Nala’s Salvation: Against Her “Christian” Legalistic Critics

Legalism continues to be rife on the theological interwebs. An OnlyFans porn star (at the top of the “game”) just gave her life to Christ (she grew up as a Baptist pastor’s kid, like me). I watched her whole interview, where she shared her life story and testimony, on the Michael Knowles show (2:20 minutes). She has gotten lots of pushback and skepticism, particularly on the website formerly known as Twitter. There is a high profile (on said website) Jewess who has been saying vile things about this former star. But she’s a Jewess and not a Christian; so, definitionally she wouldn’t understand the nature of God’s grace (at least not yet). But then there have also been “Christians” pushing back at this sister. I want to highlight one of these fellas. Of course, this guy has written a book on “biblical masculinity,” has a podcast on the topic, and unfortunately, has quite a few followers on X and probably other social media platforms. What he says about this young sister makes my blood boil; it is as antiChrist/antiGospel that someone can get (let his message be anathema). Here is part of what he said:

Nala’s entire life has been a lie. She has profited in multi-millions from the twin society-crushing evils of Feminism and the Sexual Revolution. She has led countless men astray for pay, selecting for her profession a task built on values that are explicitly anti-family, anti-Law, and therefore anti-Christ and anti-Logos. She should be revolted at the multi-generational forces that twisted a creature made in God’s image into this demonic mockery of a human female. God didn’t just save her from hell. He saved her from years of her own sin-enslaved wretchedness, which spread virally over the internet touching the lives of potentially millions in exchange for cash. Honorable men with grit under their nails and sweat on their brow and scars on their arms engaged in months of backbreaking labor to make less than she probably did for one weekend’s parade of digital sin. You do not understand the truly cosmos-rending chain of confession, repentance, mercy, grace, and salvation well enough if you think baptism and a few words on camera suffice to expunge the stain on the earth, let alone herself, that she has created. A repentant heart would scrape off all remnants of that clownish makeup to reveal the unadorned face of the woman underneath, as God sees her, and beg the men she exploited for forgiveness. She would stare into the image of the photo below with horror and never wish for one second to be mistaken for that death-cult parasite again. She would decry from the mountaintops the fallenness of the world that allowed and even encouraged her digital prostitution, and tear her garments witnessing the wickedness in her bones and bloodstream that seduced her into this line of “work.” Work which she then relished in perfecting her craft to infernal excellence, I might add. She would strip herself of artificial beauty and clothe herself in modesty then disappear into her husband’s home and hearth, next seen by the public with a small pack of children, and a tearful song of Romans 8:28-29 on her grateful lips. In so doing, she would model the true path home for women. We live in a Christ-hating nation that despises God with every fiber of its being, making a middle-class, single-income household all but impossible as an explicit attack on the institution of the family and especially the role of the father. And suddenly I’m supposed to believe we’re all celebrating a sinner being saved? On the network that just fired a female commentator, in part, for daring to say, “Christ is King”? Please. Candace Owens, who showed at least a flash of true courage, should be furious. Nala has stepped onto the public stage and been thrust into a default position of spiritual leadership, as many celebrities sadly are the moment they whisper the name of Christ to a camera. Thus I criticize her as a leader. “Give her time”? How about instead we bring on a repentant believer who has already had time? I propose Rosaria Butterfield. Maybe Nala should give herself time. Maybe the media should give her time. Maybe the legions of female sinners and their white knight cheerleaders should at this very moment be ushering Nala off the stage forever, for her own good, rather than clapping like seals in the hopes that she’ll legitimize their poorly-discipled, halfhearted repentance for sins. Because she won’t. She literally can’t. Not until Feminism and the Sexual Revolution that produced her (and women like her) are ripped up root and branch from the salted earth of the American family, burned, and the ashes cast into the brook Kidron. (2 Kings 23:6) But that’s not what we really want, is it? Women today desire to be led… but only where they were already planning on going. Others want this to be a “meat sacrificed to idols” moment. 1 Corinthians 8 is the world-befriending Christian’s dog-eared chapter, isn’t it? “It’s not that bad. I’m under grace not law.”[1]

