The Divine Unity: Katherine Sonderegger's Systematic Theology

The first volume of Katherine Sonderegger’s new Systematic Theology is nearing release, and the curious can sample the preface and first chapter of the book on Fortress’ website. 

It looks like an unmissable volume—if only because she resolutely refuses to begin with Christology or the doctrine of the Trinity. “This theology is neither Christomorphic nor Christocentric” (p. xvii). 

In her preface, Sonderegger observes that “Modern Christian theology has shown an allergy to questions about Deity—what God is” (p. xi). She sets out in this volume to explore the perfections of God through the foundational perfection: divine oneness—“oneness governs the Divine Perfections: all in the doctrine of God must serve, set forth, and conform to the transcendent Unity of God” (p. xiv). 

While some modern theologians have depicted the renewed emphasis on the doctrine of the Trinity as the victory of scripture over philosophy, Sonderegger points to the priority of divine oneness in scripture. There is nothing more scriptural, she observes, than monotheism. This marks a departure from the modern trend of beginning with the Trinity. The beloved doctrine of the modern West will have to wait until volume 2.

The sample from the first chapter is rich and interesting. Sonderegger enters into extended engagement with Jenson as a prime example of a doctrine of God that “conjoins divine identity, narrative, Trinity, philo-Judaism, and anti-Hellenism” (p. 7). Jenson’s theology is worth examining, she argues, because Jenson insists that “its defiant starting point in the doctrine of the Trinity moves it not away [from], … but closer to the law, observance, and piety of rabbinic Judaism” (p. 7). However, she finds the sidelining of oneness in his treatment dissatisfying. Against Jenson and his comrades Sonderegger argues that the foundational form of the Old Testament is not “narrative” or “story”, but Torah (p. 11). Israel’s scripture teaches divine oneness as a metaphysical commitment.

Whereas Barth, Jenson, and others have suggested that a purely monadic God would be an idol, Sonderegger argues that according to scripture a visible God would be more idolatrous. God’s invisibility is what sets the true God apart from idols (pp. 17-21). How she will reconcile this with christology and the iconoclast controversy remains to be seen.

While it is questionable to offer a critique based on a short sample—a bit like reviewing a movie after having watched only the trailer—a question did keep coming to mind. Sonderegger has decided to avoid treating God as triune in this volume in order to redress the oversight of the unity of God in modern theology. However, I am not quite convinced that the unity of God has been overlooked in the modern renewal of the doctrine of the Trinity. It seems to me that for Jenson (and perhaps for Barth and others), the unity of the divine being is a presupposition that needs to be converted by an encounter with divine revelation. That certain theologians prefer to begin with the doctrine of the Trinity does not necessarily mean, as Sonderegger argues, “that the Oneness of God comes under heavy threat” (p. 9). However, she is right that the current theological climate makes it difficult to know what we can/should say about the oneness of God.

Sonderegger’s prose is alive with scriptural allusions and spiritual insights. Most compelling is her reflection on the spiritual and theological importance of God’s humility: “So humble is this God that He will lay Himself down in our knowledge, making our paths straight, illumining our darkness, raising up the creature in His own ineffable Light… This is the exceeding Goodness of our God, His Lowliness, that He will come to us, and make His dwelling there” (p. xx).

I look forward to reading the full volume. It seems to me that her attentiveness to scripture and to spiritual practices is to be celebrated and emulated. If doing so problematises received models or methods for theology, so be it.

Audio: Bruce McCormack's lectures on election

Thanks to Jason for noting that Bruce McCormack's recent Kantzer Lectures are now available in audio:

The God Who Graciously Elects: 2011 Kantzer Lectures

1. Is the Reformation Over? Reflections on the Place of the Doctrine of God in Evangelical Theology Today

2. From the One God to the Trinity: The Creation of the Orthodox Understanding of God

3. The Great Reversal: From the Economy of God to the Trinity in Modern Theology

4. The God Who Reveals Himself: The Mystery of the Trinity in the New Testament

5. Which Christology?  Refining the Economic Basis of the Christian Doctrine of God

6. The Processions Contain the Missions: Reconstructing the Doctrine of an Immanent Trinity

7. The Being of God as Gift and Grace: On Freedom and Necessity, Aseity and the Divine 'Attributes'

Ten propositions on the God hypothesis

by Kim Fabricius

1. The story, possibly apocryphal, is both famous and paradigmatic. Summoned by Napoleon to give an account of his recently published Mécanique Céleste, the mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) was asked by the emperor why, unlike Isaac Newton, he had not mentioned God in his treatise on the gravitational forces of the solar system. “Sire,” replied Laplace, unmoved by Newton’s divine designer, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

2. Apparently, however, many contemporary scientists and philosophers do. After a century or more, the “God hypothesis” is making a comeback – and not just by the champions of ID – as an apologetic response to the “God delusion” of Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists. But what if the God hypothesis is itself a delusion? I think that it is. Picturing them as dark, frozen stars, Laplace was one of the first physicists to postulate the existence of black holes. A collapse into intellectual oblivion would be a fitting destiny for the God hypothesis.

3. Of course proponents of the God hypothesis do not offer it as a demonstration or proof of the existence of God. However, rejecting not only the conflict model (Dawkins) but also the neutrality model (Gould) of the relationship between science and religion, they argue that the empirical evidence of both physics and biology actually points to the existence of God, and therefore that in the “war of the worldviews” (Francis Collins), theism is more rational than naturalism.

4. I share with these thinkers their rejection of both the conflict model (based, pathologically, on a metaphysical prejudice) and the neutrality model (based, epistemologically, on the fact/value dichotomy). I also applaud some of the philosophical and historical points they make: e.g., that science no less than religion presumes a fiduciary framework, and that belief in a rational God who creates an orderly universe looks to be a foundation stone in the edifice of modern science. But after the curtain falls, and before they can take their bows, I head towards to exit.

5. To put it simply: the God hypothesis cannot be the God hypothesis – at least if this God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ. In fact, apart from the gloating of the godly laity at the scientific episcopate beating up Dawkins in his own cathedral, the thing I find most objectionable in “modern attempts to relate the observed cosmos to traditional religion,” as Professor Roger Lambert puts it to the precocious evangelical and computer scientist Dale Kohler in John Updike’s Roger’s Version, is “the sheer, sickening extravagance of it.” The God hypothesis – it is “churning the void in the hope of making butter.”

6. A hypothesis is an explanation – but God is not an explanation. Nicholas Lash proposes a declension narrative: “During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the word ‘God’ came to be used, for the first time, to name the ultimate explanation of the world. And, when it was in due time realized that the system of the world was such as not to require any such single, overarching, independent explanatory principle, the word ‘god’ was dispensed with, and modern atheism was born.” Ironic, or what? Christianity is, in the title of an early book by D. Z. Phillips, Religion without Explanation (1976).

7. A hypothesis is either probable or improbable – but the existence of God is neither probable nor improbable; indeed the non-existence of God is inconceivable. A deity who might not exist is contingent and therefore not worth the name of Yahweh (Exodus 3:14). Kierkegaard drives the point home: “God does not exist, he is eternal.” That is the truth behind the unfortunately named ontological argument (Anselm’s “proof” is, in fact, a prayer). At least it is for believers, who, if they engage atheists on the field of probabilities, are acting in bad faith, i.e., in either a fraudulent or downright idolatrous manner. The Creed does not begin “On balance, we believe …”

8. Or again, a hypothesis is provisional: it always concludes with the words “Until Further Notice”. A hypothesis issues from the facts as they are known. But quite apart from the fact that God is not a fact, new facts may always be discovered that suggest that a hypothesis is mistaken, and has to be discarded or reframed. Can we have faith in a god the evidence for whom we must ever be checking and rechecking? There I am, perusing the science section in Waterstones, when suddenly I cry, “O shit!” and, faith shattered, run screaming from the shop. The tentative do not say, “Here I stand.”

9. In short, advocates of the God hypothesis mistake the nature of God and the grammar of faith. At best you get a designer god who is not the Creator, let alone the Trinity. And while the argument for a designer god is buoyant when it directs us to the wonder, beauty, and intricacy of the world, it sinks without trace before the inexplicable and intractable reality of evil. It is telling, revealing that John Lennox, the author of God’s Undertaker (2007), who while burying Dawkins builds the most persuasive case I know for the God hypothesis, is completely silent on the problem of theodicy. Come to think of it, I would direct those who sincerely seek God to suffering, not science; and finally to the cross, not the computer.

