When engaging the theologians, it is an important exercise to broaden out the frame, every now and then, in order to get a greater, even critical understanding of just who we might be engaging with. This holds true for any of the theologians, including Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance (the two modern theologians who, of course, have had the greatest purchase in my life over the last, almost, two decades). In an effort to expand the scope on the way we might respectively approach Barth and Torrance, I wanted to offer some words from ecclesial intellectual historian, the late, Steven Ozment. In the following, Ozment is describing the way that 20th century, Étienne Henri Gilson, a French historian of philosophy and intellectual history, understood the impact that medieval theologian, Duns Scotus, and philosopher, William of Ockham, ostensibly had on what Gilson took to be the disruption of the pinnacle of all medieval theological acumen in the blessed work of the Angelic doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas.
After the Parisian condemnations, Gilson argued further, the work of the Franciscans Duns Scotus (ca. 1265–1308) and William of Ockham (ca. 1285–1347) further undermined the Thomist synthesis. Scotus was seen to narrow the range of scholastic speculation by finding far fewer theological truths philosophically arguable than had Aquinas and other thirteenth-century theologians. The hallmark of Scotist theology was its appreciation of God’s distance and otherness. The vast differences between God and man moved Scotus far more than areas where reason and revelation overlapped and seemed to suggest a unity of things human and divine. Will, not intellect, became the central theological category in Scotist theology; what God and man did was more basic than what they were in themselves. The primary object of faith ceased to be God as pure being (actus purus) and became God as he revealed himself to man in Scripture. And the latter required trusting acceptance from man, not rational understanding.
Gilson found in Ockham the extreme conclusion of Scotist voluntarism and covenant theology: the confinement of theology to the sphere of faith and revelation and the denial of any rationally convincing knowledge of God. “Ockham is perfectly safe in what he believes; only he does not know what he believes, nor does he need to know it.” Here, for Gilson, the divorce between reason and revelation became final and the golden age of scholasticism effectively came to an end. Faith that was content simply to believe had supplanted faith that sought full understanding.
Other scholars, sharing Gilson’s perspective, believe a natural alliance existed between Ockhamist philosophy, which denied direct rational knowledge of God, and Neoplatonic mysticism, popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which sought God in transrational and even arational experience. They also believe that it was not coincidental that the leader of the Protestant Reformation was a careful student of both Ockham and the German mystics.[1]
At a purely superficial level, does the reader see how what Barth and Torrance are doing sound a lot like the characteristics present in the thought of both Scotus and Ockham, respectively? Do you see how theologians like Barth and Torrance might be read as modern-day adherents of what also became known as Nominalism (i.e., what we see, loosely, in the thought-life of both Scotus and Ockham, respectively)? Indeed, some would attempt to argue that Immanuel Kant himself, and the dualism he proposed, was very much so akin to the nominalism developed by someone like Ockham. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of all of that, let it simply be noted that while someone like Barth was indeed conditioned by the impact of Kant on the modern Germanic ideational landscape, what Barth was doing, by way of the analogy of the incarnation (and thus faith), was to flip any sort of Kantian or Nominalistic dualism on its head by bringing the heavenlies into the earthlies as that obtained and concretized in the incarnate Son of God, the Man from Nazareth, the Theanthropos, Jesus Christ.
While the details of these matters go deeper than we will be able to penetrate herein (because of space and attention-span constraints), I think it is important to recognize that what we get, say, in the theologies of people like Barth and Torrance, have historical antecedents that reach much deeper into the well of historical development than many might imagine. Indeed, those who have imagined, in deeper more informed ways, would see something like what we are doing with Athanasian Reformed (Evangelical Calvinist) theology, as in contest with the Aristotelian/Thomism they believe entails the most orthodox way to be orthodox. It is possible to see, as we read Ozment’s distillation of Gilson’s critique, how the ole’ Thomist axiom of grace perfecting nature might become disjointed, indeed, destroyed if we were to follow the via moderna of the Scotuses, Ockhams, Barths, Torrances et al. of the world. They are afraid that if we follow the ‘modern way’ the whole Christian ground of knowing God by way of natural reason will be lost to the winds of the disenchanted moderns; i.e., those who don’t see a necessitarian link between God’s being, as the first cause, and the effects caused by God in the created order. As such, for the opponents of the perceived ‘modern way’, what is at stake is the loss of all theological order; is the loss of all ecclesiastical authority (even if presaged by a ‘paper pope’ instead of a ‘papal’ one). And yet theologians like Barth and Torrance, instead of grounding all of known reality in the ostensible capaciousness of the purely created order, ground such capaciousness in the in-breaking of God’s life for the world in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ (so within the “logic of grace” as TFT would identify that).
Things to ponder. I won’t attempt to tie this off here. I simply wanted to note how there is more than meets the eye when we are engaging with the theologians; even when those theologians are Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance.
[1] Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 15.