All this gal is doing is sharing her testimony. When a person is “born from above” they are born again of an imperishable seed; the seed of Christ’s life blossomed to the right hand of the Father for them/us. This guy, Will Spencer, thinks we need to “wait and see.” Is that what Jesus did with the Samaritan woman at the well; or many other female sinners, inclusive of prostitutes? No, once the re-birth is realized in someone’s heart, they become participant with Christ (participatio Christi), and partakers of the divine and triune being of God. Nobody can separate Nala from Christ, not even her. She’s entered into an indestructible life that is not contingent on her obedience, but Christ’s for her (which in fact is what the Gospel is all about).

This guy, Will, is simply a product of a nomist subculture that has swallowed much of the North American evangelical community whole. It is through the “retrieval” of precisianist and juridical categories, as those are found particularly developed in the Post Reformed orthodox theologies of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, that this legalistic subculture, of the type this Spencer guy is fomenting, has come to have root. And yet, most of these cats aren’t aware of their informing theology. They simply receive it, and run with it. They don’t recognize, critically so, its historical and philosophical beginnings; and as such they simply conflate these mercantilist categories with the biblical Gospel. As a result, we end up with this “wait and see” attitude in regard to having certainty if someone is saved or not. This is absurdum! But this is simply a projection of their own uncertainty and lack of assurance before God. Barth was right when he wrote the following with reference to Calvin’s thinking on assurance of salvation:

How can we have assurance in respect of our own election except by the Word of God? And how can even the Word of God give us assurance on this point if this Word, if this Jesus Christ, is not really the electing God, not the election itself, not our election, but only an elected means whereby the electing God—electing elsewhere and in some other way—executes that which he has decreed concerning those whom He has—elsewhere and in some other way—elected? The fact that Calvin in particular not only did not answer but did not even perceive this question is the decisive objection which we have to bring against his whole doctrine of predestination. The electing God of Calvin is a Deus nudus absconditus.[2]

It is this ill-formed doctrine of election that hangs over all of these legalists’ heads; it’s actually rather tragic. Not only can they not find rest in Christ for them, but then they project that unrest and uncertainty on anyone else who confesses Jesus as Lord; like Nala. If Jesus isn’t both the object and subject of God’s election, then election simply hangs in the balances of the decretum absolutum (absolute decree). And it is this type of election, the type grounded in an unrevealed, secret and arbitrary decree of God, that leaves these types of legalists floundering in their salvation. But, often, such people believe they’ve hit some sort of magical mark in their lives, finding a level of assurance that they indeed are one of the elect of God (because they haven’t sinned in certain ways like they used to; so based on their performance). But they’re still “waiting to see” if other new converts really have come to Christ based upon some subjective and abstract standard of judgment vis-à-vis the performance of said new converts. That’s what this Spencer guy and others are now doing to Nala. Historically this exercise is called experimental predestinarianism, which entails exactly what it says.

I have written more than I intended. Let me leave Will Spencer and his cohorts with a parable of Jesus’. It speaks against the type of performance and legalistically based salvation he unfortunately has been “discipled” into.

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. ² When he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. ³ And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the market place; ⁴ and to those he said, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right I will give you.’ And so they went. ⁵ Again he went out about the sixth and the ninth hour, and did the same thing. ⁶ And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing around; and he *said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day long?’ ⁷ They *said to him, ‘Because no one hired us.’ He *said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’

⁸ “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard *said to his foreman, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last group to the first.’ ⁹ When those hired about the eleventh hour came, each one received a denarius. ¹⁰ When those hired first came, they thought that they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. ¹¹ When they received it, they grumbled at the landowner, ¹² saying, ‘These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.’ ¹³ But he answered and said to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? ¹⁴ Take what is yours and go, but I wish to give to this last man the same as to you. ¹⁵ Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?’ ¹⁶ So the last shall be first, and the first last.” –Matthew 20:1-16

 

[1] Will Spencer | Renaissance Man, accessed on X 04-08-2024.