10. As for the grammar of faith, one can know God only in practice, not in theory, with commitment, not disinterestedly. One can only know God by confessing, praising, and loving God. Science can only stand at the bus stop, checking Paley’s watch (now digital), and telescopically peering at the corner which Godot never turns. R. S. Thomas, the Welsh poet of the Deus absconditus, who grappled with science and the philosophy of science – and jotted ratty comments in his copy of Paul Davies’ God and the New Physics (1983) – knew better:

    I have waited for him
    under the tree of science,
    and he has not come.

One can only wait for God under the tree of prayer: “Veni, Creator Spiritus!”

The distance between God and God

In one of my classes last week, we discussed this remarkable passage from Simone Weil:

“God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms.... Because no other could do it, he himself went the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion…. This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration.”

—Simone Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 123-24.

God does not magnify himself: on Thomas Schreiner and Jonathan Edwards

Michael Jensen mentions Thomas Schreiner’s recent New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ (Baker, 2008). Michael is right to be troubled by this interpretation of the New Testament: “Schreiner wants to argue that the anchoring theme of NT Theology is something like: God magnifying himself through Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit. That is, God’s concern for God’s own glory is the driving heartbeat of the NT witness and mission. God’s self-referencing self-regard is what perpetuates his plans and his interaction with his creatures.”

I had a similar complaint when I recently read a friend’s essay on Calvin’s doctrine of God: Calvin was not an Edwardsean! This whole business of “God magnifying himself” or of God redeeming the world “for the sake of God’s own glory” is really pretty perverse.

Personally, I’ve read Jonathan Edwards’ The End for Which God Created the World a number of times, and I think it’s an amazing achievement of speculative philosophical theology. (I haven’t read any John Piper, but I’ve heard that he popularises the same argument.) At one point in my life, I was persuaded by Edwards’ argument: its logic is so tight and so compelling; its vision of an always-self-glorifying God seemed so charged with religious awe and solemn Calvinist reverence. It was only as I was reading the Fourth Gospel one day that it occurred to me that Edwards had made one small mistake: he had forgotten to include “Jesus Christ” in his definition of God. And of course this one mistake invalidates the whole elaborate procedure: if a doctrine of God is wrong here, it’s wrong everywhere.

According to the Fourth Gospel, the divine “glory” is manifest in Christ’s cross. This presents a very different picture of what it means for God to “glorify himself”: God does not “magnify himself” (literally “make himself bigger”, from the Latin magnus); rather he humiliates himself and makes himself smaller. God’s glory travels a path of abasement and lowly self-giving. God’s glory, in other words, cannot be understood apart from God’s humanity – the eternal decision in which he becomes God-for-us in Jesus Christ.

An Edwarsean interpretation of the New Testament, then – in which God’s interactions with humanity always serve the higher aim of God’s self-magnification – can only be said to represent a stunning theological misreading of the New Testament witness. It’s one of those rare instances in which you wish a biblical scholar had read a little less theology.

Karl Barth and divine freedom

Following the recent exchange with Paul Molnar, Halden has posted a superb quote from Alan Lewis on Karl Barth’s understanding of divine freedom. This is a remarkably acute and perceptive account of Barth’s view – and it rightly draws attention to some of the internal tensions and inconsistencies that remain within the Church Dogmatics:

“God is free, not as one who could do otherwise, but as the one above all who can do no other. Self-bound to one sole way of being, God is committed, necessarily but thus freely, to the cognate course of action. God’s lordship in bowing to the contradiction of the godless cross and godforsaken grace does not reside, as Barth occasionally and illogically asserts, in a prior self-sufficiency and secure immutability, but – as he more often understood and later followers more emphatically underscored – in the uncoerced impulse to self-consistency: love’s determination not to be deflected from its purposes but to flourish and perfect itself through willing self-surrender. What judges us as burdensome imperative illuminates God as free but binding indicative: the truth – for our Creator and therefore for ourselves – that only one who gives up life discovers and fulfills it. On such a basis alone can we understand how the cross and grave truly reveal God’s inmost triune life.”

—Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 211-12.

(Oh, and speaking of Barth, this pastor in Britain is looking for someone to buy his complete set of Church Dogmatics.)

Bruce McCormack: Engaging the doctrine of God

Bruce L. McCormack, ed., Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 271 pp. (review copy courtesy of Baker Academic)

This new volume brings together the essays from the 2005 Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference. The quality and diversity of contributors are impressive: there are essays by biblical scholars (N. T. Wright, Pierre Berthoud, Don Carson), scholars of historical theology (Paul Helm, Oliver Crisp), Barthian dogmaticians (John Webster, Bruce McCormack), and leading British and European theologians (Henri Blocher, Stephen Williams, David Wright, Donald Macleod). All of them are engaged in thinking or re-thinking specific aspects of the doctrine of God’s being and attributes.

With such a range of contributors and topics, the book will have something for everyone. But the real centrepiece of the volume is Bruce McCormack’s masterful and wide-ranging essay on “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism” (pp. 185-242). At nearly 30,000 words, this is virtually a monograph in its own right – and the book is well worth its price-tag for this essay alone.

The essay is a stunning intervention in the North American debate over open theism. McCormack sees exactly what is at stake in the debate, but he refuses to allow the debate to be conducted along the usual lines. He acknowledges that open theists (Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, et al.) have identified a real problem in the classical theistic doctrine of God, but then he transposes this problematic into an entirely different register, insisting that what it is really needed is a properly christological approach to the doctrine of God.

The problem with open theism is that it is not nearly radical enough; it critiques certain features of the classical-theistic doctrine of God, but never risks a fundamental break with the metaphysical apparatus of classical theism. This is why open theists finally prove incapable of resolving the doctrinal problems which they themselves have (rightly) identified: in spite of all their criticisms of “classical theism,” they continue to play the same game and to abide by the same metaphysical rules.

In contrast, McCormack argues that Karl Barth had already identified the same basic problems, but that Barth produced a fundamental break with the whole metaphysical structure of the classical doctrine of God’s being and attributes. For McCormack, the crystallising moment at the core of Barth’s theological project is the revision of the doctrine of election. Here, Barth advances the thesis that God’s own primal decision “stands at the root of God’s being or ‘essence’” (p. 210). The event in which God chooses to be “God for us” is identical with the event in which God “gives himself his own being.” And this event of election is not located in any timeless eternity. God’s eternal decision coincides with the temporal event in which this decision reaches its goal. This coincidence – this event of utter singularity – is God’s being. Time, then, “is not alien to the innermost being of God” (p. 222). The time of Jesus Christ is the time of God’s decision – it is the primal time, the time of God’s eternal movement into history. There is no still-more-primal divine being which lurks behind this movement into history; God’s being is this movement, this effectual decision. In a nutshell (if I can put it rather crudely): it is because of the man Jesus that God is God.

McCormack’s reading of Barth, and his response to open theism, unfolds as a gripping and commanding piece of theological reflection. McCormack is not merely repeating Barth in all this; he probes Barth’s thought sensitively but relentlessly, thinking with Barth and engaging him in critical dispute. In McCormack’s view, there are internal inconsistencies within Barth’s work, and the task for contemporary dogmatics is to carry forward Barth’s own best insights in order to produce a radically revised and re-imagined theological ontology.

McCormack’s metaphysical proposal has, of course, met with considerable criticism in recent years (for example, here and here). Indeed, a curious feature of this book is the fact that the editor comes under fire even from one of his contributors! Paul Helm’s chapter on “Calvin and the Hiddenness of God” aims to critique Barth and McCormack from the standpoint of Calvin’s theology. But when Helm counters McCormack’s theological ontology with the argument that “the act of electing is the act of a someone; it cannot be an act of no one which, upon its occurrence, constitutes a someone” (p. 79) – an argument like this reminds us how deeply ingrained, how apparently self-evident, these metaphysical assumptions are.

In a debate about the relation between being and decision, it is of course merely question-begging to insist that a “being” necessarily pre-exists its own decision. But the fact that such metaphysical assumptions run so deep – strictly regulating what counts as reasonable and coherent in Christian talk about God – indicates the extraordinary importance and drastic implications of Bruce McCormack’s proposal. Even those who finally disagree with McCormack should not fail to see that his work represents one of the most searching, creative and doctrinally far-reaching projects in contemporary theology.

Metaphysics and the God of Israel: Neil MacDonald replies

Note: Last week I posted a critical review of Neil MacDonald’s new book, and I invited him to respond. So he has kindly written this detailed reply.

I.

