Category Archives: Theopolitical

On Chemical Warfare in the Womb and Trump

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I have been posting on my other social media accounts (FB and X) today with reference to Trump’s support of the abortion pill; in other words, on his support of abortion en masse. It is a dilemma, indeed. Kamala and Walz will seemingly be the final death knell for America. If they win it will be akin to jumping out of the window of a high-rise building that is on fire. The country, and world, will simply get to where it has already gone, it will find its bottom quicker than if Trump and company win. In my view Trump will only offer a retarding effect on what has already been set in motion. He will put a skid on the total and immediate economic collapse, and all the upheaval that will cause. He will bring an end to the wars that are currently underway across the world. He will bring energy independence back to America. And he will do more that will seemingly be positive, in regard to national flourishing. And yet with all of the above in the balance, on the other side he is pro-abortion (pill). He believes that accessibility to the abortion pill ought to be in reach for anyone who has access to the post office. Just to be clear, the abortion pill is not the “morning after pill,” or anything like that. A person ingests the abortion pill if they are confirmed to be pregnant; it chemically destroys the baby from there. The abortion pill is something like making a mother’s womb like mini-mobile-gas chambers. Drop the poison, and it engages in a shoah catastrophe that reaches even beyond the gas chambers of Hitler’s satanic scepter (as far as numbers go in regard to loss of human life). Ultimately the logic and activity Trump is committed to, with reference to the abortion pill, is something like going full circle. It is a logic of death that has no graded place in the economy and Kingdom of God in Christ. It is the same logic of death that Kamala and Walz et al. are committed to on the “other side” of the same coin of death.

  1. God’s judgment on the USA entails a false-dilemma. That is to say: we have been presented with two false choices, before God, for the office of the president of the United States.
  2. It is a form of natural theology that says that God spared Trump (from assassination) because God endorses Trump (He clearly doesn’t endorse Kamala either).
  3. The only abyss the human being ultimately hangs over, apocalyptically that is, depends on whether a person is for Christ or against Him. Whether a nation in the now fails or prospers is contingent on the aforementioned. It is not contingent, per se, on who the President is. If the core of the country is rotten, who the President is in the midst of that core will not bring the salvation so many hope that it will.
  4. Has the political situation become so dire that in fact it is better to jump out of the window of the burning World Trade Center than it is to stay and endure the flame and the total collapse of the building? That’s the question I am reflecting on. They both end in the same place, it’s just how you get there.
  5. Leaving abortion up to the states is like leaving slavery and segregation up to the states. It is a federal issue like nothing else is. If it cannot be banned at the Federal level, in my view, we don’t deserve to be a country.
  6. My Dad’s church (where he was senior pastor) in North Long Beach, CA was very involved with the House of Ruth, and Walk for Life. The House of Ruth was/is an organization that helps unwed and abused mothers find refuge and a way out, without being reduced to abort their babies. Walk for Life provides a public witness that there are people who oppose abortion, but also who are there to minister to those who otherwise might abort their babies. And now of course there are many other organizations (Crisis Pregnancy Centers etc.) that are involved just the same.
  7. “Abortion is not, therefore, one issue among other issues. It is the most fundamental postmodern issue. As we saw earlier in this book, the gods of the ancient world demanded that their servants sacrifice their children to their power. This was the “abomination” that the Lord refused to Israel in the Old Testament and to which Israel was continuously tempted. In the Bible, this is not a random picture of evil meant merely to shock us. It is, rather, based on an anthropological insight: the willingness to kill your child and the consequent construction of a system of child murder is the only path to pure power, pure sovereignty. Pure power demands that keeping helpless people alive be a voluntary display of power, a whim of the strong; otherwise, if power is ever revealed to be for the weak, the social hierarchy is inverted, and the whole system is exposed for the lie that it is. This is why, as we saw earlier in this book, nearly all pagan societies condone the killing of babies. This is how human power can speak order into chaos without opening itself to what is beyond it, to the transcendent. Nowhere is the West’s final slide into post-Christian paganism clearer than in the abortion regime, which kills around sixty million children every year, roughly 20 percent of all babies. As the pope wrote: ‘Where God is denied and people live as though he did not exist, or his commandments are not taken into account, the dignity of the human person and the inviolability of human life also end up being rejected or compromised.'” -Andrew Willard Jones, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2021), 336-37.

Against Cultural Christianity and Christian [Inter]Nationalism: With Reference to Alan and Andrew Torrance

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Things remain politically charged in the world, clearly; especially during this season of time as we lead up to the American presidential election in November. Ever since Trump, in 2016, it seems the balance of powers in the world have been disrupted, to a point that they are no longer willing to conceal their movements. These are indeed, trying and confusing times for Christians. Many simply want nothing to do with the politick, which is very understandable. Personally, I have grown weary of such things as well. And yet as Christians we are to be salt and light in the world. Indeed, we are emissaries of the Most High and Holy triune God. Even as we journey in this far country, even as our souls grow weary, to the point of fainting and exhaustion, as Christians (those in union with Christ), we operate with a Spirit anointed resurrection power in the humanity of Jesus Christ. It is from this power, the personal power of the risen Christ with whom we are participants, that we have overcome the principalities and powers of this world. Ultimately, our citizenship (literally in Greek, our “politic”) is in heaven; in the city of God. And yet because God is grace and beauty He continuously condescends, irrupts, and disrupts our dusty frames, our fallen world, and shouts “behold, I come with great tidings of great joy which shall be for all the people. . .. Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.” He has not left us as orphans, and He has not left this creation without hope or a Savior all encompassing.

