1/ Reviewing Bruce McCormack’s: The Humility of the Eternal Son

I am going to attempt to write a series of blog posts that will be sections of what potentially could be turned into a review essay on chapter 7 (the final chapter) of Bruce McCormack’s book The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon. Chapter 7 is where McCormack presents his constructive proposal on what he considers to be the needed ‘repair’ of Chalcedonian Christology. As the reader will see, he doesn’t abandon Chalcedon, he constructively engages with it offering an interesting proposal that I believe might be a way forward for thinking the Divinity and humanity of the eternal Son together in the singular person of Jesus Christ. I plan on sharing what I take to be key passages from McCormack’s chapter 7 and engaging with his thinking from there. The first passage presents McCormack’s general proposal, which he develops throughout the rest of the chapter.

Karl Barth was right, I think, to translate two “natures” into understandings of the “divine” and the “human” that arise out of close attention to “the history of God in his mode of existence as the Son.” Both “divine” and “human” being are “defined” by this history, for this history constitutes the “essence” of each. And so, in the place of two discrete (substantially conceived) “natures” subsisting in one and the same “persons,” I am going to posit the existence of a single composite hypostasis, constituted in time by means of what I will call the “ontological receptivity” of the eternal Son to the “act of being” proper to the human Jesus as human. “Ontological receptivity,” it seems to me, is the most apt phrase describing the precise nature of the relation of the “Son” to Jesus of Nazareth as witnessed to in the biblical texts we treated.

I am going to argue further that it is the Son’s “ontological receptivity” that makes an eternal act of “identification” on the part of the Logos with the human Jesus to be constitutive of his identity as the second “person” of the Trinity even before the actual uniting occurs. This is what I believe to have been missing in Jüngel and Jenson. The “Son” has as “Son” an eternal determination for incarnation and, therefore, for uniting through “receptivity.” He is, in himself, “receptive.” To say any more than this at this point is impossible in the absence of a more thorough reconstruction of Chalcedon, so I will stop for the moment. Suffice it to say that “ontological receptivity” on the part of the Logos does all the heavy lifting that the genus tapeinoticum would have done (had the Reformed accepted it). And it does this without requiring acceptance of the classical metaphysics that made both the genus majesticum and the genus tapeinoticum to be (logical) possibilities. In any event, the reconstruction that follows will in no way violate the fundamental commitments of classical Reformed Christology. It will, in fact, extend essential commitments while breaking with non-essential commitments.

What is essential to any genuinely Reformed Christology is (again) the emphasis placed upon the integrity of the divine and human elements in their uniting. And I will secure that emphasis. The unimpaired integrity of the divine will be secured by means of the stress laid on a determination for incarnation that is essential to the eternal Son. The unimpaired integrity of the human will be secured by the Son’s receptivity that prevents instrumentalization of the human. What emerges will be in the spirit of Chalcedon even if it is not according to the letter.

So much by way of introduction.1

I have been reading Bruce for a long time. When I read his ‘repair’ or proposal it doesn’t fall on fresh ground. In other words, I have heard this from him, and some of his students, for decades now (one in particular, Darren Sumner; see his work Karl Barth and the Incarnation: Christology and the Humility of God). These first inklings of what McCormack is only bringing together now (in this book, and we can assume the following two forthcoming in this trilogy) I was first introduced to in McCormack’s essay/chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, “Grace and Being: the role of God’s gracious election in Karl Barth’s theological ontology.” This chapter from McCormack represented, at that point, a type of watershed moment, which ended up being known quaintly as the “Companion controversy,” and/or the “Barth Wars.” Without getting into that, the controversial nature of what McCormack was proposing then in certain ways seems to be the seedlings of what is now blossoming in his ‘repair of Chalcedon.’

The critique has always been (by George Hunsinger, Paul Molnar et al.) that McCormack’s reading, and “revisionist” appropriation of Barth’s themes works against the grain of Barth’s textual theological offering. Be that as it may, that hatchet, for McCormack has been buried; he has moved on, and is developing here, not an intentionally “Barthian” account of things, instead, his is simply an offering of constructive Christological imagination. If the reader is familiar with modern theology, what the reader senses, if they do, and they’d be right, is a type of so-called postmetaphysical or post-Barthian analysis by McCormack. The reader might pick this up merely by reading the passage I offered from McCormack above. But if the reader had indeed read McCormack previous to this final chapter, they would have understood that McCormack is distancing himself from unqualified post-Barthian readings of the Christological history of ideas. He proffers what he along with his colleague Alexandra Pârvan identify as a ‘psychological ontology,’ which fits well with what he describes for us above as ‘ontological receptivity,’ to which we now turn.

When McCormack writes the following, “I am going to argue further that it is the Son’s ‘ontological receptivity’ that makes an eternal act of ‘identification’ on the part of the Logos with the human Jesus to be constitutive of his identity as the second ‘person’ of the Trinity even before the actual uniting occurs …,” one gets the type of ‘narratival’ feeling you might get when reading Robert Jenson’s own “Barth” inspired oeuvre. I would suggest that it is this thesis offered by McCormack that serves most controversial for his proposal, and yet I find it rather compelling in certain ways (which I will have to address in a later post). It is this theory, in regard to ontological receptivity, that has been inchoately present in McCormack’s thinking (at least in published form) since at least his ‘Companion’ piece. The controversial aspect of this comes back to the fear that McCormack is engaging, at the christological level, in some form of adoptionism or Ebionism. But McCormack attempts to elide this charge by emphasizing, as we see in the second paragraph above, the notion that the eternal Son has always already been Deus incarnandus (God to become flesh); which fits with McCormack’s understanding of Barth’s doctrine of election, to a point (McCormack does not think Barth’s doctrine of election goes far enough to allow McCormack to speak in the ways he now is with reference to “ontological receptivity,” which you can read about here).

For McCormack, thus far, he believes that Godself’s choice or election to be enfleshed in Christ, makes His reception in the man from Nazareth the most fitting and organic outcome that Godself eternally pre-destined for Himself as the fundamentum or foundation of the Divine identity. One could argue that this escapes adoptionism insofar that in this choice to be incarnate, God has always already been the eternal identity, or the inner-reality for which creation itself had been fitted in its own independently contingent and ordered way. As such, the Christological heresy of adoptionism has no air to breathe insofar that the type of abstract creation required for such a notion to exist never obtains; that is, the condition for an abstract notion of humanity apart from its predetermination to be what it is vis-á-vis God is a counterfactual with no factual basis in the economy of God as revealed in His history for the world in Jesus Christ. This might seem to lend itself towards a failure to secure a proper Creator/creature distinction in a God-world relation, thus resulting in some type of panentheism through a christological malaise. But McCormack will attempt to rebuff this error by appeal to a robust reposition on a Pneumatological-Christology forthcoming. If the Divine identity is contingent on God’s life for the world in Christ, the Spirit will need to do the type of “heavy-lifting” that McCormack is wont to stress as “ontological receptivity.”

Even as I write this, I am still processing whether I can co-sign with Bruce, and say amen. His reception and constructive engagement with Barth’s doctrine of election has always been intriguing to me. His Christological proposal in this book is no less intriguing; indeed, it seems to take his form of thinking, in regard to his constructive imagination with Barth, to another level. To be sure, his proposal here is not intended to be a “Barthian” proposal, per se; McCormack makes this clear throughout the book. His primary modern interlocutors are Karl Barth, Robert Jenson, Eberhard Jüngel, Sergius Bulgakov, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is not slavishly committed to any of his ‘teachers,’ but the reader can see bright pieces throughout, informing his ‘repair’ work as he attempts to harvest the best from them and imaginatively bring them into a concerto of his own rhythmic orchestration.

 

1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 252-53.

 

The Great Peace of the Barth Wars: McCormack’s Recanto to Hunsinger and Molnar

Maybe you’ve heard of the ‘Companion Controversy,’ which later came to be called The Barth Wars, by some. I have been published, a wee bit, on this here; as far as some commentary. In nuce, it entails an embroilment within Anglophone Barth studies; that is, between, in particular, Bruce McCormack and George Hunsinger/Paul Molnar respectively. It has to do with the way McCormack reads Barth’s doctrine of election as a sort of organizing dogma for his doctrine of God; in a highly actualistic sense. Hunsinger/Molnar demur and claim that the ‘textual’ (Hunsinger’s word) Barth, and his doctrine of God, has an antecedent reality (which is the classical position), and as such the economic God cannot be fully read back into the immanent (in se) God, as McCormack proposes. That’s a very rough sketch of the matter.