I would like to thank you very much for your review of my Metaphysics and the God of Israel, and for the responses to the review and the book. Having now seen the stream of responses, I should say from the outset that I have absolutely no problem with the kind of criticism directed toward what I have written! It would be kind of hypocritical to write a book of this kind and not expect – indeed, not want – its fundamental hypotheses to be subjected to criticism Popperian-style. If the main claims of the book are deficient then we must come up with something better.

I would rather think in terms of defending my little book rather than defending myself. I don’t mind being criticized at all (my wife does it frequently), but when it comes to my little book I feel I must step in. So when I reached the point in your review where you speak of finding the book “a little disappointing and a little unconvincing,” I felt its honour should be defended. Interestingly, it was the very same matter that seemed to worry Professor Stephen Webb most in a recent review (so you are in good company).

You say that concepts in dogmatic theology ought to have “real explanatory power” (material explanation) rather than operate in the realm of “tautology.” I couldn’t agree more. So let us look again at what I say. Let me take up one of my central examples of divine self-determination at work: God determined himself to be the one who created all things; therefore he is the one who created all things; therefore, the (this) world was created by God. Is this a tautology? I don’t think it is. I don’t think this can be said to be a tautology or not to satisfy the criterion of material explanation.

There is a simple reason for this. The initial proposition involves a verb describing an action: (a) God determining himself, and (b) determining himself in a particular way, usually an action described by a uniquely identifying description. It certainly would have been something more akin to tautology had it not involved an action-descriptor. Suppose I had said “Jones is six feet tall; therefore he is over five feet nine inches tall” – or better: “God is the creator of the world; therefore, the world was created by God”; then we would be in the realm of mere logical consistency. That our language here is elevated to the level of verbs rather than adjectives makes a fundamental difference here.

I agree with your example – “All men are cabbages; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is a cabbage” – but I don’t think it is relevant. We know it is not true that all men are cabbages (because we know some that are not) – so none of us would wish seriously to discuss this argument, whether or not it is valid. On the other hand: if the premise of my book’s particular argument in Part I is true then the ensuing inferences, implications, and conclusions are I think interesting.

The point is this: if my argument is logically consistent then clearly divine self-determination would be an explanation of the world – if divine self-determination as regards satisfying the action descriptor “the one who created [verb: always look for the action!] the world” is true. And it seems to me it is worth considering whether it is true, because then it would be the explanation of, e.g., the world (but only if the argument is logically consistent of course!).

II.

Another way of putting the same point is: supposing that the very world in which I breathe, eat, sleep and so forth had come into existence by God determining himself to be its creator – what follows from this claim? Initial answer: I can say that the world in which I breathe, eat, sleep, etc, was created by God (Israel’s God). I can say it. And I can say it rationally and without any kind of timidity in the face of non-Christian intellectuals! (I can say more of course, and I will come to this). To paraphrase something Hans Frei said in a review of Eberhard Busch’s biography of Barth: a theologian is about imaginatively re-describing the biblical world in such a way that it comes to be recognized or at least taken seriously as the very same world in which we live.

As I said, Stephen Webb’s review makes a similar criticism when speaking of the argument: God determined himself to be in our time; therefore he is in our time; therefore our time has God in it. He says this is a tautology. It isn’t. “God is in our time; therefore God is in time” – this is a tautology. What I have above is a material explanation. If God is in our time, how did he get there? Possible answer: he determined himself to be in our time (here we have an action sentence).

III.

But there is another issue. We have to decide whether this is divine self-determination without natural theology or divine self-determination with natural theology. Granted that God determined himself, which specific instance of self-determination took place? I ask this because I don’t think we can say that divine self-determination necessarily excludes natural theology: “God determines himself to be the creator of the world” is clearly compatible with natural theology (e.g. “God determined himself to be the creator of all things in accord with his nature”).

Divine self-determination is basic and sufficient in itself for the truth of God creating the world. This means that divine self-divine determination can take place in such a way that renders natural theology false (and therefore conditionally impossible as it were – in the world in which we live). I put it this way in the book:

“If we were to represent the world in terms of a package, we could imagine it to be stamped with the words ‘created by God’. But note well: the stamp itself tells us nothing about the package itself other than the fact that it was created by God. It tells us nothing about the package itself, regarding its contents, for example. In other words, the stamp tells us nothing about the natural properties of the package. The stamp acts simply as a designator, not a description” (p. 33).

“Crucially then: we cannot infer from the natural properties of the package to the claim that it was created by God. The natural properties of the package are not the reason that the package is stamped with the words ‘created by God’. What explains the stamp is that God determined himself to be the creator of the package. Nothing more and nothing less” (p. 33).

In order to explain this concept, in Part I of the book I invoked a thought experiment of two identical worlds – identical in terms of natural processes and laws – only one of which God has created. If this was possible, and if it turned out that our world is the one created by God (as it is obviously in the book), then our world is a world in which any kind of natural theology – be it based on motion, cause and effect, gravitational constants, etc. – is impossible.

Our answer to the question, whether “all things” is truly designated by the predicate “created by God” can only be based on the answer to the question, whether God has determined himself to be the creator of all things. This and this alone. It is creation “from above” rather than “from below.” Moreover: according to this account, God does not act through his nature (if he has one), but he acts as a divine self-determining person. It is a kind of “neo-Chalcedonian” account of divine action, and of creation in particular.

IV.

But if natural theology is possible in our world, then this world cannot have an identical world not made by God. I follow Brian Davies’ excellent book, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (pp. 62-64). Davies quotes Herbert McCabe on Aquinas’s conception of cause: a cause is “a thing exerting itself, having its influence or imposing its character on the world.” He continues: “On this account, to know that A caused B is to understand B as something that flows from the nature of A, something brought about by A insofar as it is acting in its characteristic way.” This means that, for Aquinas, “a cause and its effect are intimately connected. They are not simply instances of objects or events which we observe to be constantly conjoined as the philosopher David Hume suggested. In what way are cause and effect intimately connected? An effect, for Aquinas, can be said to flow from (or even: participate in) its cause because the cause is a thing of a certain kind with a definite way of being or working.”

To quote McCabe on Aquinas: “When you know what something is, you know what it is likely to do – indeed it is the same thing fully to understand the nature of a thing and to know what it will naturally do. Thus a causal explanation is one in terms of the natural behaviour of things. When you have found the cause there is no further question about why this cause should naturally produce this effect, to understand the cause is just to understand that it naturally produces this effect” (McCabe, God Matters, p. 101). This, in essence, is Aquinas’s analysis of causation. For Davies, this is no less relevant to Aquinas’s view of God’s relation to the natural world: “Things in the world reflect or reveal something of what [God] is because they come from him, because he is their cause or that from which they flow.”

Now from the point of view of this analysis, the reason there cannot be an identical world not created by God is that this world created as it was by God has God’s character flowing through it, in the sense that it is the effect that the cause would naturally produce were it to produce a world. And since God’s nature has a sui generis character, there can only be one such world. For Aquinas, then: no identical world not created by God. Nevertheless, we can see how natural theology is entirely plausible: God’s nature continues to function as a description of the nature of the world in virtue of Aquinas’s analysis of causation. It is not a mere designator!

Of course, I am inclined to think I cannot accept Aquinas’s analysis of causation because it presupposes natural theology. So my analysis of divine self-determination without natural theology does not presuppose Aquinas’s analysis of causation! In fact it really only presupposes that God is a person, not that he has a nature. That is, even if God has a nature, it is not relevant to the nature of the world. God does not require a nature to act. As to the question whether God has a nature, I will only point out that Claus Westermann makes it clear that, in creation, the people of Israel only identify God in his acts and do not presuppose a being as it were behind the acts.

V.

But let me end, Ben, on your fascinating thematic point of departure from which you launched your review. You say that you have been “thinking a lot lately about the relation between nature and grace.” If I were asked to say where the historical precedent for my view of divine action lies, I would say it lies with Luther. Think of Luther’s claim on God as the promising divine identity who promises us forgiveness of sins and, by extension, the gift of eternal life. Without going into the details of Luther’s thought on this matter: suppose I believe myself to be precisely the one who has been promised eternal life in this way. If this is true, then God has promised me the gift of eternal life – which means that my belief is true. But now suppose an identical world in which I exist but God does not. In this world, I also believe that I have been promised the gift of eternal life. But it is not true, I am wrong. But of course the two worlds are identical in this regard. There is no difference as regards my “ontic” status between one world and the other.

This is of course not true in Aquinas’s world as regards grace. For Aquinas, in the world which God created and in which I believe I have received grace, I receive an “ontic” infusion of grace. In the world which God didn’t create (and which doesn’t exist) and in which I believe I have received grace, I do not receive an “ontic” infusion of grace. So for Aquinas, the worlds are not identical.

