Heresies, book 5, where he writes: “The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”

[3] Barth, CD II/1 §26, (T&T Clark Study Edition), 99.

Why Do I Reject Natural and Other Speculative Theologies So Stringently?

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I was planning on writing another post sharing a quote from Barth on natural theology. But I thought it would be better at this time to simply share why I am so impassioned about this issue. The answer might resonate with you. In fact, I would hope the answer is deeply ingrained into all of us as Christians. The reason I am so invigorated by the issue of natural theology is because it gets right down to the issue of who God is. Who we think God is will determine all else in our daily lives as Christians. The reality is, is that I am simple Bible believing Christian; a Protestant even. As someone submitted to Jesus as Lord, I am going to want to hear from my Lord alone. If He has made a way for that to happen; if He has given me capacity in union with Himself by the Holy Spirit to participate in the Self-knowledge of God, then I am going to seek that first. Natural theology is not coherent with this aim of mine as a Christian. Natural theology, as we have been observing, says that the Christian person can borrow concepts from unbelievers in order to construct a concept of godness that ostensibly allows the Christian to better proximate who God is. But why does the Christian need to rely on people who are of the spirit of the anti-Christ (cf. I Jn 4) in order to articulate a doctrine of God that seems palatable for the Christian consumption and witness?

Interestingly, my posts come with an air of academia; primarily because I interact with what most people would consider to be academic Christian theology. But if you dig in what you will find is that my opposition to natural theology (itself a technical category of academic Christian theology) is an attempt to thwart the ‘school theology’ that so many evangelical theologians are taken with these days. If the average Christian (even average Calvinists) were to read the highly speculative maneuvers these evangelicals are engaging with, as far as their attempt to retrieve the past and its theologians, it would probably become clearer to you why I am so opposed to natural theology. I am not opposed to ‘higher theological learning,’ clearly, but I am opposed to theological learning that is unnecessarily speculative, philosophical, and technical to the point of breaking. When theologians presume that they have the right to simply start talking about God’s inner-life, and their only access to that life, at a categorical level, is through the categories that pagan philosophers have given them, this is when I object with vigor! And this is what natural theologians do; they base their access to God in abstraction (abstracto), and not in the concrete (concreto) of God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In principle, I consider natural theology anti-Christ because, as noted, it relies on unbelievers’ thought conceptions in order to access and make known the very inner-life of God.

If you sense a modicum of anti-metaphysics, or what some have called ‘postmetaphysics’ in my misgivings with natural theology, you’d be onto something. Unfortunately, some will see my aversion to speculative theologies, and simply write it off as an uncritical commitment to the devilish mode of so called ‘modern theology.’ But the reality is, is that the ‘faith of the Bible’ comes to us in the flesh and soil of Holy Scripture’s witness of God come among humanity. The Bible is not a metaphysical book, as far as the reality it witnesses to, instead it presents us with a God who presents Himself to us in straw of the stable, the sands of Egypt, and upon the blood-soaked wood of the cross. The character of the biblical witness of God is not a metaphysical, speculative, abstract one; instead, the witness of Scripture is always a concrete one. This is why, as a simple Bible believing Protestant Christian, I reject natural theology, and other speculative modes of theology, that presume to think and speak God from the pagan sector of thought that reject Scripture as the fundamental source for contact with God as that is given reality in and through the face (prosopon) of Christ (solus Christus).

This is why people like Martin Luther, John Calvin (at various points of interest), Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance, Irenaeus, Athanasius, and a host of others are so appealing to me. Surely, some, more than others evince the character of theological endeavor I think the Christian should be taken with. But what they all have in common is a ferocious focus on Christ as the key. Some contemporary theologians think that Christology is simply one aspect of the whole systematic or Christian Dogmatic package; but again, these folks, a priori, have already committed themselves to some form of speculative, if not natural, theology. They are able to speak of Christ as one aspect of the whole theological project because they have some foreign (to Scripture) basis as the way they take towards God. For them, and because of this alien basis, they can speak of Christology as a piece of the theological puzzle; but not understand it as the cornerstone.