In general, Hunsinger’s critique, in particular, has been that McCormack offers a revisionist Barth; and thus, doesn’t actually offer Barth’s theology at all—at least when it comes to a doctrine of God proper. McCormack has maintained that he has been offering something of the logic of Barth’s doctrine of election vis-à-vis God proper, even if Barth didn’t follow through with the logic itself. Even so, at the end of the day, McCormack has claimed to be reading the grain of Barth’s theology faithfully; more so than his ‘opponents,’ Hunsinger/Molnar. And now, in his most recent work,1 McCormack seems to finally admit that he is doing something different than Barth when it comes to Barth’s textual doctrine of election (although read me below, as I’ve been thinking this through, even as I write this, I’m developing). In other words, as I’ve been reading McCormack’s new book (which is excellent thus far), a rather striking thing gets communicated. He acknowledges that he disagrees with Barth, or that Barth’s doctrine of election represents “the limit of how far I [McCormack] can follow him.”2

Here is the full passage from McCormack:

Looking back at Barth’s early appropriation of Calvin’s exegesis of Phil. 2 in support of a Reformed Christology, which laid its emphasis upon the preservation of the “natures” of Christ in their original integrity subsequent to their union, Barth’s understanding of the divine kenosis in his later Christology clearly points in the direction of providing an explanation for the susceptibility of the eternal Son to the human experiences of suffering and death. His way of upholding divine immutability was to anchor the existence of the Logos “in the form of a servant” in the divine election — understood as a “primal decision” (Urentscheidung). Barth’s later Christology thus became the epistemological ground of our knowledge of election. Election then was posited as the ontological ground of Barth’s later Christology. Clearly, he wanted to understand the human experiences of suffering and death as essential to God in his second mode of being. Whether his doctrine of election was fully adequate to this task is debatable — which marks the limit of how far I can follow him.3

So, what is rather interesting about this development is that McCormack seems to be affirming his reading of Barth’s doctrine of election, the one that Hunsinger says is a revisionist reading, but then coming to the conclusion that he cannot follow Barth down this path; i.e. of reading human suffering and death into the second mode of being of the triune God into the essential or ‘eternal’ or in se being of God. As I reflect on this, even in this moment, it almost seems as if McCormack says he cannot follow Barth here; and yet on the other hand Hunsinger/Molnar are saying you don’t have to, because you never were to begin with. In other words, it’s almost as if McCormack is de facto agreeing with Hunsinger/Molnar, in the sense that if one were to follow through on McCormack’s “revisionist” Barth, that that theologian would be the pantheist, or panentheist that Hunsinger/Molnar have said “McCormack’s Barth” indeed reduces to. So instead of admitting that he has been misreading Barth’s doctrine of election, which would be a sort of recanto to Hunsinger/Molnar, he continues to maintain that he has indeed read Barth’s doctrine of election correctly, but that he cannot follow Barth in that direction. He seems to be making a “classical turn,” potentially, albeit one that seeks to repair Chalcedon’s Cyrillian misstep with the resources that he seems to have found in a burgeoning ‘Spirit Christology’ (I’m still reading, so we’ll see).

 

1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

2 Ibid., 121. 

3 Ibid., 120-21. 

Book Review: The Epistle To The Ephesians Karl Barth

The Epistle to the Ephesians: Karl Barth

(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2017) ISBN 9780801030918 (hardcover) – 182 pp. Price $18.33

Edited by: R. David Nelson

Translated by: Ross M. Wright

I wanted to first off say thank you to Baker Academic for sending me an unsolicited review copy of Karl Barth’s Ephesians commentary. This review will offer entrée into the current volume under consideration by engaging with the editor’s and translator’s thoughts, and then by engaging with the two forwards written respectively by Francis Watson and the late John Webster. In closing I will give a my brief impression of this book, and impress upon the reader what I think about its value.

As the editor, David Nelson notes in regard to the origin of Barth’s commentary on Ephesians, as well as its offering in English translation in this current work, “Karl Barth’s lectures on Ephesians from 1921–22 are published for the first time in English in this little volume. The lectures provide a window into Barth’s developing theology during the critical period of the early 1920s and right around the publication of the second edition of Der Römerbrief (1922)” (p. 1). Indeed, Barth did this work as he taught Ephesians in his role as professor of Reformed theology at Göttingen University; which was his first professorial post following the publication of his first volume of Der Römerbrief. As the translator Ross Wright notes in regard to the development of these lectures and what became Barth’s commentary on Ephesians, “…The exposition consists of a detailed exegesis of the Greek text of Ephesians 1:1–23, originally delivered as thirteen lectures, including a summary of Ephesians 2–6 in the final lecture” (p. 7). The reason Barth had to compress chapters two through six was simply a lack of time; he of course had many other pressures placed upon him, not to mention the publishing of his second Romans commentary. But what he did produce in his more detailed exegesis is quite impressive, and what you would expect from the capaciousness of Karl Barth.

As noted previously Francis Watson and John Webster, respectively, wrote introductory essays for this publication of Barth’s commentary; both valuable pieces of reflection in and of themselves. As David Nelson notes, as a former PhD student of Webster’s: “Barth’s Epistle to the Ephesians turned out to be my final opportunity to work with my erstwhile Doktorvater, John Webster, who passed away unexpectedly on Wednesday, May 25, 2016. From what I have been able to gather, it is also his last word on Barth, with whose thought he had wrestled his entire career” (p. 6). For those of us who were “students” of Webster’s from afar, this makes his contribution to this volume that much more significant.

In order to get a taste of how both Watson and Webster engaged with Barth’s Ephesians, and for purposes of time, I am simply going to offer quotes from each of them as provided for in the concluding summative remarks of their respective essays. Hopefully you’ll be able to get a sense of the whole of their essays by reading a small part of them here. We will hear from Watson first, then Webster.

Here is how Francis Watson closes his essay:

As evidenced in the Ephesians lectures of 1921–1922, Barth’s relation to the traditions and conventions of biblical scholarship is complex. As we have seen, Barth distances himself from what he (wrongly) regards as extraneous historical questions about author and addressees, yet he devotes significant parts of the earlier lectures to discussing them (I). He works with the Greek text and has internalized the exegete’s awareness that small-scale issues of syntax and sense can have major interpretive consequences (II). Equally characteristic of the exegete are Barth’s concern to analyze the structure of larger units of text and the willingness to engage with and learn from other exegetes in doing so (III). While theological preoccupations are everywhere to the fore, Barth makes serious and successful attempts to show their grounding within the scriptural text (IV). Barth’s radical Paulinism leads him to make unexpected common cause with a scholar already regarded by many as an archenemy of historic Christianity (V). Nearly a century after they were delivered, and from whatever perspective one comes to them, these lectures on Ephesians retain their power to disconcert (p. 30).

Reading Watson’s closing remarks the reader might get the impression that the whole of his essay was largely critical of Barth; but that isn’t quite the case. While he has some serious reservations about Barth’s ultimate conclusions I think Watson’s essay as a whole offers a charitable reading of Barth, and sheds light on Barth’s context and circumstance as he operated as a theological exegete of scripture.

John Webster approaches Barth a bit differently than does Watson. Here are his concluding remarks at the end of his essay:

It would be relatively easy to judge Barth’s lectures, both in what they say about divine revelation and its apostolic media in their presentation of Christian existence in relation to God, as often trapped by the malign contrast: aut gloria Dei aut gloria hominis. Such an opposition is not Barth’s intention: the lectures (along with those on Calvin from the following semester) are in part a struggle to articulate a relation between the “vertical” and the “horizontal” that is neither antithesis nor synthesis. So intense is Barth’s concern to draw attention to the nongiven, nonrepresentable character of God’s presence that he allows himself to say rather little about the human forms and acts by which divine revelation and saving action are communicated and received and about the ways in which they shape and order human life and activity—beyond some highly charged descriptions of the dislocation that they engender. Together with Barth’s instinctive occasionalism and his insistent rhetoric, this intensity runs the risk of denying what, after many qualifications, he is trying to affirm. In the Church Dogmatics, Barth will leave this difficulty behind in his long descriptions of God’s economic acts and the human moral history that they evoke and sustain. Here, however, his principal concern is to refuse to think of God and creatures as reciprocal, commensurable terms; yet in so doing, he sometimes appears to subvert not only commensurability but all relation (p. 49).