Daphne Hampson’s book, Christian Contradictions, speaks of a distinction between Catholic (Thomist) and Protestant (Lutheran) approaches to grace in terms of an “ontic” model and a “status of relations” model. What I have to say corresponds to these two different kinds of models. I found her book very illuminating and, after I had finished the Metaphysics book, it made me think of writing a kind of sequel, placing the work in the historical context of the contrasts between the Thomistic and Lutheran visions.

So there are these two great – perhaps irreducible – theological traditions, and I belong to the tradition of Luther, Bultmann (think of his undemythologisable analogical understanding of divine action), and Barth.

Neil MacDonald: Metaphysics and the God of Israel

Neil B. MacDonald, Metaphysics and the God of Israel: Systematic Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 248 pp. (review copy courtesy of Baker Academic)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relation between nature and grace – a relation which is of fundamental significance for the whole structure of dogmatic theology. And Neil MacDonald’s book, Metaphysics and the God of Israel, is a remarkably creative and provocative attempt to rethink this relation – indeed, to rethink metaphysics as a whole – from the standpoint of divine self-determination.

MacDonald’s central thesis is simple enough: the mode of all divine action is self-determination. God acts by determining himself to be the one who acts. In other words, God acts by directing his own identity, by acting on his own being. According to MacDonald, all divine action can be understood along these lines. God is creator, for example, simply because he determines himself to be the world’s creator. This determination is strictly something God does to himself.

The book’s most insightful – and most challenging – thesis arises at this point: if God had not determined himself to be this world’s creator, the world would nevertheless be exactly the same, except that it would not be identified as God’s creature. “We are not saying this world … would be a different world in terms of its natural properties, were it not created by God,” MacDonald insists; indeed, “there could well have been … a world identical to the one we inhabit that was not created by God” (p. 34).

If we ask, then, how the predicate “created by God” can be true of the world “without it being the case that anything is said or implied about the natural or material properties of the world,” MacDonald replies that the predicate “created by God” simply describes something God does to himself. It “does not imply anything at all” about the nature of the world (p. 35).

This line of argument is, of course, an extremely radical reassertion of Barth’s critique of natural theology. Here, there is no inherent connection between creator and creature, nature and grace. The only point of contact lies in God’s own self-determining act – an act which is itself the wholly contingent, wholly unnecessary relation between God and world.

This understanding of creation, MacDonald notes, “minimizes the importance of any … interaction between theology and science,” since “one could have two identical worlds one of which it would be true to say that God determined himself to be the creator of it and the other not” (p. 40). In a nutshell, what this means is: no natural theology!

MacDonald also argues that his concept of self-determination can lay the basis for a new “biblical metaphysics” which can account for the way God acts in relation to the world. Just as God becomes the world’s creator through an act of self-determination, so God “gets himself into the world” by determining himself to be in a personal space-time relationship with his creature (p. 67). Against the classical conception of God as acting providentially in history “from eternity,” MacDonald insists that God has a place in the world, and that God acts from within the world’s history. God determines himself to be part of his creation, to remain in our time after the act of creation (this, MacDonald says, is the meaning of the seventh day of creation in Gen. 2:2-3). God therefore “has time,” he “has a history.” In contrast to a classical metaphysical construction in which God eternally determines what will happen in time, MacDonald thus argues that God simply “determines himself to be within our time,” so that God “comes along with us” in personal relationship (p. 79).

Further, God determines himself to be infinitely temporal and infinitely spatial, so that he has a time and place within the world which is nevertheless “peculiar and exclusive to him … as one of the divine perfections” (p. 86). And if we want to understand the nature of this peculiar divine (ad intra!) space, we must point to the resurrection: “to say Jesus has been raised is to say that he is in God’s space, the space peculiar and exclusive to God” (p. 89). On this basis, MacDonald also sketches a christological reformulation, according to which “human history [is] ... present to God ad intra,” so that (following Richard Bauckham) the human identity of Jesus is the divine identity (p. 239).

This whole book bristles with vigorous insights, surprising possibilities, and explosive ideas (for just one remarkable example, see the penetrating interpretation of das Nichtige, in a footnote on p. 217) – and each stage of the argument is developed through skirmishes into Old Testament exegesis, historical theology, modern philosophy, and Barthian dogmatics. In the end, however, I must admit I found the book a little disappointing and a little unconvincing. The problem, I think, is that MacDonald’s concept of self-determination remains too narrowly formalistic and analytical, so that one is left with the feeling that this concept just doesn’t do very much after all.

MacDonald has a lot to say about logic and rationality, and he suggests that the “litmus test” for his thesis is whether it is “logically consistent” (p. 133). But logical consistency is hardly an adequate litmus test for a theological proposal of this scope. When the problem of God’s spatiality is raised, for example – in what sense can God said to be spatial if his location cannot be defined by geometrical description? – MacDonald merely assures us: “it is enough that ‘God determines himself to be in a place in this world’ … is a logically consistent claim” (p. 117). But this is clearly not enough – not by half – since there’s all the difference in the world between the (minimal) formal requirement of logical consistency and the material requirement of a convincing explanation. Concepts in dogmatic theology ought to have real explanatory power; even if they can’t clear up every problem, they should certainly “prove themselves” by reaching explanatorily beyond the safe circle of tautology (after all, any tautology is logically invincible – but that doesn’t mean it explains very much!).

It seems to me that MacDonald could thus refine his proposal, not by altering its fundamental thesis – that the mode of divine action is self-determination – but by allowing the formal questions of “rationality” and “logical consistency” to recede into the background, and by concentrating explicitly on the development of a more expansive, more differentiated, and more discursive account of self-determination. Of course, Karl Barth’s doctrine of election is itself precisely such an attempt to develop an expansive christological conception of divine being as self-determining being – and Barth’s own ontological construction (cf. also the interpretive work of Robert Jenson and Bruce McCormack) clearly indicates that the concept of self-determination need not be reduced to tautology, but can exercise extraordinary explanatory power which makes itself felt in every corner of the dogmatic loci.

I voice these criticisms, then, as a friend and ally of MacDonald’s proposal. I think a new ontological vision of divine action as divine self-determination is precisely the way forwards for contemporary dogmatics; and I believe one of the resources for this ontological thinking is a radical recovery of Barth’s critique of natural theology (as a corollary of Barth’s christological actualism). So I think MacDonald’s proposal is of tremendous value, even if the concept of self-determination needs to be developed in a much more refined and more expansive way than it is here.

One final note: in my opinion, MacDonald’s radical critique of natural theology – “the world would be the same even if God didn’t create it!” – is a stunning intervention in contemporary theology (where, in most quarters, “creation” has become an axiom which wholly determines the structure of christology, reconciliation, eschatology, etc). Nevertheless, I don’t think I agree with MacDonald’s suggestion that this stance eliminates the significance of dialogue with the natural sciences.

On the contrary, dialogue with science may play a crucial role in interpreting the “site” or “situation” (to borrow Badiou’s terminology) in which the event of God’s self-determining action takes place. If God interrupts the natural order in a new event of self-relation to the world (thus constituting the world as “creature”), then it is of great significance to understand what kind of world this is which God interrupts and reconfigures. For example: the core event on which theology reflects is the resurrection of Jesus; and although this event is unthinkable for natural science, the site of this event (i.e. a dead human body) is an object of scientific knowledge, and it is precisely this site which the resurrection interrupts and reconfigures (i.e. without this corpse, there could be no resurrection).

In other words, although there is no direct trajectory from scientific knowledge to a knowledge of divine action, science may nevertheless help us to understand the situation in which the divine action takes place, and the kind of reconfiguring which this action produces. And if this is the case, might it also be possible that a profoundly atheistic interpretation of the natural world is in fact more useful for theological reflection than any explicitly religious reading of nature?

Reconsidering Rudolf Bultmann

The new issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology includes my article on Bultmann: “Faith as Self-Understanding: Towards a Post-Barthian Appreciation of Rudolf Bultmann,” IJST 10:1 (2007), 21-35 (please email me if you’d like a copy). While Barthian theologians condemn Bultmann’s doctrine of faith for “reducing theology to anthropology,” I argue that Bultmann identifies faith with self-understanding precisely in order to maintain the distinctiveness of God’s reality. Here’s an excerpt:

“According to Bultmann, God and humanity are differentiated at the exact point of their togetherness (Miteinander) – namely, in the movement of faith which itself corresponds to the event of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In other words, God is distinguished from humanity precisely as the gracious God, the God who addresses us and claims us in the gospel. This formulation – which of course comes very close to Barth’s understanding – poses critical questions not only to overtly ‘objectifying’ theologies, but also to an ostensibly ‘Barthian’ construal of the divine freedom as sheer isolated autonomy over against the world.”