So, theological conferences, theological university educations and programs will continue to develop all around the ceaseless speculations of the theologians. The smarter the theologian the more access his or her students have to God. But this is the point or end of speculative and natural theology: it becomes focused on the wits and imaginations of the theologians. The cornerstone is not principially Christ in these theologies, the cornerstone is the theologian’s ability to speculate and imagine more altitudinally than others; and so in our pursuit of knowledge of God we become reliant on the speculative or natural theologian rather than Christ. You can see maybe better why I become so animated by this fundamental issue as it relates to the Christian’s pursuit of the Holy and Living God.

If There is No Natural Knowledge of God There Can Be No Natural Theology

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Knowledge of God is contingent upon God giving Himself to us and for us. If He simply leaves us awash in a neutered creation, meaning a creation without His Self-givenness, then all the creature has as resource are themselves. This is the status an unbeliever inhabits; a neutered reality that has no possibility for a true knowledge of the true God. There is nothing in the unbeliever’s mind’s-eye that would allow them to transcend the machinations produced by their own belly-buttons. They are simply people, as the ‘teacher’ might say: ‘under the sun.’ So, if this is the case, then why would Christians rely upon non-Christians to ideationally fund their conniving of God in categorical ways? And yet this is what has happened in the main; in the Great Tradition itself. Thomas Aquinas remains the best and most prominent example, particularly because he continues to be the go to saint that even Protestant theologians are resourcing in the current theological moment. Thomas clearly synthesizes Aristotle’s conceptions of immutability, impassibility, pure being so on and so forth into the way he grammarizes God. If this is so, and Aristotle was an unbeliever, and he was, then why should we have confidence that the God Thomas presents, by way of emphasis and categorical conjecture, coheres with the God revealed in Jesus Christ; with the God borne witness to in Holy Scripture?

Barth writes with his usual penetration. Barth challenges the commingling of the Church’s knowledge of God with the world’s. He wonders how there can be a point of contact between a soul that is in definitional enmity with God, and a soul that is union with God in Christ.

It may perhaps be pointed out that the establishment of our knowledge of God in this way is in fact possible and practicable, and that it vouches for its own legitimacy and necessity by its actual fulfillment. But what does it mean to be possible and practicable? And what does it mean that it vouches for itself? We have to do here with the attempt of man to answer the riddle of his own existence and of that of the world, and in that way to master himself and the world; with his attempt to strike a balance between himself and the world; even with his attempt to put these questions in the belief that he can regard the supposed goal of his answers or even the supposed origin of his questions as a first and final thing and therefore as God.[1]

Barth’s doctrine of sin and theological anthropology needs to be acknowledged as we work through these things with him. As a Reformed theologian he operates with a heavy dose of humanity’s total depravity, and the noetic impact that has had upon humanity’s capacity to think God, or to know the real and living God in any meaningful way. Barth, in this sense, has a rather Augustinian conception of what has happened to humanity in the Fall; i.e. the belief that humanity is in bondage to themselves, that they cannot get beyond their own pericardial sac. He takes seriously the Mosaic notion: ‘Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.’[2] And the Jeremiahian idea that: ‘“The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; Who can understand it?’[3] Further, Barth might have the Pauline thinking in mind when Paul writes: ‘“There is none righteous, not even one; There is none who understands, There is none who seeks for God;. . .’[4] And: ‘So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding,  excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.’[5] All of this is in line with what Martin Luther, in contrast to Erasmus, termed ‘the bondage of the will.’ Barth is full-fledged committed to the idea that natural humanity’s capacity to think God from its own resources can only result in a serious case of self-projection and idolatry.

Barth interrogates the legitimacy of the Church’s commingling with the world’s mind further:

It cannot even be discussed because, as we have seen from our debate with the Roman Catholic doctrine, it is possible only on the basis of a mortal attack on the Christian doctrine of God, and it certainly cannot be the case that this attack is the starting-point for the Christian doctrine of God, and with it, dogmatics, and therefore the question of pure doctrine. What good can come of it if at this point we immediately orientate ourselves in another direction than to the basis and essence of the Church? If we allow ourselves this liberty, how will it be with everything else? How are we going to treat the nature of God, and then creation, the Law, the covenant of God with sinful man? Can we ever speak properly of grace and faith if at the very outset we have provided ourselves with a guarantee of our knowledge of God which has nothing to do with grace and faith? Does it not necessarily change and even falsify everything if at this point we are guilty of enmity and conflict against grace?[6]

