Category Archives: Theo-Anthropology

Herculean Freedom or Divine-Human Freedom at the Crossroads

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Human freedom, “free will,” for theological purposes has always been a deep and abiding riddle for many. Its depths, in regard to understanding it, seems to be akin to the heights of comprehending the inner life and aseity of God; that is to say: human freedom vis-à-vis God is quite mysterious and to the depths. But really, this locus only comes to have the mysterious characteristics insofar that is thought of nakedly and speculatively from a purely philosophical and rationalistic vantage point. If the theologian engages in a genuinely theological method, they will come to an understanding of human freedom before God that is fitting to who God is, and fitting to who humans are as creatures created in the imago Dei, imago Christi.

Without attempting to explicate this seeming paradox, for the philosophers anyway, let us read along with Karl Barth as he does the real yeoman’s work, the real theological work of a theological theologian. Here Barth is referring to his continued treatment on a doctrine of Baptism. In his treatment certain themes are present in order for him to make his baptismal doctrine work. Doctrinal themes such as sanctification, human agency, free will, Divine agency, so on and so forth. The reader will notice that Barth uses the pagan philosophical mythological notions of human freedom, provided for by the Hellenic mythologies juxtaposed with his genuinely theological offering in regard to human freedom in a doctrine of baptism and sanctification, in order to amplify his own offering.

Baptism, then, is the twofold answer of man to the divine justification and sanctification, cleansing and renewal, which have taken place for him and been revealed to him in Jesus Christ. It is the corresponding renunciation and pledge. Hence water baptism, not in and for itself, but as a first model which is to be followed throughout the Christian life, is the human decision which follows the divine change effected for man, and which corresponds to the history of Jesus Christ and baptism wit the Holy Ghost. Is it, then, what Hercules did at the cross-roads? Not at all. The decision taken by this profoundly pagan ideal figure, closely resembling in its character as such the decision of Paris between the gifts proffered him by the three goddesses, is a choice between two ways which are both equally open, i.e., between two possibilities. But the decision of the Christian, executed in his baptism as pledge and renunciation, is not a choice between two possibilities available to him. The one reality which he encounters in God’s work in Jesus Christ is that which in his pledge, sanctified and renewed by God for God, he prefers to the way which is now impossible and closed to him as one who is justified by the same work and word of God, so that it can be the object only of his rejection and renunciation. He chooses that which is alone actual and possible, and therewith he rejects eo ipso that which is absolutely impossible in the light of what is alone actual and possible. To the impossible which he rejects and renounces there belongs also and indeed primarily the idea of the pagan liberum arbitrium [free will], which is illusory because it contests the one true reality, and which, as foreseen already in Gen. 3.5, makes man equal to God, the judge between good and evil, a Hercules at the cross-roads. Justified by God before God, man will justify God, accepting the right which God has against and for and to him, not seeking to establish and execute right himself, resolutely rejecting the role of quasi-divine umpire. In the knowledge that God is his righteousness, he finds not merely an admonition and warning against any such enterprise, but also cleansing from even the will or desire for it. Hence the object of his pledge, that which, sanctified by God for God, he affirms, chooses and grasps, cannot be the arbitrary or futile enterprise of self-sanctification for a service which he has sought out himself, which God ahs not required from him, with which he can only affront God. His Yes to his renewal becomes rather his will and desire for the freedom of a witness to the sanctification in which it has pleased God to call sinners, and himself in particular, to the service of His omnipotent mercy, to make them ready and capable in this service, to use them in it, to open for them the forward way beside which there is no other for them. At issue always in the Christian life are this renunciation and pledge which are not at all like the choice of Hercules. They are at issue already at the beginning of this life, in Christian baptism.[1]

In reduction, if it isn’t sinful to reduce, Barth is saying that the “brute choice” for the Christian for God is non-existent. Indeed, it is non-existent in the very fact that the Christian is for God; and this freedom for God, for the Christian, has first come into existence for the human before God in the human who is truly for God for us, Jesus Christ. It is because of His already No for us that we can now say Yes, in His Yes for us, to the living God. This vicarious representative human action (to riff Bonhoeffer’s language) by Christ for us is in itself what it means to be free for God at the very ground of human agency. This is why Barth so readily does away with anything representing something like a Hercules at the cross-roads, as if there is something deep and inherent within an abstract “natural” humanity that has the innate autonomous capacity to say Yes to God on its own powers of deliberation and rationales.

