Tag: continental philosophy

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Language and Liturgy

Alex Renner

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This post will be a bit out of place in connection with the web of posts I have spun on this blog so far. At the moment, I have three literary stallions in my mental pen: Barth’s Church Dogmatics 1/I, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. These oddly-placed but preeminent texts have a similar inner principle at work throughout each one’s many pages: the centrality and all-encompassing reality of the Word. In Barth, the Word is the Word of God, the sovereign Lord who events Himself in limited human speaking so as to bring human language into itself and allow it to participate in its ontological Truthhood. In Heidegger, the Word is – as his pupil and apostle Hans-Georg Gadamer claims – the always-before-and-evermore-permeating source of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, the being-generating reality. In Wittgenstein, the Word is the system of language games continually, creatively played with and reconfigured and bequeathed at every moment in every community, which also, similar to Heidegger, acts as the reality-encompasser.

Something I have recently been struck by in all three of these thinkers’ texts is that their emphasis on the spoken/written word as the reality-generator of all human experiential/societal being, is that wrapped up in such a world-conception is this rejection of the classical Ancient view (which extended into the Cartesian view) of the “inner-outer” distinction. In Heidegger this is especially seen in his dogged affront against the I-Thou world-picture.

The “inner-outer” conception of human and world ontology can be described roughly by inspecting our Western language surrounding things like the “Mind” versus the “body,” or the “body” and the “soul” distinction. It can further be seen in the subject-object world-conception (what I called the I-Thou world-picture above) in how Western speaking generally tends towards terminology which designates human persons as something like embodied-minds which are unencumbered or uninfluenced or undiscovered in their substantive existence within the world. To the philosophers I have mentioned, such a world-picture is out of step with how language has genuinely been investigated to be. In the course of the development of philosophy of language – i.e., what has preoccupied philosophers for the past few hundred years or so – language has been found, after Kant, to be the fundamental mode of being for (to use Heidegger’s phrase) “Dasein,” i.e., “being-there” (the term Heidegger uses for human persons).

I don’t mean, in this post, to wholeheartedly sign onto and proselytize for Heidegger’s philosophical programme, much of which can be equated with Buddhist thought and language, but to make the distinction I think should rightly be made by contemporary theologians worthy of the name, that: theological inquiry, investigation, and reflection is still very much alive without the ancient house in which it has lived for so long. In other words, to come back to a consistent theme of mine: theology can very much survive on its own without the yoke of ancient ontological categories and pagan-derived world-conceptions. As my friend and I discussed just this past week, the claim made by so many philosophers today about the centrality of language as the all-encompassing, permeating and determining world-creator is by no means contradictory to St. John’s claim (which is frustratingly always associated with Greek philosophical ontology) that Jesus Christ is the Word of God who was “with God in the beginning.” I very much see theologians like Barth, T.F. Torrance, John Webster – and even others like Eberhard Jüngel – as contributing to this new and exciting theological direction.

Why did I name this post “Language and Liturgy,” though? Because, to transition, I see this newfound understanding and appreciation for human speaking as the way in which we can today appropriate genuinely-discovered theological/philosophical insights to best lean into the theological life-world of the Church today. I see one ancient continuity towards this end in the liturgical life of the Church. What I mean is to say that perhaps one of the best things to push today is for a more liturgical expression of the Church’s life so as to combat certain conceptualizations of inner-outer understandings of personhood that has developed into what we see now in what Barth calls “pietistic-rationalistic Modernism”[1] (prevalent in both “conservative” and “liberal” veins of Church expression). Language is the key to overcoming a non-theological, Greek-derived world-picture where the human person is divided in two, instead of mysteriously and wholly united (a central affirmation of the Chalcedonian definition). The spoken word of the liturgy, as our ancient Christian brothers and sisters continually emphasized, is the place in which the communal life of the Church enters into the Person of Christ and is so drawn up into the Triune life so as to fashion us more and more into the Word of the Θεανθροπος.

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Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Karl Barth, The Doctrine of the Word of God: Prolegomena to Church Dogmatics, being Vol. I, Part I, trans. G.T. Thomson(Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark, 1963), 36.

