Rémi Brague, Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age

I imagine that many readers are familiar already with the French historian and philosopher Rémi Brague. My first encounter with him is via his latest book, Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for a Modern Age (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). It's a stitched-together collection of nine papers that Brague has given to English-speaking audiences in recent years. But that's not to say this little book doesn't put forward a coherent argument.

Brague is a conservative in the deepest sense of the word. He is concerned with the conservation of humanity itself, which he takes to be under assault in the modern West. Exhibiting his wit (not to mention his obsession with etymologies and his mastery of the English language) he commits a "deliberate spoonerism" and argues that the civilization-saving conservatism we need is essentially a commitment to conversation--conversation both with the human past and with nature itself.

Modernity is, according to Brague, a type of barbarism, defined as a "refusal to communicate". Modernity refuses to communicate with the past or with nature by way of its mythical conception of self-determination, which denies continuity with what came before and which promises a future of humanly achieved progress. The driver of this barbarism is modernity's methodological atheism which, while it allows for the description and even exploitation of the world, can offer no compelling reason why it is good for human beings to exist and to keep existing. Thus, the assertion of human autonomy inevitably results in a type of deep existential malaise. Reason itself must be seen as a product of irrational forces. Rather than grounds for meaningful action, there are merely deterministic causes.

The central move to treat modernity's condition must be a recovery of the notion of the Good in the Platonic rather than Aristotelian sense. If we are to have a reason to live, we must understand the Good not merely as something we do, but rather as the necessary ontological ground of all that exists. Brague argues that the necessity of the Good is implied in the modern (Kantian) concept of ethics as rational action (ie, action rooted in the Being of the subject), and evil as an irrational perversion of this freedom. This is a roundabout confirmation of, not only the Platonic vision, but the biblical creation story, both of which state that the Good is given to us with Being and must therefore be received as gift.

Recovering the necessity of the Good requires a return to a cosmological view of nature--the belief that the universe not only can be described in its present state or understood in terms of the mechanisms of how it came to be what it is, but rather that it is inherently meaningful and intelligible. The cosmos must be seen in terms of logos--communicating goodness to us. Humanity is not a stranger to this good nature (or "creation"), but rather at home in it, part of it. Within this good creation human freedom must be conceived as the freedom to manifest what we are as given by, in, and with nature, and not in some sort of rebellion against it. Freedom is responsive human communication with the goodness of nature. Culture is the byproduct of this communication, a cultic overflowing of praise to God (whether we realize it or not). This means, Brague says, that Christianity, if it is the true religion, is not itself a culture. Instead, it exists as a conserving conversation with every culture.

The necessity of the Good, and the attendant recovery of premodern notions of nature, freedom, and culture, Brague contends, should lead to a reintegration of both the ancient pagan virtues and the biblical commandments. Virtues are habits that allow us to "do good", to act in accordance with the nature of things. The biblical commandments of the God who says of creation "it is good" are never antithetical to this, but rather must always be species of the mandate to "Be what you are!' This rediscovery and reintegration of virtues and commandments can only take place in the family. The modern state and the modern market militate against the family. The former consistently reduces people to atomistic individuals, whereas the latter trains them as individuals who think of everything as a commodity. But the family is essential for society. The biological bond between parents and children, and the unconditional love that go with it, communicate the givenness and goodness of one's being. The family, or those things founded on the notion of family (like monarchies or the church), are the only institutions that can care about "the very long run". Only they can have a deep sense of responsibility to, and gratitude for, the past, and an existential concern for the future.

Brague's Curing Mad Truths is a radical assault on many of the things taken for granted in modern liberal societies. Nevertheless, as a "conservative" (read: conserving through conversating) project, it does not advocate some impossible return to the past. It calls us to reconnect the branches of truth upon which modernity sits to the metaphysical trunk from which they have been severed. It's a provocative, convincing, and accessible little book (only 115pp., notes and index excluded) by an important scholar, and it deserves wide attention.

Prayer for Newtown, Connecticut, December 14

“But wherefore could I not pronounce Amen?” 
—Macbeth

God of liberty, we give you thanks for the many freedoms that we enjoy by your blessing.

For the freedom to express ourselves, we give you thanks! 

For the freedom to satisfy our urges and impulses, we give you thanks!

For freedom of trade, especially the freedom to buy and sell weapons and ammunition at competitive prices, we give you thanks!

For the freedom to bear arms, we give you thanks!