Whereas Watson focused more on the biblical discipline aspects of Barth’s approach to lecturing and exegeting Ephesians, Webster, as the quote reveals, focuses on theological thematic themes that he perceives as funding Barth’s theological frames as he engages with the book of Ephesians. While largely appreciative of Barth’s work, Webster also evinces some critical notes as he thinks through what in fact Barth accomplished and communicated in his study of the epistle to the Ephesians.

Impression

In contrast to the esteemed Watson and Webster, while their points are clearly attuned to the finer impulses of Barth’s theology and exegesis, I walked away from my reading of Barth’s Ephesians with the impression that what he did in Ephesians was rather commentarial. In other words, juxtaposed with the work that Barth did in Romans, his lectures/commentary on Ephesians fit much better with a more traditional biblical commentary. For this reason I found it very refreshing, and even surprising; I wasn’t expecting to encounter Barth with this sort of genre attendant to his pen. You will certainly get Barth’s theology, as his exegesis, no matter where that is encountered, is always going to “err” on the side of the theological exegetical combine; but I was impressed with his ability to follow the text-line in an almost expositional manner. He certainly hits upon a variety of themes, one important theme being his doctrine of resurrection, which Webster highlights in his essay, and for that this work is also important as it gives us an insider’s look into Barth’s early theological thought life; again, another reason to pick up this book and read.

All in all, I was very refreshed by reading this book. I commend it to all who are interested in understanding Barth’s theology; not to mention for those interested in getting a unique look at the Apostle Paul’s theology—from one theologian to another. If I was going to rate it on a star system I’d give this volume a five out of five stars. Tolle lege.  

 

Book Review: Karl Barth on Theology&Philosophy by Kenneth Oakes

Karl Barth on Theology&Philosophy

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) ISBN 978-0-19-966116-9 (hardcover) – 288 pp. Price $125.00

By: Kenneth Oakes

I want to say thank you to Oxford University Press for sending me Kenneth Oakes’ book Karl Barth on Theology& Philosophy for review. The following will not be a comprehensive review (i.e. of the whole book), but will focus on the last chapter of the book where Oakes provides a summary of Barth’s thinking on philosophy and theology; and then highlights some fruitful ways forward towards how Barthians might think about this relationship (and non-Barthians as well).

This book is a revised version of Oakes’ PhD dissertation which he finished under the watchful eye of the late and great, John Webster at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. In order to have an understanding of what Oakes covers throughout his development in the book here is the table of contents:

Click Here

Hopefully this whets your appetite to get your hands on this invaluable resource offered by Kenneth; you won’t be disappointed. It is indeed pricey given its academic title status, so maybe check your local theological library, or maybe request a review copy yourself. I have read volumes of secondary literature on Karl Barth’s theology, and I would have to say that Oakes’ book is among the best and most insightful that I have read. He writes in a clear, concise manner; providing coverage that is comprehensive, but at the same time does not sacrifice on detail. It is a well written well balanced book that any scholar could aspire to achieving in his or her own work.

Oakes’ Summary Insights on Barth’s Philosophy of Philosophy and Theology

According to Oakes Barth’s career of understanding relative to the relationship of philosophy and theology can be reduced to three recurring thematic entailments:

In the final years of his life, Barth’s thoughts on theology and philosophy changed little. The primary argument of the essay ‘Theology and Philosophy’ was a lengthy and rehashed presentation of material from GD: theology moves from God to creation and back again; philosophy moves from creation to God and back again. Both have the same tasks, although they undertake them in inversed and contradictory orders. This essay even repeated the clock imagery found in GD and the ChrD. There was also little new material in his post-retirement interviews and round-table discussions. Barth was constantly asked about theology and philosophy, and his usual response included (1) the independence of theology from philosophy (a classic Hermannian or ‘liberal’ point); (2) the exercise of Christian freedom when reading Scripture (as against Bultmann and his demythologization programme); and (3) the inevitable presence of philosophy within theology. All three of these points have precedents within the Göttingen Dogmatics. (pp. 249-50)

Personally this has been of issue for me ever since I came to the realization that I couldn’t read the Bible without presuppositions; that I couldn’t read the Bible nakedly as it were. And just as that tension is present in biblical exegesis, it is, as corollary, present when we think about how theology and philosophy implicate each other; or don’t. For Barth, as a modern, there were always the underlying currents of his context (which Kenneth just noted in sum), and how he brought those to his own theological project in one way or the other. But as is signaled by what I just shared from Oakes, Barth cannot be relegated to a facile place when it comes to considering this question; viz. in regard to how philosophy and theology relate. Barth was clearly committed to theological theology, as Webster might say it, and in that he believed that Christian theology ought to operate under its own terms and conditions as those are prescribed by the Self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

I think the best example of what the reader will find in Oakes’ work, in regard to the relationship between philosophy and theology, comes at the very end of the book in the last few pages of the last chapter. It touches upon the most salient point I can think of when attempting to engage with the question of philosophy and theology; viz. the question of correlation. Oakes writes (at length):

For the Barthian, the primary task and modality of theology is not correlation, for humans already live and think from within a multitude of philosophies. Correlating various and different myths, gods, and scriptures cannot be a major or necessary concern, as what is at issue is difference. Theology sees other philosophies and theologies being attentive to other scriptures, and concerned about the criticism of human knowing, being, and acting (or if this seem [sic] too anthropocentric, the world, objects, causes, etc.) in accordance with these scriptures. From the perspective of a philosophy that is attentive to Christian Scripture, these other objects may or may not exist, they may be better or worse named, and they may or may not be pertinent to the hearing of Scripture and the correction of church proclamation in accordance with Scripture. Yet why would one purposefully correlate YHWH with Zeus, some first cause with the transcendental unity of apperception, das Nihil with the State, money with inner experience, the infinite with the dialectic  of history? Why would one purposefully correlate Scripture with the US Constitution, Financial Times, Cosmopolitan, the Nicomachean Ethics, or of Grammatology? The issue for the Barthian is not correlating but differentiating, as the most pressing task of theology is the continual identification and worship of God as against the misidentification of the gods with God.

In its work of differentiation, theology reaffirms and follows God’s own active self-differentiation from the gods. Humans follow a multitude of gods, scriptures, and churches and so require a God to differentiate, identify, and present himself, his Word, and his works of love and rule. For the sake of following God’s own self-differentation, comparing and evaluating a whole range of other claims and pursuits may be helpful, and indeed necessary (as in the practice of Vergleich in CD III). Theologians may and should explore the differences between the ethics of Dionysius and the Crucified; between the freedom of the transcendental ego, the patriot, and the Christian; and between the optimism of technological progress and that of Christian hope for the restoration of all things. For the Barthian, such comparisons can be a mode of Christian theology if they are performed for the sake of acknowledging and confessing God’s own self-disclosure and differentiation, and not modes of curiositas or gestures towards the exigencies of academic politics. Of course, in the process of differentiation that which is being compared my turn out not to be so different, and this result would cause no surprise or embarrassment to the Barthian inasmuch as all intellectual and practical endeavors take place within a world created and loved by God and in which God became incarnate (CD III/2). (pp. 260-61)

As is typical for Barth, according to Oakes, the preponderance of the theological task is always Self-determined not by the theologian, per se, but by the Self-exegesis and regulation of all things in God in Jesus Christ. As such the ‘Barthian’, following after Barth, will work from the primacy of the Gospel as its own sui generis non-analogous reality, and understand that differentiation not correlation will be the common mode by which the Barthian theologian will engage in the theological practice. As we see in the quote from Oakes, there is almost a kind of accidental correlation that may well happen in say comparative analyses between various truth claims that can be found in the world at large. But the correlation would be from the top down rather than the bottom up; meaning the reason other truth claims might come upon “truths” in the world at large is because the world at large is circumscribed by the domain of God’s recreative and gracious life in Christ. For Barth the genuinely theological task is always a scandalous one precisely because it starts and ends in the foolishness and weakness of God as revealed in a particular man from the backwater of Nazareth.