For Barth, the inner change for the human being, in what it means to be truly human before God, has already been actualized for humanity in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ de jure. This vicarious freedom ‘we’ now have for God has already been blazed a trail in the human heart of God in Jesus Christ for us. As the Holy Spirit awakens the human agent to what is already true for what it means to be human, they come to operate out of the capacity already recreated for them in the heart of flesh they have been given in God’s participation for them in the archetypal humanity, the second Adamic humanity of Jesus Christ. As such, the choice has already been made for the Christian, in God’s choice to be the “Christian for them,” in the humanity of Christ. In this space the individual human agent, in correspondence, in relationis with Christ’s first Yes for them, can now likewise, as corollary say Yes and Amen to the ways of God; indeed, as their raison d’etre as creatures and recreatures for God in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.

I have glossed over many important details in the above paragraph, but alas, that’s all I have the time to offer at the moment.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/4 §75 [163] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 157–58.

Barth Contra Metaphysics of Causation / God’s Personal Action in Salvation

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I don’t think people realize that Barth (Torrance) isn’t attempting to figure out the riddle of individual belief, as if he can identify a causal system that explains it all. He limits Himself to what is revealed in the Theanthropos, the Godman, Jesus Christ. We know why Jesus believes, trusts the Father; and we know that He does so for us in our stead; and so from thence we know that people believe God because of God’s action in humanity, in the Son. Barth isn’t worried about solving the “causation” enigma, per se; at least not by referring to some speculative metaphysics of causation. But this is why people constantly claim that Barth’s theology must reduce to universalism; even though Barth’s theology only really reduces to the freedom of God to be God as God has always already and eternally been, and continues to be.

Human Being that is Free for God

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How does the would-be Christian come to have the capacity to trust in God in Christ for salvation? In other words, do people have an inherent innate autonomous capacity to seek and believe God? Or, is it required that something or someone external to the would-be believing human agent gives them a capacity to believe? Historically, the so-called Pelagian position maintains that human beings are born in a neutral status, with a natural capacity inherent to their being to freely choose for God, or for self. Obversely, the Christian position has maintained that the human being inhabits a status that is locked into, incurved upon itself, thus requiring that God in-breaks into humanity’s heart, and gives it a new human freedom to be for God and not against Him.

There are a variety of ways various theological positions have attempted to cut this salami. For my money the only way to go is by emphasizing God’s action become human action for us. In other words, what is required for us to be for God is that God first be for us in His saving and believing action for us in Jesus Christ. What is necessary, in my view, is that human beings come to have the capacity to truly be human once again; that is, according to their purposed telos: i.e., to be in right relationship with the triune God who created them for a koinonial (fellowshipping) relationship with and in His free life of Self-given love as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But again, what is required for this reconciliation between God and humanity to obtain?

God freely chooses to create humanity in His image; the imago Christi (see Col. 1.15). Humanity in Adam and Eve inscrutably choose to doubt God’s Word for their own serpentine inspired word. As a result, humanity is plunged into death and trespasses, into a ruptured relationship with the living God. In this rupture humanity’s purpose for being human is lost into a strange wanderlust of sub-humanness. In this new and dead status all humankind can do is to seek themselves, driven by the “purpose” of their own self-possessed base desires. The freedom they once had for God has become sublimated by a “no-freedom” wherein the only choices available to them is to ultimately be for them; driven by sorted and competing self-affections that leads to the passing pleasures of sin.