As we read this we are reminded of the Apostle Paul’s language of being ‘unequally yoked’ with unbelievers:

Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness?  Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; just as God said, “I will dwell in them and walk among them; And I will be their God, and they shall be My people. “Therefore, come out from their midst and be separate,” says the Lord. “And do not touch what is unclean; And I will welcome you. “And I will be a father to you, And you shall be sons and daughters to Me,” Says the Lord Almighty.[7]

We might even think that throughout Barth’s §26 he has something like the above passage from Paul in mind. Barth’s whole premise is that of Paul’s; i.e. that unbelievers and believers have nothing in common; the idea that believers are the temple of God, whereas unbelievers the temple, so to speak, of Belial or the devil. It is not simply a passive contrast, but an active reality wherein the unbelieving mind is at enmity with God. Barth reasons from these premises that the unbelieving mind, no matter how brilliant, like in the case of Aristotle, has no real contact with the living God. Barth’s contention is that the unbelieving mind is at such warfare status with God, that it has  a desire to be its own god, that there can be no reliable connection between the self-desire, and the true God who is defined by an outturned givenness for the other (think of the triune persons in eternal fellowship).

If all of these things be so, then what place is there for a natural knowledge of God? There is none. And if there is none, then no matter how long the activity of synthesizing natural categories of God with revealed ones has been occurring, this activity ought to be repented of. This is challenging because it seems as if God has left Himself without a witness, or so the response might be. But for Protestants this shouldn’t worry us. We are already heirs of a tradition that believes the Gospel was corrupted for centuries by the Church’s teaching. It is unclear to me why Protestants constantly rely on the history of the Church as the bulwark wherein they hope to find stable solace in regard to a knowledge of God. If that bulwark has been built on an admixture of sand and rock there is only a façade of stability to begin with. The Protestant ought to be willing to repent of this foundation, and find solace in the voice of the living God as that is borne witness to afresh and anew in Jesus Christ and in Holy Scripture. This is what I see Barth calling the Reformed churches to: viz. that she would repent of frameworks that portend towards a knowability of God that are built on the foundations delivered not by the Church, simpliciter, but by the wits of unbelieving minds; minds that are naturally and constantly at warfare with the reality of the living and Self-revealed God.

 

[1] Barth, CD II/1 §26 (T&T Clark Study Edition), 83-4.

[2] Genesis 6.5

[3] Jeremiah 17.9

[4] Romans 3.11

[5] Ephesians 4.17-19.

[6] Barth, CD II/1 §26, 83.

[7] II Corinthians 6.14-18

Why Natural Theology Sucks, Part Two: A Fuller Development on How Jesus is God’s Grace

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Let me pick up on my last post, and fill it out with more substantial reflection. Karl Barth, no doubt, is always in the background of my thinking; particularly when it comes to musings on natural theology. In case it didn’t stand out enough in my last post, let me reiterate what I wrote there: ‘If we cannot know who or what God is apart from being able to say “He is Lord by the Spirit,” then we cannot say He is God by appealing to the philosophers who have not the Spirit.’ This is the key aspect that drives my rejection of natural theology; viz. that the CATEGORIES supposedly discovered about God from the philosophers, are not categories arrived at by an obedience to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God of Jesus Christ. Barth riffs on Calvin’s concept of ‘faith as knowledge of God,’ and of course develops it in his own way. But this is key, a genuine knowledge of God is the knowledge of faith. True, Calvin had his so called sensus divinitatis, and so I would argue that he was not fully consistent with the implications of his own adage about knowledge of God vis-à-vis faith; Barth takes Calvin where Calvin didn’t go himself, but should have. For Barth, and I think this is the biblical way, knowledge of God is never conceived of as something gained from an abstract creation; not in a primary sense. In the bible knowledge of God is always, from the very first verse of the bible, a knowledge that is grounded in God’s Self-revealed and spoken Word.

