Category Archives: Theological Epistemology

You Have a Hermeneutic, Did You Know That? Probably Not.

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The online and non-online Christian world is occupied by interminable and ongoing debates with reference to both theological and exegetical conclusions vis-Ć -vis an a priori, yet typically, uncritically received hermeneutical framework. And even if this or that person claims this or that theological framework, say a Calvinism or Arminianism, a Hellenism or Hegelianism, an asserted literal biblical hermeneutic or allegorical/spiritual, so on and so forth, there is almost zero discourse having to do with the ideas that stand behind said frameworks. That is, there is little to no awareness about the informing ideas and intellectual histories that have given rise to the array of hermeneutical expressions that we live with today. Indeed, there is this type of uncritical non-self-reflective reception of whatever hermeneutic said person receives and deploys in their respective engagement with the text of Holy Scripture, and its reality in Jesus Christ (I just snuck some of my hermeneutic in right here).

What I am primarily referring to, particularly on the theological side, is a prolegomenon. A prolegomenon, especially when the student flips open a systematic theology book, is often the first section of said book. It is explaining the theologianā€™s theological methodology and the various theological-intellectual priors they are utilizing to arrive at their respective theological conclusions vis-Ć -vis the array of theological loci that typically populates a systematic theology. But even among the theologians who present a prolegomenon for their systematic theologies, respectively, they often simply reveal that they too have uncritically received a particular style of a so-called ā€˜classical-theisticā€™ commitment. That is to say, this or that theologian often will give the company lines as their prolegomenon; and as far as that goes, that can be helpful for the reader, in terms of knowing what to expect. But even at this level if the theologian is just repeating what has been handed down for the centuries, within their respective theological ā€œgroup,ā€ all they end up doing, ironically, is modeling a way to uncritically receive, rinse, and repeat a theological methodology that has been cleanly packaged for them by their prior giants. This model for doing theology is not helpful in my view, and only ends up contributing to the perpetuation of what I was referring to in my above paragraph for this article.

So, it might seem like Iā€™m griping just to gripe. But I want to suggest something. I want to suggest that all theologians and biblical exegetes need to spend the time criticizing their own received interpretive traditions, their hermeneutics, respectively, and consider their source and synthesis. In other words, be sure, as a theology or Bible reader and doer, that you, the theologian, spend the time looking at what is informing your theological and exegetical conclusions. Make sure, in other words, that you understand the theological ontology and subsequent epistemology that stands behind and informs the way you think theologically in general. Ask the question: does my theological methodology (hermeneutic) have a ground in the heavenlies, in the ascended Christ, or does it only have an earthly and abstract fount of knowledge? In other words, consider whether or not your theological methodology has a genuinely Christian ground, and one that works from the interior theo-logic presented by the implications of the incarnation of God in Christ, or if it only reflects a prior logic deduced from the abstract and speculative ratiocinations of a naked humanity; one that relies on philosophical witticism rather than Christian revelation.

Without this type of self-criticism and deep self-engagement, as far as understanding what stands behind and within our theological and exegetical conclusions, theological discourse will only continue to go by the bye. Now, I am not so naĆÆve to think my exhortation here will fall on ripe ears, per se; at least not in general. But what I am hoping is that by at least highlighting this matter it might have the effect of waking some folks up. Maybe they have never even stopped to consider that they have a hermeneutic; that they have prior theological and philosophical commitments informing their respective conclusions. I think this issue plagues most of the Church; not just among the laity, but the ā€œspecialistsā€ alike. And until people recognize this fact, they will continue to frustratingly bang their heads against their interlocutorā€™s walls.

The Tomb of Christian Revelation Juxtaposed with the Vapors of Metaphysics

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There is no abstract conceptual apparatus by which we can know the Christian God. Knowledge of God is absolutely contingent on Godā€™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 Maryā€™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 Goliath god of the Philosophers Versus the Father God of the Son

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. . . It is not a loud and stern and foreign thing, but the quiet and gentle and intimate awakening of children in the Fatherā€™s house to life in that house. That is how God exercises authority. All divine authority has ultimately and basically this character. At its heart all Godā€™s ruling and ordering and demanding is like this. But it is in the direction given and revealed in Jesus Christ that the character of divine authority and lordship is unmistakably perceived.[1]