This has become humanity’s status in the first Adam. But because of who God is, He is free graciousness, He is Self-given love within His interpenetrative subject-in-being life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and because of this “who-ness,” the very who-ness that freely chose to create human beings in His image to begin with, He chose, from the very beginning, to not be God without us, but with us. That entailed that He had already freely and sacrificially bound His being to ours, to human being; not as its predicate, but as the predicator of human life in and through participation, by fellowship with Him. As such, if this status of relationship with Him, which is the very purpose of what it means to be human, was to be maintained, particularly in light of the Fall (but not because of it), God, in keeping with who He is, because ‘He cannot deny Himself,’ became the Logos ensarkos (the Word enfleshed). He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. In this becoming He assumed our subhumanity, our sinful statuses for Himself, and by this poverty made us rich by His riches of resurrection and ascension. It was by, and it is by this Divine action that humanity comes to have the capacity they were always already created for: to be free for God, and for Him alone. As Christ became us, by grace and adoption, by His recreation for us, we became recreated in Him; indeed, He who is the second and greater Adam. In this action He has exalted humanity in His elect status as the Son of Man, as the Word of God, as the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ.

All of the above to say: that outwith this “intervention” of cosmic undertaking, left to ourselves we would remain in the bondage of the self, incurved upon the vein satisfaction of our darkened hearts, with only destruction and non-being as the “purpose” for our existences. Left to ourselves we wouldn’t have the capacity, the resurrection power, the grace of recreation to be for God. As such, what has been, and is required, is that God give us a heart of flesh that is soft for Him, rather than the hearts of stone we are born enslaved to. Without God’s humanity humanity could not and would not ever be; not to begin with, and not in the great forthwith. But because God has covenanted with us in the Son, because He has first unilaterally acted for us in a way that we wouldn’t act left to our self-slaved hearts, we have come to have the freedom for God that God has for Himself as we share in that through the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. God calls, and we respond. He has made a new way for that, new relative to the old of our dead-man statuses, by forging a new humanity, an elevated humanity, in the resurrected and ascended humanity of Jesus Christ. He graciously placed us into Himself, as He assumed our humanity as His in the humanity of His dearly beloved Son, as that pierced through the womb of Mary in that still silent night in Bethlehem. As a result, humanity, by the power and awakening work of the Holy Spirit, has come to have the capacity to genuinely and freely be for God and not against Him. But this only as a share, as a participatio in His original, eternal freedom as He is unboundedly Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

What should be immediately apparent, and with this we close, there is only One freedom to have, to be. God’s freedom is the only freedom available. There is no independent human agency, no autonomous human freedom, no non-contingent life or reality, outwith God’s upholding Logos. So, the “trick” is to come to an understanding whereby humanity can be participant with said freedom. And the answer is God’s choice to not be God without, but with us, Immanuel. He has brought His freedom to us, He has grounded that for us as the anchor of our souls, in the humanity of Jesus Christ. And by this unio mystica (mystical union) between God and humanity and humanity and God in the hypostatic union of the eternal Son with conditional humanity, it is in this union, all of it an ontological reality from the very first creation, that our hearts of stone are removed and we are given to participate with the Son’s human heart for us. It is by this that we might say Yes and Amen to God because God first is the Yes and Amen for us in the face of His Son for us, Jesus Christ.

Barth’s Covenant Theology in Human Action

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Barth’s covenant theology entails this: The triune God acts and becomes for the world in Christ, and in His action He creates the space for free human action in correspondence with Christ’s freedom for the Father by the Holy Spirit. It is a unilateral divine action that re-creates the space for their to be a genuinely free and human action in correspondence with God’s action. So, human action in this covenantal schema has never been grounded in an independent autonomous humanity, but only within God’s humanity for the world in Jesus Christ. Union with Christ by the Holy Spirit is where human freedom comes to spark towards God as God gives us, His creatures and re-creatures in Christ’s risen and ascended humanity, a share in His liberum arbitrium (freewill); but in grace and in creaturely correspondence to His. The circle between God and humanity is closed within the humanity of God for the world in Jesus Christ.

The unBondage of the Will: Liberum Arbitrium

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Latin theological word for the day: LIBERUM ARBITRIUM=‘Freewill.’

Biblically, only God genuinely has liberum arbitrium. But He is a gifting God. Never in abstraction from Himself, but only concretely within Himself, and thus for us in Jesus Christ. As such humanity comes to have liberum arbitrium only because God has freely elected that we come to actually have it, to be for Him rather than against Him, in and through participation with the only humanity that is truly for God; Christ’s vicarious humanity for us. So, the path for human agency, human freedom for God, is only blazed first, by Christ’s humanity for us; indeed, as He is the firstborn from the dead. It is by the Holy Spirit that human beings are awakened to the fact that this is already the objective and subjective reality for them, as Christ has already accomplished that for them, whereby by a node of corresponding faith with Christ’s for us, that the human being can say Yes and Amen for God, just as Christ is God’s Yes and Amen for us, in both the No (to sin) and Yes (for God) that Christ freely chose to be for ALL of humanity, as His humanity is ALL of humanity as humanity’s free turn to God and away from the incurved hearts they have lived in bondage to since conception.