Natural theology, while claiming to respect this, does not. Natural theology fundamentally starts with the categories of the philosophers, in regard to the ‘actual infinite’ (or whatever ‘pure being’ theosophy someone wants to plug-in), and simply rests in the assertion that these identifications ‘just are’ who God must be. As a method the Christian natural theologizer will tell us that what the philosophers have discovered is coterminous with who God has revealed himself to be (the ‘two books’ of revelation theory), but then they will turn around and privilege the categories of the philosophers in their “synthesizing” work. The most ironic aspect of the natural theological approach is that it ‘proves’ itself; or it is circular. In other words, it operates as a tautology. It will say: ‘look, this just is how Christian theology in the Great Tradition developed, and so we know that God must have been providentially governing this process.’ This is ironic because natural theology, in order to prove its validity, will appeal to history as if we simply can read off of its canvas that God just does act the way the history and development of theological ideas suggests. Again, this all presumes something theologically anthropologically about human agents. It presumes that we have an inherent capacity (so the philosophers) to read and discover things about God without the direct and in-breaking reality of God in our lives. And the Christian natural theologizers, in the Thomistic realm (as an example), will argue for a created grace that ostensibly allows the theologian to cooperate with God in the soteriological practice of knowing God, and making God known. This is the caveat they will appeal to in order to argue that nature has an independence of its own, in regard to making divine things known.

In contrast to natural theology Karl Barth rightly identifies the role that God himself must play if we are going to have a real knowledge of who God is. And here is an important aspect: the God revealed in Jesus Christ comes without remainder. In other words, a genuinely Christian conception of God does not need to be supplemented by the philosopher’s knowledge of God. For the Christian it is Christ alone who has exegeted (exegato) who God is (cf. Jn 1.18). It is within the grace of God alone that a genuine knowledge of God obtains; and Jesus is the grace of God for us; Jesus is the graced telos and ground of creation itself as we come to recognize the work of recreation He has accomplished in His Incarnation and Atonement (and all that entails in the resurrection, ascension, and second advent). For the ‘revelational-theologian’ there is no abstract creation, there is only creation and recreation in and for Christ. This is why faith must be the ground of knowledge of God; the faith of Christ. In God’s economical Kingdom there is no other reality but the face (prosopon) of Christ smiling in every corner and cranny of the created order; the resurrection itself ensures this. Barth writes:

When we can no longer evade the objectivity of God, we can and will still evade God Himself; we can and will still see the objectivity of God changed into that world of dead gods or all too living demons, into a world whose essence we can contemplate without giving ourselves into the hands of God, but for that reason being all the more enslaved by these gods and demons. This is the characteristic temptation of those who are already called to the people and Church of God. If we give way to it, the knowledge of God is not merely partially but totally lost in the sphere of this people, in the sphere of this Church. What proceeds out of ourselves will always be this temptation—and this is true even of those who are chosen and called, enlightened and commissioned. Therefore we have to pray that we may overcome this temptation. The being of God for us is His being n hearing this prayer and therefore by the act of His grace. The being of God is either known by grace or it is not known at all. If, however, it is known by grace, then we are already displaced from that secure position and put in a position where the consideration of God can consist and be fulfilled only in the act of our own decision of obedience. The object of this consideration is God in His almighty and active will. But if it is consideration of God in His almighty and active will, how can it fail to lead at once to decision? Either the consideration will become a flight before what is considered, and therefore disobedience, and therefore meaningless, thus ceasing to be the knowledge of God; or the consideration will become that correspondence, and therefore obedience, and as such real knowledge of the real God. Tertium non datur (There is no third option). But where by grace it is really consideration of God in His almighty and active will, it has already passed this Either-Or, and has become obedience and therefore real knowledge of God. Concretely, this means that the distinction and union between God and man in which the knowledge of God comes to pass will be fulfilled in the order laid down by the almighty and active will of God. It will not be any sort of freely chosen union and distinction, but will be concerned under all circumstances with the gracious God on the one hand and sinful man on the other. This qualifying of God and man will be the norm and criterion of all union and distinction, and therefore of the knowledge of God, and therefore of all speaking and hearing about Him. This qualifying is, however, unthinkable as naked thought. It will not be realised, or man will not know what he is doing in realising it, if, when he realises it in thought, it is not fulfilled beforehand in himself; if he does not know the gracious God as his God and himself as the sinful man distinct from God and yet united with Him; if he is not the man directed by the act of God the living Lord; if, therefore, in his direction to God he does not stand in obedience. Just as truth is certainly only to be had as grace, so the securing of grace will certainly have to consist in the decision obedience.[1]

