Archive for the ‘Theory of Revelation’ Category
Opining on Thomas’s Analogia Entis and At Least One Reason Why I Reject It
I am currently reading Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, at least part of it; and I’ve come across a passage where Thomas is asking the question: ‘is there a natural knowledge of God?’ This question is related to what is called the analogia entis (‘analogy of being’), and is a primary means by which Aquinas, following the ‘Philosopher’, Aristotle, develops his theological ontology and subsequent epistemology. I will share, in brief, what this passage says, and then comment on the other side of it:
APPENDIX TO Q. 4, ART. 3
12, Art. 12. (Whether, in this life, God can be known through natural reason.)
Our natural knowledge begins from sense. It can therefore extend so far as it can be led by sensible things. But our intellect cannot in this way attain insight into the divine essence. Sensible things are indeed effects of God, but they are not proportionate to the power of their cause, and for this reason the whole power of God cannot be known from them. Neither, consequently, can his essence be seen. But since effects depend on their cause, sensible things can lead us to know that God exists, and to know what is bound to be attributable to him as the first cause of all things, and as transcending all his effects. In this way we know that God is related to creatures as the cause of them all; that he differs from creatures, since he is none of the things caused by him; and that creatures are separated from God because God transcends them, not because of any defect in God.
This way of analogical knowledge of God presupposes something about the human intellect and rationality in the Fall; it presupposes that a certain spark has remained, that there is something inherent within the human animal that yet allows it to discursively work its way to a limited, yet analogical knowledge of the true and living God. We see the role of what is often referred to as the via negativa or the negating process that occurs within this mode of knowledge towards God as well. I.e. “In this way we know that God is related to creatures as the cause of them all; that he differs from creatures, since he is none of the things caused by him; …” For the life of me I have no idea how a thorough going dyed in the wool Reformed theologian or Christian can affirm something like this; but hey, what do I know? In other words, how can someone claim that post-lapse there remains this capacity within humanity to not only desire to have knowledge of God, but an actual ability to posit things about the real and living God that are corollary with and analogical of the real and living God.
You ask me why I reject the analogia entis, particularly in the Thomist form, this is why. Now, there is a reason why Thomas must maintain, at an essentialist level, why human being must retain an intellectual capacity that allows them to have knowledge of God; but I don’t see how his premise jives in any way with a biblical mode of understanding. Romans 3 says there is no one who knows God, nor seeks after him; this is a rather basic notion we see in Holy Script. In other words, from a biblical perspective, when humanity fell at the Fall they were so impacted that their very ontology as human being was corrupted to the point that reasoning capacity or desire to reason towards a knowledge of God was rendered defunct and absent. That Thomist analogia entis cannot accept this because of its need to maintain a theological anthropology wherein the intellect, at some level, remains intact (I’ve written about this aspect of Thomist anthropology elsewhere) is problematic indeed.
Nature, Grace and Knowledge of God: Does Michael Allen Really Understand the Thomist’s and Thomas Aquinas’s Position on Created Grace?
Let’s keep on theme. This has been an important thing for me for quite a few years now, and I’m realizing once again that it remains such. It has to do with the theme we’ve been touching on in the last many posts I’ve been writing; i.e. how can a human being have real knowledge of God? This essentially gets underneath that now proverbial question of ‘what hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ Is there something, some moral quality, some created grace, some inherent bent in humanity’s teleology that equips and allows them to know God; or want to know God? There have been many attempts by various theologians over the centuries to engage this question, but I want to start with Holy Scripture; and then think from there. It’s not that those who arrive and different conclusions than me haven’t worked from Scripture, all that that variety illustrates is the impact that certain a priori theological commitments have upon the exegetical practice.
