Category Archives: Philosophical Theology

The Tomb of Christian Revelation Juxtaposed with the Vapors of Metaphysics

Posted on by

There is no abstract conceptual apparatus by which we can know the Christian God. Knowledge of God is absolutely contingent on God’s free Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. This is the only way as Christians that we know God; as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He has descended to us in the real garb of a flesh and blood human; as a Jew from Nazareth. And His reception in Mary’s womb was made fertile by the millennia of preparation for His first coming as the Holy Spirit hovered over the Hebrews.

None of the above requires augmentation by way of appeal to and appropriation of foreign and abstract metaphysics. The Christ child came in the wood of the manger; died on the wood of the cross; and rose again from the rock of the tomb. These are all concrete and particular materials that have no correspondence with the ethereal of the philosophers, per se.

‘The Faith of Christ’ in Contradiction to the gods of the Metaphysicians

Posted on by

What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens? A question from the days of Tertullian, and now down through the centuries. I would vociferously argue that Jerusalem must condition Athens in such a way that Athens becomes nothing more than a pretext to be used by the textuality of God’s life Self-revealed for the church and world in Jesus Christ. This question of “faith and reason” has been given many iterations and treatments throughout the halls of history, whether that be from someone as boisterous as Martin Luther, or someone as methodologically skeptical as Rene Descartes. Indeed, the reformational scholastics themselves, and their progeny, even into the repristinate of today, ostensibly maintain that the metaphysics of the classical Greek philosophers is in fact univocal towards thinking and speaking the Christian God.

I protest, and so does Eberhard Jüngel:

The faith which interposes such questions is a disturbance. But should not faith be seen as a disturber of the metaphysical thought of God, as even its greatest menace? Was it not necessary that a study of religion within the boundaries of pure reason would have to come to the aid of the metaphysical concept of God in order to reduce the all too human discourse about a God who reveals himself in history to a rational level? Did not faith have to be subordinated to that morality which was established without faith, if it were not to become irrational in and of itself and thus be dead?

But then faith will reply with the question whether it really is such a rational capacity that a theoretical or practical use of reason, separate from the event of faith, can prescribe reason’s function. What becomes of God when an abstract “I think” or an abstract “thou shalt” sets the context from the outset within which one then may and must decide what merits being called God? Although the intention to maintain the strictest possible distinction between God and man cannot be supported too strongly by theology, does not this approach lead to a result which is totally opposed to that intention? And finally, if God has been established as the securing factor for man, has not then the decision been already made that from now on the securing must become the god of man? Is not ultimately the categorical imperative the grand attempt to establish the morally understood security of the human race as its highest good? If “nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will,” then does not the good will which secures the welfare of the human race become the god of man?[1]

Prior to the above passage Juengal has been discussing how certainty and non-certainty might work within a theological and philosophical frame vis-à-vis God. Without getting into the details, for our purposes, the questions Juengal puts to the God constructed from classical and modern metaphysical premises are sufficient. Sufficient, for drawing attention to the fact that faith itself, if indeed it has to do with a genuine knowledge of the genuine and triune God of the Christians, has its starting point insofar as God starts with us first; that is, rather than us starting with God first. Is Christian faith intended to provide a provision of self-security in a seemingly insecure world for its own sake (something like a ‘god-of-the-gaps’)? Or is Christian faith purely focused upon knowledge of God that is focused on God as God, as God is in Himself as the reality who indeed is to be worshipped simply because He is, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Well of course, the Christian should want to say the latter rather than the former. But methodologically so much of Christian theology, one way or the other, no matter how much piety and piousness is on display, has given way to thinking God only after God has first been thought by the profane mind. Indeed, the mind that is ultimately seeking a huge scratch for the itch of uncertainties, for the chaos that this world presents each and everyone of us with upon our respective arrivals on planet earth.