On a more general note, I reckon this is a very good issue of the IJST. As Paul Nimmo notes in his editorial, all the articles in this issue have a thematic focus on re-thinking the doctrine of God. There are articles on Descartes’ understanding of divine infinity, Wolf Krötke’s doctrine of the divine attributes, and the trinitarian theologies of religion of S. Mark Heim and Gavin D’Costa.

There’s also a provocative and important article by Adam Eitel: “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Karl Barth and the Historicization of God’s Being” (pp. 36-53). He explores the relation between Barth’s theology of resurrection and Hegel’s, and he argues that Barth “conceptualizes the resurrection as the historical fulfillment of God’s eternal being,” so that “God’s being is both eternally a being-for-resurrection and eternally a being-for-us.” I think this is a brilliant proposal – and I love the luminous concept of an eternal “being-for-resurrection.”

More on the Molnar debate

There are some very helpful posts which offer further reflection on our recent discussions of Paul Molnar’s new book. In another excellent post, Halden critiques the logos asarkos and speaks of the ontological implications of the resurrection; and Brandon discusses (what D. B. Hart calls) “the aetiological fallacy,” or “the belief that the meaning of a doctrine should be determined by the governing concerns and intentions of those who first promulgated that doctrine, rather than by the history of its subsequent theological elaborations and clarifications.”

Denkwürdiges Geheimnis: Festschrift for Eberhard Jüngel

Ingolf U. Dalferth, Johannes Fischer, and Hans-Peter Großhans (eds.), Denkwürdiges Geheimnis: Beiträge zur Gotteslehre: Festschrift für Eberhard Jüngel zum 70. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 653 pp. (review copy courtesy of Mohr Siebeck)

This extraordinary collection of essays was presented to the Tübingen theologian Eberhard Jüngel on his 70th birthday. For the past four decades, Jüngel has distinguished himself as one of the world’s leading dogmatic theologians, and as the most brilliant and creative of all Karl Barth’s pupils.

In their foreword, the editors offer a succinct and acute summary of the central themes of Jüngel’s theology. More than any other theologian, Jüngel “placed God’s advent at the centre of his thought. Since God comes, we must speak of him and we can think him. Without God’s advent, there would be no faith, the Christian would have nothing to say, and Christian theology could not think any truth” (p. ix).

Although God comes always “from himself, to himself and through himself,” he nevertheless comes “to the world and to humans.” Indeed, God comes “as the mystery of the world by showing himself as the human God” (p. x). And this coming of God as the world’s mystery is by no means a “worldly necessity” – on the contrary, it is “more than necessary.” God’s coming “does not follow from any conditions inherent in the world, nor does it fulfil any preceding human needs” (p. x). In other words, God is neither merely possible nor necessary for the world – instead, he is actual, since he freely comes to the world. And because God comes to the world again and again, “we must always speak of him further, and we can never be done with thinking of him” (p. xi).

This has always been Jüngel’s central concern – to engage in the difficult business of thinking God; to think God as the coming one, the one who relates to the world in sheer freedom and actuality, and therefore the one of whom we can truly speak.

In honour of Jüngel, the editors have thus gathered a massive collection of 32 new essays, all centred on the theme of “God and the thinking of God” – since this is the central theme both of all theology and of Jüngel’s entire career (p. xii).

The list of contributors reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary academic theology: there are biblical scholars like Martin Hengel and Rudolf Smend; ecumenical theologians like Kasper, Küng and Lehmann; German dogmaticians like Pannenberg, Moltmann, Dalferth, Krötke and Rendtorff; as well as three leading Anglo-American theologians: David Ford, Bruce McCormack and John Webster (whose essays are written in English).

The papers collected here span several disciplines – Old and New Testament, church history, philosophy, dogmatics, practical theology, hermeneutics, world religions – but they are united by their focus on “God and the thinking of God.” Moreover, alongside the most rigorous forms of academic theology, there are essays here on preaching (together with a sermon by Rudolf Smend). This is especially fitting, since much of Jüngel’s thought has turned around the concrete situation of preaching. And while it is customary for German theologians to cap off their careers with a multi-volume work of dogmatics, it’s no accident that Jüngel’s career has culminated in several volumes of sermons – sermons which demonstrate vividly Jüngel’s underlying conviction that the God of advent truly “comes to speech” (i.e. becomes an actual event in our world) in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In sum, this volume is not only a superb tribute to one of our greatest living thinkers; it is also a profound and important contribution in its own right to contemporary reflection on the doctrine of God.

Ten propositions on faith and laughter

by Kim Fabricius

1. Let’s face it: the Bible is not exactly a barrel of laughs. In the Old Testament the Lord laughs a few times in the Psalms – at the nations’ rulers in Psalm 2:4, at the wicked and godless in Psalms 37:13 and 59:8 – but it is a disdainful, derisive laughter. As for human laughter, the preacher in Ecclesiastes 2:2 calls it “foolish” (GNB), “mad” (NRSV), even if it does have its “time” (cf. 3:4); while Job’s so-called comforters Eliphaz and Bildad console their friend with the promise of laughter if he repents (5:22, 8:21) – but we know what God thinks of them (42:7).

2. Is Sarah an exception? She laughs when God promises her a child in her dotage, but beneath her breath (Genesis 18:12). But the Lord hears her giggling – “Yeah, right!” she is thinking – and he is not amused at her doubt, so in fear she denies that she laughed (18:15a). “Oh yes you did!” the Lord replies (18:15b). We should remember that Abraham laughed too when told that Sarah will bear him a child (17:17), but evidently our (sexist?) Lord was more indulgent with the old man than with his old lady. One thing is for sure, juxtapose the two scenes and you have the stuff of situation comedy!

3. And then there is the name “Isaac” – “the one who will laugh.” Does giving the child of promise such a sobriquet suggest that God has a sense of humour after all? And perhaps we should not overlook the additional syllables that God adds to the names Abram and Sarai: they become AbrAHam and SarAH. “An onomatopoeic ‘Ha-Ha’”? (Simon Critchley).

4. There are three explicit references to laughter in the New Testament. In James 4:9 the complacent laughter-become-mourning of repentance; in Matthew 9:24 (par. Mark 5:40, Luke 8:53) the dismissive laughter of the crowd at a funeral that Jesus crashes; and in Luke 6:25 the smug laughter of the powerful – and in Luke 6:21 the eschatological laughter of the powerless. The eschatological laughter is promising, even proleptic. For if the verbal abuse of Jesus’ enemies at the foot of the cross surely included cruel and mocking laughter, may we not suggest an Easter laughter – risus paschalis – that rings out with resurrection joy?

5. Did Jesus laugh? The fictitious dispute in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose “is more than fiction. It reflects a line of tradition which really existed, from John Chrysostom through Augustine to Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugo of St Victor, of the Christian denunciation of laughter” (Karl-Josef Kuschel). Nor is such a “theology of tears” limited to the world-denying, death-obsessed zeitgeist of the Middle Ages. John Wesley once disciplined a preacher on the charges (in ascending order?) of heresy, adultery – and the man’s proneness to “break a jest, and laugh at it heartily.” Here, from Beckett’s Molloy, Moran debates the issue with Father Ambrose, who sides with Eco’s Jorge (a Dominican – who is blind):

“What a joy it is to laugh, from time to time, he said. Is it not? I said. It is peculiar to man, he said. So I have noticed, I said. A brief silence ensued. […] Animals never laugh, he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said. What? he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said loudly. He mused. Christ never laughed either, he said, so far as we know. He looked at me. Can you wonder? I said.”

6. You laughed, right? Christ, I reckon, would have cracked up too! Did he not have a Beckett-like sense of the absurd (gnats and camels, logs and splinters), the ironic (calling Simon a Πετρος, telling fishermen where to fish), and even the coarse (suggesting that one go starkers in court [Matthew 5:40], insinuating that the Pharisees are full of crap [Mark 7:15]). And is anyone going to tell me that a man who likes to party, with a reputation to go with it, doesn’t like a laugh? So with many a Renaissance Humanist, Eco’s William of Baskerville (a Franciscan, one of God’s “merry men” – who can see because he wears spectacles) was surely right: of course Jesus laughed! A limerick comes to me:

    In the O.T. our God the Most High
    in his folk put timor Domini,
    but in Jesus his Son
    he earthed Word-play and pun:
    like a mushroom, he was a fun-guy.