To start, let’s take a look at Romans 3:9-18:
9 What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. 10 As it is written:“There is no one righteous, not even one; 11 there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. 12 All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” 13 “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.” “The poison of vipers is on their lips.” 14 “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.” 15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16 ruin and misery mark their ways, 17 and the way of peace they do not know.” 18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
I take this, particularly the portion I have emboldened, to be definitive of the state of the human heart coram Deo (‘before God’); and I’m not alone. Most Reformed theologians would want to affirm the traditional doctrine of total depravity although maybe not total inability, but because these same theologians also have, what I would contend is a competing (with Scripture) metaphysic underwriting their approach to Scripture, they at some point have to soften the “way” the Romans passage sounds at a prima facie level. Most Reformed theologians follow in the Thomist tradition; the Thomist tradition, also known as the Thomist Intellectualist tradition sees the human intellect as the definitive component of what makes a human being a human being at an essential level. So they must posit that when the fall of Genesis 3 took place that the intellect, at some level, remained untouched[1]; viz. that it maintained some level of operative power even in its capacity to posit, at the most, God (again we can see how something like this would coalesce with a subsequent [but also prior in a basic way] appeal to the philosophers in order to supply such Reformed theologians with the categories they find useful in their theological endeavors). Such Reformed thinkers have their point of contact precisely at this point; i.e. their point of contact between God and humanity. Yes, they would also recognize that the intellect, while still operative, even if living under the dregs of the fall, and because of such dregs, requires the supplement of grace to enter into the [elect] individual and ‘escalate’ or elevate the intellect to a regenerate status resulting in the person’s ability to fully access God (at least in the ways God has generously decided to accommodate that in ectypal fashion). So the mainstay of classical Calvinist or Reformed theologians really don’t affirm that people are fully or even functionally disabled (as the Romans passage would intimate), instead they must, at some level (and there are various ways to nuance that among such theologians) keep, as a live option, the operation of the intellect such that people, in general, have a capacity towards knowledge of God. Sure, it might not ultimately terminate in a true and saving knowledge of God, but nevertheless that moral ‘point of contact’ and hook remains active in fallen humanity (i.e. a proclivity or at least an ability to seek after God).
I wanted to share the full quote from Allen because it helps illustrate the various ways all of this has unfolded in and among both Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians alike. He notes the differences and even the internecine differences among Catholics and the classically Reformed alike; but what stands out, and this is what I’ll share from Allen simply to illustrate the reality, is their shared point of convergence when it comes to working from the Thomist tradition. Yes, this can take numerable directions, from Henri de Lubac, to Thomas Aquinas, to Herman Bavinck, to Kathryn Tanner; but the point is, they all at some level, one way or the other want to affirm and work from the Thomist intellectualist tradition (e.g. remember how I described, a bit, the theological anthropological component that funds this tradition i.e. ‘the intellect’). Allen writes:
How then does the new life relate to the character of created nature or, more specifically, how does the regenerated being of the saints relate to their given nature as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve? Here we enter debates regarding nature and grace, matters which have marked controversies both in the classical era and also into recent decades. Indeed, twentieth-century Roman Catholic theology debated the relationship of nature and grace at length, pointing to even deeper disputes within the tradition. We do well to attend to these conversations, as they suggest realities present in the medieval and early modern context in which the Reformed tradition was shaped decisively. They also present a conversation wherein the heritage of Reformed thought has been altered or misperceived by much more recent developments. Before turning to specifically Reformed approaches, then, we do well to note the broader trends in Roman Catholicism and to find their roots in a shared Thomist heritage, at which point we are in a position to ask about specific concerns flowing out of the Protestant Reformation.[2]