The aforementioned ought to conjure something. It ought to make us recognize, as Christians, that every sphere of this world, including ourselves, belongs to the triune God in the risen Christ. That there is no place where His life, Immanuel, does not own the cattle on a thousand hills. This entails something for us, as participants in this type of Kingly life; i.e., that we have the most important voice in the world, in regard to who we represent, and who we bear witness to in all spheres; not least of which is the political. Father and son, Alan and Andrew Torrance, have the following to communicate as they reflect on the political theologies and themes present within the works of S∅ren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, respectively.

In chapter 3, we considered ways in which the Enlightenment subverted the gospel message. Whereas Kierkegaard exposed the impact of post-Enlightenment construals of reason on Danish theology, Barth exposed a parallel confusion in German cultural Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus)—one that provided fertile soil for the emergence of German nationalism. A key factor in this was the two kingdoms doctrine that was inherent in nineteenth-century Lutheranism and had shaped Christian thought in both Denmark and Germany. Its effect was to inoculate the people’s cultural and political commitments against any challenge from acknowledging the lordship of Jesus Christ and it did this by dichotomizing allegiances into the sphere of personal piety and the spheres of the state and culture. Christ’s lordship belonged to the former, the effect of which was to make it a spiritual lordship. This gave rise to an attitude of dual allegiance which was supported by a series of parallel dichotomies between law and grace, state and church, the secular and the spiritual—distinctions that would find further support, as Anthony Thiselton has argued, in Neo-Kantian dualism. The resulting division of allegiances meant that the lordship of Jesus Christ found itself circumscribed by more foundational loyalties to the state, to the nation, to the realm of the law, and thus to the culture.

But why did this separation of the realm of the church from that of the state and culture not weaken rather than strengthen cultural Protestantism? After all, cultural Protestantism held to a synthesis and confusion between faith and cultural affiliation. Their separation, one might assume, should encourage persons to avoid any syncretism. It is important to recognize why this is not the case. As Barth saw with such clarity, when theologians endorse a system of dual loyalties with different sets of obligations (in this case, to the state and also to the church), what is perceived to be the broader field of obligation tends to become foundational, constituting thereby a procrustean bed that determines the extent or boundaries of faith and thus the lordship of Christ. What the history of cultural Protestantism and “civil religion” illustrates is that when it is assumed that the “spiritual” is not allowed to inform the “worldly,” or that participation within the church should not interfere with political allegiances (i.e., that we should “keep Christianity out of politics”), the person of Christ and the Bible are bracketed out of the evaluation of the so-called worldly sphere and thereby the duties and obligations that characterize everyday life. The problem is then compounded when this dual allegiance finds theological endorsement in the insistence that Jesus Christ is Lord only over the spiritual realm of personal piety, but that God has a separate and different purpose for the sociopolitical domain. That has the effect of ascribing divine endorsement to the dictates that emerge within the political or secular realm. Romans 13 is frequently cited, eisegetically, in support of this move.[1]

I think the most important focus to grab from the above is to avoid the neo-Kantian dualism of abstracting the sacred from the secular, and vice versa. In the economy of God, the Kingdom of Christ, the great divorce between heaven and a fallen earth has been put to death in the crucifixion, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. The world, as both Kierkegaard and Barth would argue, just as the Torrances have fruitfully underscored for us, is no longer the sphere of the devil and his minions, but instead, it is the domain of the Word of God. There is no quadrant where Christ is not prime over all; where He is at once elevated and condescended for us by the Spirit, even as He has always forever freely chosen to be God with us, and not without us; to be God in us, and not merely outside of us. It is Immanuel’s veins that have brought times of refreshment to a world committed to a futility of its own sublapsarian making.

Ultimately, as Alan and Andrew Torrance have reported for us, as they have engaged with Kierkegaard’s and Barth’s theologies, respectively, what remains always the truth: is that Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords! This is not merely an ethereal Platonic form in the heavens, but instead a concrete reality as Christ in-breaks, by the Spirit, into the world afresh anew. Even as He is the firstborn from the dead, the firstfruits of God, it is from this place of primacy that the Christian has the elevation, even as we are constantly being given over to the death of Christ, that His life might be made manifest in the mortal members of body, to proclaim that Jesus is Lord, without remainder. This is against a cultural Protestantism that seeks to “win” by the weapons of carnality, and instead it is by a unionizing with the living Christ in the triune God wherein Christians go out in power; even if such power appears weak and foolish to the world and church writ large.

 

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 150–1.