What we have to do with here is a fundamental and principled consideration; it is a consideration of what a theological ontology/epistemology entails. The reason I think this is so important is because who God is, is at stake. If we cannot follow, in principle, the idea that God Himself in Christ gets to determine what we think of Him, from within a koinonial and relational basis with Him, as constructed by Him, then we will indeed fall derelict to a knowing of God that is not grounded in God’s grace, but in a grace we have constructed ourselves.

 

 

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §25, 25.

Why Natural Theology Sucks

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I often rail against natural theology; I think some wonder why. In a very basic way, natural theology operates off of the premise that we live in a graced creation which is open for our at will discovery of God and His ‘attributes’ (Rom 1.18-20). This presupposes upon a particular theological anthropology that entails the belief that human agents have a latent or remaining capacity (post fall) to accurately access the realities of who God is by simply peering out at the created order and identifying who God must be by a series of negations (via negativa). In other words, it operates off the premise that we can work from our finitude (effects) to God’s ultimate infinitude (cause) and surmise godness from this sort of discursive practice. Or it looks at our finitude, negates it, and arrives at God’s infinitude; or it looks at the trees, the mountains, the lakes, the stars and posits that the power it took to create such monuments must be of a factor ultimately greater than any power we have as humans to create within the realm of our own dominion.

The problem with this, if you haven’t noticed, is that this procedure always comes back to us as regulative, or more strongly, determinative, in regard to the parameters that we feel comfortable with when thinking God. What isn’t present, in this approach, is a principled groundedness in God’s Self-revelation in Christ as the fundamentum of what and who gets to determine what godness entails at a basic level. Yes, proponents of Christian natural theology will argue that they are first committed to faith and that revelation prior to a commitment to natural theology as the basis for their conniving of God. But when you look at how they actually operate, what stands at base isn’t God’s revelation, but instead the philosopher’s machinations in regard to ultimacy and godness (ie Aristotle, Plato, et al.)

This is why I think natural theology sucks, at the very least. It says it’s doing one thing (being shaped by revelation), when in fact it’s doing the other (allowing the philosophers to present us with the categories of godness — and to do so from their unregenerate wits). If God is fundamentally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then to attempt to think God, definitionally, from any other basis can only be an adjunct of our own self-projections. The Bible knows of no general conception of God, and just because the monad of the philosophers seems to have certain correlations with the One God of Israel/One God of Christ, this does not mean these correlations are univocal or even analogical; instead they are equivocal from the very start. If we cannot know who or what God is apart from being able to say ‘He is Lord by the Spirit,’ then we cannot say He is God by appealing to the philosophers who have not the Spirit.

More to say (writing this one on my phone in a siding out on the rail). It isn’t that I haven’t iterated these things before, but I thought reiterating would be good to do once again.

How Theology of Correlation is Destroying Evangelicalism: A Case Example Found in the SBC and Johnny Mac

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Disruptive Grace presents the Christian with a subversive posture towards all things; it is the very ground of their life. George Hunsinger, when writing a book on Karl Barth’s theology, didn’t just happenstancely entitle it Disruptive Grace; there is a very theological reason. For Barth’s theology, and one of the things that makes it so appealing to me, there is an otherworldly/thisworldly component to it. Meaning, it is thoroughly grounded in the hidden above, while at the same time being revealed in the hidden below in the unbecoming face of a lowly vagrant from the village of Nazareth. God in Christ engaged in, and continues to engage in a disruptive act of given mercy, such that He in-breaks into this fallen world with His Kingdom proclamation of faith, hope, and love for all who will hear. His work, grounded as it is His own inner-triune-life and character, has no correlation with this world’s structures; in other words, it is not contingent upon the creaturely reality, but instead the divine reality. As a result its resources are ineffable and endless; miraculous even. The character of God’s Kingdom, then, is not one that is in correlation or acquiescence with this current world order (or to use biblical language: this current ‘evil age’). This means that there is a genuine sui generis and novum present in God’s act towards the world in Christ; one that cannot be prolongated by our own imitation of it; but only one that we can bear witness to as we participate in and from this One and Three life of God for us.