[2] Karl Barth, CD II/2, 111.

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

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

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

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

My response was the following (off the top):

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

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

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

No One But God is Good: And Its Implications for Modern People

Some people confuse the Enlightenment for the New Creation. To the point that the human spirit has come to a crossroads in its development, and become civilized, or good. But this is not what the Gospel says. The Gospel says that we are constantly being given over to the death of Jesus that His life might be made manifest through the mortal members of our bodies. This presupposes that as Martin Luther rightly emphasized, as Christians, we are simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner) while we continue to inhabit this in-between time within our bodies of death. The New Creation is not an abstract human achievement; that is to say, there is no turn or development to the good without the Godman (Theanthropos), the mediator between God and humanity, becoming sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in His vicarious humanity for us. It is the lie of the desperately wicked and above all evil hearts, that fallen humanity is born with, that asserts that humanity has a spark of good (or divinity) built into them. Indeed, the ultimate lie is that humanity, on its own, has the capacity to achieve a holiness deigned by its own whims and desires; that it can simply call something good, and it is so. All that the Enlightenment did was push the Edenic lie further into the hearts of men and women; that is, that they could be God in and of themselves. It said that the indomitable human spirit in fact is God, and that humanity stands the best chance of flourishing by finally accepting the notion that all of the traditional attributes of God are in fact really just projections of the collective humanity of all times. As such, the conclusion (to the Enlightenment) is that humanity, in fact has really been God all along; that humanity has the capacity to be good on its own self-possessed and self-designed terms. Look at where this type of thinking has gotten us in the world. The world is literally collapsing under the pressure of its own “enlightened” thinking. Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy!)

Abortion as the Logic of the Pagan’s Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Against Winsomeness Because of God’s Holiness

Someone I know from online recently wrote a viral article for First Things where he gently critiques the approach of Tim Keller. His primary critique was of the ‘winsome’ and purported ‘third wayism’ that Keller has operated with for the last couple of decades, and even further back. My friend, James Wood, made some appeal to sociological analysis as a way into making his critique of Keller. In nuce, the argument was that Keller’s winsome approach may have had some resonance in the last decade or so, but that we have moved into times that aren’t as receptive to Christian “niceness.” Indeed, Wood has critiqued further that the Keller approach may have never been an effective strategy of outreach to begin with (or maybe that’s just me reading my own hagiography into these things).

I’m going to be blunter (what’s new). Things seem less nuanced than this to me, even though I understand that people convinced of being “faithfully present” and winsome won’t have ears to hear this (at least until the Eschaton). As I read the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, what I find is a God who, while Fatherly and Lovely, doesn’t shrink back, who doesn’t “contextualize” in such a way that He comes off as “winsome” when confronting the sins of His people; not to mention the sins of the world in general. Indeed, when God confronts sin, whether that be in the OT or NT, it always involves blood and judgment. Some might push back and say: “well, that’s because God accommodated Himself to the Ancient Near Eastern culture His covenant people inhabited, and mediated judgment, under His theocracy, under the strictures dictated by said conventions and customs of the time.” Indeed, but He established the New Covenant in the blood of Christ, and that remains the reality, with the scars in Jesus’ hands, feet, and side in tow for all eternity. In other words, even though the once and for all bloody sacrifice has been made for all of humanity, it is this sacredly shed blood that stills cries out as the blood of the Sacrifice, the blood of the Passover that always already confronts and contradicts us sinners with the very life and power of God as witness both against us even as He is for us. In other words, He is indeed, as Barth underscores, the ‘Judge judged,’ but since we remain ‘simultaneously justified and sinner’ until we are finally rescued from these ‘bodies of death,’ since we continue to inhabit a battled-body that is fighting between the things of the Spirit and the things of the flesh, God in Christ by the Holy Spirit confronts us, He persuades and convinces us, He convicts us of our sin, constantly, calling us to the repentance that Christ first won for us in His vicarious humanity. So, because God loves us, because He is merciful and gracious, He doesn’t leave us in the squirminess of our sins; note:

Again the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations, and say, ‘Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem: “Your birth and your nativity are from the land of Canaan; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. As for your nativity, on the day you were born your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed in water to cleanse you; you were not rubbed with salt nor wrapped in swaddling cloths.  No eye pitied you, to do any of these things for you, to have compassion on you; but you were thrown out into the open field, when you yourself were loathed on the day you were born. “And when I passed by you and saw you struggling in your own blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ Yes, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I made you thrive like a plant in the field; and you grew, matured, and became very beautiful. Your breasts were formed, your hair grew, but you were naked and bare. “When I passed by you again and looked upon you, indeed your time was the time of love; so I spread My wing over you and covered your nakedness. Yes, I swore an oath to you and entered into a covenant with you, and you became Mine,” says the Lord God. “Then I washed you in water; yes, I thoroughly washed off your blood, and I anointed you with oil. I clothed you in embroidered cloth and gave you sandals of badger skin; I clothed you with fine linen and covered you with silk. I adorned you with ornaments, put bracelets on your wrists, and a chain on your neck. And I put a jewel in your nose, earrings in your ears, and a beautiful crown on your head. Thus you were adorned with gold and silver, and your clothing was of fine linen, silk, and embroidered cloth. You ate pastry of fine flour, honey, and oil. You were exceedingly beautiful, and succeeded to royalty. Your fame went out among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through My splendor which I had bestowed on you,” says the Lord God.

God is God. God is Holy, and commands us to be ‘holy as He is Holy.’ In Christ His ‘conversation is with grace seasoned with salt,’ but it is blunt and-in-your-face nonetheless. We might be prompted to think of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well; or maybe Jesus and the moneychangers; or perhaps his tirade against the Pharisees and their “dead man’s bones”; or maybe we might think of the Apostle Paul calling out the guy having potentially incestuous relations with his mom, and handing him “over to satan”; or maybe the way Paul confronted Peter for his hypocrisy in Galatia. Not to mention the brutal reality of the cross of Christ, and the holiness demanded there; or the book of Revelation, with particular reference to chapter 19. Or what about the author to the Hebrews chiding the Hebrew Christians for ‘trampling the blood of Christ under foot and counting it a vain thing?’

The point is that there is an urgency to God’s holiness such that the Christian must bear witness to it in all con-versations of life. We aren’t worried about being winsome, but that doesn’t mean we have to be mean or nasty either. It does mean that we are not of those who shrink back and fail to testify, speaking the truth in love, that God is God, that God is Holy, and demands holiness of all people; that is if people are going to ‘see Him.’ God is gracious and patient with us ‘desiring that none of us perish,’ and it is precisely because of this that the Christian doesn’t waste time thinking of “strategies” in regard to how to relate to the world in non-offensive ways. Indeed, if the Christian is genuinely bearing witness to Christ in the world, they will be considered foolish and weak precisely because the Christian is bearing witness to the scandalous reality of the cross of Christ. At the very crux of the cross God’s holiness is on display, and this is exactly what the world, and cultures writ large find so offensive.

At the end of the day, we all stand before the Lord, even as Christians. There is a Bema judgment seat for Christians, and we will be held to account for what we did with what God has given us in Himself in Jesus Christ. I am uninterested in wasting time, I’m here to redeem the time, and then beatific vision.