Save us, O God, from those who would threaten our rights;

Save us from legislators who would take away our freedoms;

Save us from those who would constrain the free expression of our feelings;
Save us from those who would compromise our free commerce in guns, weapons, and all instruments of self-protection.

Increase our freedoms more and more:

freedom to do as we please,
freedom to buy and sell,

freedom to possess handguns, semi-automatic assault rifles, automatic machine guns, stockpiles of ammunition, holsters, slings, scopes, and other accessories,

freedom against neighbours,
freedom against strangers,
freedom against children,
freedom against the unborn, 

freedom with our bodies and the bodies of others,
freedom to pursue our own interests,

freedom to gratify ourselves at any cost.
May the firstlings of our hearts be the firstlings of our hands,

and may we bring this freedom, O God, to those who lack it.

Fulfil us, O God!
Gratify our desires!
Validate our feelings!
Let us be free, though the world perish!

We ask it in the name of Jesus, your beloved son,
whose birth and infancy we venerate,
who came among us harmless as any child –

Adrian Johnston: Žižek's ontology

Those of you who are into Žižek (yes, I’m looking at you, Shane) will be interested in Adrian Johnston’s very fine new book, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Northwestern UP, 2008). The book is a fascinating account of subjectivity and ontology, and it’s far and away the best and most interesting thing I’ve read on Žižek. (Actually, the best part of the book is Žižek’s humorous endorsement on the cover: he expresses some anxiety about the question whether Johnston “is the original and I am a copy.”)

To summarise Johnston’s argument very briefly: While Badiou wants to think subjectivity as something that can never emerge from being, Žižek tries to understand subjectivity as emerging from flaws that inhere in being. For Žižek, subjectivity occurs as a kind of monstrous mistake, a malfunctioning produced by the cracks and imbalances in being: “this malfunctioning occurs because substance is shot through with openings for possible deviations from its ‘normal’ functioning…. For Žižek, true subjectivity is a kind of catastrophic imbalance that shouldn’t exist, a monstrous ontological mutation that comes to be as an outgrowth of antagonisms and tensions immanent to the being of human nature” (p. 196).

This theory of subjectivity leads Žižek to rethink the very ontological foundations of materialism: “One of the most regularly recurring philosophemes in Žižek’s oeuvre … is the notion that being as such is ‘not all’. He repeatedly insists upon the incomplete and discordant nature of whatever constitutes the foundational substance of ontology. Žižek describes the Hegelian Absolute … not as a calm, serene, universal All peacefully at one with itself but, on the contrary, as at war with itself, as internally rent asunder by antagonisms and unrest…. A crack runs through being. Žižek identifies this crack as the subject” (p. 165).

On a related note, a reader of F&T has notified me of Terry Eagleton’s new book, Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics (Blackwell, 2008) – I haven’t seen this yet, but apparently it critiques the enthusiasm with which some theologians have tried to appropriate Žižek and Badiou. If you’ve read the new Eagleton book, I’d be very interested to know what you think of it.

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.)

Human agency according to Augustine, Paul, and Lou Martyn

In his extraordinary book on the history of Christian spirituality, The Wound of Knowledge, Rowan Williams describes Augustine’s understanding of human agency:

“Augustine is less concerned than almost any of the Greek Fathers with freedom…. The human subject is indeed a mystery; no one could be more painfully and eloquently aware of this than Augustine. But the mysteriousness and unpredictability have more to do with the forces that act on the subject…. Augustine’s undiminished appeal to a post-Freudian generation has much to do with this aspect of his thought. He confronts and accepts the unpalatable truth that rationality is not the most important factor in human experience, that the human subject is a point in a vast structure of forces whose operation is tantalisingly obscure to the reason. Human reality is acted upon at least as much as acting” (pp. 82-83).

This reminds me of a provocative SBL paper in November by the great Paul scholar, J. Louis Martyn (he was in a session with Douglas Campbell and Susan Eastman, with responses from Darrell Guder and Telford Work). Martyn presented Paul’s understanding of human agency along these lines: the human agent has no subjective autonomy and no moral competence to choose her own path. She is under the sway of inscrutable cosmic powers – and will remain so except for the militant, apocalyptic interruption of a divine agent who vanquishes the enslaving powers and creates a new moral subject.

Further, according to Martyn (much to the displeasure of his respondent, Telford Work!), Paul’s apocalyptic conception of human agency is a deliberate critique of the “classic moral drama” which underlies much of the Old Testament, e.g. in Deuteronomy, where “morally competent” agents are said to stand at a crossroad between two possible choices.