7. The only serious theological question is not “Did Jesus laugh?” but “Did Jesus laugh in his divinity as well as his humanity?” As with suffering, the doctrine of the divine impassibility would suggest not. If, however, revisionists like Moltmann and Jüngel are right, then, if God can suffer, surely God can laugh. The resurrection event is crucial, as it identifies, even defines, if it does not constitute, the very being of God. In any case, the grammar of faith allows, and (I submit) the substance of faith demands the statement: “God laughs” – and not only with scorn for his enemies but, above all, with joy for his friends.

8. Ergo, an Easter people cannot act like lemon-suckers. Chesterton said that “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly,” and no less an authority than the Angelic Doctor himself “leaves the Christian with a wide field for his fun. He does so on the authority of the Philosopher” – revelation and reason in perfect harmony – “who, we are reminded, ‘posits the virtue of eutrapelia, which in Latin we call jucunditas, enjoyment.’ His conclusion rejoices smiling Christians” (M. A. Screech). Alas, St Thomas set limits to Christian frivolity: no dirty jokes! Calvin agreed – but not scatologically-minded Luther. And Erasmus, while keen on wit, disapproved of tickling – which, in my view, comes close to advocating child abuse!

9. There is a political dimension to laughter, namely laughter as protest and resistance, disarming tyrant or terrorist with ecstatic power. “Laugh and fear not, creatures,” declares Aslan. “For jokes as well as justice come in with speech.” Humour has been particularly important in sustaining the children of Moses in the wilderness of oppression, not least in the face of Christian anti-semitism. Hence the extensive corpus of Jewish jokes about Christians, doleful and yearning, yet also acerbic. Like this one:

The priest says to the rabbi: “There are three things I can’t stand about you Jews: you wander about the synagogue, you pray noisily, and your funerals are chaotic.” The rabbi replies: “We wander about the synagogue because we feel at home there. We pray noisily because Yahweh is old and hard of hearing. And as for funerals, we too prefer the Christian ones.”

And there is the Jewish character, figure of fun, known as the schlemihl: a rather weak, inept, and vulnerable guy who takes on the chin whatever goys throw at him, who gets knocked down again and again, but who always gets up, dusts himself off, and gets on with life without a grumble. There is a Christian version of the schlemihl: his name is Charlie Brown. In the schlemihl, laughter is not only polemical critique, it is also therapeutic self-critique lest the oppressed becomes an oppressor.

10. Finally, the liturgical dimension of laughter: is there a place for laughter in worship? W. H. Auden suggested that “The world of laughter is much more closely related to the world of prayer than either is to the everyday secular world of work,” and Reinhold Niebuhr actually said that “Laughter is the beginning of prayer.” But Niebuhr also said that “there is faith and prayer, and no laughter, in the holy of holies.” So it’s okay to crack a joke in the pulpit perhaps, but not at the altar? But who has not laughed during the scrum that can be the passing of the peace? And if there are children at the table, well, as Art Linkletter famously put it on his American TV show, “Kids say the darndest things!” And although the eucharist as anamnesis of the meal “on the night he was betrayed” is certainly a solemn moment, does not the eu-charis-t as anticipation of the Messiah’s wedding feast invite making merry? Donald MacKinnon rightly pointed to the tragic elements in the Christian story, but his mentor Kierkegaard, depressive Dane that he was, called it “the most humorous point of view in the history of the world.”

A personal anecdote. During my training for the ministry I was leading morning worship at Mansfield College, Oxford. Lesslie Newbigin was present, so I wanted to be word perfect. The Old Testament lesson, from I Samuel 14, was about Saul slaughtering the Philistines. I came to verse 15, which reads: “There was a panic in the camp.” But this idiot read: “There was a picnic in the camp.” As I prayed for the earth to open, all eyes turned to the great man. How would he respond? He laughed, of course!

St Theresa prayed well: “Lord, preserve us from sullen saints.”

Matthias Gockel: Barth and Schleiermacher on the doctrine of election

Matthias Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-Theological Comparison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 229 pp. (review copy courtesy of Oxford UP – and there is also an online edition)

The exact nature of Barth’s relationship to Schleiermacher is one of the most complex and far-reaching problems for historians of modern theology. Barth himself took pains to distance himself from Schleiermacher, and he insisted that his own theology represented a fundamental break with Schleiermacher’s thought. But Barth was often an unreliable interpreter of his own theology. And, misled by Barth’s own representation of his relationship to Schleiermacher, subsequent generations of interpreters have often presupposed an unbridgeable gulf between these two Reformed theologians.

In this new book, Matthias Gockel offers a groundbreaking new evaluation of Barth’s relationship to Schleiermacher. Instead of painting with a broad brush, Gockel restricts his study to a close and acute analysis of the development of Barth’s doctrine of election in relation to Schleiermacher’s doctrine of election.

Schleiermacher’s most original contribution to the discussion of election was his conception of “a single divine will and decree” which effects both faith and unbelief (p. 26) – a conception which completely revised the older model of a twofold divine will of election and reprobation. This revision, articulated in Schleiermacher’s early work, was developed more fully and rigorously in his mature doctrine of election in The Christian Faith. Here, the doctrine of election is conceived as a single divine decree of salvation in Christ. Schleiermacher rejects the idea of particular relations between God and different individuals, in order to move beyond particularistic accounts of individual redemption and to emphasise the “divine unity and the unity of the world” (p. 101). Schleiermacher thus regards reprobation as only a temporary passing over. In spite of such temporary reprobation, all unbelievers remain predestined to salvation: “God sees all human beings, not only the believers, in Christ” (p. 102).

Barth’s early revision of the doctrine of election, Gockel argues, is strikingly similar to this Schleiermacherian account. In Romans, Barth emphasises the dialectical unity of God’s decree: “God’s reprobation (of the elect) and God’s election (of the reprobate)” are “one and the same in God” (p. 118). There is a real duality here of judgment and grace, but it is the duality of God’s unified action, an action which affects all human beings alike. It is thus impossible to conceive of the church and the world as “two separate groups of persons” (p. 125). This revised model of double predestination is developed further in Barth’s Göttingen Dogmatics. Here, Barth emphasises the teleological ordering of election and reprobation. God judges in order to be gracious – the way of predestination leads us “through damnation, even through hell, to salvation and life” (p. 156).

In both Romans and the Göttingen Dogmatics, then, Barth has developed what Gockel calls a “Schleiermacherian reconstruction” of the doctrine of election. For both Barth and Schleiermacher, the divine decree is to be understood in the context of the historical decision between faith and unbelief; for both of them, election articulates the sheer initiative of the divine act; and for both of them, there is a teleological movement in time from reprobation to election. Above all, both theologians focus not on “individual predestined human beings” but on “the predestining God” (p. 157). Surprisingly, then, Gockel argues that it is “precisely the anthropocentric outlook of traditional views” which motivated not only Barth’s revision of election, but also Schleiermacher’s (p. 12).

Barth did, however, revise the doctrine of election a second time, and it is this decisive “christological revision” that is developed so expansively in CD II/2. Now Barth comes to think of God’s twofold decision of election and reprobation as a decision about Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is reprobated for the sake of election. And, crucially, the divine decree “is not made in an abstract eternity” prior to Jesus Christ, but “precisely in the life of Jesus” (pp. 163-64). Jesus Christ is both subject and object of election: the Logos is identified with Jesus of Nazareth (p. 203).

Further, Barth’s earlier (Schleiermacherian) doctrine had focused on humanity as the object of God’s decision. Now, in the Church Dogmatics, his focus is on God’s self-determination – God himself as the object of his own decision. This decision is not merely revealed in Jesus Christ, but it actually takes place in him – he “constitutes God’s gracious choice as the self-determination to be God for His people and the determination of humankind to be the people of God” (p. 169). Barth’s doctrine of election thus effects a remarkable systematic integration of christology with the doctrine of God, so that it becomes possible to understand God’s own being and decision “exclusively in the light of the history of Jesus Christ” (p. 170).

Gockel’s reading of Barth thus leads him to support Bruce McCormack’s controversial interpretation: “the idea of the immanent trinity depends on the concept of predestination” (p. 177). There is no difference between God’s decision in time and God’s decision in eternity – they are precisely the same event in Jesus Christ himself. And Gockel observes that Paul Molnar’s critique of McCormack – resting as it does on a strict separation between God’s being-in-himself and his being-for-us, i.e., between triunity and election – represents “the very opposite of what Barth intended” (p. 180). Indeed, Gockel suggests that, if we take Barth’s own christological revision seriously, we will have to ask whether the doctrine of election should stand not only within the doctrine of God, but “at the beginning of dogmatics as a whole” (p. 180). This is, after all, exactly Barth’s point: Jesus Christ is the first word that must be spoken about God!