We note in the last emboldened clause just what I was referring to previously; that Allen fully affirms the reliance for the classically Reformed (including himself) upon the Thomist heritage, and all that attends to that. Like I highlighted earlier, there are multiform ways to flesh out said heritage; nevertheless, in categorical ways, certain features remain basic and fundamental for the Thomistically inspired theologian. This is where I found Allen’s coverage rather lacking; he prefers to gloss over the theological anthropological point that I was noting earlier, and which I only alluded to in my prologue, in regard to grace. Remember I noted that some theologians, the Thomist ones, see some source of contact built into even fallen humanity’s bent or capacity for some knowledge of God (even if that remains fleeting among the reprobate). Thomists, and Thomas Aquinas himself, actually posits a concept of created grace (which I’ve written on before, more than once here at the blog), this is an addition and quality that God (to state it crudely) implants into the accidents of elect humanity which allows them, through moral effort and habituation (habitus) activate and allows them to move beyond the fleeting knowledge that all human beings have, in regard to capacity for knowledge of God, and takes them to the next level. Allen glosses this component—in regard to created grace as a thing or quality or stuff—and simply transubstantiates such thinking from a created stuff/quality to the personal work of the Holy Spirit; he writes:
Grace’s gift does not merely heal sin’s harm by returning one to Eden. Grace also moves us forward such that there is escalation from Eden. Grace is not a stuff or substance, of course, but the personal presence and action of God. Specifically, grace is the life-giving work of Christ by his Holy Spirit. We do well to remember the way in which Thomas Aquinas spoke of this effective presence: “The Holy Spirit makes those to whom he is sent like the one whose Spirit he is.” The Spirit, then, conforms the Christian into the image of the invisible God, to the form of Jesus Christ, for the Spirit is none other than the “Spirit of Christ” (e.g., Rom 8:9; Phil 1:19; 1 Pet 1:11).[3]
I mean who am I to question a genuine theologian, I’m just a blogger, but this makes me seriously wonder whether or not Michael Allen actually understands Thomas Aquinas’s superstructure; particularly when it comes to Thomas’s appropriation of Aristotle’s habitus theology and substance metaphysic. Aquinas writes all over his Summa about grace being a created quality, and refers to it as medicine (which fits well with the kind of intellectualist sin/grace-ailment/medicine symmetry that would be funding Thomas’s theology). Note, as an example of many of instances from Thomas:
Now this nature is disordered, however, man falls short even of the goodness natural to him, and cannot wholly achieve it by his own natural abilities. Particular good actions he can still perform in virtue of his nature (building houses, planting vineyards and the like); but he falls short of the total goodness suited to his nature. He is like a sick man able to make certain movements by himself, but unable to move like a man in perfect health until he has had medicine to heal him.[4]
This will have to suffice to illustrate how I’m not sure, exactly, Allen is really reading Aquinas right in this regard. You can go read Thomas for yourself to see if I’m misrepresenting Aquinas on this, or if Allen is.[5]
I digress somewhat; but I wanted to note what I think is a misreading in the analysis of Allen in regard to Thomas’s theology. Further, in this process, I’m hoping you can see how this issue, relative to knowledge of God, gets fleshed out in the ways that it does for the classically Calvinist in particular (at least by way of providing some exposure). But furthermore, let me also just note, that because of this kind of Thomist commitment by many of these guys and gals, I think they end up misrepresenting what Scripture asserts about the noetic impact of the fall on humanity’s capacity to have a point of contact and/or capacity for knowledge of God as an inherent capacity in the created nature (even if that’s in the accidents rather than essential as we have been highlighting). We can see how they must go the direction they do; and we can start to see how their a priori commitment to Aristotle’s categories mediated through Thomas pressures them into this extra-biblical direction.
The tradition Karl Barth et al. offers does not work from the grace/nature combine that most classical theologies work from; particularly as we’ve noticed that in the Thomist frame. Barth’s offering sees all reality funded by God’s grace and then miracle alone; his doctrine of creation is funded by the covenant of grace, which for Barth works from his doctrine of election and God’s choice to be for us in Christ. For Barth the inner reality of creation is God’s covenant life of grace, consequently leading to the idea that creation itself is the external expression of that life as grounded and conditioned by the humanity of God in Jesus Christ.
That’s enough.