I think the moral here is that God’s Self-revelation is categorically distinct, in a sui generis type of way, from the metaphysics. That is, knowledge of God for the Christian entails a vulnerability. But the vulnerability isn’t about assuaging our own anxieties about the ostensible disorder of the world, and our place in it. The vulnerability is that we don’t have the capacity to disentangle ourselves from the chaos of this world order; no matter what type of metaphysical structures we might build in that very attempt. The genuine vulnerability we have is that without being rightly positioned within the order that God has set about, we indeed will seek to create our own veritable towers of Babel; reaching up to a certainty of reality that ultimately has to do with ensuring a salvation for ourselves rather than being reliant upon the One who can actually provide us with a true and rightly ordered salvation, as that obtains in Godself for us in Jesus Christ. And it is this, this faith of Christ, that confronts the metaphysically construed gods, who seek a faith built upon its own internal premises, rather than the alien premises of faith provided for, truly, by the living God for us in Jesus Christ.

[1] Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf&Stock [reprint], 1983), 195–96.

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

Posted on by

Ludwig Feuerbach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barth on Philosophy and Theology and Nothing

Posted on by

The relationship between philosophy and theology remains a varied thing, at least for me. In the Barth[ian] tradition there are a variety of takes on this relationship just the same. Barth himself sees a relative value to having an understanding of the various philosophies blowing about, whither and thither. But in the main, for Barth et al., an untoward appropriation and deployment of any philosophy vis-à-vis a Christian theology, ends up presenting a highly delipidated theology that bears no resemblance to the genuine article as Self-revealed in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ. Of note, as Barth is engaging with a doctrine of God and Nothingness, here we have an example of how he thinks of the Catholic’s deployment of the Aristotelian philosophical categories in the grammarization of their respective theology. As you read the following passage from Barth you will also notice him referring to these ‘modern thinkers,’ in regard to their respective impact upon the unfurling of an Enlightened and post-Enlightened theological offering (he is referring, in context, to his treatment of Heidegger and Sartre on a metaphysic and doctrine of nothingness per their respective existentialist [atheistic, in a way] theological offerings). So, a lot going on here: but as an evangelical calvinist I am wont to press Barth’s comment on the impact of Aristotle on the doing of Latin theology in general; he sees it as fallacious, as do I (as I/we have detailed with our Evangelical Calvinism books, and my blog posts here over the decades).

. . . And the position which Roman Catholicism gives to Aristotle as the philosopher par excellence was and is a very remarkable but also a very questionable matter. In theology, at least, we must be more farsighted than to attempt a deliberate co-ordination with temporarily predominant philosophical trends in which we may be caught up, or to allow them to dictate or correct our conceptions. On the other hand, there is every reason why we should consider and as far as possible learn from the typical philosophical thinking of the day. As we have listened to Leibniz and Scliliermacher [sic], so now we listen to these modern thinkers at a point which is particularly important for them and in which they may be able to teach or warn us in our own understanding of the theme.[1]

The theme, as already noted, has to do with a doctrine of nothingness (rather than somethingness). But again, what I wanted to draw our attention to was simply the way that Barth thinks a relationship between theology and philosophy. He doesn’t see no value in understanding the philosophers of the day, whatever period, and how their respective inklings might create a cultural milieu, which in turn might impact and even distort a reception of a genuinely conceived Christian theology. Indeed, it is primarily in this negative type of a way, even as it might contribute to the construction of a positively framed Christian theology, wherein Barth sees a legitimate placement and engagement with philosophy. Even so, in the end, what stands primary for Barth is the Word of God.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §50–51 [334] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 44.