The Arminians Versus the Calvinists: Human Freedom and Divine Sovereignty in Combine

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The battle of the Arminians and Calvinists continues on ad infinitum; indeed, in different expressions and levels of discourse. Nonetheless, the gruel continues unabated. Ironically, and historically, the Arminians, particularly, Arminius himself, weren’t outwith, but within the Reformed halo. As is commonly understood, Arminius was intent on engaging with the theological-anthropological conundrum of human freedom vis-à-vis God’s ostensible sovereignty (as the Calvinists were wont to press in their own stylized way). It wasn’t, of course, that Arminius was attempting to undercut the Calvinist notion that God is sovereign—God forbid it!—but instead, he was challenging the character and way of God’s sovereignty related to human freedom. Jaroslav Pelikan offers nice coverage on this:

The most controversial attempt at such an elucidation within the Reformed communion was the one associated with the names of Jacob Arminius and Simon Episcopius, which eventually challenged openly the central affirmations of the Calvinistic doctrine itself. Arminian acquired its own confessional status in the Remonstrance of 1610 and then, after the Synod of Dort, in the Remonstrant Confession of 1621/22. Reiterating and developing many of the objections to predestinarianism that had already been current during Calvin’s lifetime, the Arminian and Remonstrant protest focused on the problem of will: of the human will as responsible for conduct and therefore in some genuine sense free of “fatalistic necessity”; and of the divine will as addressed to all and therefore in some genuine sense universal, but also as free of sin and evil and free coercion, since such freedom was “the perfection of the [divine] will.” Calvin’s “fictitious fate of predestination” was “hostile to religion” because it managed to undercut both the free will of God and the free will of man. Against “the iron and fatalistic necessity of the Stoics, Manicheans, and Predestinarians,” as well as against the “blind chance” of the Epicureans, stood the biblical doctrine of “the providence of God in the world, which rules everything in a wise, holy and just manner.” The providence of God, which followed immediately upon creation and which extended also to the work of redemption, was universal in scope, pertaining to “this entire universe and especially to man,” as an expression of “the wisdom, justice, and equity of God.” These divine attributes of wisdom, justice, and equity, as disclosed in providence, meant that God was free from “any internal necessity of his own nature or of any external power of some other force”; therefore it was Arminian and Remonstrant doctrine, no less than it was Calvinist doctrine, that God did foreknow future contingents and that he was free “to dispose for his creatures whatever he wills,” death or life, command or prohibition.

It was likewise Remonstrant doctrine, no less than Calvinist, that the grace of God, defined as “undeserved and unmerited favor,” was, as the Remonstrance put it, “the beginning, the progress, and the completion of all good.” But that did not mean that grace was “irresistible.” The analogy, drawn by Augustine and after him by Calvin, between God’s call to faith and the summons to resurrection addressed by Christ, irresistibly, to a dead body, was fallacious. For “those whom God calls to faith, he calls seriously”; if it were impossible to resist the grace of God, his offer of “a reward for Christian virtue” and his threat of punishment for immorality would both be vain. On the other hand, the distinction between what God willed and what God permitted, which Calvin had dismissed as a “falsehood” and an “evasion,” was essential to prevent “the overthrow of all religion”: divine permission did not imply that “it is not possible for anything but disobedience to follow,” but rather that “man can be disobedient, yet only if he so wills.” Therefore God permitted evil not because he will it, but to leave man free. And, contrary to Calvin’s theory, it was similarly “with the permission of God and in accordance with his just judgment,” but by their own action, that the hearts of sinners were “hardened.” Hardening, also in the case of the Jews, was a divine “declaration,” not the initiative of a divine “action.”[1]

A rather succinct presentation of the primary theme[s] present between the Remonstrants and the Calvinists.