This is something, it seems, that neither the ‘right’ nor the ‘left’ grasp when continuing on in the tussle of the so called culture wars. Barth’s repudiation of natural theology, and the correlationism inherent to that, is more apropos than ever these days. Just look at what is happening in and among the Southern Baptist Convention, and independents like John MacArthur et al. The impasse neither is recognizing is that they are both iterations of the same sort of natural correlationist theology that funds almost all of the Western evangelical (etc.) trajectory. In other words, they have (typically) uncritically accepted the old German idea that God and cultural/creational patterns can co-exist and in fact are coterminous, at a level, insofar that God’s ratio can be discerned/discovered in the natural order; thus allowing the churches, under this ambit, to come to the belief that they can subvert the culture by assimilating the culture (whether that be on the perceived negative or positive side). For example the SBC has recently adopted the idea that they can use critical theory and intersectionality as a critical aid in helping them engage the culture at large. This has caused no small pushback from folks like JMac, and folks, like Tom Buck in the SBC, against this cultural appropriation. The irony is that the pushback, against the SBC, is coming from folks who have assimilated other forms of cultural norms into the strata of their own ‘Christian’ engagement with the world and other churches. In other words, JMac&company have elevated certain ‘right-wing-conservative’ norms as the standard by which the status quo of the Gospel remains just that: the status quo. The SBC is recognizing that there is a problem with the evangelical church’s engagement with the culture, but they are reaching for tools that are based on the assumption, just as JMac uncritically does, that there is some sort of possible ‘natural’ correlation between God’s order revealed in Christ, and the order latent in fallen creation. They both believe they have the tools, ironically, through revelation, to discover what that ‘order’ entails (the order in nature), and then commandeer it for the purposes of the Kingdom. But this is wrong!

As an alternative, Barth’s theology of culture, offers a way that recognizes the problem of correlationist theology, and then presents the antidote in the overwhelming reality of God’s ‘disruptive’ grace as that is revealed and given as gift over and again in Jesus Christ. Here Jamie Smith describes Barth’s turn:

One of the most significant challenges to the Tübingen empire was voiced from Basel in the work of Karl Barth. If the Tübingen liberal project is correlationist, we might describe the Barthian project as revelationist—eschewing any notion of a neutral or secular “point of contact” between the gospel and public or sociopolitical structures, proclaiming instead a revealed gospel that subverted cultural givens. In his bombshell, which landed on the playground of liberal theology, Barth asserted:

The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths. . . . So new, so unheard of, so unexpected in this world is the power of God unto salvation, that it can appear among us, be received and understood by us, only as a contradiction. The Gospel does not expound or recommend itself. It does not negotiate or plead, threaten, or make promises.

Directly confronting the dominant Tübingen strategies that dominated both theology and preaching in his day, Barth eschewed such correlational, apologetic projects. “Anxiety concering the victory of the Gospel,” he continued, “—that is, Christian Apologetics—is meaningless, because the Gospel is the victory by which the world is overcome.”

This Barthian challenge was taken up in its contemporary form in New Haven with the advent of what came to be known as the Yale school of postliberal theology associated with Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. Following Barth, the Yale school sought to revalue the revelational pole of Scripture in theological formulation, emphasizing not the correlation or synthesis of revelation with secular frameworks but rather the antithesis between them and the way in which revelation subverts secular frameworks. The difference between Barth and postliberals, we might say, is that the Yale school made the linguistic turn in a way that Barth had not. The Yale school took part in a certain Wittgensteinian direction (resisted by the Princeton Barthians) that would eventually produce a satellite project in Durham, N.C., embodied in the work of Stanley Hauerwas. Here Barth’s Reformed thought is melded with the Anabaptist theology of John Howard Yoder (Reformed anathemas of the Anabaptist notwithstanding). But this mixture raises a question: What have Basel and Goshen to do with one another? While it remains a curious amalgam, the possibility of the synthesis is found in Barth and Yoder’s shared  emphasis on the antithesis of revelation vis-à-vis given cultural forms. Both deeply resist the correlational and Constantinian projects of modern theology, and both emphasize the practices of being the church, informed by the narrative of Scripture, constituting an alternative community and a peculiar people. Echoing Barth, Yoder emphasizes that the norm for Christian existence—and hence theology and proclamation—must derive from the gospel as modeled by Jesus, not from the supposedly neutral norms of a public social ethics independent of revelation. Arguing against what he called the “mainstream ethical consensus,” rooted in “an epistemology for which the classic label is the theology of the natural,” Yoder criticizes the attempt to discern the shape of Christian theology under the guidance of public norms; the Tübingen consensus claims that “it is by studying the realities around us, not by hearing a proclamation from God, that we discern the right.”[1]