My Final Oxford Essay for My Philo Rel Course: God’s Existence in Cosmic Relief

Posted on by

God’s Existence in Cosmic Relief

Is there any need to explain why there is a universe at all? Would God be an explanation? This is the question the rest of this essay will engage with. 1) This essay will reason on the moral need for an explanation of universe’s existence vis-à-vis human teleology. 2) Based on the affirmative of point one this essay will further attempt to reason from the universe’s apparent contingency concerning God’s existence as the best inference to an explanation, regarding the universe’s existence in general, and human existence embedded in the universe in particular. 3) For purposes of thoroughness T. J. Mawson’s chapter on the cosmological argument[1] will be engaged with as how we might conclude on the universe having an explanation for its existence (or not). As we engage with Mawson, it will become clear that the author of this essay affirms some relative value in thinking God’s existence from the cosmological argument. But in the end, it will be concluded that such metaphysical abstractions cannot finally lead a person to a knowledge of God in ways that satisfy the need for human purpose and value as that is evinced (or not) within the vastness of the universe. Once these matters have been duly weighed, this paper will summarize the various ideas posited and engaged with. As a parting note, the author of this paper will suggest a way forward towards thinking about what type of God might fit best with a universe that has at least one known planet (Earth) where human beings who are personal persons exist.

The universe is there. As such, an adequate explanation for its existence is required; at least, insofar that the people inhabiting it would like to live an ‘examined life.’ Being rather than not being ought to inculcate within someone’s inner being a desire to know why they have being and extension into the universe rather than not. I would argue that this is so because as self-reflecting entities, that is, as sentient beings extending into space and time, to know our whence, indeed, to know the universe’s whence, presents it with a potential context for understanding human self-determination and purpose in a universe wherein to the naked eye it might appear to be simply here for no reason at all. But human beings live with a sense of inherent purpose; humans move and breathe with sets of values—culturally ladened as they might be—which presents each and everyone of us with a ‘common sense’ of a shared being in the universe that preceded us, along with all of humanity from all time, that pressures the genuinely self-reflective agent towards a desire of knowing: “where did it all come from?” Once that desire is cultivated, even among just a percentage of people through the millennia, it is proper and even required for us to pursue the “whence” question of the universe that we inhabit. And as a first instance of that pursuit towards understanding the whence of the universe, I would argue that the most organic question to probe is to understand whether the universe has always been, or did it have a beginning.

Since the universe is a finite entity, observable simply from the fact that human life, and other life forms, have beginnings and endings, it is proper to conclude, by extrapolation, that the universe itself, ever expanding as it is, likewise had a beginning. If this is the case, then to reason about the universe’s beginning from its contingency has a certain explanatory power to it all by itself; even if that only leads to a capacity for the reasoner to infer from the negation of contingency that there is something prior to the contingent, definitionally, that in itself is non-contingent. And to reason thusly, I would suggest, ought to lead the reasoner to an openness about their being what is classically understood as a God as the non-contingent begetter of the contingent.

The previous line of reasoning leads us to what philosophers have identified as a ‘cosmological argument’ or ‘argument from contingency’ regarding the existence of a Creator God. I believe, on its own, the cosmological argument, or argument from contingency, is a powerfully intuitive argument for the reasonability of a God’s existence. Beyond that, as already alluded to, as the literature and empirical data presents[2], the universe itself, in its expansive nature, is a contingent entity which, according to the “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” as described by Mawson[3], requires a conclusion concerning its original instantiation. I think that rejecting the principle of sufficient reason is done so from a prior commitment to not want to believe that it is reasonable to believe in a God’s existence; of course, the obverse is also the case. That is, to want to believe that it is reasonable to believe in a God’s existence is done so from a prior commitment that already knows there to be or wants there to be a God who exists. In this sense, in my view, it becomes a matter of what “a priori” has the greater “intuitive” or even “revelational” explanatory power for it. That is, does an atheist’s desire, like Bertrand Russell’s, for there to only be the physical universe in a closed system determinately governed by random chance, space and time[4] fit better with this “pre” approach to something like affirming the cosmological argument? Or does the Christian theist’s desire, like mine, for there to be an “enchanted” universe, fulgent with a living and triune God’s glory to be on display, as revealed particularly in the face of Jesus Christ, fit better with a “pre” approach to something like affirming the cosmological argument of some type?