Further, Gockel notes that Barth’s christological revision leads him to abandon his early strictures against universalism. While he had previously rejected the idea outright, he now “joins Schleiermacher in leaving open the possibility” of universal salvation (p. 188). But the fact that Barth never embraced universalism leads Gockel to raise a series of pointed questions. Is Barth’s appeal to the divine freedom consistent with his own understanding of God’s self-determination to be God-with-us in Jesus Christ? Does Barth’s refusal to commit to universalism tear open again the abyss of the decretum absolutum – as though God’s decision about any particular person might still be different from the decision which God has made in Jesus Christ? Is there not a certain kind of “necessity” in God’s acting – the self-appointed necessity of God’s own self-determined faithfulness and grace? After all, Gockel concludes, both Schleiermacher and Barth would agree that “the truth of the doctrine of predestination can hardly be different from the truth of eschatology” (p. 211).

Matthias Gockel has given us a remarkably profound reading of Barth’s theology, as well as the most sophisticated study to date of Barth’s relationship to Schleiermacher. He convincingly shows that “Barth’s theology is not just a repudiation of Schleiermacher but an expansion of his predecessor’s work in a new framework” (p. 13). And his own critical engagement with Barth models exactly the kind of close dogmatic scrutiny that Barth’s own thought both deserves and demands. This is certainly the best work on Barth to have appeared within the past year or more, and it will prove to be an immensely valuable resource for contemporary constructive work on the doctrine of election.

Podcast: John Webster on mercy

John Webster recently gave a lecture on “mercy” at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. Jordan Barrett made a recording, and (with Webster’s permission) he has now made it available as a podcast. The sound-quality isn’t perfect, but the lecture is well worth listening to.

Michael Menke-Peitzmeyer: Karl Barth and divine subjectivity

Michael Menke-Peitzmeyer, Subjektivität und Selbstinterpretation des dreifaltigen Gottes: Eine Studie zur Genese und Explikation des Paradigmas “Selbstoffenbarung Gottes” in der Theologie Karl Barths (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2002), 637 pp. (with thanks to Aschendorff for a review copy)

This big and ambitious book on the Subjektivität und Selbstinterpretation des dreifaltigen Gottes (“The Subjectivity and Self-Interpretation of the Triune God”) explores Karl Barth’s conception of divine self-revelation in the context of the modern problem of human freedom. Menke-Peitzmeyer rightly notes that the concept of divine self-revelation is really “the great theme of 20th-century theology” (p. 555), and he argues that the notion of the absolute subjectivity of God in his self-revelation is central to Barth’s entire theological project.

It was Hegel who bequeathed to modern theology the themes of absolute subjectivity and self-revelation. In taking up these Hegelian themes, Barth was trying to overcome some of the intellectual dead-ends that had been inherent in the Enlightenment understanding of subjectivity and freedom. And according to Menke-Peitzmeyer, Barth’s own account was developed both (negatively) through his critique of Schleiermacher, and (positively) through his reception of Anselm.

Menke-Peitzmeyer agrees with Hans Urs von Balthasar’s judgment that Barth “comes from” Schleiermacher: “Schleiermacher was for Barth what Plato was for the thinkers of the Renaissance, what Spinoza was for Herder and Goethe, what Schopenhauer was for Nietzsche” (p. 40; citing Balthasar, p. 199). Drawing creatively on Anselm’s thought, however, Barth sought to turn Schleiermacher’s problematic on its head, so that human subjectivity would now be grounded in the subjectivity of God. While (in Barth’s view) Schleiermacher risked turning divine freedom into a predicate of human subjectivity, Barth now reversed this problem by making human freedom a “predicate of God” (p. 48). For Menke-Peitzmeyer, however, the critical question is whether this approach really resolves the Enlightenment problem of freedom, or whether it simply “leads to new aporias” (p. 48). And he argues that Barth’s view in fact creates a new (and equally disastrous) aporia within the same basic Enlightenment paradigm. Thus Barth “misses his goal of extracting theology … from the ‘Logos’ of modernity” (p. 48).

At the core of this critique is the claim that Barth’s account of divine subjectivity finally eliminates human freedom. “The incarnation of God as evidence of God’s freedom for humanity turns out to be evidence of God’s freedom instead of that of humanity.” And this means that the human agent “appears as a puppet in the divine plan of salvation” (p. 388). Ultimately, then, in Barth’s theology there is “no free relationship between God and humanity at all” (pp. 388-89). Instead of the Enlightenment displacement of divine freedom, Barth reverses the process and so leaves us with “the elimination of human freedom” (p. 415).

Menke-Peitzmeyer argues that this “elimination of human freedom” was not a necessary component of Barth’s account of the divine subjectivity in CD I/1. At the early stage of Barth’s dogmatic project, he could still have avoided this aporia. But it is in the doctrine of election (CD II/2) that the aporia becomes necessary and inevitable. Further, Barth’s doctrine of election eliminates genuine divine freedom as well.

In CD II/2, Menke-Peitzmeyer argues, the predestination of Jesus Christ and of humanity becomes the condition for the existence of an immanent Trinity. This means that it becomes impossible to think of God as freely acting in salvation-history. Menke-Peitzmeyer thus raises a series of pointed questions: “Is there a material difference between the immanent Trinity (and thus the self-constitution of God), and predestination as part of the self-interpretation of God – in which case predestination becomes a contingent act of God? Or is the immanent Trinity nothing other than the carrying-out of predestination? Or more sharply still: Is the immanent Trinity, for Barth, identical to God’s eternal (and supralapsarian) decree of the incarnation?” (p. 416). These questions, he insists, are of great importance, since the freedom both of God and of humanity is at stake. “If there is an identity between the immanent Trinity and predestination, that is, between God’s self-constitution and God’s self-development (or self-interpretation), … then there would be no room for a free salvation-event between God and humanity, and thus the importance of this event would be marginalised” (pp. 416-17).

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this argument is the way it intersects with the current North American controversy surrounding Bruce McCormack’s interpretation of Barth. According to McCormack, God’s triunity is a function of the divine election; it is the act of God’s decision to be God-for-us that constitutes God as triune. Menke-Peitzmeyer offers a very similar reading of the inner logic of Barth’s doctrine of election – although he concludes that this position radically compromises God’s freedom. Presumably this conclusion is not a necessary one, however, since McCormack’s own interpretation rests on exactly the opposite vision of God’s freedom. For McCormack, the thesis that triunity is a function of election is precisely an affirmation of God’s lordly freedom: in his freedom, God is Lord even over his own being and essence.

In any case, according to Menke-Peitzmeyer’s argument, Barth’s doctrine of election finally amounts to “a self-manipulation of the divine love, which avoids the risk of salvation-history and thus the actual dialectical tension of the relationship between infinite and finite freedom.” In place of this dialectical tension, Barth constructs “an a priori synthesis” of divine and human freedoms (p. 547). Ultimately, then, Barth does justice “neither to the freedom of God nor to human freedom” (p. 585).

Against Barth, Menke-Peitzmeyer proposes that we should speak of “the absolute subjectivity of God as the self-interpretation of the triune God”; and this means speaking “both of the self-constitution of the triune God in his immanence, and of God’s self-development in history” (p. 586). God’s subjectivity “manifests itself in God’s immanent self-interpretation, which is carried out in the epiphenomena of salvation-history” (p. 547).

In this whole argument, Menke-Peitzmeyer is following critics like Pannenberg, Trutz Rendtorff, and Peter Eicher, who have argued that Barth’s theology remains ensnared in the fundamental problems of modernity. While among Anglo-American scholars today, there is an increasing tendency to see Barth as an advocate of Chalcedonian christology and evangelical orthodoxy, certain scholars in Germany have continued to advance radical critiques of Barth’s theological project, and have continued to argue that Barth’s theological ontology is systemically flawed. In particular, scholars influenced by Rendtorff and Pannenberg (whose opposition to Barth is fundamental) have argued that Barth’s response to the Enlightenment is inadequate, and that Barth’s account of divine and human freedom is incoherent.