I would suggest there is a better way. It is unnecessary to place humanity and God and God and humanity into either the Arminian or Calvinist combine. All that is required to overcome such enmity is to think the relationship between God-humanity through the singular personalis (person) of Jesus Christ. Both God’s downward movement to humanity and humanity’s upward movement to God can be understood from within this miraculous nexus. When election, predestination, human freedom vis-à-vis Divine freedom/sovereignty, so on and so forth becomes the ambit by which such loci is imagined, the Gordian knot of inimical theofare, as that obtains between the “Arminians and Calvinists,” is once and for all cut through.

Pax mundi theologica obtenta est.

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300—1700), Volume 4 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 233–34.

Divine and Human Agency Betwixt a Doctrine of Sanctification

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Human agency, a Theanthropology will be a central piece of development in treating a doctrine of Sanctification in the theologies of Barth and TFT, respectively. Without genuine human agency, human freedom before God, even as that is somehow unilaterally grounded by God’s Self-freedom, it isn’t really meaningful to think of a Christian doctrine of sanctification. That is, because agency without real human freedom only reduces the human to metaphysical abstractions acting out an automated history already done for them absolutely by God. But in reality, if thought well, both accounts of agency, Divine and human, must and can be thought together—hypostatically so.

On Barth’s Affirmation of Anselm’s ‘Proof of God’ and Rejection of A Natural Theology

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Being oppositional to natural theology is a hallmark of Karl Barth’s theological posture. His primary rejection of a natural theology isn’t a result of his socio-politico atmosphere in the Reich of Germany per se; even though it has application towards the type of Nationalistic Socialism that characterized Adolf Hitler’s vision of the golden age of Germany. Barth rejected natural theology for theological reasons; i.e., theological-anthropological reasons. He maintained a radical commitment to the reformational notion of the total depravity of humanity; albeit, in an Athanasian key. This commitment is best illustrated by his collegial correspondences, and even debates with Catholic German theologian, Erich Przywara. Przywara, was a modern advocate, and constructive builder, indeed, a retriever of the classical Thomistic analogia entis (‘analogy of being’). Przywara ultimately argued from something like a capaciousness left in fallen humanity, as if a residual spark continued to burn within the intellect; which when perfected by grace, even preveniently or objectively so, would allow fallen human beings to build an intellectual cathedral wherein its spire might reach into the heavens and touch the feet of God. But of course, this was a speculative measure by which human beings reason by a series of negations from their finite beings to its primary and first cause in the infinite being, the unmoved mover, who is, in the Przywaran frame, the God of Jesus Christ. Barth retorted to such machination with a loud Nein, such that the canton church bells in Basel were made to ring out.

Barth offered his own reading on thinking God. This has been identified by such theologians as Eberhard Juengal et al. as the analogia fidei -/relationis (analogy of faith -/relation). Barth contended that there was such a qualitative disjunction between God and humanity that outwith God’s invasion, His descending into the fallen world, outwith His assumptio carnis (assumption of flesh) it would be nigh impossible for human beings to begin to even imagine the living and triune God; let alone ‘know’ this God. What was required in Barth’s estimation was that God enter into the garb of our humanity, by becoming human Himself in Jesus Christ, and to do so unto the point of death; even death on the cross. Barth maintains that it was only this type of the dissolution of fallen humanity, and then via its resurrection in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that humanity by the Holy Spirit, in union with Christ’s humanity (spiritually), might come to have a correspondence of faith, with Christ’s faith, through Christ’s relationship to humanity mediated through His humanity, and in turn, through His human nature in inseparable relationship with the divine Logos, who is the ground of Christ’s singular person, that humanity could ever have a center in God to rightly know God by.