‘Know Thyself’ γνῶθι σεαυτόν as the Ground and Grammar of an aTheological Ethics

We are suffering the ravages of a society turned in on itself; the “Enlightened,” turn-to-the-subject. This turn knows no boundary between the sacred and secular, it is pervasive among both the elect and reprobate, as it were. Biblically, this turn is the natural condition of humanity, the sin nature is woven deeply into the very fabric of our beings as humans in this fallen world. Thus, the organic way to live life is to do so by what Luther identified as the homo incurvatus in se (humanity incurved upon itself). We are oriented by what Augustine identified as concupiscence, or ‘self-love.’ This is the human way, post-lapse, that is to live wayward from the inward of our self-possessed apotheodic lives. On the ‘sacred’ side, whether it be Progressives or Conservatives, we all have this bent, of course, to affirm ourselves, to baptize our ways in the name of Jesus Christ, and indeed, name them, Jesus Christ. We are prone to navel-gaze, and worship ourselves as if we are worshipping the living God; indeed, this is the natural propensity, to look into the words of our lives as if the mirror of God’s Word, rather than allowing God’s Word to be the mirror by which we come to see not our own abstract reflections peering back at us, but instead the communio sanctorum as that is given vivification in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ for us, for the world.

Karl Barth takes this type of theme up by referring to the ancient Greek notion of γνῶθι σεαυτόν (‘know thyself’). Here, with his usual thematic candor he recognizes how awry this way of life is if it is thought in abstraction from God’s humanity for us in Jesus Christ. He notes how outrageous it is for humans, in this disposition, to think as if they might have the capacity to construct an ethics for human living and being that in any way elevates itself to the ‘good’ of God’s life. Indeed, as Barth notes, if the self, and knowledge therefrom, is measured by itself, even collectivistically, it might appear as if an abstract humanity has achieved something supererogatory; even as if without God, as God itself. Barth writes:

. . . The right and power and the power with which it tries to assert itself have been borrowed from the very place where theological ethics itself has found the right and power to answer the ethical problem, and will never cease to seek it. In so far as a non-theological ethics has for its content a humanity which is grounded in itself and discovers and proclaims itself, theological ethics will have to deny the character of this humanity as humanity and consequently the character of this ethics as ethics. It will still have to do this even when the latter includes a more or less friendly and appreciative regard for religious and ostensibly even for Christian interests and positions. There is no humanity outside of the humanity of Jesus Christ or the voluntary or involuntary glorifying of the grace of God which has manifested itself in this humanity. There is no realisation of the good which is not identical with the grace of Jesus Christ and its voluntary or involuntary confirmation. For there is no good which is not obedience to God’s command. And there is no obedience to God’s command which is not the obedience of Jesus Christ or His positive or negative glorification. But in its true and strict historical sense γνῶθι σεαυτόν does not lead to the obedience of Jesus Christ and His glorification. In its true and strict historical sense it can be understood only as a summons to rebellion against the grace of God. This rebellion does not become less heinous if later, perhaps, it proceeds to make the grace of God an object of human self-reflection, self-understanding and self-responsibility, to make it a special content of human self-consciousness, and therefore to give to this self-consciousness, among other things, a religious or even a supposedly Christian content, as in the classical attempt of Schleiermacher, the Christian apologist among the Idealists. What begins with the human self cannot end with the knowledge of God and of His command. Nor can it end with the knowledge of the real man and his real situation. In its true and strict historical sense, the γνῶθι σεαυτόν, and an ethics conceived and developed in the practice of this imperative, is shown—post Christum natum [after the birth of Christ]—to be illegitimate and impossible by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In so far as an ethics derives from this source, in so far as it carries out in the background an apotheosis of the self or the self-given answer or the self-undertaken enquiry, in so far as it tries at best (if it does not prefer to be atheistic) to understand God decisively from man instead of man decisively from God, it cannot be regarded by theological ethics as legitimate or possible. Only that well-meaning interpretation in meliorum partem [understood in a charitable sense] can be expected of the latter. It must be content to be understood by it differently (we say better) than it understands itself.[1]