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The Latin Heresy at Play and the Actuality of Our Salvation in Christ

Alex Renner

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George Hunsinger’s book, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology, is a wonderful summarizing and exploration of Barth’s momentous and huge theological opus, the Church Dogmatics. Recently I decided to take the plunge into the Dogmatics, but thought that before setting off I would benefit by reading a few prefatory works to prepare for the journey. In the past few years, I have read numerous anthologies of the Dogmatics – the best of which was recently published and can be found here – which is how my initial interest in and appreciation for Barth grew.

The blog post I wrote a few weeks ago related to T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy outlines Torrance’s (and Barth’s) conviction that the central cancer at the heart of the development of Western theology is what is called the “Latin Heresy.” The Latin Heresy refers to the dualistic, systematic tendency of Western theologians following Augustine to separate the Being and the Work of Christ, relying on NeoPlatonically-derived conceptual schemes to so theologize. How this has materially played out in Western theology in the past few millennia can be seen clearly in groups like the Westminster/Dort Reformed worlds, where, following Calvin (a substantive theological heir of Augustine), theologians have refused to accept the mysterious unity of Christ’s Person and Work as constitutive of and effective for the entirety of the human race and subsequently chosen to stipulate that in the program of salvation each individual person must therefore appropriate Christ’s work (and therefore complete, fulfill, or perfect “it,” i.e., Christ’s work for humanity). Now, at this point we must be careful, lest we ourselves fall into what Torrance is warning against. Our theological instinct, upon hearing such an analysis, is to think, “But doesn’t this lead to universalism? How can Christ’s Person and Work so be conceived so as to render his action and person effective on behalf of all? Does that not betray the Christian faith’s necessary emphatic charge to people to believe? If Christ’s work is effective ‘for all,’ what is the need for faith?” Let us turn, now, to how Hunsinger poses the problem.

He writes,

“Two points above all seemed essential to Barth about salvation. First, what took place in Jesus Christ for our salvation avails for all. Second, no one actively participates in him and therefore in his righteousness apart from faith. The first point constitutes the objective aspect, the second the existential aspect, of salvation… The human act of faith is in no way determinative or creative of salvation, and the divine act of grace is in no way responsive or receptive to some condition external to itself as necessarily imposed upon it by the human creature… Grace therefore confronts the creature as a sheer gift. The human act of faith, moreover, in no way conditions, contributes to, or constitutes the event of salvation. Faith therefore confronts the Savior in sheer gratitude and sheer receptivity (which is not the same as mere passivity), and is itself inexplicable except as a miracle of grace.”[1]

The next portion, however, brings home the point:

“All these were axiomatic and nonnegotiable for Barth, because he took them to be the assured results of exegesis when the Bible was read christocentrically as a unified and differentiated whole… No possible tidier outcome could be achieved except at the expense of hermeneutical adequacy. Any gains in technical consistency at the conceptual or doctrinal level could be had only by suffering unacceptable losses of coherence with the subject matter of scripture. In such cases adequacy was to be regarded as a higher virtue than consistency. The sheer mystery and incomprehensibility of the subject matter (particularism), as attested in and through the biblical text (realism plus actualism), not only imposed important limits on the possibility of achieving technical consistency, but also established the very conditions for the possibility of any intelligibility in theological discourse worthy of the name (rationalism). All doctrinal construction, ordering, and testing, and all assimilation of extrabiblical conceptions, had to be done with a sure and uncompromising sense of the limits to conceptualization imposed by the subject matter. Otherwise the subject matter, whose mysteries as such fell into specifiable patterns, would no longer be comprehended in terms of its own intrinsic and indissoluble incomprehensibility.”[2]

For those readers who have read St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation: the similarities here with that text cannot be more clearly seen. In the same way that Athanasius pushes forward the salvific union of the Son of God’s sharing in humanity’s fallen flesh as the redemption of the human nature in which all share – i.e., how he unifies the Person and Work of Christ – so here the unity of the two cannot be more similar. Perhaps the biggest point to push here is that the question of the “possibility of universalism” is itself, claims Torrance and Barth, a symptom of the West’s dualistic thought form (which is a cancerous sore on the Western theological face). This is not to say, though, that Barth is positively arguing for the reality and orthodoxy of the idea of universal salvation; it is to say that a consistent reading of scripture yields a salvation picture where the two mysteriously-contradictory images of 1) no one being left out of the restorative union of the Son of God with human nature and 2) the act of miraculous divine grace is absolutely unconditioned and autonomously existent apart from any human’s recognition or appropriation of it, are nonnegotiable and cannot be systematized in such a way where one is given theological precedence and centrality over the other but where both must be held in a creative, mysterious, and simultaneous tension.