With the aforementioned noted, Anthony Feneuil offers a helpful reading on how Barth engaged with Anselm’s so-called ‘ontological proof’ for the existence of God. As Feneuil shows, Barth could affirm Anselm’s proof without collapsing it into something like the analogia entis presented by Przywara et al. So, how could Barth affirm a ‘proof’ for God’s existence, without falling prey to his own critique of an analogia entis (which is a subset of a natural theology simplicter)? Feneuil writes (in extenso):

According to Barth, Anselm’s proof is not natural theology. Anselm never places himself on the —supposedly common to the believer and the unbeliever—ground of natural reason. The definition of God Anselm gives at the beginning of the Proslogion is not, says Barth, a definition in the strict sense of the term but, rather, a confession of faith. It does not define the nature of God but acknowledges a divine command, actually the first of the Ten Commandments (“You shall have no other gods before me”): “We believe that You are something than which nothing greater can be thought.” It is not about the abstract essence of God, but about the relation of lordliness between the revealed God and God’s creatures. Anselm does not place himself on the fool’s ground, he does not think on the same level. And the proof does not primarily prove the existence of God but, rather, the fact that, on the ground of this lordliness relationship that God initiated, it is not even possible for us to imagine, even as a mere hypothesis, the inexistence of God. The mere hypothesis of the nonexistence does not fit God. In that respect as well, God is very different  from any other object of the world (very different from a hundred–euro note, for instance). Therefore, Anselm’s proof is not an ontological proof, that is, a proof that would go from God’s essence in thought of God’s actual existence. It is not a proof in which human thought is above God, in which human thought decides about God’s existence. It is the other way around: the proof aims at showing, from the revealed name of God, that human thought cannot establish itself as a spectator above God. The proof shows that human thought, in relation to God, is unescapably limited.

Therefore, one could say that, in a sense, the proof aims precisely at negating the possibility of any natural theology, understood as a human attempt to escape the relation of obedience to God, and to establish oneself in the position of being able to make judgments about God’s existence, just as about the existence of any object. It is a proof that declares our wisdom as a folly before God. Hence, the insipiens, in Barth’s reading of Anselm—that is, the one who does not understand the proof—is not only the one who denies the existence of God, but also the one who tries to establish this existence on purely rational grounds. Who, then, is the insipiens? He is Descartes, not less than Kant, because when Descartes attempts to ground the certainty of God’s existence exclusively on human reason, he believes that he can consider God as a thought object similar to others, whose existence can always be put into bracket. Insofar, he is an insipiens: he believes that one can talk about God as about a thing or an absent person, using a third-person discourse, whereas one cannot talk about God without talking to God. Consequently, there is no fundamental difference between Anselm’s insipiens and Paul’s fool: both refer to those who do not acknowledge the foolishness of their own wisdom, but neither Anselm’s incipiens [sic.] nor Paul’s fool refer to the one who cannot reason well, for any contingent cause.[1]

If Feneuil is correct in his reading of Barth, and there is no reason to think otherwise, we can see, even in Barth’s reading on Anselm’s ‘proof’ how Barth’s rejection of a natural theology was operative. Ultimately, I would contend, Barth sees natural theology, and its subset in the analogia entis, as foolish because it attempts to decenter God’s ontology with fallen humanity’s; i.e., by asserting that there remains a residual foundation within the intellect of fallen humanity whereby knowledge of the true and living God has been retained; even if it might need a drop of God’s created grace to jumpstart it.

[1] Anthony Feneuil, “The Cross of Wisdom: Ambiguities in Turning Down Apologetics (Paul, Anselm, Barth),” in Christophe Chalamet and Hans–Christoph Askani, eds., The Wisdom and Foolishness of God: First Corinthians 1—2 In Theological Exploration (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 174–75.

The Fittingness of God to Become Human / The Unfittingness of Humans to Become God

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It is unfitting for man to exalt himself to the status of God. But it is entirely fitting for God to become man (human). It is fitting for God to enter His creaturely sphere, to become His creaturely magnum opus, and redeem and elevate it from the inside up. It was so fitting for God to become human (man) that He freely elected that status for Himself, even before the foundations of the world, as He elected humanity for Himself; which was ultimately going to be for us (pro nobis). To invert that order is to imbibe the spirit of the Antichrist. The very spirit that slithered upon the Holy ground of Eden and whispered into Eve’s ear with its serpentine forked tongue: “you will be like God.” Barth writes,