This follows from knowing God first as Father of the Son mediated through the Son by the Holy Spirit. And this is to the point and heart of an Evangelical Calvinism Athanasian Reformed mode of theological and Christian existence. The Son, the eternal Logos conditions the way we approach the Father, just as the Son has eternally indwelt the bosom of the Father. There is no discursive routing here and there on a way up to God to be taken. There is only the Son descended (exitus) to the point of death the death of the cross, and new humanity ascended (reditus) on the healing wings of the Holy Spirit as He in Christ takes us to the glory the Son has always already shared eternally with the Father. Indeed, it is in this oikonomia (economy) that God has freely chosen to make Himself known to and for the world, in the face of Jesus Christ. Godā€™s exousia (authority) is not an authority of an abstract monad back yonder in the ethereal gases of the philosophers; such that He is some type of Goliath God. Nein. Godā€™s authority, His sovereignty, His power is that of a gentle father with his children; it is a filial familial authority.

This is the interminable perduring seemingly unquenchable battle of the God of Jerusalem versus the God of Athens. God is Father of the Son, as Athanasius has intoned, or he is simply an abstraction plastered onto the God of the Bible; as if some type of graffiti that would seek to draw attention to its own self-projected beauty rather than the beauty of Godā€™s manger and cross in Christ. Choose you this day who you will serve.

[1] Karl Barth,Ā Church Dogmatics IV/1 Ā§58 [100] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study EditionĀ (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 97.

TF Torrance and Augustine in Discussion on a Knowledge of God vis-Ć -vis the Imago Dei

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I find Thomas Torranceā€™sĀ stratified knowledge of GodĀ and St. Augustineā€™sĀ exercitatioĀ mentisĀ (spiritual exercises), and their relative correspondence to be quiteĀ intriguing, and yet in this intrigue there is also recognition of a fundamental difference. Here is how Ben Myers describes Torranceā€™s ā€˜stratified knowledgeā€™ (if you want to read Torrance on this see hisĀ Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons):

Thomas F. Torranceā€™s model of the stratification of knowledge is one of his most striking and original contributions to theological method. Torranceā€™s model offers an account of the way formal theological knowledge emerges from our intuitive and pre-conceptual grasp of Godā€™s reality as it is manifest in Jesus Christ. It presents a vision of theological progression, in which our knowledge moves towards an ever more refined and more unified conceptualisation of the reality of God, while remaining closely coordinated with the concrete level of personal and experiential knowledge of Jesus Christ. According to this model, our thought rises to higher levels of theological conceptualisation only as we penetrate more deeply into the reality of Jesus Christ. From the ground level of personal experience to the highest level of theological reflection, Jesus Christ thus remains central. Through a sustained concentration on him and on his homoousialĀ union with God, we are able to achieve a formal account of the underlying trinitarian relations immanent in Godā€™s own eternal being, which constitute the ultimate grammar of all theological discourse. [Benjamin Myers, ā€œThe Stratification of knowledge in the thought of T. F. Torrance,ā€ SJT 61 (1): 1-15 (2008) Printed in the United Kingdom Ā© 2008 Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd]

And here is how Gilles Emery, O. P. describes Augustineā€™sĀ exercitatio mentis:

Augustine emphasizes in particular that in order to glimpse God, the spirit must purify itself of corporeal representations and ā€œphantasmata.ā€ The spirit must not stop at created images but must rise to what the created realities ā€œinsinuate.ā€ This is precisely the usefulness of the study of creatures and the goal of the exercise. TheĀ exercitatioĀ proposed by Augustine is anĀ ascension ā€¦Ā toward God from the image that is inferior and unequal to him, and it is at the same time a gradual movementĀ toward the interiorĀ (introrsus tendre). From these corporeal realities and sensible perceptions, Augustine invites his reader to turn toward the spiritual nature of man, toward the soul itself and its grasp of incorporeal realities, in a manner ever more interior (modo interiore), in order to rise toward the divine Trinity. The exercise of the spirit is ā€œa gradual ascension toward the interior,ā€ in other words, anĀ elevationĀ from inferior realities toward interior realities. One enters, and one rises in a gradual manner by degreesĀ (gradatim).Ā Such is the way characteristic of Augustine: ā€œpull back into yourself [in teipsum redi]ā€¦, and transcend yourself.ā€ [Gilles Emery, O. P.,Ā Trinitarian Theology as Spiritual Exercise in Augustine and Aquinas,Ā inĀ Aquinas the AugustinianĀ edited by Michael Dauphinais, Barry David, and Matthew Levering, p. 14.]