A Rejoinder to Christian Nationalism[s] via Appeal to a radical Reformation

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If you’re on X, the site formerly known as Twitter—Christian theological X, in particular—you will more than likely be exposed to a certain mode of so-called Christian Nationalism. This mode is of a modern postmillennial variety of the theonomic type. Without getting into the nuts-and-bolds of said framework, it essentially believes that the Great Commission entails the Christianizing of the entire world; in other words, the establishment of a Christendom. Some might look at a post-Constantinian world as what a Christendom involves. So, that is one take on a theological Christian Nationalism, which is seeing some legs under it these days. There is another type that is more philosophically based; maybe of the type that the French revolution was motivated by. A nationalism motivated by the self-determination of the people; we might even think of Libertarians in this way, or even of the Republic we inhabit de jure (in principle) in the United States of America (loosely conceived). It is the latter type the rest of my post will be responding to.

I had a friend pushback on me, on FB, with reference to a short little post I posted earlier today. I wrote: “I understand the impulses for a Christian nationalism, but I am not a proponent. We aren’t actually in Babylon (like Israel), we’re already/not yet in the Kingdom of the risen Christ; emissaries.” The pushback from the friend (and I won’t use his name because I didn’t ask him if I could use his quote here) went like this:

Maybe I don’t see the eschatological tinges to Christian nationalism. It seems more practical, or commonsensical to me. If you’re given the responsibility for, say, passing traffic laws, and setting the budget to expand the existing roadways and water treatment plant, or are faced with formulating some kind of immigration law or setting the penalties for crimes… does it really matter if the kingdom is not yet? Does that have any relevance to the question? Seems like you have to make the best decision that you can whether the kingdom is here or not here. And for the Christian, that will be informed by Christian convictions and not naturalistic or atheistic ones. “Ok, ok, you’re an emissary. I get it. Now, what should we do about the problems caused by these pharmacy-benefit managers? People can’t afford their prescriptions.”

My response was the following (off the top):

I suppose make decisions and support movements that are in line with best bearing witness to the kingdom. The church is not the state, and vice versa; but both are claimed by the domain of the Word, of Christ. The church’s role in the singular kingdom of God, which encompasses ALL of creation, is to bear witness; which often entails resistance etc. I’m unsure though how passing laws etc. constitutes a *Christian Nationalism* per se. That is not what most Christian Nationalist proponents of today (they are en masse on Twitter) are motivated by. It is indeed about spreading a Christendom that will pervade the entire globe; of the type that will usher in the consummate kingdom. I don’t know how to think about this abstractly either. I see some proposing a Christian Nationalism as if some type of sanitized theory of government that remains just as buffered as the secular does from thinking things from a genuinely theological imaginary. Which is ironic, since it is claiming to be “Christian.” I’m unsure what “Christian convictions” are in abstraction from the kingdom, what are those? And if there isn’t a distinction, then in what way would/could you differentiate your view of a Christian Nationalist from the postmil reconstructionists I have in mind? It seems to me that your premise, in regard to Christian convictions (which I believe are real), without some sort of robust qualification, starts functioning, ironically, in the same way that the postmil theory does. In other words, what makes your inchoate theory of a “Christian” nationalism distinct from the theonomists version in function? If we are in the world, but not of it, then how does that bear upon the relationship of nationhood vis a vis ultimate and prior commitments as those are conditioned by being ambassadors of the kingdom? IOW, I don’t see a Christian + Nationalist as a possibility. I see Christians inhabiting nations, indeed, as emissaries from another country. But not one detached from this world, but precisely and concretely for it. But not from an abstract set of conditions in the world, but from the concrete conditions of the primacy of Christ as the telos and eschatos of all creation. I think our primary task as Christians in the now of the kingdom is to bear witness to the not yet; as we all (of creation) are in fact in the kingdom of the risen Christ. So, I see the world, indeed, as the kingdom of Christ, waiting its final victory when Christ will finally place the last enemy, death, under his feet. As Christians in His kingdom, then, we ought to be about bearing prophetic and martyrological witness to the inner ground and reality of all of creation; inclusive of the nations. How this informs the way the Christian operates within the parameters of whatever nation they find themself within, will take shape by asking the questions of what it means to be a *witness* (an ambassador). I don’t see those questions and answers being formed by someone’s status within this or that nation, per se; but by someone who recognizes that they are of the city whose maker is God. This does not evade the question of laws regarding mundanities such as civil law etc., but it frames it within a kingdom rather than an absolutely “nationalistic” frame.

I don’t think it is possible, of course, to have a politick without a theopolitical framework (in that sense the postmils are onto something). So, I reject this idea that there is some pure notion of nationhood that isn’t somehow absolutely entangled with the kingdom of Christ. To think those as if different spheres (Kuyper) make no sense to me. Clearly, I’m functioning from a universalistic logic; but one, again, that is kingdom/Christ conditioned rather than abstractly or untheologically framed. E.g., if you talk to a progressive Christian (typically democratic socialist) they would see pharmacological laws as profoundly grounded in the reality of kerygmatic and thus ecclesial witness bearing activity. Ironically, their respective theopolitical theory has a utopian end to it (really not much different than a theonomic postmil). But I’m somewhere in that mix as well, as far as seeing the theological framing of these matters. I don’t really understand what you mean by “commonsensical” or “practical.”