So, I might agree with Mawson that the cosmological argument left to itself isn’t a good argument for proving God’s existence.[5] But, when it is placed in a broader noetic web, it can come to have a serviceability to it that fits better with the affirmation that a living God exists rather than a No-God not existing. In other words, it is the prior and broader belief-frames that will end up determining whether or not someone seeing the cosmological argument has any value. And so, as Mawson rightly argues, it is required that we look elsewhere, and interrogate other things, to arrive at a conclusion that a God does or doesn’t exist.[6] And these other things, like “religious experience”, while related to the questions of contingency in deep ways, often, have a different criterion built into them; such as “encounter” “experience” “revelation” so on and so forth, that attempting to argue from mere physical or even metaphysical premises cannot inherently offer in and of themselves. That is to say, what is required is a personal touch, so to speak; that is, because we are persons and not just random quantum happenstances miraculously “happening” in the ether of a purely brute type of contingent universal and cosmic order. Notice, appeal to the black boxes of quantum happenstances, in the end, is just to appeal to something like a god, but a god who remains hidden, in the dark, and to whom we can ultimately remain unaccountable.

I see these matters as moral issues, which a cosmological argument, while compelling in highly intuitive ways, in and of itself, cannot ultimately address, per se. The cosmological argument cannot apprehend the moral issue, because, at best, all it can do is leave the universe open in regard to its need for a God to explain its existence. It cannot describe, per se, whether or not this God is personally present, or impersonally distant (like the God of the Deists). As a result, other means are required for determining whether or not the non-contingent being known as God is indeed personal and active in the universe’s world, or if God is simply a generic placeholder to fill in the gap in people’s minds with reference to the origination of the universe in toto.

Conclusion

This essay has considered the following things: 1) It is reasonable for sentient human beings to reflect on the universe’s existence. It was argued that this is the case because human beings, as finite beings in a finite universe, inherently desire to know their purpose whilst inhabiting the universe; which entails morality. 2) It was further argued that since life in general is finite, and thus contingent, by extrapolation, the universe in general is also a contingent entity that the ‘examined life’ seeks to understand regarding its origination. 3) Engaging with philosopher, T. J. Mawson, based on the “principle of sufficient reason,” as he explained, since the universe, as a contingent entity is, it requires an explanation.[7] Even so, it was reasoned that ultimately the cosmological argument only has relative value in regard to proving God’s existence.

In conclusion, this essay concludes that the universe does require an explanation for its existence, and that its best explanation is positing something greater than itself as its cause: this “greater than” is classically understood to be God. Even so, it has also become apparent that a simple appeal to something like a cosmological argument does not suffice towards providing human beings with enough knowledge of who or what this God might be regarding the deepest questions of the human heart. So, while an argument from contingency might serve well for pointing out the coherence of a Creator God, it remains unhelpful in presenting someone with a personal God who can make sense of the various moral quandaries human beings are presented with throughout their lifespans. For this, what is required, this essay suggests, is an engagement with revelation claims about God such as is found among the Christians.

References

Mawson, T. J. Belief in God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

NASA Hubblesite. “One of Hubble’s Key Projects Nails Down Nearly a Century of Uncertainty.” Accessed 03-28-2025.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Russellian Monism.” Accessed 03-28-2025.

[1] T. J. Mawson, Belief in God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 153–62.

[2] NASA Hubblesite, “One of Hubble’s Key Projects Nails Down Nearly a Century of Uncertainty,” accessed 03-28-2025.

[3] Mawson, Belief in God, 154–55.

[4] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Russellian Monism,” accessed 03-28-2025.

[5] Mawson, Belief I God, 161–62.

[6] Ibid., 163–78.

[7] Mawson ultimately believes that the principle of sufficient reason can function as a double-edged sword which, in the end, can be applied to both the theist’s side as well as the physicalist side of the atheists. See Mawson, Belief in God, 161–2.