[For further reading on a Reformed version of ascension theology check out Julie Canlisā€™ sweet bookĀ Calvinā€™s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension.]

One fundamental and important differenceā€”even given some apparent similarity between Torrance and Augustine, like on stratification or graded movement towards Triune knowledge of Godā€”becomes an issue of theological anthropology and the difference between Augustineā€™sĀ a prioriĀ versusĀ Torranceā€™sĀ a posteroriĀ approaches in relation to theĀ imago Dei/Christi.Ā 

For Augustine, knowledge of God is already present (even if soteriologically and christologically construed) by way of analogical reflection upon the image of God (which is opened up soteriologically by Christ). For Torrance, knowledge of God is not a result of turning inward, but looking outward to Christ. So we donā€™t know what it is to really be in the image of God, there is not resonant knowledge of God available in the human being, per se. It is only as we are recreated in Christ in the resurrection by the Spirit that genuine knowledge of God can be acquired by observing and spiritually participating in the knowledge of God through Him. So the analogy for both of the these theologiansā€”by which we come to knowledge of the Triune Godā€”is grounded in reflection upon the image of God. But the difference is that for Augustine, the image of GodĀ isĀ grounded in each individual person (which would help to explain his view of election/reprobation as well); for Torrance the image of God is grounded in Christ (Col. 1.15), and thus the supposition is that Godā€™s image has a ground external to creation in Christ, which allows us to think of knowledge of God as something external to us, and not something resonant within us (even if like Augustine we try to explain this in his kind of soteriological way).

My Reduction

I donā€™t like doing this, but for sake of blogginess and reception let me do so: For Augustine knowledge of God happens by turning inward to the self (by Christ to be sure) and attending to personal piety; For Torrance knowledge of God happens by turning outward to Christ, and attending to personal intimacy therein.

This kind of movement (inwardĀ a prioriĀ and outwardĀ a posterori) has some other interesting implications that get fleshed out in subsequent centuries and theologies that continue to affect us to this day. We will have to talk about this later.

*Originally posted in 2019 at another site of mine.

The Cipher-Jesus Predestined by the Fallen Heart

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German anthropologist and philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach stated: God is ā€œthe outward projection of a human’s inward nature.ā€ A very telling observation with reference to a postEnlightenment turn-to-the-subject worldpicture. This remains a fitting observation even for our 21st century time; i.e., that people, by nature (according to Scripture, and empirical observation), in the inverse, have collapsed the classical attributes of God into the mirror of their own image. A postmodern, normative relativistic people simply wake up in the morning, look in the mirror in the bathroom, and say: ā€œhello there God.ā€ Even if not this overtly, it is the way us sinners operate enslaved, enbondaged to the incurvature of our in-turned hearts. We are, in the first Adam sense, slaves of our polluted, stained, dead souls; souls that by sinful being (ousia) naturally believe that our way is the way.

This is being played out every single day, not just out there, but in here; indeed, in our own daily lives. This is why the Apostle Paul by the Holy Spirit exhorts us to reckon ourselves dead to sin, and alive to Jesus Christ. Even so, the pagan, the heathen has no resurrection power to mortify these first Adam ways of life that dominate every shred and depth of the marrow of the bones; they are simply enslaved to love of themselves; and left to themselves have no capacity to not sin; to not worship the self as God. It is whilst inhabiting this type of beleaguered existence that in an attempt to worship, the person will name their own person as the Messiah. The urge to worship, of course, is because the human animal has been created by the living and alien God to worship; to worship Him in spirit and truth. But absent the Holy Spiritā€™s indwelling, the only reality the fallen person knows to worship, most immediately, is themselves. And yet, there seems to be some type of cultural pressure (maybe the Christian witness and the Holy Spiritā€™s conviction in the world) that leads said fallen people to worship something or someone outside of themselves; even though they havenā€™t the capacity to actually achieve a genuinely extra worship. And so, they might in parody, and for convenienceā€™s sake, attribute their self-worship to the worship of Jesus. But their respective Jesus, as has already been alluded to, is really a Jesus who does what their deepest desires yearn for; the desires that are enchained to the kingdom of darkness; to their father of lies and death, the devil.