On the one hand, then, Menke-Peitzmeyer’s book is of great value precisely because it so clearly embodies and develops this radical German reading of Barth. On the other hand, however, Menke-Peitzmeyer’s critique suffers acutely from its isolation from major developments in recent English-language scholarship. To mention the two most important examples: John Webster’s meticulous work on divine and human agency poses a systematic challenge to this interpretation of Barth; and Bruce McCormack’s groundbreaking work on Barth’s genetic development poses fundamental problems to Menke-Peitzmeyer’s rather schematic depiction of Barth’s early development as a straightforward negotiation between Schleiermacher and Anselm.

But in spite of these problems, it would be a mistake to dismiss Menke-Peitzmeyer’s argument out of hand. His critique is based on a painstakingly close and patient reading of Barth, and on a deep wrestling with the internal grammar of Barth’s dogmatics. He rightly perceives that, for Barth, the most important and far-reaching dogmatic decisions are made not in the prolegomenon (CD I/1) but in the doctrine of election (CD II/2) – and he rightly perceives that Barth’s doctrine of election is aimed at nothing less than an entire ontology of divine and human agency. Even if this book’s conclusions are ultimately unconvincing, then, they still provide a vigorous and welcome challenge to the complacency of our (sometimes all too easy) “orthodox” readings of Barth.

Ten propositions on the Holy Spirit

by Kim Fabricius

1. Two’s company, three’s a crowd: pneumatology has always been the odd “ology” out in trinitarian thought. In the Nicene Creed (325), the third article is so minimalist it’s almost a footnote. Only in the aftermath of Nicaea, mainly as a result of Basil of Caesarea duking it out with the Pneumatomachi, did the Holy Spirit get some extended creed cred at Constantinople in 381. Then there was the domestic bust-up between East and West over the filioque clause from the 9th century, leading to the messy divorce of 1054. In the 20th century the Pentecostal and charismatic movements foregrounded the Spirit in the Western church, but, again, not without controversy. No doubt about it: while often rather anonymous, the Spirit is a holy troublemaker.

2. The Holy Spirit is God. By “appropriation,” after a nod to creation, we tend to associate the Spirit with ecclesiology, and also with anthropology – the Spirit within us (as in Calvin’s “testimonium internum”) and among us (as in John V. Taylor’s “Go-Between”). And that’s okay, indeed crucial – as long as there is no collapse into immanentism. But immanence is always ominously imminent: witness the pervasive influence of Kantian and Hegelian idealism, the historicism and subjectivism of liberal theology, and the ecclesiomonistic preoccupations of much postliberal theology. The Holy Spirit must never be confused with, collapsed into, or commandeered by the human spirit or the church. The Holy Spirit is God.

3. What about the filioque? Too much ink, let alone blood, has already been spilt on this contested issue for me to add to it. There are good biblical as well as patristic grounds for positions both pro and contra. The pneumatological advantages of a double procession include: a stress on the Spirit as personal being rather than impersonal force, a specific (Christological) content and criterion for discerning the spirits, a guard against lapsing into natural theology, pantheism, and fuzzy mysticism. The pneumatological advantages of a single procession include: an assurance of the cosmic and global sweep of the Sprit’s activity, a break on Christomonism, a bulwark against dualism, modalism, and subordinationism. Of course the Western church, with its unilateral action, must take most of the blame for the Great Divorce. In my view, it should now retake the initiative, this time in reconciliation, with the widely accepted ecumenical formula that the Spirit proceeds “from the Father through the Son.”

4. Is the Holy Spirit feminine? Don’t be silly! None of the Trinitarian personae is gendered. And I’m afraid the Fathers would smile at any sisters (and brothers) who think they thought otherwise. Thus the idea that taking the Spirit to be feminine would provide a maternal balance to masculine and patriarchal Father-Son imagery rests on a mistake at source, quite misunderstanding the nature of trinitarian imagery and theological language. The intention of revisionists is to achieve a balanced differentiation, and thus transcendence, of the sexes in God, but I wonder if it doesn’t rather just sex him/her up, misleading the church into a kind of Canaanite captivity. The Holy Spirit is neither he, she, nor it. The Holy Spirit is God.

5. And God is who God is in God’s acts. What, then, does the Holy Spirit do? In the Old Testament, the Spirit is the divine dynamo that quickens life, empowers people, and inspires prophets. In the (synoptic) gospels, the Spirit quickens, empowers, and inspires Jesus. It is Luke, in particular, who highlights the intimate connection between the Holy Spirit and Jesus – in his birth, his baptism, his temptations, his Nazareth manifesto, his healings, his prayer-life, his passion – to which Paul adds his resurrection. Colin Gunton emphasises the role of the Spirit as “the mediator of the Son’s relation to the Father in both time and eternity,” as the source of the “otherness and particularity” of Jesus, and as the agent of his freedom and obedience. “The Spirit,” says Kathryn Tanner, “radiates the humanity of Jesus.” Gunton also stresses that it is the Spirit “who forms a body for the Son.”

6. Eugene F. Rogers picks up this theme in After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West (2005), and extends the discussion to the resurrection and ascension – and to Pentecost and beyond. “In the world,” Rogers writes, “the Spirit is not Person or thing, because the Spirit is Person on thing. And the Spirit is Person on thing because the Spirit is Person on Person. The Spirit rests on material bodies in the economy, because she rests on the Son in the Trinity.” Again: “To think about the Spirit it will not do to think ‘spiritually’: to think about the Spirit you have to think materially.” Following Rogers’ trajectory, I would suggest that there are rich pickings here for a political pneumatology: the Spirit of Jubilee who inspires a praxis of liberation and an economy of grace.

7. The church is itself a body-politic, instituted by the ascended Christ, constituted as the koinonia of the Holy Spirit. Interestingly, however, koinos (unclean) is the exact opposite of hagios (holy). And as Jesus crossed cultic boundaries, Paul Avis ventures that “if the Old Testament concept of holiness means separation, the New Testament concept means, even more than ethics, participation.” Which is to say that it is not moral rectitude but the forgiveness of sins – the credal characteristic of the communio sanctorum – that distinguishes the citizenship and embodies the holiness of the church. “There is no greater sinner than the Christian church,” said Luther. Which is why in the ecclesial body-politic, the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer and the practice of mutual confession are the centre of the civics of sanctification.

8. The Holy Spirit gathers the church – in order to send the church. “The church exists by mission as fire exists by burning” (Emil Brunner). In his seminal Transforming Mission, David Bosch observes that whereas Paul relates pneumatology primarily to the church, “the intimate linking of pneumatology and mission is Luke’s distinctive contribution to the early church’s missionary paradigm…. For Luke, the concept of the Spirit sealed the kinship between God’s universal will to save, the liberating ministry of Jesus, and the worldwide mission of the church.” Bosch also observes that while the early Fathers focussed on the Spirit “as the agent of sanctification or as the guarantor of apostolicity,” and the Reformers “put the major emphasis on the work of the Spirit as bearing witness to and interpreting the Word of God,” it was only in the twentieth century that there was “a gradual rediscovery of the intrinsic missionary character of the Holy Spirit.”

9. Mission, however, transcends monological evangelism. Missionaries once commonly spoke of “the great unreached.” “Unreached by whom?” I ask. Religious pluralism? On the contrary, (a) I find the exclusivism-inclusivism-pluralism paradigm confused and unworkable; and (b) I resist a purely conversionist missiology precisely on the basis of a high Christology, a cosmic pneumatology, and a robust ecclesiology. The Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov says, “We know where the church is; it is not for us to judge where the church is not.” Thus the Holy Spirit inspires the church to engage in mission without closure, mission that does not predetermine the divine action, mission practiced as dialogue, a listening as well as a speaking witness. Indeed Rowan Williams (in a fascinating essay “The Finality of Christ”) speaks of a “readiness for dispossession,” warns of the “seductions of ‘totalized’ meaning,” and, trying to break the logjam of the exclusivism-inclusivism-pluralism paradigm, points to a Christ that, as the revelation of God, “is God’s question, no more, no less. Being a Christian is being held to that question in such a way that the world of religious discourse may hear it.”

10. The Holy Spirit is the divine glorifier. After Moltmann, both Pannenberg and Robert Jenson find a direct connection between pneumatology and eschatology. Both accord an ontological priority to the future and link it to the Spirit: Pannenberg speaks of the future as God’s mode of being, and Jenson says that “the Spirit is God’s own future that he is looking forward to.” They both seem to bind God’s deity to the perfecting work of the Spirit, which is the apotheosis of creation. Although there are philosophical (Hegelian) problems with this vision, and theological dangers too, there is an awesome boldness, beauty, and grandeur to it. In the eschaton, the Holy Spirit is stage centre, cover of anonymity blown, face-to-face in the faces of all the redeemed in their infinite diversity (Vladimir Lossky). The end is doxology.