On the Cosmological Argument and the Universe’s Existence

Posted on by

Plato

My Philosophy of Religion class at the University of Oxford is now complete. I have just submitted my final essay (1500 words approx.) for the class, which represents the capstone project. I essentially wrote my paper on the cosmological argument for God’s existence. The question I was addressing was “does the universe require an explanation for its existence; and if so, why would it be God?” The following represents my conclusion to said paper.

This essay has considered the following things: 1) That it is reasonable for sentient human beings to reflect on the universe’s existence. It was argued that this is the case because human beings, as finite beings in a finite universe, inherently desire to know their purpose whilst inhabiting the universe; which entails morality. 2) It was further argued that since life in general is finite, and thus contingent, by extrapolation, the universe in general is also a contingent entity that the ‘examined life’ seeks to understand regarding its origination. 3) Engaging with philosopher, T. J. Mawson, based on the “principle of sufficient reason,” as he explained, since the universe is, it requires an explanation. Even so, it was reasoned that ultimately the cosmological argument only has relative value in regard to proving God’s existence.

In conclusion, this essay concludes that the universe does require an explanation for its existence, and that its best explanation is positing something greater than itself as its cause: this “greater than” is classically understood to be God. Even so, it has also become apparent that a simple appeal to something like a cosmological argument does not suffice towards providing human beings with enough knowledge of who or what this God might be regarding the deepest questions of the human heart. So, while an argument from contingency might serve well for pointing out the coherence of a Creator God, it remains unhelpful in presenting someone with a personal God who can make sense of the various moral quandaries human beings are presented with throughout their lifespans. For this, what is required, this essay suggests, is an engagement with revelation claims about God such as is found among the Christians.

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

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Accidental God and the God of Logical Possibility

Posted on by

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

Creator of the world

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

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

Creator of value

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

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

Revealer

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

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

Offerer of eternal life

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

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

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

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

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

Eternal Life

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

A Raw Syllogism

P1. The triune God alone is eternal life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Monad with Attributes

Posted on by
More from the philo class. On the potential problem for classical theism and its doctrine of divine simplicity. How can God be Simple and yet still have attributes? That’s the question I’m responding to w/ ref to our reading of Maimonides.
I overlooked responding to the question: “Can this claim be held together with the claim that God has attributes?” I think this can portend of a weakness for the pure being view of Maimonides et al. I think it is important to say that God is non-composite. But on the other hand, God comes to us by way of names (in the Bible), personal perfections etc.–by revelation. The fact that the Aristotelian view of Maim. et al. requires that a qualification be put in place with reference to the attributes vis a vis God’s non-composite being shows an incoherence built into the negating approach at its base. I think this because to attempt to construct a notion of godness without reference to God’s Self-revelation, which is personal for the Christian, in particular, ends up requiring that the philosopher turn human discussions about divine attributes into a mere heuristic device whereby we can hang our wondering hats vis a vis God, so to speak. But then when we acknowledge, along with Maim. et al. that ultimately these devices cannot really penetrate into the inner-life of God’s life, then in what sense is this a valuable exercise? At the end, this philosophical Monad does not correlate or comport well with a God, in the Christian frame, who has Self-revealed as Father of the Son. The best illustration of this, for me, is that if we follow Maim, or Aquinas , or any number of Muslim thinkers, we can all find a common ground set out for us, ostensibly, by the God of a so-called classical theism. And yet, the point of departure between a God who is triune and a God who is necessarily unitary (unitarian), does not allow for this type of easy fellowship between the disparate doctrines of God embedded in each of the so-called Abrahamic faiths. If God is three in one/one in three for the Christian, from the get go, and the God of Judaism and Islam is not, then just on a purely logical scale we have an inchoate contradiction.

Maimonides on Divine Simplicity: With Christian Relief

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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