Barth helps us,

It is not, therefore, doing Him a mere courtesy when it names the name of Jesus Christ. It does not use this name as a symbol or sign which has a certain necessity on historical grounds, and a certain purpose on psychological and pedagogic grounds, to which that which it really means and has to say may be attached, which it is desirable to expound for the sake of clarity. For it, this name is not merely a cipher, under which that which it really means and has to say leads its own life and has its own truth and actuality and would be worth proclaiming for its own sake, a cipher which can at any time be omitted without affecting that which is really meant and said, or which in other ages or climes or circumstances can be replaced by some other cipher. When it speaks concretely, when it names the name of Jesus Christ, the Christian message is not referring simply to the specific form of something general, a form which as such is interchangeable in the phrase of Lessing, a ā€œcontingent fact of historyā€ which is the ā€œvehicleā€ of an ā€œeternal truth of reason.ā€ The peace between God and man and the salvation which comes to us men is not something general, but the specific thing itself: that concrete thing which is indicated by the name of Jesus Christ and not by any other name. For He who bears this name is Himself the peace and salvation. The peace and salvation can be known therefore, only in Him, and proclaimed only in His name.[1]

There are much too many cipher-Jesuses running around, reigning supreme in the world. There is only one Jesus Christ, and He alone puts His words in His own mouth in perichoretic conversation with the Father and Holy Spirit. The zeitgeist would make us think that Jesus is simply an imprimatur of our own waning and base desires; that Jesus is whomever our enchained souls would determine Him to be. Whether this be for interpersonal reasons, or collectivist political reasons. When Jesus simply becomes a cipher for me and my tribe, for our self-determined predestined agendas, He has simply been collapsed into us, as we have stolen His name and badged ourselves with it. God forbid it!

[1] Karl Barth,Ā Church Dogmatics IV/1 Ā§57 [021] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study EditionĀ (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 18.

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

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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 Godā€™s life Self-revealed for the church and world in Jesus Christ. This question of ā€œfaith and reasonā€ 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 JĆ¼ngel:

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 reasonā€™s function. What becomes of God when an abstract ā€œI thinkā€ or an abstract ā€œthou shaltā€ 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 ā€œnothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will,ā€ 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-Ć -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 ā€˜god-of-the-gapsā€™)? 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 Godā€™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 isnā€™t about assuaging our own anxieties about the ostensible disorder of the world, and our place in it. The vulnerability is that we donā€™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 JĆ¼ngel,Ā God as the Mystery of the World,Ā trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf&Stock [reprint], 1983), 195ā€“96.

God’s Annihilating and Evangelical Word: With Reference to Eberhard Juengal

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Eberhard Juengal is engaging with the address of God, and the role that language plays in that address. He is appealing to Heidegger and others with reference to how certain language games have functioned in the profane world, in regard to anthropologically and socio-linguistically situating people as people; both within their inner-lives, and as that relates to what it means to be a human being in the world at large. After he develops things along these lines for a bit, he gets to the payoff. He receives these types of profane frameworks, particularly within there existentialist hue, and then reifies them from within a Christian theological frame of reference. He shows how Godā€™s address, Godā€™s language towards us, has an eschatological character to it that resituates us in a right and new relationship with Godself. Juengal writes:

The eschatological character of manā€™s distancing from himself has an eminently critical dimension. For, to the extent that this distancing surpasses everything which is, everything which is for itself is made nothing. Every word which addresses man about God is, in that sense, a negating or destroying word. It brings about an annihilation in that it surpasses not only our being-here, but also our past and our future. But distanced from himself in such a way, the man addressed about God is brought into a new, ultimate nearness to himself. That is, to be sure, a nearness of the ego to itself which includes its being before God. The New Testament understands this as the presence which is eschatologically oriented through the guarantee of the Holy Spirit.