My responses are very rough draft-like inklings that need to be developed much further. But as far as a conversational response on the way, I think they reflect the heart of the matter for me. I need to finally sit down and write out my own theopolitical theory, in a way that has substantial development and thematic coherence through and through. But the above is what I opine for now, and what floats my boat for the moment. I am seemingly radically Reformed, even when it comes to my theopolitic; with leanings toward a qualified type of Anabaptism.

Abortion as the Logic of the Pagan’s Power

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When approaching a discussion on abortion, even in so-called conservative Christian circles, at least traditionally, you will often hear people arguing that abortion shouldn’t become a single-voter issue. In other words, these people like to trick themselves into thinking that who we vote for, based on their policies, is bigger than the doctrine and practice of abortion. These people like to lull themselves into the idea that they are more nuanced, that they have greater sophistication, that they understand the complexity of life better than those who would argue that, indeed, abortion, all by itself is worthy of reducing a political vote to that issue alone.

Catholic author, and theologian, Andrew Willard Jones in his book Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics points out just how insidious and pervasive the logic of abortion actually is. He points up how antiChrist, and how present this logic has been since the beginning, in every culture and society since the fall of humanity. His treatment puts the idea of abortion being just one issue among other considerations, when it comes to political appointments, so on and so forth, on ice. He writes:

Abortion is not, therefore, one issue among other issues. It is the most fundamental postmodern issue. As we saw earlier in this book, the gods of the ancient world demanded that their servants sacrifice their children to their power. This was the “abomination” that the Lord refused to Israel in the Old Testament and to which Israel was continuously tempted. In the Bible, this is not a random picture of evil meant merely to shock us. It is, rather, based on an anthropological insight: the willingness to kill your child and the consequent construction of a system of child murder is the only path to pure power, pure sovereignty. Pure power demands that keeping helpless people alive be a voluntary display of power, a whim of the strong; otherwise, if power is ever revealed to be for the weak, the social hierarchy is inverted, and the whole system is exposed for the lie that it is. This is why, as we saw earlier in this book, nearly all pagan societies condone the killing of babies. This is how human power can speak order into chaos without opening itself to what is beyond it, to the transcendent. Nowhere, the, is the West’s final slide into post-Christian paganism clearer than in the abortion regime, which kills around sixty million children every year, roughly 20 percent of all babies. As the pope wrote: “Where God is denied and people live as though he did not exist, or his commandments are not taken into account, the dignity of the human person and the inviolability of human life also end up being rejected or compromised.”[1]

Abortion is the ultimate stand of the pagan kingdom, the kingdom of darkness. As Jones rightly develops, believing that it is you, and you alone who holds the power of life and death, the life and death of the most vulnerable in your hands, provides someone with a sense of power that in fact God alone possesses. To contradict this power, as the Gospel does, is to contradict the very being, the very esse of the homo incurvatus in se (human incurved upon itself). This is where the den of darkness and demons have pitched their tents, and is why when challenged it would seem as if the hornets’ nest of kingdom done has been poked.

At least for the Christian, the Christian whose life is conditioned by the reality of the Gospel, abortion is the single issue of all time that will motivate them, like nothing else, to fight with all the spiritual weaponry at their disposal. Abortion is antiChrist precisely because it represents the exact opposite of the Kingdom of the Son of His love which is defined by the least of these; by the most vulnerable among us; by the children, particularly children yet in their mother’s wombs. And the Christian, as Jones understands, recognizes that there is, indeed, a logic that underwrites the impietas (unholy doctrine) of abortion. The logic itself funds the culture, or as Isaiah identifies it, the covenant with death, that the profane culture has decidedly made by virtue of their fallen antiChrist natures. The only response to this logic comes from the logic of the Kingdom of Christ, it is a logic that elevates the weak of society, while at the same time putting down the strong; that is, by what counts as such things in the broader society’s purview.

Abortion is not a single-voter issue when it comes to political activity. It is the issue for precisely the reasons that Jones helpfully identifies for us. Made God have mercy on us all if in fact we don’t in some way bear witness to the fact that God is God, and we are not. And may this activism, this proclamationism result in bringing life to the world rather than death; for as Christians we have chosen life, or we are no Christians at all.

[1] Andrew Willard Jones, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2021), 336-37.

What Hath Christology to do with Politics and the State?

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What is the relationship between politics and Christian theology, is there any? Understandably, many Christians want to simply shy away, and have nothing to do with the political order in the world. But the fact of being human entails that we are “political animals,” that we are necessarily social beings, and as such, we cannot escape the reality of being political in some way. Indeed, the kerygma, the Gospel reality Hisself, which of course is God become flesh in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, is the greatest political act of all time. This was not absent from the early Christian experience, indeed, as it was just burgeoning, wrestling over the implications of just who Jesus was had staggering political implications (one way or the other) for the subsequent trajectory of the Church’s reality, vis-à-vis the state, in the following centuries right into the present. Many Christians don’t recognize just how deeply entrenched they are as an “ecclesiopolitical” people, and thus, as a consequence, they shirk back at their responsibilities of being responsible “political animals,” and ambassadors for Christ, in intentional and intelligent ways.