[1] The Thomist needs the intellect to remain untouched in some way because without that in the fall, if the intellect along with the will and affections (in a tripartite faculty psychology) fell, the human being would no longer be, at a constituent level, a human being; they’d be some sort of monster or zombie. For the Thomist the affections are what not only led to the fall (i.e. the lust of the flesh etc.), but were what actually fell in toto (in totality); the intellect, for the Thomist, was affected by this in some significant ways, but not in the same way that the affections/will were impacted. It is interesting, the Thomists, because they are working, in basic ways, from anthropological categories (i.e. the faculty psychology) that many theologians of today have abandoned for non-reductive physicalism etc.; so we can see a pretty stark repristination project being engaged in by such theologians in our 21st century.
[2] Michael Allen, Sanctification (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2017), 213 kindle edition. [emboldening mine]
[3] Ibid., 215 kindle edition.
[4] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Concise Translation, 16.
[5] See also a paper I wrote many years ago on grace and nature in the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Bear in mind I was very dilettante at this point, in my writing and theologically; but the paper itself will help to illustrate further my point in regard to Allen’s apparent mishandling of Aquinas’s theology on a rather salient front in regard to what Allen is attempting to glean relative to Aquinas’s theology qua Reformed theology simplicter: NATURE AND GRACE IN THE THEOLOGY OF THOMAS AQUINAS.
Who Is Jesus Christ for Us Today?: A New Kind of Empericism
I thought this was a good and interesting way to summarize Ben Quash’s essay on Revelation in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology; Quash writes,
[T]he opening up of a ‘third term’ in the confrontation between the recepient(s) and the medium of revelation is something that all good theologies of revelation in the modern period have had to attempt in different ways. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has left us with what is arguably one of the most suggestive and fruitful, with his affirmation of the penultimate (the rational, empirical, social domain) in its intimate closeness-in-distinction to the ultimate. The ultimate opens opens up within the penultimate in the form of a question, as we confront and examine the phenomena of our earthly existence. It is not our own question—it is given to us. And although it is given to us phenomenally (in the penultimate), its answer is not. The questions is “Who Is Jesus Christ for us today?’ (Bonhoeffer 1966: 30: 1971: 279). This question draws us along the way of the cross into dispossessive relationship with one who is the non-circumscribable ultimate of existence. We find him incognito, ‘hidden in empirical history as empirical reality, “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3)’ (Janz 2004: 220). He is the definitive revelation of God by allowing himself to be pushed out of the world onto the cross, in this way showing us the God who is not an agent in competitive relation to other agents in the world—not just one who makes particular differences—but one who makes all the difference, in but not in addition to all the differences that there already are. [Ben Quash, 342.]
I think the most decisive thing Quash notices about ‘Revelation’ and its theory, is this: ‘It is not our own question—it is given to us….’ Christians did not invent the story for their own political purposes (to the contrary); Christians did not schematize the categories by which we approach God, they were given to us. And so we ought to allow what is given, hidden as it is, in the veil of the flesh of the Son of Man, to impede upon us in the gracious way it is given; in the Love of the manger, in the Love of the cross, in the Love of the resurrection, in the love of the new heavens and earth. Jesus Christ for us today is the same as he was for them yesterday, and as he will be for us tomorrow.
Revelation, Christ the Key
I was going to post something from Herman Bavinck, and his Philosophy of Revelation, but instead I am going to post something on St. Efrem the Syrian’s theory of revelation which comes from an essay that Mark Mourachian wrote for the last installment of Participatio Journal’s offering which was themed off of Thomas F Torrance and Orthodoxy. Mourachian brings Torrance into conversation with St. Efrem, and part of what I am going to share is the result of that conversation. What should stand out about this theory of revelation, from St. Efrem, as reported by Mourachian is how Jesus Christ serves as the key that unlocks all of the riches that are present in God-given creation. Here is Mourachian:
Up to this point, our discussion of Ephrem’s understanding of divine revelation has focused on the manifest things of God, that which he has planted in the midst of creation voicelessly, and that which he has conveyed through the Bible by means of human language. It is necessary, though, to appreciate the correlate to Ephrem’s emphasis on God’s self-manifestation: his stress on God’s hiddenness. In one of his Hymns on Faith Ephrem writes:
Indeed, who is able to comprehend the Lord of natures,
to inquire into His Being and to investigate His Fatherhood,
and to explore His Greatness and to say how It is?