But none of this is satisfying for the non-Barthian theologian/philosopher. They might detect certain informing theologies, maybe even correlations funding Barth’s theology; they might see Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and even Aristotle in the midst of Barth’s theological activity. They might attempt to use this as an ‘external criteria’ by which to disqualify the supposed Gospel-determined “foundationless” theologizing that Barth ostensibly engages in. Yet as Oakes develops; to attempt to read Barth too deeply in this area, while an interesting engagement, fails to appreciate the overriding commandeering that the Gospel plays in the material conclusions that Barth’s theology produces. Oakes writes:

Theology, for the Barthian, names the assemblage of philosophies that is attentive to Scripture and to that which Scripture is attentive. Barth can swiftly dismiss a line of thought or an argument as ‘philosophical,’ and yet he never means by this epithet that theology is being to reasonable or thoughtful. Usually this label is functionally equivalent to ‘insufficiently scriptural,’ or what is essentially the same thing for Barth, ‘insufficiently Christological.’ Conversely, labelling an argument, theme, or method ‘theological’ cannot mean something very different from ‘scriptural.’ Barth is especially interested in the influence of philosophy upon the interpretation and exegesis of Scripture, because philosophy and ‘natural theology’ always remain so close to theology and to theology’s very source, Scripture. Yet he seldom shows much interest in these background philosophies or the influence they might exert, for undue attention to them might distract one from the actual task of reading Scripture and thus hinder the transformation these philosophies undergo when Scripture is read.

The ‘isolation’ of theology, if it is not to be established apologetically, can only be derivative of its attentiveness to Scripture and to the things to which Scripture is mindful. When Barth speaks of theology’s ‘independence’ he does not mean that theology is or should be insulated from other discourses. Theology can and should listen to those who have also been attentive to Scripture and to that which Scripture is attentive. Barth will sometimes use a variant of the word ‘pure’ to describe theology, but this adjective does not represent a theology anxious to defend itself against foreign despoilment or alien elements. ‘Pure’ does not mean that theology ought to be devoid of all things ‘philosophical,’ ‘foreign,’ or ‘human.’ As Barth notes, ‘let theology avoid all interests but its own, then it will not be isolated. It is isolated so long as it is afraid that it will be isolated.’ (pp. 256-57)

This might be the most basic and important observation of Oakes’ development, in regard to how philosophy functions in Barth’s theology. Personally I find this to be the most inviting thing about Barth’s approach; there is a genuine movement to use philosophy, but only in a way as if it is ‘passing away’ and as if the ‘Word of God will endure forever.’ In other words, as Oakes points out (my paraphrase), Barth doesn’t make much of the philosophies he may or may not slide in and out of, and this is because he’s more concerned with the theological task of allowing Jesus Christ to reinscribe the verities provided by the philosophies by the ultimate reality revealed in the Gospel of God in Jesus Christ. That noted, Barth clearly sees many of the modern developments (i.e. Kant, Hegel, et al.) as the most pertinent categories towards articulating a theological grammar for the 20^th century wherein Jesus Christ can be magnified most intensively; and in the lingua franca of Barth’s modern context. And yet, even if the hues of these various philosophers can be detected in Barth’s own theologizing, precisely because of Barth’s own locatedness, for Barth the philosophies themselves are only incidental for the task at hand; which is to produce theology that magnifies Jesus Christ. For Barth, as I read Oakes’ presentation, the categories he wants to think through are those revealed in and through Jesus Christ; because of the priority of the Christ’s reality, all other human languages (i.e. philosophies) will ultimately have to bow down to their Lord, who is the Christ.

Final Impression

I found Kenneth Oakes’ book Karl Barth on Theology&Philosophy to be one of the most insightful books I’ve read when attempting to get at the way philosophy functioned within Barth’s theological development. The only weakness with the work that I can think of is that it wasn’t long enough; I wanted more, I didn’t want the book to end.

A Response/Review of Les Lanphere’s: Calvinist Film

Rather than a review I thought I would offer a response to Les Lanphere’s recently released film: Calvinist. Co-founder of the Reformed Pub and Pubcast, and film producer, Les Lanphere last year started a crowd-sourcing campaign to raise money to produce the film I’m offering response for now. The film just released September 12^th, 2017 on vimeo, and it already appears to be getting quite a few views. It is available for $7.99 to rent (for 48 hours), or $20.00 to purchase. I was actually surprised that it cost anything given that it was a crowd-sourced undertaking; I’d wrongly assumed that the $50,000 or $60,000 raised from that would have been sufficient for producing and distributing this film—apparently it was not. Beyond that, for the rest of this response I will attempt to cover the main bases covered in the film, and try to provide an accurate feel for what to expect. Once I have finished with that I will offer my response (so I guess this will be something like a review). Here is the preview to the film:

Overview of the Film

The film starts out by describing the phenomenon of Christianity itself, but then quickly turns its focus to why the Protestant Reformation was needed and who was involved in that process. Before getting into anything else the film highlights the role that the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement has played in revitalizing the resurgence of Reformed theology in North America. The producer, Les Lanphere notes his own generational position within this movement, and frames the rest of the film through this lens. Once this frame is provided we get right into the thick of things with Martin Luther and his realization from his engagement with Scripture, in the original languages that the Roman Catholic Church had come to its current shape in the 16^th century through an accretion of traditions that were actually unbiblical. The film notes how Luther’s realization led him to begin protesting what he considered to be unnecessary and burdensome religious tasks that had nothing to do with what the biblical Gospel entails. Moving on we are next introduced to John Calvin as the second generation reformer who provided the concrete impress into a doctrine of Scripture; what later would be known as sola Scriptura. The film emphasizes how a move in authority shifted from the magisterium of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to Holy Scripture; and then notes how things developed from there. Pretty quickly we are introduced to Jacobus Arminius, and the development of Arminianism; the debate between the Arminians and Calvinists is noted with reference to the Synod and Canons of Dordt. Accordingly we move from this entrée into an introduction of what the 5 points of Calvinism entail; each point of the TULIP is given some depth of coverage. Much of that coverage involves interviews with various participants who describe what a particular point involves, and how they see it functioning both personally and corporately in the church. As we finish up with the “P”, and in closing, the Calvinist touches upon a potential weakness that has plagued Reformed theology since its inception; that is its ostensible lack of penetration into the more marginalized demographic of people groups. It speaks to this primarily through the impact that the Young, Restless, and Reformed resurgence has brought to Reformed theology by interacting with some Christian rap artists, most prominently with Shai Linne, and their thoughts on the impact that Reformed theology is having within the minority communities as it has contact through rap music in particular.

The film features these voices: R.C. Sproul, Collin Hansen Paul Washer, Shai Linne, Ligon Duncon, Michael Horton, Timothy Brindle, Steven Lawson, Joel Beeke, Kevin DeYoung, James White, Joe Thorn, R. Scott Clark, Tim Challies, Carl Trueman, Jeff Durbin, Peter Lilliback, Scott Oliphant, Robert Godfrey,  and some lesser known folks. There is reference made to Matt Chandler, John Piper, J.I. Packer, Martin Lloyd Jones, Marc Driscoll; with particular focus on Piper as a kind of codifying godfather of the Young, Restless, and Reformed resurgence. The film also singles out Driscoll as a kind of golden-child of the movement, but then also as a representative of what happens when celebrity takes over instead of the doctrines of grace; and the kind of ruin that can come if perspective is not kept.

Calvinist makes a hard case for the 5 points of Calvinism and attempts to demonstrate how the TULIP simply represents a straightforward prima facie reading of Holy Scripture. It contrasts its reading of Scripture with the mainstream evangelical understanding of salvation which it aligns with the man-centered part Roman Catholic/part Arminian concept offering of the salvific envelope. The film wants to provide a hard and fast distinction between the orthodox Gospel of grace that Calvinist theology offers, versus the shallow offering that mainstream seeker-sensitive churches offer; or more extreme what televangelists like Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen offer their parishioners. There is a binary set up between what Calvinism offers, and what the rest of evangelicalism offers. It does attempt to soften how folks approach this by warning of what is often called the cage stage; the stage that happens when someone is “converted” to the ‘truth’ of Calvinism, and they want everyone to know it (and if people don’t accept it then folks in this stage are prone to look at these people as possibly not even Christian).