Andrew Willard Jones offers a really nice taxonomy of how the various Christological theories of the early Church, as those developed in the midst of a Constantinian Roman empire, implicated the political theory and actions of the state. These same realities continue to implicate our political climate today. The difference, of course, is that we live in such a secularized state of mind, that it becomes difficult to parse these things out, unless one has eyes to see and ears to hear. The following comes just on the heels of Jones’ sharing the text of the Chalcedonian creed (circa 451 ad).

Here, finally, was a definitive statement on who Christ was, on what really happened at the Incarnation. It had taken over four hundred and fifty years and the concerted efforts of Christianity’s greatest minds to come to this definition. That is how difficult the problem was. The problem was not merely speculative, however. As we have seen, it bore directly on the social order of the now-Christian empire. The conversion of the empire away from paganism in both doctrine and “political” form was a part of the process of coming to understand the fully meaning of the Incarnation. The rejection of Arianism was the rejection of the superiority of the temporal and material. The rejection of Nestorianism was the rejection of the idea that the temporal and spiritual were entirely separate, operating in independent realms. The rejection of Monophysitism was the refusal of the possibility of the spiritual entirely absorbing the temporal into itself. Sorting out Trinitarian and Incarnational orthodoxy was, at the same time, the sorting out of the relationship between what would eventually become known as the temporal and spiritual powers, the powers of the laity and of the priesthood, within a united Church that was a polity. Political theology was integral to fundamental dogmatic theology.[1]

Without getting into the nitty of the Christological theories, which Jones has done prior, what this passage should alert the reader to is just how integral Christology and a Theology Proper were to the development of the Latin and Greek political states. These are the same bases upon which our state is built, indeed the entirety of the Western world. It’s just that we have immanentized the eternal Logos ensarkos (the eternal Word enfleshed) into our own humanity. Following the antique taxonomy, as Jones has laid it out, the state now has fallen prey, once again, to the Arian heresy, wherein the leaders become the gap-fillers between heaven and earth. No longer is the Son of Man elevated as the King of kings, but the Son of “they” has displaced Him with Arian and Bab-elic vigor, elevating their state-being as the Being of all being, as the Godhumanity for all humanity. It is important that we begin to retexture our thinking in these “Christian” ways, such that we come to have a ‘social imaginary,’ once again, that allows us to see things in light of the God’s Light for the world in Jesus Christ. We need to ‘reenchant’ the world, such that we see God of God in Christ as Lord, and ourselves as His emissaries in the midst of a broken state that attempts to see itself as God’s highest creature; to the point that they are the bridge between God and humanity.

What does it mean to be a responsible and intelligent political animal in the 21st century coram Deo (before God)? It means to understand where we are situated in the Kingdom of God, in the heavenly places, and recognize that we stand as ambassadors for Christ, as witnesses, as prophets, through the proclamation of the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; that Jesus is Lord of lords, and the lords aren’t. Even so, with this realization, we understand that ultimately our witness will end up as the ancient witness of the first Christians, as a witness of the martyrs’ blood. Many of us may never experience a martyr’s death for the sake of Christ, but we can live in such a way, in the state, that under different political circumstances (from now) would warrant such a witness sealed in the shedding of our own blood in echo of our King’s shedding for us. But the matter is a matter of living, and how we do that in this world.

The political state, as Jones helpfully signals for us, is a state rooted in the implications of the Incarnation of God, in a Theology Proper that implicates theories of power and authority. Christians need to learn to recognize this, and think in these terms. This will allow them to better understand their place vis-à-vis the “secular” state. It will allow them to see that ultimately there really is nothing secular at all, and that we are here to bear witness to that ultimate fact of life.

[1] Andrew Willard Jones, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2021), 79-80.

A Response to Tim Keller’s ‘Third Way of Winsomeness’ and James Wood’s Critique

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My friend, James Wood, wrote what became a controversial essay for First Things (of which he serves as an editor) entitled: How I Evolved on Tim Keller. As was predictable Twitter took up the baton of James’ essay, and ran in equal and opposing takes. My summary of James’ essay is this, in nuce: Tim Keller has attempted to offer a ‘third way’ to an engagement with the culture writ large. His third way operates in such a way that ‘winsomeness’ or ‘being extra nice’ to the culture will eventually draw the culture into the way of the Church, the ‘third way.’ This way might have worked a decade ago, to an extent, but given the shifts in the culture, particularly as so-called post-modern ideation took hold, or what we might call a ‘normative relativism,’ being winsome no longer works. The culture, instead of being open to the ‘nice people’ is now wholly ‘negative’ towards the third way, as such winsomeness no longer serves as the best way to engage with the culture. Indeed, as I read Wood, winsomeness for Keller really has become a symbol for capitulation to the mainstream winds of the culture; indeed, while this critique could be pinpointed on Keller, it is really one, more broadly focused on the whole of BigEva (‘Big Evangelicalism’). Insofar as I have understood James’ thesis I can only say, amen.