For Barth there is no ‘human self-consciousness,’ no sense of ‘feeling’ or ‘dependence’ on the Divine, as in Schleiermacher, that can ever achieve genuine self-knowledge. If so, the logic follows, that to make an attempt at establishing a system of “right/wrong,” as if a profane ethics might be achieved, Barth rightly shouts a resounding, nein! Instead, in keeping with his usual Christic tenor, Barth only imagines that a genuinely Christian ethics can obtain insofar as that is grounded in the crucified humanity of God in Jesus Christ. As the Son of Man resurrects, this becomes the ‘heavenly soil’ in this far country of a heretofore wayward humanity, wherein a genuine ground and grammar of theological-ethical existence can finally be actualized. Not through a humanity that in ad hoc fashion attaches itself to an exemplarist Christ; not through a human wit that attempts to contact God through tapping into a cosmic Christ-consciousness, as if infused into the human soul; not through an attempt of analogizing from effect to cause, through an interconnected chain-of-being, as if the creation itself has been planted with the vestiges of the Triune logoi waiting to be taken up by a pilgrim’s harvest. No, as Barth rightly understands, any attempt to bridge the infinitely qualitative distance between humanity and God based upon anything other than God freely bridging that distance for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ, becomes an escapade in futility and self-worship; an idolatry of the most heinous specter.

To know thyself, just as for Calvin, as for Barth, apart from God’s Self-knowledge for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ, cannot bring the ‘good’ to humanity. Barth’s thought is shot through with the classical, and dare we way biblical notion that humanity, by itself, is really nothing more than a dissolving shadowy sub-humanity that has no lamp to brighten the path before its sullen and smelly feet. Left to itself this type of humanity can only end up in the dregs of the fiery abyss that originally had been designed for the Devil and his lowly minions. This is the type of antiChrist spirit that an abstract humanity can hope to achieve as far as a theological-ethics; it is an ethics given breath in the reprobate winds of the ‘nothingness’ found in the un-elect of this world order—the realm of the demonic whose telos can only be self-dissolution by God’s judgment.

The world we inhabit, whether the sacred or secular, has imbibed this type of de-cruciformed humanity wherein the only basis of doxology is to sing the pagan chorus of ‘know thyself.’ As Christian people, in particular, in mimicry of their “cultured despisers,” attempt to worship God, from a know thyself mode, they end up, most naturally, singing praises of themselves to themselves, even as if immersed in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the tank of apostasy the world, and Christendom itself, is drowning itself in as it attempts to make a go of it outwith serious submission to the crucified life of God as that has been risen in the humanity of Jesus Christ. Kyrie eleison

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 §36 [541-42] The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 31-2.

The Ethics of the Resurrection: Applied to Transgenderism

I was contemplating the absurdity of the man who claims to be a woman, who then puts on a swimsuit, enters a woman’s swim-meet, wins the contest, and then is declared the fastest swimmer among some of the top-tier women swimmers in the world. As I contemplated this, I tweeted the following: “You can identify as a bird all you want, but the second you step off the Golden Gate Bridge physics take over.” I elaborated further on Twitter, this way:

And just to be clear, physics isn’t the judge, God is the Judge. When people rebel, and physics, physiology, psychology, presses back against their rebellion, it isn’t those components that have an inherency of their own; they simply reflect God’s recreative order. People aren’t simply being “metaphysical rebels,” they are acting out according to their sin nature; the nature that self-possessively and viciously maintains that it is God, and that the real God is not. When they rebel, they are loving themselves, and not God. And it is this self-love, incurved upon itself, that leads to the various aberrations and disaffected expressions we see all around us. According to the logic of self-Godhood, even when something clearly bespeaks aberration, new logics must be constructed in order to persuade the self and others that in fact their personal expression of sin is no aberration at all; that it is in keeping with the kingdom they have constructed as “self-God.” The problem arises because these self-declared self-Gods inhabit the only genuine and living God’s creation, and recreation in Jesus Christ. As such, we end up in a diabolical spiritual battle wherein all of humanity is born believing itself to be God, while all along being confronted with the fact that they live in a universe that inherently declares the very opposite by the wisdom of the cross. The wisdom of the cross, and/or the staurologic therein, is the ground of the new creation that finally attests that the old has gone the new has come. It declares that God is God, and we are not. It isn’t until the person ‘repents’, bows the knee to the wisdom of God in Christ, that the Son finally sets them free indeed. But to the logics of the world the freedom of the Son looks like bondage because it contradicts the very essence of what the world takes to be the way, the truth, and the life; that they are God, and God is not.