My Response

As The Evangelical Calvinist we are automatically going to have problems with how the Calvinist film set things up. For one thing it trivializes the history and development of Reformed theology. It glosses over huge aspects and developments of Calvinist theology, and as a result it ends up reducing things to an unfortunate and binary level. For example because it almost immediately sets things up within the context of Calvinists versus Arminians, and it does so by noting the Remonstrant articles and the Synod of Dordt’s subsequent response and articles (which much later would be captured by the acronym known as the TULIP), it sets things up as necessarily combative from the get go. Because the film moves so quickly in this direction it doesn’t give the proper focus to the development of the guts of what classical Reformed or Protestant theology involves; viz. Covenant or Federal theology. It doesn’t note how this framework in the historical milieu sets up the conditions that gave rise to Arminius’s own theology; and ultimately how Reformed theology culminates in something like the Westminster Confession of Faith. It does acknowledge that this history is present, but only with a quick reference and comment made by Carl Trueman. Without this context all the Calvinist could be left with is what it ended up emphasizing and presenting: TULIP theology. While it noted that there is more to Calvinist theology than the TULIP, and it noted, quickly, the various streams and developments of the Reformed Confessions and catechisms, it failed to discuss in any meaningful way what type of theology was present in these important confessions.

To be fair it is a film that only had about 90 minutes to work with (although I would imagine they could have made it longer at the discretion of Lanphere), but because of this limitation the film unfortunately comes off rather flat; and I mean in regard to the picture that it paints of Calvinist or Reformed theology. Furthermore, because of this kind of flat development, in regard to the material ideas that shapes Calvinist theology in the history, it didn’t have the capacity to offer any type of meaningful nuance and distinctions that were actually present in the history. The film comes by this lacuna honestly though; in other words, the scholars it relies on are committed to an idea that the Reformed faith is basically a monolithic reality. Not that there aren’t nuances in and among the various theologians say of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, when what is called Post Reformed orthodoxy developed, but they would argue that there is an essentialist type of congruency at a basic thematic level that would allow all of these theologians in one way or another to affirm what we find, for example, in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Unfortunately what these scholars, and subsequently, this film fail to recognize is that the history itself reflects different strains of Reformed theologians who were actually contemporary with the construction of something like the Westminster Confession of Faith. There were the Marrow men in England and Scotland who were averse to the hard Federal theology that prevailed at Westminster; there were Puritans like Richard Sibbes, John Cotton (in America), et al. who have been called The Spiritual Fathers who contested the so called Intellectual Fathers who came to be known as the orthodox champions of Reformed theology. But things were never as tidy as the scholars in this film would like us all to think.

I was not surprised by the direction of the film; it delivered exactly what I expected. It is not a film that will provide any new information for anyone who has had any exposure to Calvinism for any length of time—even at the most rudimentary of levels. I see the Calvinist as a kind of introductory or orientation film for the newly ingratiated Calvinists; folks who aren’t totally sure yet what it is all about. Or maybe for folks who are, indeed, in the so called stage cage, who would like to be bolstered in their new found tradition.

As far as its relationship to Evangelical Calvinism; there is none. This film offers a version of Reformed theology, 5-Pointism that Evangelical Calvinism stands at total odds with. What the film doesn’t do, because it skims across the surface as it does, is that it doesn’t delve into any of the background depth theological and metaphysical levels that funds the theology they are promoting. Unfortunately, as is typical, it doesn’t note the role that Aristotelianism, Scotism, Ramism, Agricolanism, Voluntarism, Nominalism, so on and so forth plays in the development of the apparatus that supplies the 5 point Calvinist with their hermeneutic and subsequent exegetical conclusions. In other words, it oversimplifies to the point that things are left too sterile and clean; it doesn’t complexify the history enough in order to problematize or self-criticize in anyway. Honestly I wouldn’t expect this with a film like this—not even the scholars and pastors it relies on take this tact typically—but that’s what a film called the Calvinist should be about. It makes a point about how the Young, Restless, and Reformed represent a generation that wants to get deep, but then ironically the film itself doesn’t illustrate what that looks like for them. It doesn’t dig deep into the history of Reformed theology; it doesn’t refer to scholars like Michael Allen or Scott Swain who are aware of some of the challenges in the history and development of Reformed theology (even though both of them argue, along with folks like Carl Trueman that Federal or Covenant theology is the way to go). The film’s producer[s] doesn’t seek out other strains that have developed in Reformed theology; like the strain that we flow from as Evangelical Calvinists (which can be found primarily in Scottish, English, and American contexts in the history). So the Calvinist fails to layer things in the deep kind of way that its self-identified audience, by their own description, is looking for; for depth of understanding in regard to the development of Reformed Protestant theology. In this respondent’s view this was a seriously missed opportunity by the Calvinist.

Overall, other than viewing this for “critical” purposes I wouldn’t recommend this film. I think most people who already identify as Calvinist won’t find anything new here, and for those in the ‘cage stage’ it will only add unnecessary fuel to your fires. I think it glosses things too quickly; that it doesn’t provide the depth its audience would be looking for; and it presents the Calvinist or Reformed faith too reductionistically.

Geordie Zielger’s: Trinitarian Grace and Participation: An Entry into the Theology of T.F. Torrance. On God’s Freedom and Grace in Creation in Critique of Barth

I am continuing my read through of Geordie Ziegler’s published dissertation published by Fortress Press (thank you Olga for the review copy, and Geordie for having it sent to me) entitled: Trinitarian Grace and Participation: An Entry into the Theology of T.F. Torrance. As I noted previously instead of doing a standalone book review I am going to do a running review and engage with parts of the book that stand out to me along the way; this post represents one of those serial reviews and engagement.

What stood out to me in the following, from Geordie’s research, has to do with Torrance’s appropriation of the concept that God has always been Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but that being Creator and even Incarnate is something new for God; something that is associated with God’s grace which is an act for the other generated, as it were, by God’s triune life of eternal love. As you will see, Geordie makes an interesting distinction at this point though, a distinction between how Torrance conceives of God’s grace versus Barth (and this distinction might actually say more about the reading of Barth that Geordie has adopted rather than Barth himself—that’s what I need to find out further). Let me share the quote in full length (a few paragraphs worth), and then I will respond with a bit more push back. Here’s Geordie on TFT and God’s freedom to be gracious:

How: in Freedom

How does God create? While Torrance emphatically asserts that there is an ontological correspondence between the being and activity of God in se and ad extra, this does not detract from his insistence that the ad extra of creation is an utterly new event for God. The acts of God ad extra are acts of God’s will, whereas the activity of God ad intra in the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit are eternal activities of God’s nature. Creation is neither eternal in the way that God is eternal, nor is it necessary. Thus, there is no logical link between creation and generation. Because creation is brought into being by a definite act of God’s will and freedom, it must be affirmed as ex nihilo. God “does not beget out of himself but wonderfully brings into being out of nothing.”133 The newness of the act of creation is in fact an integral element in the logic of Grace.

This means that while God has always been Father, he is not always Creator. Creator is something (and consequently someone) God became. At this juncture, the important point to emphasize in Torrance’s thought is that God’s ontological becoming does not mean ontological change. Ontology is not constituted by or dependent upon soteriology. God’s ontology is such that “without ceasing to be what he eternally is” he is free “to be other than himself, and to bring into being what is entirely different from what he has done before.”134 Because God’s acts are his acts-in-being and his being-in-action, for God to do new acts implies that his being is “always new while always remaining what it ever was and is and ever will be.”135 In this sense, Torrance can affirm with Jüngel, that “[God’s] eternal being is also a divine becoming.”136 Yet for Torrance the language of becoming is not to evoke potential or development, but the overflow of God’s eternal fullness.137 The act of creation does not expand God’s being, for he is life in himself. Yet as life and aliveness, God’s being is also dynamic. Thus for God becoming is fitting, but not necessary; free, yet not arbitrary.