The word of God which addresses man about God, has, then, an annihilating effect, for the sake of something new. Evangelical theology may not remain silent about the fact that it is destructive. But, and this is what evangelical theology must chiefly speak of, it is destructive only on the basis of the positive fact that God addresses us about himself in such a way that he promises himself to us. One should not understand it in such a way that God would permit what exists to be made nothing in order then to be able to begin all over again from the beginning, so to speak. The reverse is true: because God, in addressing us about himself in such a way that he promotes himself to us, always creates something new, that which is old becomes nothing.[1]

Juengal elaborates further, particularly with how it relates to the respective theologies of Karl Barth and Friedrich Gogarten, in footnote 6 with reference to the above second paragraph:

Thus sin passes away only when it is forgiven; but the forgiveness of sins is always more than the passing away of sin. And in exactly the same way the godless person passes away because he is justified, not in order that he can be justified; the justification of the godless is always more than the passing away of the godless. The actual contrast between the theology of Karl Barth and Friedrich Gogarten appears to me to consist of this contrasting definition of the theological relationship between the passing away and becoming, of death and life, of judgment and grace. See on this the analysis of Gogartenā€™s writings with special attention to the Luther statements which he cites in W. HĆ¼ffmeier, Gott egen Gott; Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zum Gottes- und TodesverstƤndnis Friedrich Gogartens unter besonderer BerĆ¼cksichtigung seiner Luther-interpretation (TĆ¼bingen dissertation, 1972). On this relationship between Barth and Gogarten I refer to the insightful investigation presented by P. Lange in Konkrete Theologie? Karl Barth und Friedrich Gogarten ā€œZwischen den Zeitenā€ (1992-1993); Eine theologiegeschichtlich-systematische Untersuchung im Blick auf die Praxis theologischen Verhaltens (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1972). Karl Barthā€™s dogmatic approach, to define the judgment of God on the basis of grace, that is hermeneutically to say that on the basis of the new the old has become old and passed away (II Cor. 5:17), has been taken up chiefly by Ernst Fuchs and independently developed further hermeneutically.[2]

This hearkens me back to what more contemporarily is being identified by folks like Philip Ziegler, Jamie Davies et al., as Apocalyptic Theology. Essentially, the idea is what I take to be the Pauline idea of Godā€™s disruptive grace (to borrow language from George Hunsinger); that is, that when God addresses us by the Word of God, Jesus Christ, He takes us from our present and visible circumstances, and places us into Himself, in the new creation and resurrected life of Jesus Christ. The result being, that the old is ā€˜annihilated,ā€™ as it were, as the new has come (and continues to come, and will finally come at the second advent of the Christ). Peter refers to this type of theologizing in this way:

10Ā ButĀ the day of the LordĀ will come like a thief, in whichĀ the heavensĀ will pass away with a roar and theĀ elements will be destroyed with intense heat, andĀ the earth andĀ its works will beĀ burned up.

11Ā Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness,Ā 12Ā looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of whichĀ the heavens will be destroyed by burning, and theĀ elements will melt with intense heat!Ā 13Ā But according to HisĀ promise we are looking forĀ new heavens and a new earth,Ā in which righteousness dwells.[3]

As Juengal has underscored for us already, while there is a ā€˜taking awayā€™ there is also a ā€˜bringing anewā€™ that is greater than not less than what has been annihilated in the death of death in Christ. This might remind us of Paulā€™s thinking when he writes, ā€œ17Ā things which areĀ aĀ mereĀ shadow of what is to come; but theĀ substanceĀ belongs to Christ.ā€[4] So, accordingly, there is a passing away of the shadows, which in themselves couldnā€™t handle the weight of what was coming as the antitype of its stead. It isnā€™t that the original and now fallen creation isnā€™t real, but that its inner reality had always already stood before it, as it was first created for its second recreation in the incarnation, resurrection, ascension, and advent of Jesus Christ. That is to say, the first creation, we might say, the first Adam, was something of a placeholder for the coming of his intended reality, in the archetypal, second and greatest Man, Jesus Christ; indeed, for the first Adam, and for all of the world therefrom.

These, are heavy teachings; who can hear them?!

[1] Eberhard JĆ¼ngel,Ā God as the Mystery of the World,Ā trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf&Stock [reprint], 1983), 175.

[2] Ibid., n. 6.

[3] II Peter 3.10-13, NASB95.

[4] Colossians 2.17, NASB95.