I tend to agree with this inherent tension, not because I am a universalist or a Barth fan boy, but because what I have seen in the Tradition would point to an absolutely christocentric picture of salvation, one where the systematic’s mind has no place or ground to theologize. For Barth, and hopefully for all of us, the reaction and form of life we should subsequently adopt upon coming to such a state of “sheer receptivity” towards the Triune God is one of wonder, love, grace, gratitude, and a readiness to tell the world how Christ has already loved it and given itself for it, even before it has come to realize it. The Person and Work of Christ are truly one, united in mysterious, salvific harmony. Jesus Christ is our Θεανθροπος.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), 106.

[2] George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), 107.

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The Word of God and the Word of Man, Reconsidered

Alex Renner

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“Jesus Christ is that Truth truthfully communicating himself, and enabling us truthfully to receive him. He is the Truth communicating himself in and through truths, who does not communicate himself apart from truths, and who does not communicate truths apart from himself. It is in this utterly unique way that Jesus Christ constitutes in himself the controlling and justifying Center of reference for all our statements about God, and as such he is the ultimate Judge of their truth or falsity.”[1]

T.F. Torrance’s set of biblical-theological essays touching on the nature of the Bible, the Word of God, and the appropriate place of biblical interpretation and theological reasoning, is titled Reality & Evangelical Theology: The Realism of Christian Revelation. In it, Torrance sets out to clarify his mode of theological reason, his style of writing, and his particular approach to the meditative study of the Scriptures in tandem with his Barth-derived notion of the Word of God. In my continuous study of Barth’s “Word” doctrine, Torrance could not have been a better guide and help.

Torrance’s continual emphasis throughout the set of essays is the divide which exists between God and man, and how when man views his own theological language – much of which could be right in line with how Christians have always spoken and in line with a semi-coherent wrestling with the message of Scripture – as univocally apprehending the (capital T) Truth of God which exists always and evermore before and outside of our linguistically-encapsulated notions of God’s Truth (i.e., in our creaturely realities), man takes his first step down the road to theological inconsistency and revelational emptiness. The divide which Torrance rightly recognizes as existing between God and man functions in his theological programme as a sort of parallel paradigm to the hypostatic union of Jesus Christ, with both human and divine realities existing side by side, yet with the divine side firmly in control of and sovereign over the human side. On the human side is human speech: our language, thought forms, and general speech patterns about God which over time we behave as if speaks univocally of the Truth of God towards which it points. On the divine side is the Truth of God, the ontological reality of God’s separately-existing being (identical with God Himself) which cannot and will never be captured by the limited notions of human thought forms and speech, but which sovereignly decides to so intervene within the partially-true events of human theological speaking to so reveal Himself in Jesus Christ to real people in their spatiotemporal existences.

The way the Barthian notion of the Word of God functions in Torrance’s theology is by both further supporting his other consistent claim that what God reveals is not something outside of Himself but is really and truly Himself and providing an objective referent against which the myriadly-colorful but far too often anarchic warscape of human theological speaking may be judged, analyzed, and sifted. Without some objective Truth to appeal to – apart from some magically-imbued theological power-structure like the Roman church – Torrance believes, our theological speaking becomes even more anarchic and ridiculous than it already tends to be. He backs up his claim, writing:

“It is the Truth itself and not any formulation of the church’s understanding of it that is the canon or criterion of true knowledge. The Truth of God may be known only in accordance with what it is independently in itself and as we on our part submit our understanding to its judgment… Understood in this epistemological way, justification by Grace, or verification through the Truth that Christ himself is, provides theology with the most powerful principle of objectivity, for it cuts away the ground from all our subjective claims and assertions.”[2]