Conversely, while I stand in fellowship with Wood’s critique, in regard to a Kellerian engagement with the culture, I think my alternative approach is at an impasse with James’ own more ‘De Lubacian’ approach, which still maintains some sense of a given ‘natural order’ inherent to the world, even while given to it by the grace of God. I wrote the following as a thread on Twitter and Facebook, as an expression, off the top, of how I see the ‘third way,’ and the alternative to that as understood through a radically Christologically construed lens:

There is no “third way,” such a way always already presupposes the “binary,” and thus becomes predicated by it. In other words, to say that the Christian way in the world, vis-à-vis politics etc., ought to represent a third way (per Keller) presupposes that there is a “natural order” suffused by an abstract notion of common grace that purportedly funds the entirety of the created order. But this simply is not the Christian case. The created order is sustained by and for the living Word who is the Christ. The order is always already contingent upon that Word. As such its life is one of ec-static existence, one that is always already given to it, afresh anew, by the breath of the Holy Spirit, as He speaks God’s Word to us from moment to moment. It is this “hovering Word,” this in-breaking invasive Word whereby the Christian lives their respective lives from. There is nothing stable in this world order, except the Word for whom it was created. So, the Christian looks to and bears witness to Jesus Christ and His disruptive Word of Grace. A Word that contradicts the “common order,” with the otherworldly order of Kingdom come and coming. The common Grace of this world, is God’s disruptive Grace for the world as given in His own enfleshment in the Son. Thus, the Christian doesn’t operate from a “third way,” the Christian operates from the ONLY WAY, Jesus Christ.

I don’t think Wood’s and I conclude at disparate places, per se, but we arrive at the destination differently. Either way, Keller’s third way ends up looking thisworldly in a very abstract sense. In other words, his purported winsomeness ends up being a capitulation to the winds of the progressive culture rather than a witness that contradicts it. Is the culture good, inherently so? No, the cross says so. Is there a way to be in the world that stands back and looks critically at the ways of the world, and says: ‘there is a better way, a third way, and I am here to tell you about it.’ No, the resurrection says so. The reality is that the Christian Way is not a thing, or a mode, it is not a posture we have possession over. Thus, the Christian Way ends up being something that the Christian waits upon, and bears witness to as the Way comes afresh anew into the life of the Christian as the Christian bears witness to their lived reality, to their Christian existence for them in Jesus Christ. When the Christian lives in and from this Way it ends up being a way that is not informed as a third way, as an alternative to the other ways of the world, but the Only Way as the Lord of lords imposes Himself upon our ways, and thus the world’s way. In other words, rather than living from a ‘holy-huddle’ (third wayism), from a static worldview known as the Christian third way, the Christian lives under the Way of God for the world that not only contradicts the ways of the world, but the ways of the Church, insofar that the Church ends up looking more like the culture it inhabits (by way of values, morality so on and so forth) rather than the culture of heaven whence it receives its life as gift moment-by-moment from Jesus Christ. The third way, as I read it, forecloses on the Way of God for the world in Jesus Christ in such a way that it leaves its proponents in the same lurch it is supposedly attempting to redeem. In other words, ironically, the third way ends up collapsing the Kingdom into its own perception of what that looks like, and in so doing its way ends up looking like the cultures of this world rather than the culture of the King. And this, once again, because the third way ends up really being a worldview constructed from the supposition that the world has an inherently natural order to it, one funded by the neo-Calvinist, or Dutch Reformed notion of ‘common grace.’ But this isn’t the way, for as David Fergusson has written: “the world was made so that Christ might be born.”

David Bentely Hart’s Orange Goblin and the American Heretics: Is There Salvation?

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Is there salvation for the orangeman and his followers, the American heretics? According to David Bentely Hart there is not, he writes:

For instance, if impoverished and terrified refugees arrive by the thousands at our southern borders, bearing their children with them, driven from their homes in El Salvador and Guatemala and Honduras by monstrous violence and hopeless poverty, much of it the long-unfolding consequence of our own barbaric policies in Central America, and our foul, degenerate, vicious, contemptible, worthless, brutishly stupid sociopath and dropsical orange goblin of a president and the little horde of oleaginous fascists who slithered out of the spiritual sewer by his side react by imprisoning the adult asylum seekers and abducting and caging their children, subjecting all of them to the most abominable psychological torture, degradation, and despair in order to terrify other refugees who might also come seeking shelter here, we need no doubt for a moment that these monsters have thereby truly revealed themselves as damnable and, in fact, already damned. And if a good number of our fellow citizens are aware of these atrocities and continue to lend their support to the fiends who have committed them, we can say with perfect certitude that those citizens have thereby revealed themselves to be—even if they are so deluded and blasphemous as to call themselves Christians—children of the devil, who have chosen the side of the goats rather than the sheep. Of this, Christ has given us firm and delightful assurances.[1]

The irony of the self-proclaimed democractic socialist’s take is too hard to ignore. In his usual pugilistic antics Hart cannot contain himself. While this book was just released, he clearly penned it while Trump was still in office. The irony is that, indeed, Hart’s political antidote to the “fascists” is socialism. The quirk of Hart’s indolence is his inability to take enough self-assessment to recognize that, just maybe, the very atrocities he is noticing have taken shape not just under the supposed orangeman’s reign, but under the combine of all American presidents and leaderships. Indeed, for all of Hart’s ostensible critical intellectual range he often, and easily, falls prey to the indulgences of the flesh when it comes to his own self-political dainties. The most glaring irony of the whole is that Hart is an ardent [Christian] universalist, so even the orangeman and his heretics will eventually be cozied up to Hart’s castle in the heavenly kingdom.