The ‘Tübingen emphasis,’ as Smith describes it, might sound more radical and ‘progressive’ than what we are finding in the internecine squabble between say examples like the SBC and those opposed, symbolized by people like JMac. But I suggest it isn’t! There is a rugged natural theological individualism as the basis that stands behind the whole thing; one that gives the participants the belief that their ‘tribe’ has the spirituality required to engage in the sort of ‘German’ correlating of culture and Christian theology that Barth&company has sought to contradict and correct through the emphasis of the other-worldly Gospel.

This is why, I maintain, my own house of ‘evangelicalism’ is collapsing right before our very eyes. Underneath the whole project is a theological anthropology that gives the fallen, yet redeemed person, too much space between them and God; a space that allows for them to find things in the created or natural disorder that they think helps to amplify the revelation of God in all its analogous force. The only way forward, is for evangelicalism, in the main, to repent of their adherence to this correlationist natural theologizing and actually allow the Gospel to be the disruptive power of God that it is. And yes, JMac and crew believe they are on this ‘repented’ side of things, but in fact as you look at what is informing their anthropology, doctrine of Scripture, doctrine of creation/recreation, it quickly becomes clear that they are just as guilty as the SBC at large in its acquiescence to the ostensibly given social ethics and assumptions present in the culture that surrounds them. Something more radical must occur in the lives of these communions; something like the irruptive Grace of God that has no correlation or analogy save the very inner-life of God itself.

[1] James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2004), 38-9.

A Word Against the Christian Psychology Sub-Culture and the ‘Natural Theology’ It Springs From

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I think there are physiological imbalances that can obtain in the brain wherein medication is needed in order to bring balance back (often natural remedies are more systemically effective and health-engendering than the synthetic medicines of the modern world—but that’s a tangent). But most often, I’d contest, people who struggle with “mental illnesses,” are actually dealing with some form of narcissism (I write this, of course, not as a psychiatrist, but as a theologian of little means). Martin Luther famously pressed the notion of sin as homo incurvatus in se (‘a person incurved upon oneself’). I would like to draw a correlation between what often counts as mental illness, in the 21st century, to this notion of sin. Sin is not a mental illness, but often mental illnesses, or what are categorized as those, are a consequence of prolonged patterns of sin; prolonged and unchecked patterns of human beings navel-gazing. If human beings are created to look outside of themselves, and upward to God as the ground of their being, then it is no wonder “mental illness” is ostensibly on the rise. But I want to use this brief reflection to catapult into a methodological discussion about Christians and psychology.

Psychology, much like its master, philosophy, is a horizontal science that scans the flatlander horizon of observable data, and attempts to construct a global field of knowledge from what it ostensibly discovers within the immanent horizon found under the sun. When Christians attempt to synthesize these discoveries with the Christian reality, as if an aid to theological dogma, at a methodological level we quickly come to recognize that there is an appeal to natural theology being made. In other words, psychology relies on the prior axiom that ‘all truth is God’s truth,’ and that latent within the created order there is unrevealed and thus discoverable knowledge of the ways of God that are perspicaciously open to the natural minds of the searching men and women of the world. But this presumes too much in my estimation.