Now, how is Torrance’s idea of the Word of God then apprehended, at all, by human interpreters? Torrance’s answer runs along the lines of the traditionally-conceived debate between faith and reason. Torrance, ever the Barthian, insists that it is only as the human theologian/biblical interpreter – the same thing in Torrance’s (and my) opinion – “submit[s] [his]… understanding to [the Bible’s]… judgment” that the human theologian may wish to utter any correct theological speech at all. It is only through a total dependence on the Reality of God – a hope that that Reality apprehends and encompasses the interpreter – that any human language may hope to participate in the ontological Reality of God by God’s own intervention and eventing of his revealing-of-Self. In Anselm’s classic phrase, “I believe [or, allow myself to be encompassed by God’s reality], therefore I understand.”

All the ways that certain Modern categories about textual authority and truthful correspondence have infiltrated evangelical understandings of the Word of God, I am convinced Torrance presents a solid case here for a unique understanding of these concepts of the Word of God and the Word of Man. Of course, one of Torrance’s other argumentative veins is that his arguments are not new, as he claims Athanasius, Calvin, and others have thought identically. I myself have long been wrestling with issues of biblical-textual coherence, and for all the ways I have reconceptualized my own understanding of biblical authority I have come back to the thought that the Bible is indeed revelatory, wonderfully amazing, and inspired; where that inspiration, authority, and revelation is to be located, however, is purely and completely with the power and control of the God who reveals, authorizes, and inspires the text. When the text itself is imbued with an independent power, as many evangelicals implicitly think of it, it takes on a truly dangerous discursive function and serves the power-moves of those theological speakers who would proof-text their way to the top. Although the “implications” of such a view would seem to some in the conservative evangelical vein to lead to “liberal theology,” I think it does just the opposite: emphatically pushing the claim that the reality of the Bible’s inspiration lies in the sole hands of the God who willed its existence destroys the foundations of contemporary theological leftism. How, I think deserves a whole other blog post. I would, of course, add as a footnote add that such an understanding of the Word of God must always and evermore be supplemented by a constant listening-ear to the word of the Ancient Church Catholic (i.e., the saint’s throughout the ages who have themselves wrestled, better than us, over these issues). Take these thoughts with a grain of salt; I myself am still thinking through them.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Reality & Evangelical Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1982), 125-6. 

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Reality & Evangelical Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1982), 123.

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Thomas F. Torrance as the Best of the Barthians

Alex Renner

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Thomas F. Torrance was a Church of Scotland minister, mentee to the preeminent Karl Barth, and a world-renowned theologian in his own right whose universal appreciation – from all sides of the aisle – points to the man’s formidable theological mind, his heart for people, and a passion for the unity of the twentieth century Church. Personally, I have benefitted enormously from the little amount of meditative reading I have recently done on him, and do not plan to stop reading Torrance until I go to be with the Lord. Along with Barth, he has all but revolutionized my understanding of what Christ has done for the world and how I should subsequently see my place within Christ’s universe; of those I have heard from who have read Torrance with charity, a similar change has taken place in them. Of the Barthians – the term I am using to refer to those theologians which Barth intimately influenced – I think Torrance stands as the most insightful and thought-out theologian, and his evangelistic fervor and obvious concern he had for the pastorate pull on my deepest heartstrings. Eberhard Jüngel, the Lutheran mentee of Barth’s whose place in the hierarchy of those Barth taught falls directly behind Torrance, in my opinion, had a similar but quieter influence on the theological landscape of his day but in mostly Lutheran circles (whereas Torrance was a Reformed man, through and through).

The First Things article titled “T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” written by a Roman Catholic acquaintance of Torrance’s, presents a clear-cut image and a strong critique of Torrance’s entire theological project. In so many respects like his mentor, Torrance used strongly-worded language when referring to those ideas he perceived to have corrupted the Church’s theological language through the centuries, perhaps the most exciting of which was what Torrance termed the “Latin Heresy.” The Latin Heresy alluded to the Western Church’s continual tendency to adopt theological language which conceptualized God’s relation to humanity in Christ in dualist terms, using ways of speaking which separated being and act, form and content, and, in Torrance’s view, Jesus Christ and God the Father. The Latin Heresy – and the essay Torrance devoted to the development of the idea, titled “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy” – is what the author of the article, Douglas Farrow, tackles from a Roman Catholic perspective. In what follows I will pull out a few ideas of Farrow’s and Torrance’s and put them in critical conversation, and attempt to work out my own thoughts concerning it all.