For Paul, there is no crossroad, no moral competence, no “choose this day.” To be sure, there is a real alternative: slavery or freedom! But this alternative doesn’t lie in our power or depend on our agency. This means that God’s action cannot be said to “help” us or “enable” us – the divine action is a unilateral liberation which constitutes us as new agents.

After his paper, Martyn was asked: “Why are you so uncomfortable with the word ‘enable’?” He replied: “I’m not uncomfortable with it. It’s just wrong.”

Divine and human agency: no competition

“Drama offers a sort of parable of the fact that the exercise of power resides at least partially in letting other people act. The secret is not to suppose that your agency is incompatible with the agency of others – that there is competition for a limited ‘space’ of agency. Your agency does not need to push the agency of others aside in order to triumph…. Just so, in dealing with the Christian God, we ought not to be in the business of identifying which actions are our achievements, and which God’s puppetry, in order to attribute relative quantities of power respectively…. The highest instance of power we have been given to know in the God of Jesus Christ does not compete for a limited arena so that it can exercise itself in brute solitude over against us.”

—Ben Quash, “The Play Beyond the Play,” in Sounding the Depths: Theology through the Arts, ed. Jeremy Begbie (London: SCM, 2002), pp. 102-3.

Slavoj Žižek and the meaning of freedom

The new paperback edition of Slavoj Žižek’s The Universal Exception has just been released. It includes a new essay with the catchy title, “Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on the Violence in France and Related Matters.” And it also includes a delightful new preface by Žižek, entitled “The Big Other between Violence and Civility.” Drawing on the notion of civility as a free act which is feigned as an obligation, Žižek characterises human freedom as a “feigned necessity” (p. xii). Belonging to a society “involves a paradoxical point at which each of us is ordered to embrace freely, as the result of our choice, what is imposed on us anyway” – this is the “paradox of choosing freely what is already necessary” (p. xv).

G. C. Berkouwer on divine and human action

In his brilliant work on Divine Election (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960), the Dutch Reformed theologian G. C. Berkouwer argues that the relationship between divine and human action must not be understood in competitive terms – as though there were either a conflict or a mere “distribution of work” (p. 50) between God and human beings.

Berkouwer observes that divine sovereignty and human responsibility have often been viewed “as factors that limited one another on … the same level” (p. 21). Although such a competitive construal is clearly flawed, Berkouwer does not suggest that the relationship between divine and human action is simply a “complementary relationship.” Rather, in polemic against both Catholic and Protestant forms of synergism, he insists that divine and human action are not “component factors, functioning side by side” (p. 44). Faith is not the complement of grace, but its correlate.

What, then, is the nature of this correlation? “The divine act makes room, leaves open the possibility for man’s act. That possibility is not absorbed or destroyed by divine superiority, but created, called forth, by it” (p. 46). God’s action is thus a summons to human action; grace creates the space within which the human response becomes possible. Here, Berkouwer draws directly on Karl Barth’s polemic against synergism. Barth speaks of the theological “fear-complex” (Angstkomplex) which causes God’s action to be viewed as a threat to creaturely freedom: “as though we were perhaps ascribing too much to God and too little to the creature, as though we were encroaching too far on the particularity and autonomy of creaturely action and especially on human freedom and responsibility! As though there could be any sense in sheltering from such an intrusion under the safe cover of a crude or subtle synergism!” (CD III/3, pp. 146-47).

This is precisely Berkouwer’s point as well: there can be no thought of a competition between divine and human action, since God is the one who makes room for human action in the first place. To be human is to exist in the “space” of God’s grace.

Mozart and the invitation to freedom

In a delightful essay in the latest issue of New Blackfriars, Thomas Casey explores the depiction of human freedom in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni: “Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the Invitation to Full Freedom,” 
New Blackfriars 88:1015 (2007), 288-299. Here’s an excerpt:

“The truth that ushers in our freedom is the realization that there is more to each of us than we suspect: as persons, we exist beyond ourselves. We can never be circumscribed within the immanent horizons of culture and society. We are not commodities or things. However limiting the culture we inhabit, it can never definitively stifle the infinite desires that surge and rise within us. We are excessive creatures, elastically exceeding the web of finite contexts. This is because we are founded upon a freedom that is full and expansive and perfect. We find our origin – and goal – in God.”