I want to be clear that creation itself has no built-in or abstract value-center of its own; that’s why I refer to staurologic or the wisdom of the cross. The original creation, I take it (protologically), to be created so that Christ might be born (see David Fergusson). In other words, the created order is eschatologically conditioned by God’s free choice to be for the world, in the world, in Jesus Christ; i.e. He is the telos of creation. As such, when He comes into this world order in ‘Bethlehemic flesh,’ it serves as an irruption, of the sort wherein this world finally comes to understand its actual orientation. So, the new creation that God accomplishes in Jesus Christ was always already the reality of this world’s trajectory to begin with; sin, in this sense then, becomes an aberration that only God, extra nos (outside of us), could invade, take to Himself, enter it from the inside/out, and put it to death. It is as this ‘seed’ fell into the ground, died, that new life could come to blossom, such that the old becomes the new, but under the pressures of a totally elevated and/or actualized sort. In other words, what I am attempting to articulate, is that the point of continuity between the old and the new isn’t an inherency that the “original creation” had potent within itself. The point of continuity between the old and the new is God’s choice, before creation, to be for the world and to create the world for Christ; but not without us, but with us. He is the order of this world, the new has left the old behind, but the old bore witness to the coming of the new insofar that the new was in fact the origination of the old to begin with; that is in God’s free election to be God of the humanity of Jesus Christ.

Hence, the aforementioned entails that what it means to be human was already actualized prior to creation in God’s choice to be human for us in the ‘to be’ enfleshment of the Son (Deus incarnandus). Since His humanity is the ground of the created order, even as that is given subjective-distinction in the particularity of ‘our humanity’ as ‘images of the Image,’ this entails that creation itself is not free to be free in abstraction from its root and reality in the vicarious and archetypal humanity of Jesus Christ. As such, judgments about what is right and wrong are not left to self-proclaimed human agents, as if this was an obtainability inherent to simply being created. Human agents, as has been observed, are not free unless they are living in and from what it means to be humanly free coram Deo (before God). It is only in this freedom, since anything outwith is bondage, wherein right and wrong before God comes to be known, internalized, and with the possibility of creational reversal and transformation through the re-creation of creation’s telos and esse in the resurrection of humanity in the eternal Logos’ Self-assumed humanity in the man from Nazareth.

It is from this continuously irruptive reality that a human agent comes to understand the order of the Kingdom, as that has always already had a cruciform shape. It is in this mode and posture before God in Christ whereby creatures, as participants in God’s life through the grace of God’s humanity in Jesus Christ, come to have the capaciousness to discern the straight from the crooked. This vicious desire to be self-God becomes non-directive for the creature attempting to live against their ‘election’ to be genuinely human in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, and thus they come to have the lights to live from the Light of God. There is an experience of freedom that invades their lives with the result that the new life of the new creation explodes upon them such that God’s order becomes the only order for them that appears safe and secure. Living outwith this order becomes as distant as the old is to the new; as Barth says: “What took place on the cross of Golgotha is the last word of an old history and the first word of a new.” This ‘first word’ becomes the norming norm for the new-creatures’ life, and, for example, being born a biological male, rather than female, or vice versa, is lived into as the order and telos that God recreated as the eschatological bliss He saw fit for the world to begin with; just as the bride to the groom symmetry bears witness to the beauty of God’s design in Christ to His Church.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Listening to Joe Rogan Depresses Me: The Hope of Jesus Christ as the Antidote