As a side note of sorts, I would like to start with a small comment Farrow makes near the middle point of his article. He writes, about Torrance’s value to Christians of other traditions:

“For he [Torrance] is capable, with Barth, of helping Protestants learn how to be critical of Protestantism as well as of Catholicism, and how to enrich themselves with patristic insights and resources. Moreover, Protestants can learn from Torrance something that Barth cannot teach them: a degree of respect for liturgy and sacraments and even for episcopal ministry… Catholics can hardly dismiss Torrance’s critiques as so much Protestant caricature. In Torrance, as in Barth, they are confronted by a Protestant who forces them to think hard about the mediation of Christ in ways they are not accustomed to. On the other hand, in Torrance they can discover points of contact with the hieratic and liturgical dimensions missed by Barth.”[1]

Here Farrow notes something I too have realized about the difference between Barth and Torrance. In many respects, Torrance has a much more patristic flavor than Barth, even considering how heavily Barth leaned on and listened to the Fathers. One can only expect Torrance, then, to have a much higher appreciation for catholic – and here I am very much ready to throw Barth under the rug – sacramental understandings and for the place of structure and order in the Sunday liturgy. The very fact that Torrance’s entire project was constantly emphasized to be founded on the complimentary theologies of Sts. John Calvin and Athanasius of Alexandria points to how highly and explicitly Torrance considered Nicene theology in his approach. Torrance was a thoroughly Nicene theologian, and no one can combat it.

Of course, Farrow then combats it. Before we get to Farrow’s critiques, let us see what Torrance puts forth in thesis form (this is a blog after all) in his essay “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy.”

To begin with, Torrance outlines Barth’s primary theological input as reminding the Church that “‘God himself is the content of his Revelation,'” as opposed to an instrumentalist or dualist conception of Revelation where God is imparting some thing outside of Himself. He then goes on to lay out theological history as he sees it developing in the West (for the worst):

“What Karl Barth found to be at stake in the twentieth century was nothing less than the downright Godness of God in his revelation, for the Augustinian, Cartesian and Newtonian dualism built into the general framework of Western thought and culture had the effect of cutting back into the preaching and teaching of the Church in such a way as to damage, and sometimes even to sever, the ontological bond between Jesus Christ and God the Father, and thus to introduce an oblique or symbolical relation between the Word of God and God himself. Barth’s struggle for the integrity of divine Revelation opened his eyes to the underlying epistemological problems, not only in Neo-Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, but in Protestant orthodoxy as well. These were bound up with the Western habit of thinking in abstract formal relations, which was greatly reinforced by Descartes in his critico-analytical method, and of thinking in external relations which was accentuated by Kant in his denial of the possibility of knowing things in their internal relations. This is what I have called ‘the Latin heresy,’ for in theology at any rate its roots go back to a form of linguistic and conceptual dualism that prevailed in late patristic and medieval Latin theology.”[2]

Torrance’s primary problem, then, is Western theology’s characteristic tendency to externalize the ontological relations of God in both its doctrine of the Trinity and its doctrine of the Hypostatic Union. Thus, he goes on to say, you see Westminster orthodoxy’s tendency to Nestorian-ize the Hypostatic Union in pursuit of fulfilling their closed doctrinal loop of satieting God’s anger-principle, and, in Roman Catholicism, of constructing an ecclesiology which objectifies God’s grace in an outer-hierarchical-imparted-grace-Church mode. Farrow rightly summarizes,

“Liberal Protestantism… had more or less reduced theology to ethics, and the mediation of Christ to moral influence… In so-called high Calvinism, represented by the Synod of Dort, there had long been a severe instrumentalization of Christ, which both Barth and Torrance spent much energy resisting… British and American Evangelicalism… developed a penal substitution theory of the atonement that has its closest Catholic counterpart in Mel Gibson’s misbegotten The Passion of the Christ.”[3]

Following this critical-historical diagnosis of Western theological thought, Torrance goes on to reveal what he believes is the antidote to the problem. Bringing in St. Athanasius, he further argues:

“My concern here, however, is with the place which Barth, like Athanasius, gave to internal relations in the coherent structure of Christian theology, and of the way in which he exposed and rejected the habit of thinking in terms of external relations which had come to characterize so much of Western theology.”[4]

At the heart of Torrance’s and Barth’s critiques of the West have to do with the primary issue mentioned earlier: for God to truly have said to reveal Himself to mankind, for the Christian faith to be truly unique from the rest of mankind’s self-made religious-expressive landscape, for God to have truly said to have united Himself to humanity in his breaking-forth into our limited, corrupted existence in Jesus Christ, there must really and truly be taking place an authentic, Triune, Self-revealing in the event of the incarnation. The externalism of the West obscures and objectifies what God imparts to us, diminishing this central truth of the Gospel that what we have in salvation is relational, since our “salvation” is truly “reconciliation,” i.e., reconciliation with God Himself and not some external legal thing or some external imparted or mediated “grace.”

*Here, I might footnote that a sacramentology which uses language of “imparted grace” does not necessarily then fall into the externalism under discussion, but, understood rightly, further reinforces this truth of the Gospel-centric presencing of God in, through, and with the sacraments.*

Let’s bring in Farrow’s critique. He remarks, after a lengthy appreciation section on Torrance:

“Barth and Torrance have, in part, misdiagnosed the problem and misconstrued the solution… Barth’s imposition on the doctrine of the Incarnation of an actualist ontology – an ontology that already contains and is soteriology – is seen by Torrance as a breakthrough that enables us to shake off the Latin heresy. But it can also be seen as a kind of theological oversteer that puts Christology into the ditch on the Eutychian side of the road… The first consequence of turning Jesus into a reconciling event, into a divine-human Happening that… is everywhere and always taking place, is that the Church becomes nothing more than a community of witnesses, a community of people who with the eyes of faith see and confess what is everywhere and always the case. The sacraments themselves become mere acts of confession… For if reconciliation is an event strictly internal to the being of Christ, and if Christ is without remainder the reconciliation he achieves, then the Church must be denied any reconciling or mediating function of its own, lest it somehow be confused with Christ. Thus the Eucharist, as traditionally understood both in the Latin and the Greek Churches, is incomprehensible – even idolatrous. And the Church remains something hidden. Even in the Eucharist it cannot be said, ‘Here is the Church.’”[5]

I think Farrow is actually on to something here. Although I would push back with his observation that Torrance’s formulation of the Incarnation is Eutychian (it is one of the healthiest, most balanced treatments I have come across of the Hypostatic Union), his ecclesial and sacramental concerns resonate with me. Undoubtedly, what Farrow has in mind in terms of the “mediating function” he wants imparted to the Church looks like the specifically Roman hierarchical structure of which he is a part, but the sentiment behind it is not necessarily wrong. As I noted in my aside earlier, the language of “imparted grace” does not constrict the Christian theologian to a Roman sacramental or ecclesial understanding. The “authority” of the Church can still wholeheartedly be affirmed, apart from the poles of the Roman magisterium or the pietistic, democratic religion prevalent in lower Evangelicalism.

For sake of space, I will cease the discussion here (for now). Farrow will go on to mention his frustrations over Barth’s and Torrance’s Mariologies and perceived historical ignorances. Perhaps I will do a blog post on how rightly I think Torrance and Barth tackle history.

Farrow gives a critically appreciative final thought, the spirit of which I share:

“For my part, I wish to say in grateful tribute: It was he who began to open me to theology as a discipline, to Barth as its preeminent twentieth-century practitioner, and to critical realism as its appropriate epistemological mode. Like many others, I learned from Torrance how to find in Barth what his many detractors had missed or deliberately overlooked. From Torrance (as from Gunton), I learned to see some things that even Barth had overlooked, and so to think independently of Barth. The twentieth century was a century of great theologians, the likes of which we may not see again for a long while, and Torrance must be numbered among them.”[6]

Thomas F. Torrance is worth your time to read. As a Nicene, Trinitarian, Christological, and Ecumenical theologian, he should rightly go down as a contemporary Church Father.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Douglas Farrow, “T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” First Things, December 2013, pg. 28. 