Free for God

“Not for anything in the world would I be free from God; I wish to be free in God and for God…. God must again be the centre of our whole life.”

—Nicolai Berdyaev, The End of Our Time (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1933), p. 105.

Ten propositions on freedom

by Kim Fabricius

1. An intellectual history Europe since the Enlightenment could be written with the title “The Decline and Fall of the Concept of Freedom”. The nadir has now been reached with the banality of freedom as “choice”. From life-style and shopping, to schools and hospitals, to our bodies and death itself, the mantra is “choice”. Such an understanding of freedom “presupposes a blank will looking out at a bundle of options like goods on a supermarket shelf” (Rowan Williams). A more vulgar anthropology is hard to imagine.

2. Nor a more dangerous one: for “freedom of choice” read “will-to-power” and social nihilism. And all the more dangerous for the rhetorical force of the word “freedom”, with its claim to ideological innocence and, indeed, quasi- religious righteousness. Here a hermeneutics of secular suspicion is de rigueur – but so too is a hermeneutics of theological retrieval and reconstruction.

3. Writing at the beginning of the Cold War, Isaiah Berlin famously plotted a pre- to post-Rousseau trajectory of freedom. Initially Berlin referred to these two types of liberty as the “liberal” and the “romantic”, the former understood as the absence of obstacles to thought and action, the latter understood as self-expression and -actualisation. Later, in a seminal inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1958, Berlin recast these concepts as “negative” and “positive” liberty. Berlin did not reject positive liberty as such, but he observed, historically, a “strange reversal”: what began (for example in the French Revolution) as reformation ended in terror and tyranny.

4. Berlin was attacked from both left and right. The right resented his challenge to liberal elites and disputed his claim that the values of freedom and truth may be incompatible, and his insistence that liberty should therefore be disconnected from projects of liberation. The left argued that his critique of self-realisation, while right about Rousseau, was a distortion of Kant; and that while on target about Stalinism, it left laissez-faire regimes to run amok.

5. Needless to say, theologians must look on these internecine secular polemics with astonished detachment. The scene really is Pythonesque. How, we wonder, can these philosophers be unaware of the elephant in the room? Because, they think, the beast has long been banished to the Reservation for Otiose Deities. But why the enforced exile? Because they think that divine and human freedom is a zero-sum game, an exercise in irreducible agonistics. Because, in short, they have a pagan notion of divine omnipotence and presume the Trinity to be a mathematical nonsense.

6. Herbert McCabe (following Aquinas): “God’s activity does not compete with mine. Whereas the activity of any other creature makes a difference to mine and would interfere with my freedom, the activity of God makes no difference. It has a more fundamental job to do than making a difference. It makes me have my own activity in the first place. I am free…. Not free of him (this would be to cease to exist), but free of other creatures. The idea that God’s causality could interfere with my freedom can only arise from an idolatrous notion of God as a very large and powerful creature – a part of the world.”

7. The inevitable and predictable upshot of this oppositional understanding of human and divine freedom is an antagonistic reading of human freedom over against nature, other individuals, and society as a whole. And thus the “convention” of freedom as human autonomy, pre- or post-Rousseau, personal or political, is unmasked as “destructive of the very reality of liberty which it seeks to uphold and defend…. What is required is a gospel-derived account of freedom as that which creatures discover in fellowship with the free, self-bestowing God made known in Christ and in the Spirit” (John Webster).

8. The starting point for such an account will be freedom as divine gift, the gift of me and the gift of others. I am free to be the unique person the Father has created me to be, freed by the Son from the false self I have become, enslaved to sin and death, freed for life in the Holy Spirit who perfects human freedom. The Trinity sets me free from self-concern, above all the self-concern of fear. But in the same dynamic movement, the Trinity sets me free for other people, given to me to love. Evangelical freedom is thus not the “freedom” to do what I want. “What kind of power would that be! Man becomes free and is free by choosing, deciding, and determining himself in accordance with the freedom of God. The source of man’s freedom is also its yardstick” (Karl Barth).

9. Luther: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant, subject to all.” The relationship between freedom and obedience is not antithetical but dialectical. Ben Quash suggests that Karl Barth “wants the creature to have the obedient embrace of freedom,” while Hans Urs von Balthasar “wants the free embrace of obedience.” Both, however, are agreed that the free creature is characterised, above all, by joy and thanksgiving – and by prayer and praise.