I am no defender of Trump. I think Trump might well be all those things that Hart identifies, except for the fact that Hart seems to get the facts on the ground wrong in regard to the treatment of the massa of humanity fleeing to the land of opportunity. These things are a complex, in regard to the politics. I dare not mention how things are on the ground currently at the border, and under whose watchful eye. But to the point: I simply wanted to note how a theologian of some renown can fall prey to the indulgences of his own sense of “godness,” in regard to the anathematization, damnation of a whole swath of varied (from him) political others. I suppose he is only illustrating the major premise of his book, You Are Gods (unless you’re an orange heretic).

[1] David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature And Supernature (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2022), 45-6.

Don’t Be a Normie “30s and 40s” German Thinker: There is No Agendaless Thinking

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The following comes from a William Shirer, a war correspondent, and someone who lived in Europe (Germany) during the events leading up to Nazi Germany, and during the actualization of those events under the Third Reich. Indeed, he has written an award-winning book, among others, entitled The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The reason I want to share his insight is because it is apropos to the current global moment vis a vis COVID, and its political response. I recognize that I have many readers here at the blog, for which I’m grateful; some in fact are MDs. In my last post one of these MDs encouraged me to read Biologos etc. as if a neutral source of information regarding COVID and its entailments. The reality, as Kant knew so well, is that there is no such thing as an agendaless Switzerlandish mode of being in this world. We all are bounded by preunderstandings that have come to us tacitly through our own various formations as human beings in a very active world. As a result, we must engage in the process of what has been called distanciation, as much as possible. This is the process of gaining critical distance from our own presuppositions and preunderstandings about reality, insofar as that is possible, and thus come to have the critical valence necessary to be discerning. Even then, we are still pressed about by various external stimuli and pressures that define our subjectivities. But this does not need to result in a normative relativism of the sort that we are unable to critically discern truth from falsity, insofar as things have discernable correspondence to extramental or mind-independent realities that are true with or without are assent. I mention all of this, leading into this passage from Shirer, because my hope is that by reading what he has to say the critical person will come to have a capacity to see how history just might repeat itself; insofar that peoples’ hearts, unchecked, don’t change. Here Shirer writes about how it was that an otherwise highly educated German population became subject to a psychosis that led them to believe that whatever the state fed them was right, and that all other dissent was incredulous:

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but … one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were. – William Shirer (in Adolph Hitler’s Germany)

I am presenting this again because I want to be clear about my approach to things in this current world moment. I believe the sort of delusion that came over Germany in the 30s and 40s has once again swept across the world. To simply appeal to untethered asserted narratives without any public debate is neither Christian nor safe. The Christian mind has brought about much of what we consider to be the Enlightened world, for better or worse. But, as with anything, the spoils gotten can quickly become spoiled gain that only brings rot to the soul. That’s largely what I see taking place currently in the world, and even among professing Christians. They have lost the plot, and as such have joined in with the state narrative that whatever our Big Brother says simply is the truth. But this is not the way the truth works, not for the Christian. We discern light from dark, and have the capacity to do that in Christ by the Spirit. But there must be a humility to accept that we might be considered foolish, not part of the mainstream institutional thinking, if we are going to actually come to have the capacity to think critically about things.

I recognize that many of you don’t read me for my political views. But it is precisely because of my theological commitments, indeed, my radical commitments that I am against any form of natural theology as I see it. When the American church (and the Western church in general) comes to conflate the state’s pronouncements with the Gospel truth, it is at this point that I become highly suspicious. My suspicion motivates me to seek out, often, dissenting voices, voices that are experts in their fields; but voices that are dissenting (and thus being smeared by the state) from the mainstream political narratives afoot. I consider churches participant in forwarding state narratives to be antiChrist. I consider failure by Christians to discern this to be telling about their intellectual if not spiritual commitments.

I will no longer have comments open on anything political I might post forthcoming. My straight theology posts will always have comments open, but honestly, I am not interested in dialoguing here at the blog about political matters (which COVID most definitely is, it also has a highly religious and ethical component tied into it of course!). My admonition: don’t be the type of person Shirer writes about; that isn’t limited to the 30s and 40s, it is about the human condition in general.

PS. The primary reason I will have comments on such posts closed is to protect me, and potentially you. I get too triggered and very quickly on these issues, and I’m afraid of what I might say in the heat of the moments.