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy,” Divine Interpretation: Studies in Medieval and Modern Hermeneutics (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017).

[3] Douglas Farrow, “T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” First Things, December 2013, pg. 28-9.

[4] Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy,” Divine Interpretation: Studies in Medieval and Modern Hermeneutics (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017).

[5] Douglas Farrow, “T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” First Things, December 2013, pg. 29-30.

[6] Douglas Farrow, “T.F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” First Things, December 2013, pg. 31.

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Theological Knowledge as Originating in God’s Initiative in Karl Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline

Alex Renner

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Karl Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline is an imperfect summarizing of his more layered, theologically-structured work, the Church Dogmatics. The Outline, made up of 24 chapters each covering a portion of the Apostle’s Creed, is a formidable introduction for the Barth-curious. More than a simple introduction, however, Dogmatics in Outline is a rich theological-devotional meditation which Barth gave in the form of a series of lectures immediately following the end of the Second World War. Along with his Evangelical Theology (also a series of lectures he gave, but in America), the Outline is a shiny jewel in the myriad-ly colorful theological crown of Karl Barth. There are too many sizable nuggets of theological goodness to cover here, but chapters 5-10 are especially enriching.

At the beginning of chapter five, Barth begins an offensive against the unnamed specter of his theologically liberal forefather Friedrich Schleiermacher. He contrasts the faith found in the Apostles Creed with that espoused by the preeminent theological Romantic, who represents (still, sadly) much of modern hermeneutics and biblical theology of both “liberal” and “conservative” veins. He starts:

“In the sense of Christian faith, God is not to be found in the series of gods. He is not to be found in the pantheon of human piety and religious inventive skill. So it is not that there is in humanity something like a universal natural disposition, a general concept of the divine, which at some particular point involves the thing which we Christians call God and as such believe in and confess; so that Christian faith would be one among many, an instance within a general rule… The God of the Christian Confession is, in distinction from all gods, not a found or invented God or one at last and at the end discovered by man; He is not a fulfillment, perhaps the last, supreme and best fulfillment, of what man was in course of seeking and finding.”[1]

In other words, the classical method of “proving God’s existence,” of analyzing God just as one would analyze the theological pronouncements of any other deity originating in the sinful creativity of mankind, is a fools errand; it does not and cannot get you to the God revealed and disclosed in the Christian Scriptures. Further, God is not something which can be, has been, or will ever be “found out” by man, period. Man, in his lowly and corrupted estate, is incapable of finding his way to the God who is, and all attempts have ended up creating language structures and conceptions of a god which are in fundamental disagreement with who God tells us He is in such Scriptures (and the Tradition which interprets those Scriptures). The only way in which such a God-to-Man relationship can be established is if God breaks forth into our limited reality and establishes such a relationship. Theologically and existentially, we are in need of God’s help.

“What is involved [i.e., revealed in the Apostles Creed] is man’s meeting with the Reality which he has never of himself sought out or first of all discovered. ‘What no eye hath seen nor ear heard, what hath not entered into the heart of any man, God hath given to those who love Him’… God in the sense of the Christian Confession is and exists in a completely different way from that which is elsewhere called divine.”[2]

So. Barth has helped us establish that the “infinite qualitative distinction” which Christian history has affirmed of the ontological divide between God and creation is indeed true, and is the sword which splits in two every idea of divinity originating in Man’s mind. How, then, is theology established? How is it that humanity can speak of God (which is an ability Barth must believe we now have, however that works out, since he has written what he has written), if humanity cannot then “ascend” to true knowledge of God?

As he gives his answer about how theology is allowed, he also sets out to distinguish his theological project from most “systematic” theologians of the past five centuries or so. He writes:

“It is this God in the highest who has turned as such to man, given Himself to man, made Himself knowable to him… God in the highest, in the sense of the Christian Confession, means He who from on high has condescended to us, has come to us, has become ours… By this definition something fundamentally different is taking place from what would happen, if I should try and set before you conceptually arranged ideas of an infinite, supreme Being. In such a case I would be speculating. But I am not inviting you to speculate. I maintain that this is a radically wrong road which can never lead to God, but to a reality called so only in a false sense… When our talk is of Him and we speak of Him as about a familiar entity, who is more familiar and real than any other reality and who is nearer us than we are to ourselves, it is not because there may have been particularly pious people who were successful in investigating this Being, but because He who was hidden from us has disclosed Himself.”[3]