Thus the newness of the act of creation does not imply its strangeness. In all of its non-necessity, creation is entirely fitting. Because it is as the Father that God is Creator, and not visa versa, creation can be understood truly as an act of love. God’s power to create flows from his intrinsic nature as love; the eternal Father freely shares the fullness of his love in fellowship with that which he creates.138 As Father, God is “essentially generative or fruitful in his own Being, and it is because he is inherently productive as Father that God could and did freely become Creator or Source of all being beyond himself.”139 The work of creation “is activated” and “flows freely” out of the Father’s eternal love of the Son, that is, from the life and love of the eternal God. In this sense, creation (and incarnation) cannot be said to be an after-thought. Creation is a free act of God’s will. Thus, the motion of Grace ad extra is fitting to who God is inwardly.140

At this point an important difference between Torrance and Barth arises—one that has significant implications within contemporary theology. While Torrance affirms the fittingness of the motion of Grace ad extra to who God is inwardly, he does not consider Grace per se to be an activity of the immanent Trinity. God in himself is not Grace to himself. Grace itself is not a divine perfection. The Father is not gracious to the Son, nor the Son gracious to the Father, nor is the Spirit the communion of Grace between the Father and the Son. What the triune persons share among themselves in the eternal communion of their life is more appropriately defined as love, not Grace. Grace specifically is that eternal movement within the Trinity turned outward beyond the Trinity. For Torrance, to blur this distinction, and to insist (as Barth does) that Grace as such is one of the divine perfections, is to deny the gospel of Grace itself. Grace by necessity cannot be necessary.[1]

Much to affirm, if not all. But it is the very last clauses (which I’ve emboldened) which I find most striking about what Geordie is getting at. As we can see for the bulk of what Geordie has written, it is pure Torrance description, relative to his Athanasianly influenced theology, but it is how that is then used to offer a substantial critique of Barth (almost in passing) that intrigues me the most about this section. It is interesting to me that Geordie makes this critique in a section entitled “How: in Freedom;” it’s interesting to me because I am positive that the Barthian response, at this juncture, would be to refer precisely to this very reality in God: i.e. his freedom. Indeed, it is by pressing into this idea of God’s Freedom that someone like Bruce McCormack can elevate the doctrine of election in Barth’s theology as constitutive of God as Triune and Creator in the first place (which is what George Hunsinger critiques, and thus serves as the basis for the so called Barth Wars), and at the same time avoid collapsing God’s being into creation as if creation is necessary.

So whether or not we follow McCormack’s reading of Barth, or Hunsinger’s, either way in Barth’s thought itself God’s Freedom as a primal reality, in my view, would allow Barth to escape Geordie’s critique from the Torrancean perspective. Hmm, an interesting conundrum and much to contemplate.

[1] Geordie Ziegler, Trinitarian Grace and Participation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 38-9.

The Early Barth. The anti-Metaphysical Barth. The Biblicist Barth.

Kenneth Oakes in his book Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy in his first chapter entitled The Earlier Barth concludes a section in that chapter with a summary of the characteristics that formed the core of who the young Barth was. This was a time prior to Barth’s ‘conversion’ to the Barth that so many have come to know through his more mature writings found in his Church Dogmatics. What’s of interest, at least to me, is that as we see in Oakes’ development, even in the young Barth there are many recognizable traits that will emerge later in the maturing and older Barth. Here is what Oakes writes:

A number of the young Barth’s intuitions and practices have now been covered. Barth’s earlier theology is stamped with ethical, experiential, and individualistic characteristics. It is focused on the ‘historical’ and the concrete over the transcendental and the abstract, and is highly suspicious of the effects of metaphysics upon the doctrines of God and Christ. Particularly worrisome are the neutralization, reification, and intellectualization of God at the hands of metaphysics. Faith is generated by God, and it is primarily an affective and practical matter that is either indifferent or hostile towards apologetics and metaphysics and impervious to the yet good and necessary work of historical and psychological knowledges. In a telling sign of his freedom from historical Protestantism and Protestant confessions, Barth can even criticize the Reformers for understanding faith as a matter of believing certain things to be true. Revelation is the inner communication of an objective Jesus Christ, and this revelation is objective even if not primarily cognitive. Barth can even call religion and the religious life ‘irrational,’ insofar as they lie outside the strictures and sphere of transcendental consciousness even if they still motivate and ground cultural consciousness in reality. There is a fundamental passivity of the human being before revelation, but the human being, nevertheless, actively responds and submits to revelation. The young Barth can look favourably upon Socrates, Plato, and Kant while criticizing the re-emergence of metaphysics within theology inasmuch as what impresses him the most are Socrates’ questioning and critical spirit, Plato’s emphasis upon the good, the true, the beautiful, Kant’s ethical austerity, and the moral, self-involved nature of all three of their philosophies. Finally, while Jesus Christ should not be identified with the church or with any kind of Christian worldview, he is and should be identified with the social movement.[1]

One of the traits, noted by Oakes, that is most controversial in Barth’s theology (for people who approach Barth’s theology), and one that remains throughout Barth’s life, is his posture towards metaphysics. Later on his animism, if we can call it that, towards metaphysics is circumscribed by his heavy concentration upon Christ, and even more pointedly, by his doctrine of election. Instead of an Augustinian a priori method for thinking God, for Barth there is a focus on an a posteriori method for knowing God; by encountering the personal Self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. For Barth Christ exhausts God’s Self-revelation, as such any a priori metaphysical reflection about Godness detached from Jesus Christ becomes a non-starter for Barth. Thomas Torrance makes this clear when he writes of Barth’s theology:

Because Jesus Christ is the Way, as well as the Truth and the Life, theological thought is limited and bounded and directed by this historical reality in whom we meet the Truth of God. That prohibits theological thought from wandering at will across open country, from straying over history in general or from occupying itself with some other history, rather than this concrete history in the centre of all history. Thus theological thought is distinguished from every empty conceptual thought, from every science of pure possibility, and from every kind of merely formal thinking, by being mastered and determined by the special history of Jesus Christ.[2]

Because of this Barth is often charged with being someone who has historicized God’s revelation; even more foreboding that Barth has Hegelianized theology; or even that he has offered a kind of positivistic theology. While some of these things may be true, at a certain level, in reality none of these charges actually take much care in attending to Barth’s reification and constructive appropriation of his own modern context. In other words, I would contend, that even though Barth was as much of a product of his own context as we are, he was self-critical (or he became such throughout his life) enough to materially move beyond some of the negative connotations of the labels that he has been tagged with.

But still, what of metaphysics? Does Barth’s ostensible allergy towards metaphysics place him at odds with the pre-critical, pre-modern tradition of the church; the tradition given shape in various streams of theological development by appeal to both Aristotelian as well as Platonic metaphysics when attempting to speak of God and his ways? There are obviously different ways to answer this, which in our North American context has resulted in what has become known as the ‘Barth Wars.’

What is clear though, particularly from Oakes’ summary, all that we have received from Barth started in seminal ways for him very early on in his theological development. Truly, Barth, the young and old was a modern theologian, but one who sought to constructively and imaginatively engage with the tradition of the church; so much so that George Hunsinger identifies what he calls the Chalcedonian pattern framing Barth’s theology. This is why I personally am edified by Barth so much; while he serves as a polarizing figure for some, he doesn’t for me. He represents a modern Christian thinker who loves Jesus Christ, and who seeks to express that love for the church of Jesus Christ in ways that engages with the whole stream of the intellectual history available to him in the Christian church. I find his focus on Jesus, and as such his de-emphasis upon metaphysics, refreshingly ‘biblical.’ Barth attempts to think from the ‘event’ of God’s Self-revelation as attested authoritatively in Holy Scripture; he attempts to allow the contours of Scripture’s themes and motifs to dictate the way he speaks of God. It is his dialectical approach, at this point, that I find truly refreshing. Barth does not attempt to artificially impose intellectualized or scholasticized ‘fixes’ on the teachings of Scripture as they find their reality in Jesus Christ; he is content to live within the tensions and pressures created by the living and ineffable God who is Triune as given literary attestation in the written Word of God. Sometimes metaphysics aren’t all they are cracked up to be, they can do more damage than good to the Word of God by imposing certain emphases and characteristics upon God that are not true to who he is as revealed in Christ and spoken to in the Bible.

[1] Kenneth Oakes, Karl Barth on Theology&Philosophy (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 45.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910-1931, 196.