The Therapeutic Christian: Against Monsters, Demons, and Dark Souls

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The Prophet, Jeremiah famously wrote the following: “’The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? (Jer. 17:9)” Modern Christians will read things like this, give it a head-nod, and not think much about it in concrete personal ways. The Apostle Paul wrote the following:

So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. (Eph. 4:17-19)

Both Jeremiah and Paul are affirming what the cross of Jesus Christ reveals in depth; that is, that humanity’s fallen incurved heart is depraved beyond all imagination; depraved so deeply that it took the eternal God to become human in Jesus Christ to put it to death, for each person, personally. And yet, for some reason most modern [even “conservative”] Christians don’t really believe this, not in practice. In the main, modern Christians operate like what Jesus did only has purchase for their place in heaven, something like ‘fire-insurance.’ In other words, we have this pervasive ‘moralistic-therapeutic-deism’ run-amok among most of the evangelical churches, operating as if the massa of humanity is mostly good. They operate as if world-leaders, entertainers, and most people in general have good intentions at heart. But this fatly contradicts the reality of the cruciformed Gospel. The cross says that people aren’t inherently good, but instead, inherently evil. Not just in theory, but concretely. And yet Christians, in the main, have so-called ‘social-imaginaries’ that ‘buffer’ them from actually believing what the Gospel presupposes: ie that human beings in their unchecked fallen hearts are deleteriously evil all the way down. People in general, and Christians in particular, don’t want to imagine that people really are all that bad, and so along with the world, they attribute evil actions of people to psychiatric problems; or maybe they’ll allow for the idea that someone’s ‘family-of-origin’ (again more psych categorization), ie nurture not nature, has led a person to do evil things.

Why do so many modern Christians act as if the reality of the Gospel, and its full attestation in the total canon of Scripture, really is just an artifact of history? Why do they operate as if the world of demons, monsters, and dark souls is a primitive relic of a past superstition that has now been transcended by the turn-to-the-modern? Why do Christians, even if they intellectually know about the impact of Enlightenment categories on the Christian imagination, still operate as if the “primitive” datum of Holy Scripture has been transcended by human reason, and the dawn of the scientific revolution? Charles Taylor provides insight into how the Christian mind has come to function in the 21st century, as if in opposition to the Gospel it claims to be submissive to:

What made Christianity particularly repulsive to the Enlightenment mind was the whole juridical-penal way in which the doctrine of original sin and the atonement were cast during the high middle ages and the Reformation. Our distance from perfection was glossed as just punishment for earlier sin; and our salvation through Christ as his offering satisfaction for this fault, paying the fine, as it were.

There were some repugnant aspects of this just in itself. But it became connected to two doctrines which were potentially deeply offensive. The first was the belief that only a few are saved. The second was the doctrine of predestination, which seemed to be generated inevitably from a belief in divine omnipotence in the context of the juridical-penal model.

Now in fact, opinion begins to move against these doctrines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, there is the “decline of hell”, and the rise of universalism; on the other, there is growing revulsion at predestined damnation, even within Calvinistic societies. Of course, these developments were surely not independent of the one I was tracing above, viz., the growth of confidence in the human power to do good. But they add an extra level of motivation, a revulsion at the orthodox formulations, which must either lead to a revised faith, or in certain cases, to a sharp break with it.

Again, as confidence in human powers grows, and in particular, in the powers of reason, the claims of Churches to authority on behalf of a faith which partly consists of mysteries, becomes harder and harder to accept. This is another way in which a modern rationalism based on science can argue that the rise of science refutes religion.

But this still doesn’t capture fully the negative movement, the hostility to Christianity which spread among elites at this time. It wasn’t just the particular doctrines of the juridical-penal model, nor the rationalist rejection of mystery.

We saw that much of the historical practice of Christianity ran afoul of the new ethic of purely immanent human good: . . .1

For those who have studied the history of ideas this isn’t new information. But then I scratch my head: because even many people who know the history of ideas still operate as if modern humans have ‘come of age’ and transcended our primitive pre-critical past. We’re more comfortable with attributing what used to be considered demon-possession to psychiatric problems. Once the world of actual sin, evil, and the devil are smudged away as if a footnote of intellectual history, the modern Christian, along with their pagan counterparts, give way to the seduction of the materialistic and thus therapeutic world. As modern Christians we feel free to reduce everything to a physicalist explanation, leaving the ‘world’ of the Bible in the dustbin of history.

As a result, many modern Christians, cannot, will not imagine that our dear leaders just might have evil intentions inspiring what they do. After all, post-Enlightenment, any respectable person knows that humanity has the generative power within itself to be either good or bad; and given Romantic categories, clearly most people are inherently good, or so the imagination goes. This is the belief that seems to pervade our species currently. It surely has realized universalistic premises behind it; ie the idea that Christ has so objectively turned humanity back to God, that humanity indeed, and in general, operates with God-like attributes. This seems to be the ethos that currently dominates the mainstream evangelical-mind. It is an ethos that looks nothing like the biblical revelation as that comes in the Theanthropos, the Godman, Jesus Christ.

People, by definition, are drunk on their own self-driven-wanderlust. That’s what the kerygmatic reality demonstrates; that’s what the stauro-logic (cross-logic) demands. And yet modern Christians carry-on on their merry way as if most people really are good when it comes right down to it. But that thinking doesn’t come from the Gospel, it comes from the elevation of human reason to the point that it comes to think itself smarter and wiser than God. The Enlightenment only took humanity full circle, with some technological and scientific advancement, such that humanity believes itself to be beyond the mythos of Holy Writ. I’m left wondering if when Jesus comes again, and He surely will, if He really will find faith on earth; He wondered the same. I’m rather skeptical about that at this point.

 

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2007), 262-63 kindle.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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