10. Finally, a theological account of freedom must have not only a relational and social but indeed a political dimension, a baptised version of Isaiah Berlin’s “positive liberty”. The Old Testament paradigms are the exodus from Egyptian slavery and the return from Babylonian captivity. In the New Testament Jesus reconfigures Isaiah (of Jerusalem, not Berlin!) with his Jubilee manifesto (Luke 4:18-19, cf. Isaiah 61:1-2). The freedom of the children of God is more than political freedom, but its telos cannot be less than political freedom. When Western missionaries translated the Bible into African languages, for “redemption” they often used words that meant, literally, “God takes the chains from our necks.” Libertas is a package deal – even if the package is finally unwrapped only in the civitas Dei.

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.

Paul Helm on Karl Barth

Paul Helm of Regent College has written a critique of Barth’s doctrine of election for a forthcoming volume entitled Karl Barth’s Theology: Collected Critical Perspectives; and he has posted a draft of the essay on his blog.

Helm has done lots of excellent work on philosophical theology and on the history of Christian thought, so it’s interesting to see him attempting to grapple with Barth. Admittedly, he hasn’t yet really penetrated into the structures of Barth’s thought – and his interest in Barth seems to have derived mainly from Bruce McCormack’s essay on election in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (2000).

Bruce McCormack’s interpretation has generated heated debate among Barth specialists. And Helm attempts to weigh into this debate with his own rather heavy-handed philosophical critique: “It is no good saying, with McCormack, that for Barth ‘essence is given in the act of electing, and is, in fact, constituted by that eternal act.’ For necessarily actions have agents. The act of electing must be the action of someone; it cannot be an act of no-one which, upon its occurrence, constitutes the agent as a someone.” Although that seems like a common-sense objection to McCormack (and to Barth), it is in fact a petitio principii – it simply begs the whole question of the relationship between act and being. From one perspective, Barth’s entire theological project could be seen as a challenge to precisely Helm’s common-sense assumption that the agent must precede the act.

In the same way, when Helm objects to Barth’s view of divine freedom, his criticism rests on a theological petitio principii: “It may be granted, with Barth, that God is free in the sense that he is under no obligation to do what he does. But could he have done other than he did? On Barth’s view … it does not seem to be possible.” Again, Barth’s whole theological project could be viewed as a challenge to precisely this assumption that “freedom” entails alternativity of choice, a formal ability to choose between different options. For Barth (as McCormack has rightly emphasised), God is free precisely in his decision to be this particular God. To ask whether God “could have done other than he did” is simply to bypass Barth’s own understanding of what divine freedom is all about.

I enjoyed reading Paul Helm’s paper, and I’m delighted to see that a volume of “critical perspectives” on Barth is being published – this, at any rate, is better than any uncritical repetition of Barth! But an effective critique of Barth’s doctrine of election will have to engage much more deeply with the structures of Barth’s own thought, and will have to take seriously Barth’s own highly distinctive understanding of divine freedom on the one hand, and his highly actualistic understanding of the divine being on the other.

The freedom of God's future

“If the futurity of God is thus the structure of his trinitarian life with and for us, we do not need to safeguard God’s freedom by the clumsy device of calling the ‘dispensational Trinity’ the ‘image’ of an ‘immanent Trinity.’ For futurity is the condition of freedom. God is free over against the realized actualities of his trinitarian life with us, because he is always ahead of them; he always can be otherwise triune than he has so far been. This freedom is his trinitarian life.”

—Robert W. Jenson, God after God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future, Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 174.

What is grace?

“Grace is the presence, event, and revelation of what the human cannot think or do or reach or attain or grasp, but of what is, in virtue of its coming from God, the most simple, true and real of all things for those to whom it is addressed and who recognise it. Grace is the factual overcoming of the distinction between God and humanity, creator and creature, heaven and earth – something that cannot be grasped in any theory or brought about by any technique or human practice…. Grace is God’s sovereign intervention on the human’s behalf. The work and gift of this grace of his is the freedom of the children of God – their freedom to call upon him as Father.”

—Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4 Lecture Fragments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), p. 72.

What is hell?

“Hell is the name of that false history against which the true story, in Christ, is told, and it is exposed as the true destination of all our violence, by the light of the resurrection, even as Christ breaks open the gates of hell and death. Hell is with us at all times, a phantom kingdom perpetuating itself in the wastes of sinful hearts, but only becomes visible to us as hell because the true kingdom has shed its light upon history….