The ‘Young Marburg’ Barth against Charles Ryrie, Thomas Aquinas, and the Cosmological Argument for God’s Existence

The first time I attended Bible College was just after I graduated high school in 1992; I attended a small Conservative Baptist Bible College in Phoenix, Arizona, at that time called Southwestern College (it is now called Arizona Christian University). I was a bible and theology major, as such I had an introduction to Systematic Theology class; it was taught by an old school theology professor, meaning he was of the very conservative, almost fundamentalist type (and he was also an old guy). The text he had us use for our primary theology text was Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology: A Popular Systematic Guide to Understanding Biblical Truth. When the title says ‘Basic’, it indeed is very basic theology, almost completely cut off from any of the confessional riches available in the Protestant past. But what is typical of Ryrie’s theology relative to other “evangelically” oriented theology texts is his appeal to philosophical proofs for the existence of God in the prolegomena of the text itself.

For Ryrie’s part, the first proof for God’s existence he appeals to is the cosmological argument; he explains it this way:

General revelation comes to mankind in several ways.

1.Through Creation

1.Statement. Simply stated this line of evidence (the cosmological argument for the existence of God) points out that the universe around us is an effect which connotes an adequate cause.

2.Presupposition. This line of evidence depends on three presuppositions: (a) every effect has a cause; (b) the effect caused depends on the cause for its existence; and (c) nature cannot originate itself.

 3.Development. If something now exists (the cosmos) then either it came from nothing or it came from something which must be eternal. The something eternal in the second option could either be the cosmos itself which would have to be eternal, or chance as an eternal principle, or God the eternal Being.

To say that the cosmos came from nothing means it was self-created. This is a logical contradiction, because for something to be self-created it must exist and not exist at the same time in the same way. Furthermore, self-creation has never been scientifically demonstrated and observed.[1]

Ryrie goes on and elaborates this further, but this represents a good representation of his line of thought. Clearly there are more sophisticated presentations of this argument, starting with Thomas Aquinas himself, and even by contemporary thinkers like William Lane Craig. But the basic tenets of the argument are presented by Ryrie, and are probably what most young bible college students, seminarians, and pastors have been exposed to in their training.

I open this post up like this to actually transition to a critique of approaching theology proper, to approaching God in this way. For the rest of this post we will consider young Karl Barth and his critique of the cosmological argument for the existence of God.

The Marburg Barth

Karl Barth attended Marburg University in Germany under the watchful eye of Wilhelm Herrmann, among other theology and biblical studies professors. Barth graduated from Marburg in 1908, but did not immediately enter pastoral ministry, instead he stayed on in the Marburg area and wrote for Die Christliche Welt. Kenneth Oakes gives us more background information:

Slow to enter pastoral work immediately after his university studies, Barth stayed in Marburg for another year, working as an editorial assistant for Die Christliche Welt, a journal published under the direction of Martin Rade, a friend and colleague of Herrmann. Thus from 1908-9 Barth was allowed to imbibe more deeply the ‘modern school’ and Marburg theology….[2]

During this time, according to Oakes, Barth wrote two pieces that caused some controversy, at least for some.[3] We will consider the second piece, which has to do with Barth’s critique of the cosmological argument, and that whole mode of theologizing. Oakes details this at length for us:

The second and more revealing piece as regards theology and philosophy is a talk Barth wrote against the cosmological proof for the existence of God. In this piece, Barth begins with an explanation of the argument’s formulations in Thomas Aquinas, the defence of the possibility for knowing God in Vatican I, Leo the XIII’s recommendation of Aquinas in the 1879 Aeterna Patris, and the censuring of the agnosticism of modern philosophy and philosophy of religion in the 1907 encyclical Pascendi. He covers the distinction between the natural knowledge of God and the revealed knowledge of God, along with their concomitant disciplines, natural and revealed theology. He then considers the cosmological argument as found within J.A. Becker’s work and Thomas’ five ways. He defends Thomas against the common charge of pantheism, although he thinks Thomas comes close to such a position at times. Nevertheless, Barth is still worried about the status of God’s ‘Persönlichkeit,’ a good Ritschilian concern, in Thomas’s doctrine of God. Barth wonders whether the free and textured identity and agency of God is lost when God is described in abstract and impersonal terms such as the highest thing, the most necessary being, or the first cause.

The cosmological proof has two serious problems. The first is philosophical. Barth brings the full weight of Kant’s critical philosophy onto the proof. Following Kant, he argues that the cosmological proof tacitly depends upon the ontological proof, and that the ontological proof (or at least Anselm’s version of it) fails insofar as the proposition ‘God is’ is deemed to be analytic (the predicate ‘is’ adding nothing to the subject ‘God’). The cosmological proof fails, as the ontological proof on which it relies is specious. The second problem is theological. Barth argues that even if the cosmological proof were true, what it proves would remain quite different from the God of Persönlichkeit:

Such is clear: the way of the syllogism, of the subordination of individual, empirical things underneath universal concepts, absolutely does not reach a final, real, and in this respect transcendent being, but only to the idea of one, to the idea of a being about whom there is nothing to say other than that he is the negation of his not-being on the one hand, and that he is absolutely prior to everything finite on the other; by its construction and the concepts used such a being remains entirely within the world.

By definition, philosophical metaphysics can neither reach the God beyond the cosmos nor his specific ‘personality,’ and in this judgment Kant and the modern theology are in complete agreement.[4]

Remember, this is the young Barth, barely a college graduate, but this type of critique from him in regard to ‘natural theology’ and knowledge of God given foundation through philosophical proofs, would perdure in Barth’s thought and life throughout.

In a very reduced sense Barth is arguing that the philosophers might be able to prove a conception of godness all day and all night, but at the end or beginning of the day all they’ve proven is something they were able to conceive of through their own intellectual prowess; i.e. they haven’t begun to access the holy of holies and touch the feet of the living and true God.

I agree with Barth, in contrast to Ryrie, Aquinas, Craig, et al., and this of course is what makes Barth such a controversial figure for so many evangelical theologians (young and old) to this day. They fundamentally disagree with Barth’s critique of something like the cosmological argument since they base so much of their theological methodology and approach upon the foundations laid by people like Thomas Aquinas and the rest of that tradition which is imbibed deeply by the post-reformation reformed orthodox theologians.

What This Has Meant To Me

As I noted, my seminal introduction to systematic theology started with Charles Ryrie, and a very basic presentation of the cosmological argument or proof as a credible foundation for how I could know with certainty that God exists, and that he exists in a certain way. But this has never satisfied me. Later I went to Multnomah Bible College, this time I was presented with more sophisticated instruction, but at base the way I was taught to think of God from Ryrie remained the way I was taught to think of God by my professors at Multnomah. It wasn’t till I attended seminary, at Multnomah’s seminary, where I was finally introduced to historical theology, and I began to explore, quite deeply, the history of ideas and how they were given formation. It was a breath of fresh air to realize that there was another way, a way that I believed was more faithful to the God I was encountering over and again as I read Holy Scripture.

I was introduced to Barth and Torrance (a bit), in seminary as well. I graduated from seminary in 2003, but it wasn’t until about 2006 that I started reading Barth and Torrance intensely, and I found what I was looking for in their critiques and way of thinking; particularly as that has to do with this very issue. I had already given up on the idea that God could or should be “proven,” but it wasn’t until I hit Barth and Torrance that I really appreciated how to work that out by focusing on revelational theology; by focusing on Christ as the key. Yes, in seminary, in my studies of John Calvin and Martin Luther et al. I was introduced to what is called kataphatic or ‘positive theology,’ and I relied on both Calvin and Luther, deeply, to enable me to move forward into a revealed theology approach.  But what I found in Barth and Torrance were teachers who took that to the next level, and offered a grammar and way to think that filled out what I only latently picked up through Calvin and Luther.

It is refreshing to know that God cannot nor should not be “proven.” If we think he can be the foundations for how we are thinking of God, by definition and method, are not supplied by God in Jesus Christ, but instead by our own trained wits. Our wits will always let us down, but the Word of God will endure forever.

 

[1] Charles C. Ryrie, Basic Theology: A Popular Systematic Guide to Understanding Biblical Truth (USA: Victor Books, 1986), 28-9.

[2] Kenneth Oakes, Karl Barth on Theology&Philosophy (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 28.

[3] Ibid., 29.

[4]Ibid., 29-30.