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

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Ludwig Feuerbach

Karl Barth is often identified as a neo-Kantian, or just straight up Kantian in his theological orientation (and methodology). It seems too facile to me to maintain that Barth was somehow a slavish servant of Kant, especially materially. Maybe formally, Barth could be understood to be a Kantian in certain qualified ways. But in the air he breathed to be ā€œKantianā€ 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, letā€™s now refer to Eberhard Buschā€™s discussion on these matters, as that pertains to Kantā€™s and Feuerbachā€™s deliverances of a Barthian theology and knowledge of God.

. . . In Barthā€™s view, what Feuerbach ā€œrightfully objected toā€ was that in human religion the one who prays, the pious individual does not ā€œget beyond what he himself has thought and experienced,ā€ that all his ā€œattempts to bridge the gap. . . take place within this world.ā€ The interpretation that leads Barth to entertain Feuerbachā€™s critique of religion is clearly in line with Kantā€™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 Feuerbachā€™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 ā€œpresuppositionā€ (of man). Therefore ā€œGodā€ is not untouched by Feuerbachā€™s critique when he is generally understood as a metaphysical reality beyond all human hypotheses, but only when he is understood as ā€œthe origin of the crisis of all objectivity devoid of all objectivity.ā€ After all this we may assume that Barth is especially influenced by Kant, deepened by Neo-Kantianism but also by Feuerbachā€™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 ā€œrecognizedā€ 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 Barthā€™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 Kantā€™s theology suffered from.

Conversely, and for the purposes of this post, I think it is interesting to hear some of Buschā€™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 Buschā€™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 Barthā€™s appeal to Feuerbach and Feuerbachā€™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 understoodā€”because he was a Christian of no small statureā€”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.

Iā€™m afraid this whole post has been rather abstract. The necessary context for this offering is reliant on the readerā€™s own familiarity with these things. Even so, hereā€™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 ā€œChristianā€ appropriations of God, categorically, that are too contingent upon speculative discursive reasoning, and the ā€œdiscoveriesā€ 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.

Stream of Consciousness on the Supernatural

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It is unfortunate that so many Christians in the West, and elsewhere, have so taken on the materialist/physicalist picture of the world, like in the way we process things on a daily basis, that we allow that to impinge, and thus reduce, or negate, the reality of the supranatural reality of all reality. I.e., that humanity, the world, the globe, the earth and the š‘š‘œš‘ š‘šš‘œš‘  itself, is created by the living God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As such, the rest of what Paul identifies as the š‘š‘™š‘’š‘Ÿš‘œš‘šš‘Ž (as he gives that his christological twist) in the epistle to the Colossians, also is necessarily negated; that is, the world of the spiritual realm of angels, demons, demiurges etc., in general.

Often times, in overreaction to the the materialist world, other Christians will go to other extremes and absolutize what has come to be known as the charismatic and even the Pentecostal world picture; where in fact, miracles and the supranatural becomes normalized, categorized, and codified, such that it becomes so normal that, in effect, God and the supranatural has been domesticated to our own personal experiences in consumerist types of ways.

Contrariwise to the aforementioned, a substantive benefit, one of many, of being immersed in Holy Scripture, is that these faulty extremes themselves become negated. The supranatural, the spiritual, miracles, so on and so forth come to have a concrete context. The context, is indeed God’s own free life within itself; within His own Self-determination, not ours. The reality of Jesus Christ, as the Self-determination of God for the world, wherein Heaven and earth, God and humanity, are united in His singular person becomes the norming norm (š‘›š‘œš‘Ÿš‘šš‘Ž š‘›š‘œš‘Ÿš‘šš‘Žš‘›š‘ ) of the real life Christian world picture. The material world (i.e., albeit created and contingent on the upholding power of God’s Word), and the spiritual world (i.e., the inner, eternal, and triune Life of God) have a ground to be thought from in the center of God’s life. The ground is both transcendent and immanent. God’s act in Christ, indeed as that has first been freely determined in God’s choice to not be God without but with us in Jesus Christ, becomes the point of departure by which the Christian world picture comes to have an organicism wherein miracles, the spiritual reality of life (which is the antecedent reality to all of contingent life), the supranatural and natural have an inner-core that is alien to us; that is outside of us (š‘’š‘„š‘”š‘Ÿš‘Ž š‘›š‘œš‘ ). As we live in this world, with this inner-ground of God’s life for us as the grounding-calibration of all things, we can rightly engage with this world, without reduction or negation, in the way it actually is, without it becoming more or less than it is at the same time.