We can state at once the impotence of this enterprise and therefore its inward futility. God becomes and is man. His condescension to us, His being as we are, is an event. It is actuality. It is the act of the One who is free and able to do this. It is the powerful execution of His eternal resolve. It is a triumphant and indisputable and irrevocable fact. But man, on the other hand, only wants to exalt himself and to be as God. He can never do it. He does not have the freedom or power. He may determine on it for long enough, but nothing will ever come of it. He will always fall back on himself and still be man. It is not paradoxical or absurd that God becomes and is man. It does not contradict the concept of God. If fulfils it. It reveals the glory of God. But it is certainly paradoxical and absurd that man wants to be as God. It contradicts the concept of man. It destroys it. Man ceases to be a man when he wants this. It does not involve any alteration in God for Him to become a creature. Even as such He is still the Creator. But it does require an alteration in man—and one that is not given to him—to become God. He cannot hope and he need not concern himself that this will finally be attained. For his own good it is provided that he cannot pass his own limits, try how he will. The only result of his attempts is the revelation of his impotence to do so, and, because he ought not to do so, the revelation of his shame.[1]

This bespeaks the goodness and very goodness of God’s creation. All things in their proper order (taxis) in relation to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and within that given, that gift humans have the capacity to flourish in the ways intended by the living God. Rebel against this order, as we are wont to do by our ‘sinful natures,’ and it all goes to hell.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [419] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 61–2.

Reflecting On Charles Taylor’s Social Imaginary and Buffered Self

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I read through Charles Taylor’s tome, Secular Age, a few years ago; it took me a couple years to get through. I think his sociological analyses, peppered with theological riffs, represents some of the most profound observational insights available. While I was reading through it, I found some of his theological eloquence lacking, especially with reference to his reading of Calvinism. But ultimately that lacuna didn’t subtract from his overall cultural and sociological analysis. For me his most poignant themes remain his thinking on the social imaginary along with the buffered [secular] self. These two intellections, respectively, have been most applicable in my day-to-day existence out there in the big world. These themes have helped me keep the world in order so to speak. In other words, they have allowed me to have the critical valence and distanciation necessary to continuously place the various cultural-identity-posture expressions into some identifiable frame; indeed, expressions presented by the heathen, the religious, and the Christian alike.

On social imaginary: this has served as a helpful psychologizing factor, as far as realizing that all of humanity has various ideational categories that they are consciously or subconsciously drawing from in order to navigate their relative places in this ‘world system.’ It isn’t always easy to identify the various in-forming and out-forming pressures from whence the people are indeed formed. Even so, just knowing that there are clusters of various social imaginaries present in the world, an ordered filament, to one extent or another, an intellectual press that has a pedigree of development in the history of the world’s ideas, this helps me to approach people with an understanding that they aren’t as ‘naked’ or absolutely subjective as they think they might be. And of course, this sword doesn’t just cut on them ‘out there,’ but also on me, ‘in here,’ in my own spiritual and intellectual development.

On the buffered self: this dovetails with the social imaginary. People, whether conscious or not, use various belief-structures, social imaginaries, often-times, as coping mechanisms that allow them to navigate a world of other people who might present with competing social imaginaries. This is to say, the buffered self in the modern and postmodern periods, respectively, often-times and relativistically, picks the ideas and theories of life that they have inherited from the past, consciously or not, to keep the other competing social imaginaries, out there, at bay. That is to say, that in our highly individualistic world, people deploy mechanisms of ideation and belief in order to keep the world of the other ‘out there,’ in an attempt to keep a semblance of order internal to their own self-development and truths. The buffered self, I would contend, is simply representative of what might be identified as a modal collapse, an absolute immanentization of total reality, as perceived atomistically by each individual, into the turn-to-the-subject. That is, the buffered self, as the fallen self, vis-à-vis God, necessarily imbibes what it perceives to be the attributes of God into their own preponderances and activities in the world as human and individual agents. Thusly, the buffered self seeks a life of absolute autonomy, as monadic centers circumscribed purely by their own self-perception as gods among other gods; each god ostensibly capable of constructing their own worlds, their own truths.

The above, on a sketch, represents how it is that I have personally appropriated a couple of Taylor’s themes as critical mechanisms that allow me, in an attempt, to find some semblance of intellectual and sociological order, even whilst living in the midst of a world wherein each individual human agent believes themselves to be gods. From a biblically narratival vantage point what I have been describing, clearly, is a reference to the fall of humanity as that is described in Genesis 3.