The ‘Young’ Karl Barth and Wilhelm Herrmann’s Impact on Barth’s Anti-Natural Theologizing and other Miscellanies

I am currently reading Kenneth Oakes’ published PhD dissertation researched at the University Aberdeen entitled: Karl Barth on Thoelogy&Philosophy. The copy I have is a review copy graciously sent to me by Oxford University Press. I will be posting from this book along the way as I read it, which will culminate ultimately in a final summarizing “book review;” but I intend these posts to be like mini-reviews of Oakes’ book along the way—even if what they really are end up only being my reflections upon whatever I am reading at a particular moment from Oakes’ book.

I am currently in the early part of chapter 1, the chapter is entitled, appropriately: The Earlier Barth. For anyone who has even spent a cursory moment with Barth they will be expecting some sort of mention of one of Barth’s more prominent teachers, the famed Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922). As Oakes develops the impact that Herrmann had upon the young Barth that stands out to me are the contours of thought that bleed through into Barth’s lifetime project; one of which is his segregation of “religion” from history and philosophy. Oakes’ sketches this type of development in Herrmann this way; you will notice the genealogy that not only impacted Herrmann, but as consequence of relation, impacted Barth’s theology one way or the other.

The struggle for the Selbständigkeit of religion in modern German and Prussian theology has a long and distinguished history. It found one of its most forcible exponents in a young Friedrich Schleiermacher and his Reden (1799, 1806). In the second of his Speeches Schleiermacher handles the Wesen, or essence of religion and distinguishes religion and religious knowing from both ethics and metaphysics. Piety or religion, a young Schleiermacher famously argues, is neither a doing (Tun) nor a knowing (Wissen), and so religion is independent of both ethics and metaphysics. Hermann adopted and carried on Schleiermacher’s quest for the establishment of religion’s independence. This task was most notably undertaken in his 1876 Die Metaphysik in der Theologie and 1879 Die Religion im Verhältnis zum Welterkennen und zur Sittlichkeit. In both of these works Herrman sharply distinguishes the ‘knowing’ characteristic of ‘knowledge’ of the world and of religion, granting the latter a free and independent sphere. These works antedate a similar attempt to distinguish faith and metaphysics by Albrecht Ritschl in his 1881 Theologie und Metaphysik. In this slim but influential volume Ritschl argued for the removal of metaphysics and philosophy (especially the philosophies of Aristotle and Hegel) from theology so as to extract any vestige of natural theology. Ritschl even thought that orthodox Lutheran dogmatics, and in particular the works of F.H.R. Frank and C.E. Luthardt, were guilty of dabbing in natural theology. In the cases of Schleiermacher, Herrmann, and Ritschl, establishing theology’ independence meant distinguishing between religion, ethics, and metaphysics.[1]

I am sure that none of these contours of thought, for those familiar with Barth’s theology in general will surprise anyone. But I find it interesting to have a trace understanding (if not more) of Barth’s informing theology since, for one negative reason, so many of Barth’s critics attempt to guilt him by his various associations and lines of thought. In other words, Barth’s critics often think that just because they can identify some sort of Kantian, Hegelian, Schleiermacherian, or other influences in Barth’s thought, that by virtue of that alone he should at best be regarded as heterodox and not orthodox. But honestly such criticism of Barth is simply engaging in, for one, the genetic fallacy, and for two, poisoning the well; there are numerous other fallacies engaged in when critiquing Barth along these lines. All I can say to such critiques is: so what! We all have informing voices, and we all are conditioned by those voices one way or the other. The salutary thing about Barth, the genius thing about Barth is that more than others, in some respects, he was able to become aware of his informing voices, critically aware, and in turn offer critique where it was necessary, and appropriate under the pressures of his christological concentration where it was appropriate to do so.

As Oakes continues to write he reiterates the impact that Herrmann had upon the ‘young’ Barth:

His commitment and dedication to Herrmann ensures that Barth’s earlier thought bears the marks of centuries of reflection and debate within Prussian and German intellectual life. His thought, like that of all pupils, is the outcome of wars waged and treatises made long before him. The education in which he was formed was not only broadly post-Kantian in its distinction between religion and culture, but also had dealt with and responded to higher criticism of Scripture, a secularized reading of church history and confessions, and the History of Religions school. This inheritance meant that some distinctions were already put in place for Barth: a strict split between faith and history and the God of faith and the god of metaphysics. Otherwise put, there was a strong distinction between (1) the individual’s experience of faith and God’s love and forgiveness; and (2) either a transcendental or empirical determination of the human subject and its knowing, and being in general. The work of theology falls within the first realm, while the work of psychology, history, and philosophy in the second.[2]

Again, for anyone who knows Barth these themes are not surprising at all. But what might be enlightening to realize is that just like any of us Barth had a context, an informing context; a context that shaped and conditioned Barth’s life’s work one way or the other. One thing in particular that stands out to me as we look at this sketch of Barth’s background is the aversion to ‘natural theology’ that his teacher[s] had. Often we will hear it asserted that Barth developed his anti-natural theology because of his German/Nazi context; indeed, it well may be the case that this reality heightened this mode for Barth. But as we can see through Oakes’ development this anti-natural theological bent was already seeded into Barth’s life by his teacher Herrmann and the context he was surrounded by, theologically, as just a young virtuoso. There is more to this background, particularly with reference to this aversion to natural theology, but we will have to get into that later. Nevertheless, I think we should bookmark this point in regard to Barth’s development. He indeed ended up being known for his anti-natural theology, but this was just one thing of many he inherited from his intellectual predecessors and informers.

[1] Kenneth Oakes, Karl Barth on Theology&Philosophy (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22.

[2] Ibid., 27.

Book Review: ESV Journaling Bible, Interleaved Edition. Natural Leather, Brown, Flap with Strap

ESV Journaling Bible, Interleaved Edition: natural leather, brown, flap with strap. ISBN – 10 1-4335-52760/ISBN – 13 1-4335-5276-2. PP. 1584. Price: $129.99. Publisher: Crossway: Wheaton, IL., 2016.

I would like to thank the fine folks at Crossway for sending me along a copy of the ESV Journaling Bible, Interleaved Edition; the version they sent me is the natural leather, brown, flap with strap style, resembling something you might find in the saddle bag of famous theologian and pastor, Jonathan Edwards. Indeed Crossway’s description of the Bible notes the intentional move to model this Bible after Edwards’ Blank Bible:

Patterned after the Bible that Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century preacher and theologian, used to record more than 5,000 notes about God’s Word, the ESV Journaling Bible, Interleaved Edition features a full, blank page next to every page of Bible text. Created for Bible readers looking for as much space as possible for sermon notes, personal reflections, prayers, or artwork, this edition features cream-colored paper and a durable binding to ensure that it lasts a lifetime. (source)

The story goes that Edwards’ wife sewed blank pages in between the pages of his Bible in order to provide the over 5,000 notes that he would eventually make as he read and preached through his Bible. This Bible, created by Crossway, will give you a sense that you are holding a bit of history and remind you of the great teachers Jesus Christ has provided for his church; including, Jonathan Edwards.

The Bible itself is rather big (6.5 in x 9.25 in and 70.7 ounces), and the font is relatively small (7.5), although it is readable. But other than that, the Bible itself is put together well. The brown natural level feels sturdy, and looks appropriate for a Bible that sells itself as a replica of Edwards’ Bible. The paper used for the pages of the Bible are cream colored, which I like, and are a very sturdy paper which will not be prone to bleeding, for any note takers who insist on continuing to use highlighters rather than colored pencils (which is my preference when highlighting). Between each and every page of this Bible there are indeed blank pages of paper where someone could make voluminous notes; I am guessing way more than 5,000 (depending on the size of the notes). Unlike most Bibles, this particular Bible does not have Bible-land maps in the back; instead it has a “through the Bible in a year reading plan.” As the reader opens the flap of the Bible, by unwinding the strap used to keep the flap of the Bible closed (which can be a little cumbersome to undo while using the Bible in a church service, etc.), they will immediately notice a little pencil or pen holder which will hold a pencil or pen in your Bible even with the flap closed.

Overall, I would certainly recommend this Bible. It is a great looking Bible, accompanied by a great translation of the Bible, and it has the durability of a Bible (because of the quality of materials used to produce it) that will last someone a life time. If you purchase this Bible I would recommend, that as Augustine would say tolle lege, ‘take up and read,’ and read it constantly!