For, behold, in all those respects He is hidden from all,
and unless He wants to make Himself plain to us
there is nothing in Creation that is able to interpret Him.[1]
The core assumption at work here – indeed, everywhere in Ephrem’s theology – is that between the Creator and the creation there yawns a gaping chasm, a “great, boundless gulf” over which no created thing may cross.[2] Any and all knowledge of God is fundamentally dependent upon God’s good pleasure in revealing himself as he sees fit. Note the last two verses in the stanza quoted above: God is altogether hidden, and no created thing can interpret him, unless he wills it do so. He has so willed, and his very act of creating the natural world and taking on human language is sufficient evidence of that claim’s truth. Yet as near as God may draw, through the created means he chooses for his self-revelation, he nevertheless remains infinitely transcendent. He is at once very close and immeasurably far.[3]
Sebastian Brock uses the category of perspective to explain this example of Ephrem’s habit of thinking through polarities.[4] From our perspective, all created things are of revelatory significance, and we understand them as just that, God’s self-revelations in and through his handiwork. But from the perspective of divine reality itself, God has hidden something of himself in created things, pointing “to something that will one day be revealed: what is ‘hidden’ in the symbols of Nature and of Scripture is revealed in Christ at the Incarnation; what lies hidden in the Sacraments will be revealed at the eschaton, in Paradise.”[5] Even when we come to see the symbolic significance of all that God has imprinted of himself in created realities, he yet remains hidden, which fact is all the more apparent in view of the ontological divide between God and creation: nothing finite could ever manifest completely the infinite, inimitable majesty of God as he is in himself.
While Brock’s explanation of the polarity between the hidden and the revealed is helpful, there is one point on which his language is potentially misleading. He speaks of the human perspective as “subjective,” while the divine perspective enjoys objectivity.[6] By “subjective” he means that “every individual will approach God’s hiddenness by way of a different set of galyata, or points of revelation.”[7] That is so because all the instances of God’s self-revelation are differentiated, and that to which they all point in their manifold ways, God himself, is infinitely greater than the sum of revelation’s parts: “the revelation is always partial.”[8] His explanation of what he deems the “subjective” character of the human perspective is certainly true to Ephrem, but his choice of the term “subjective,” in contrast to “objective,” is open to misinterpretation. To the modern ear those terms typically register in ways that are contrary to Ephrem’s thinking and are commonly understood against the background of a dualist framework in which subjectivism is pit against claims to an accessible objective reality—not with reference to subjectivity.
Brock surely does not foist on Ephrem some radical disconnect between knower and known, or between the content of one’s thought and the reality it appears to intend, such as a dualist epistemology would entail. His exposition of Ephrem shows no marks of that kind of crippling of the human capacity for real knowledge. But it bears repeating that, for Ephrem, it is God who implanted in creation reliable indications and symbols of himself, constituting them to function as the faithful mind of the believer understands them to function. In that respect, both the divine and the human perspective are objective: they are grounded in and intend the objective reality that God is, albeit in radically different ways. God makes created symbols to correspond in a contingent, creaturely way to the truth that he himself is in a non-contingent, uncreated way.