I just finished listening to another episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. In this episode he had virologist/immunologist/pathologist, Robert Malone on the mic. This episode was on the heels of his viral podcast with a colleague of Malone’s, Peter McCullough. If you are staying informed on things, Malone and McCullough are of a cadre of high profile, and pre-eminent, MDs and scientists (including epidemiologists) who are critical of the mRNA and DNA vaccines; along with the lockdowns, and other measures being deployed in an attempt to ostensibly quell the Sars-Cov2 pandemic. I stand with these doctors in their respective efforts to descent against the machine. But this post isn’t about that effort per se.

As is typical with me, the issue I am having, particularly as I’ve listened now to a few of Rogan’s higher profile podcasts, is the lack of hopeful prescription. In other words, he, and his guests, at least the ones I’ve watched, while describing the utter insanity of the world right now, have no substantial hope to offer the world, i.e. they only have the indomitable human spirit to look to in order to make an attempt at providing a way of salvation out of this socio-cultural morass. But that is the problem: the indomitable human spirit, and that sort of turn-to-the-subjectivism is precisely what has led to the global conditions that would allow for this current mass psychosis to obtain. Their respective lack of viable prescription is precisely because they have opted out of revelational insight about the status of a fallen humanity (so theanthropology) and collapsed that into their own immanent lights. They simply operate on the horizontal in absolute ways. This is the very condition that gives rise to the sort of brute naturalism, and the hierarchy of being therein, that funds the authoritarianism that they rightfully are standing against. Because they have no genuine knowledge of self—which as Calvin notes in his duplex cognitio Domini only comes when the person has a genuine knowledge of the living God—they are unable to properly diagnose the real problem at play: viz. the fallen human condition.

While this ought to be expected with pagans, such as Joe Rogan et al., what has become more troubling in these times, is how it is that so-called spiritual leaders (pastors, theologians, Christian thought practitioners) are ostensibly operating with the same sort of “blind-spot” that their pagan counterparts are operating with. This is nothing new, as I argued in Master’s thesis on I Corinthians 1:17-25 (with a broader focus on chapters 1—4), the Apostle Paul confronted the Corinthian church for adopting the wisdom of the world in the name of the wisdom of the cross. This made them just as ‘carnal’ as the world they were supposed to be contradicting (with the wisdom of the cross), and as such they came to see the wisdom of the cross as both foolish and weak. Human nature, fallen human nature, has remained the same. The Church is populated largely by people who are held in a sort of ‘Babylonian Captivity’ (as Luther might intone) wherein a theologia crucis (theology of the cross) has given way to a theologia gloriae (theology of glory); indeed, given way as if the theology of glory was actually the theology of the cross.

As I walk away from podcasts like Rogan’s, or from a verity of church services and/or theological podcasts, the level of ‘carnal’ wisdom at work leaves me with a sense of nihilistic darkness. I feel the weight, not of God’s glory, but of nothingness that this world is guided by. It’s as if satan’s breath, eggy as it is, has filled the lungs of these ‘carnal’ practitioners (secular or sacred) with the sulfur of his forthcoming abode (and potentially theirs, God forbit it!). The answer to what ails the world isn’t a new Bab-el (the ‘coming together of a united humanity’), at least not one generated by the self-possessed, incurved humanity that is the abstract and aloof (from God) world. The answer, of course!, is God’s answer and purpose for the world enfleshed in His humanity for us in Jesus Christ. It is only this Pentecost[al] reality that has the power to turn this current world-order upside down, with a baptism of flaming tongues of fire that all cry out in their variegated unison, that Jesus is Lord. It is only this humanity, the singular humanity of God in Christ for the world, wherein a genuine denouement, an actualist reversal can obtain. This is the eschatological hope for which this world has been created, and now re-created in the resurrection of the Theanthropos, Jesus Christ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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