“Hell is the perfect concretization of ethical freedom, perfect justice without delight, the soul’s work of legislation for itself, where ethics has achieved its final independence from aesthetics. Absolute subjective liberty is known only in hell…. [H]ell is the purest interiority…. [I]t is a turning in, a fabrication of an inward depth, a shadow, a privation, a loss of the whole outer world, a refusal of the surface….

“[H]ell is no place within creation, no event, though its history is everywhere told, its dominion everywhere suffered.”

—David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 399-400.

Why I am not a universalist

On our new blog of the week, The Fire and the Rose, David Congdon has been posting a remarkably interesting series on the topic “Why I am a universalist.” He draws extensively on Karl Barth’s theology in support of a universalist view of grace. Naturally we can try to press Barth’s theology in this direction if we wish. But we shouldn’t forget that Barth himself was always sharply critical of “universalism.”

For Barth, the grace of God is characterised by freedom. On the one hand, this means that we can never impose limits on the scope of grace; and on the other hand, it means that we can never impose a universalist “system” on grace. In either case, we would be compromising the freedom of grace—we would be presuming that we can define the exact scope of God’s liberality. So Barth’s theology of grace includes a dialectical protest: Barth protests both against a system of universalism and against a denial of universalism! The crucial point is that God’s grace is free grace: it is nothing other than God himself acting in freedom. And if God acts in freedom, then we can neither deny nor affirm the possibility of universal salvation.

In Barth’s own words: “The proclamation of the Church must make allowance for this freedom of grace. Apokatastasis Panton? No, for a grace which automatically would ultimately have to embrace each and every one would certainly not be free grace. It surely would not be God’s grace. But would it be God’s free grace if we could absolutely deny that it could do that? Has Christ been sacrified only for our sins? Has he not ... been sacrificed for the whole world? … [Thus] the freedom of grace is preserved on both these sides” (Barth, God Here and Now, pp. 41-42).

For Barth, then, we can neither affirm nor deny the possibility that all will be saved. So what can we do? Barth’s answer is clear: we can “hope” (see CD IV/3, pp. 477-78). And as Hans Urs von Balthasar has also shown, there is all the difference in the world between believing in universal salvation and hoping for it.

The fall from freedom

“Like someone who has shrieked too loudly and has lost his voice, so we have been boastful in our freedom, and now freedom ... has been lost.”

—Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology (London: Lutterworth, 1939), 135.

Freedom and theological arguments

“While arguments of physics, based on observation, experiment and mathematics, have a logically compelling character, the philosophical-theological arguments for the acceptance of a meta-empirical reality can at best be an initiation and an invitation. Thus in these latter questions there is no intellectual compulsion, but rather freedom.”

—Hans Küng, Der Anfang aller Dinge (2005), p. 95.

Are there "fundamentals" of faith?

Chris Tilling has a thoughtful post on the fundamentalist controversy of the early 1900s. The fundamentalists claimed that there were five “fundamentals” of Christian faith: the verbal inerrancy of Scripture; the divinity of Christ; the virgin birth; the substitutionary theory of atonement; and the bodily return of Christ. Needless to say, these polemical points can hardly qualify as the “fundamentals” of faith.

The most serious error of the early fundamentalists was that they tried to turn faith into a law, into a set of doctrines that must be believed—but faith is only ever a matter of freedom and permission, not of law or obligation. That's why I myself could never be comfortable using the term “fundamentals.”

So when Chris asks whether there are any true “fundamentals,” I would have to answer No. But perhaps instead of speaking of “fundamentals” (i.e. things that you have to believe in order to be a Christian), it would be better to speak of “identifying beliefs” of Christian faith (i.e. beliefs which are essential to the identification of faith as Christian faith). In this case, there’s no question of trying to impose certain beliefs on others or of turning certain doctrines into laws that must be obeyed, but only of describing those beliefs that distinctively mark out Christian communities and traditions from other communities and traditions.

So what are the “identifying beliefs” of Christian faith? It seems to me that there are two related ones: Christian faith is identified both by its christological character and by its trinitarian character. And at the core of both of these identifying characteristics is a single, central belief: a belief in the unity between Jesus Christ and God.

This, then, is what I would highlight as the central “identifying belief” of Christian faith: that in Jesus Christ we have to do with God himself. This belief itself can be (and has been) expressed with many different doctrinal formulations. And the formulations themselves are less important than the underlying intuition that our encounter with Jesus Christ is an encounter with the reality of God.