It is better to consider the terms “subjective” and “objective,” as applied to Ephrem’s theology, from within the realist framework that Torrance so clearly articulated. In Torrance’s description, realism is:
the orientation in thought that obtains in semantics, science, or theology on the basis of a nondualist or unitary relation between the empirical and theoretical ingredients in the structure of the real world and in our knowledge of it. This is an epistemic orientation of the two-way relation between the subject and object poles of thought and speech, in which ontological primacy and control are naturally accorded to reality over all our conceiving and speaking of it.[9]
It is critical to appreciate how much a realist Ephrem actually is. In no way whatsoever does Ephrem allow for a theory of meaning as subjectively constructed out of whole cloth and totally dependent on the idiosyncrasies and fantasies of the mind unmoored from objective reality. The media through which God reveals himself to us, and the specific content of those manifestations, are objectively determined by God to be what they are and to function as they do. When we exert the effort to engage those media and discern their function and their hidden, divinely bestowed content, that experience yields results that are real yet, as Brock rightly notes, always and necessarily partial – partial in each individual instance and in the aggregate. What that fact implies is that the revelation of God is always and everywhere new, and the particulars of its manifestations are unexpected. As Michael Polanyi avers:
To hold knowledge is indeed always a commitment to indeterminate implications, for human knowledge is but an intimation of reality, and we can never quite tell in what new way reality may yet manifest itself. It is external to us; it is objective; and so its future manifestations can never be completely under our intellectual control.[10]
While we are free to discover the coherence and meaning of divine revelation through created things, we are not free to construct it. In other words, the fundamental structure, manner, and content of divine revelation are not subject to human control and determination: the structure, because the Creator orders all things; the manner, because he reveals himself as he wills; and the content, because the real, ultimate content of his self-revelation is the person of the incarnate Word, who reconciles us with the Father and gives us his Spirit to guide us “into all truth.”[11] [see whole essay from Mark Mourachian here, starting at pg. 94]
[1] HdF 44.7.
[2] HdF 15.5. It should be noted that the chasm is not the result of man’s disobedience and sin; it exists simply by virtue of the Creator-creation distinction.
[3] See HdF 72.23-24.
[4] See his discussion in his Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992), 27-29.
[5] Ibid., 28-29.
[6] Ibid., 27-28.
[7] Ibid., 27.
[8] Ibid.
[9] T. F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), 60. See also Torrance’s essay “Theological Realism,” in The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology, ed. Brian Hebblethwaite and Stewart Sutherland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 173.
[10] Michael Polanyi, “Faith and Reason,” Journal of Religion 41 (1961): 244. See also Torrance’s discussion of open concepts (Theological Science, 15), with respect to which “the reality conceived keeps on disclosing itself to us in such a way that it continually overflows all our statements about it.”
[11] John 16:13.
Who Is Jesus Christ For Us Today?
I thought this was a good and interesting way to summarize Ben Quash’s essay on Revelation in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology; Quash writes,
[T]he opening up of a ‘third term’ in the confrontation between the recepient(s) and the medium of revelation is something that all good theologies of revelation in the modern period have had to attempt in different ways. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has left us with what is arguably one of the most suggestive and fruitful, with his affirmation of the penultimate (the rational, empirical, social domain) in its intimate closeness-in-distinction to the ultimate. The ultimate opens opens up within the penultimate in the form of a question, as we confront and examine the phenomena of our earthly existence. It is not our own question—it is given to us. And although it is given to us phenomenally (in the penultimate), its answer is not. The questions is “Who Is Jesus Christ for us today?’ (Bonhoeffer 1966: 30: 1971: 279). This question draws us along the way of the cross into dispossessive relationship with one who is the non-circumscribable ultimate of existence. We find him incognito, ‘hidden in empirical history as empirical reality, “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3)’ (Janz 2004: 220). He is the definitive revelation of God by allowing himself to be pushed out of the world onto the cross, in this way showing us the God who is not an agent in competitive relation to other agents in the world—not just one who makes particular differences—but one who makes all the difference, in but not in addition to all the differences that there already are. [Ben Quash, 342.]
I think the most decisive thing Quash notices about ‘Revelation’ and its theory, is this: ‘It is not our own question—it is given to us….’ Christians did not invent the story for their own political purposes (to the contrary); Christians did not schematize the categories by which we approach God, they were given to us. And so we ought to allow what is given, hidden as it is, in the veil of the flesh of the Son of Man, to impede upon us in the gracious way it is given; in the Love of the manger, in the Love of the cross, in the Love of the resurrection, in the love of the new heavens and earth. Jesus Christ for us today is the same as he was for them yesterday, and as he will be for us tomorrow.