We know who God is; we know the ways of God from one source: God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In my view, Jesus Christ came that He might ‘exegete’ or explain who God is in Himself for us. If this is the ‘ground and grammar’ of all genuine knowledge of God, and His ways in creation (in a God/world relation), then how can we presume upon a prior idea that we, apart from this revelation, can know God or His ways? If we can only know the ways of God from Christ as the exhaustive revelation of God without remainder, then where does this leave natural theology (and all other modes of knowledge that are contingent upon its reality)? If who God is is only known through His Self-presentation in Christ, then there can be no other form of actual knowledge of God. George Hunsinger writes the following as he defines Barth’s understanding of ‘actualism’ and God’s presentation in Christ for the world:

“Actualism” is the motif which governs Barth’s complex conception of being and time. Being is always an event and often an act (always an act whenever an agent capable of decision is concerned). The relationship between divine being and human being is one of the most vexed topics in Barth interpretation, and one on which the essay at hand hopes to shed some light. For now let it simply be said, however cryptically, that the possibility for the human creature to act faithfully in relation to the divine creator is thought to rest entirely in the divine act, and therefore continually befalls the human creature as a miracle to be sought ever anew.[1]

If knowledge of God, and His ways, in relation to us (His creatures) is fully contingent upon the continuously Self-giving miracle of God for the world in Christ, then in what way can a natural knowledge of God be a viable option? And if a natural knowledge of God is not a viable way, then in what way can ‘Christian psychology’ deliver to us a conception of self-knowledge that is in any way accurate vis-à-vis God’s determination? If as Holy Scripture tells us, over and again, that God alone searches the depths and inner-recesses of the human heart; then in what way can psychology attempt to tell us what God alone knows? How can a science based upon purely natural and horizontal assumptions find the power of vision to peer into the human heart; and then prescribe actions for behavior and self-modification that is supposedly able to save us from ourselves?

I think: Christian psychology has arisen in the modern period as a “para” movement; a movement that operates in the absence of recognizing that the Gospel in itself (Hisself) is indeed the Power of God! And not an abstract power, like the God of potentia absoluta gives us, but a concrete power that breaks into our worlds on a moment by moment basis. And not in a generic or theoretical world of Platonic light, but the sort of world where the Savior comes and craps His diaper as a baby, and sheds His blood on a wooden cross. The Gospel is only as abstract as we presume upon it with our own faulty understandings; understandings that void the Gospel of its real penetrative transformative recreative power, and relegate it to a sort of insurance policy for a life to come (but not life now).

In my view, Christian theology, the sort that is doxological (or worship promoting), is what gives the Christian the sort of therapeuo or “therapy” that our souls are in dire need of. The sort of healing that raises the dead to life, and causes the person to finally look outside of themselves (extra nos); and to the ground and telos (purpose) of what their whole being has always already been intended for since the beginning: i.e. to be in a right relationship with the Creator who is Father of the Son in the bond of union provided for by the Holy Spirit. God alone knows our heart, the very source of who we are; and He has pronounced a judgment on it. His judgment is that it required ‘divine blood’ (Acts 20.28) to be shed, in order to bring life where there was (and is) only death. This is the prescription that comes with the description in hand. In other words, the incarnation of God in Christ, and the atoning work therefrom, tells us that the depth of sin and the human heart are too great for horizontal knowledge to handle. It tells us that God alone is the answer to our deepest problems, no matter how the profane world wants to label such things; and that His power in Christ alone has the capacity to break this inveterate urge to look inward to the abyss of ourselves instead of the bounty of God’s Triune Life.

In light of this I can only counsel the many Christians who are still under the spell of ‘Christian psychology’ to abandon any hope of finding real answers about the human heart therein. Scientism has penetrated the psyches of the evangelical Christian sub-culture; as such the sciences (soft or hard) have been given too much weight in regard to identifying what the actual human predicament is. We displace God’s pronouncement about us, and His prescription in Christ, when we attempt to “supplement” that pronouncement with modes of knowledge that have no real access into the Holy of Holies of God’s Triune Life. I take psychology to be an attempt to access what God alone knows; and as such it attempts to draw causal connections between observable human behaviors, and their source in the inner-human. Again, God alone knows the depths of human sin (which is what constitutes the inner-human orientation apart from Christ), and as such He alone has the power to actuate what psychology only pretends to have facility for. There is no depth dimension, by definition, within the discipline of psychology; it is merely a horizontal attempt to access what can only be accessed by the vertical penetration of God into the world in Christ.

 

[1] George Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16-18.