Theology can only be established on the foundation of God’s initiative to reveal Himself to Man. Without such a divine initiative, Man is doomed (but also revels in being doomed) to forever theorize and imagine a god who fits Man’s fancies and passions. Ten times out of ten, Man creates idols of the world he exists in, and without divine illumination is stuck in such a degrading, self-chosen pattern of destruction. Though his doctrine of the Word of God is be similar yet distinct from mine, Barth’s focus on Jesus Christ as the center of that divine initiative on the part of God to break through Man’s faulty thought-world is summed up well when Barth writes,

“The whole work of God lives and moves in this one Person. He who says God in the sense of Holy Scripture will necessarily have to say Jesus Christ over and over again… From this work we must make no abstractions, if we would know God’s nature and existence. Here, in this work, God is the Person who expounds Himself, and is thus the subject of this work.”[4]

Jesus Christ is the place where God breaks through to us and screams, smiling, “Here I am!”

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1959), 36.

[2] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1959), 36.

[3] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1959), 37-38.

[4] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1959), 39.

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Maximus the Confessor on Deification in His Two Hundred Chapters on Theology

Alex Renner

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Maximus the Confessor is quickly becoming one of my favorite historical theologians. His characteristic Christocentrism, his healthy balance of apophatic and kataphatic theology, and his descriptions of the Christian life all lift up the soul to heights of love and peace which few contemporary Christian paperbacks have the ability to do. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’s insistence, in his famous preface to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, that, nine times out of ten it is the time-tested, ancient theological treatises which offer more spiritual encouragement than anything coming out in print today (with a few exceptions). I find the same to be true when reading Maximus; you can tell the man loved God, loved people, and found much growth in the contemplation of divine things. I myself benefit by allowing my soul to be lifted up by his theological movements.

When my wife and I were perusing the humungous Oxford book store, Blackwells, I came across a Patristics section which took up most of my time that day. While there, I purchased SVS Press’s copy of Maximus’s Two Hundred Chapters on Theology. It is turning out, in only the first few pages, to be enormously rich and spiritually and theologically precious to me. There is much gold to be dug up, here.

Maximus begins his work by setting up a few guard rails about God’s absolute otherness, using terms I have only ever read Dionysius use (i.e., “super-substantial” and “absolutely above/beyond essence or substance”). He then goes on to describe the inner life of the one whose spiritual/thought life is continually disciplined to draw itself up to God:

“1.13 He who has dazzled the intellect with divine thoughts, and has accustomed his rationality unceasingly to celebrate the creator with divine hymns, and has hallowed his sensory perception with unadulterated mental representations – such a one has added to the natural beauty in accordance with the image, the deliberate good in accordance with the likeness.”[1]

You can see here the patristic conception of image/likeness in Maximus, as well as a definition of deification as a mystical union or sharing, an unutterable love-relationship which God and Man continually keep up with one another (based on both God’s and Man’s dual initiative). Reading 1.13 reminded me of a similar statement of Maximus’s in his Ambiguum, where his explanation of mystical union revolves around something like the idea of being fully encompassed by the Other. To Maximus, our union with Christ is a full-encompassing, where, though we keep our essential humanity intact, we are known and are seeking to be more known only in line with those characteristics and particularities as filtered through God’s gifting of them. In other words, we refuse to be known or encompassed apart from our own total-identification and encompassing by Christ. Glorious.

Three “chapters” later, Maximus illustrates a provocative picture of salvation which further attempts an elucidation of deification. He writes,

“And he who has been purified, is illuminated; and he who has been illuminated is made worthy to lie with the bridegroom Word in the chamber of the mysteries.”[2]

Maximus chooses to relate our union with God to the sexual union which a husband and wife share on their wedding night. He caveats that image, though, with the “mysteries” as the place wherein that sexual union takes place. Now, by “mysteries” he means the sacraments of the Church: the Eucharist and Baptism. So, the sacramental mysteries are the means through which God unites himself, continually, to his people. Without a consistent participation on the part of the Bride (the Church) in the mysteries (the Eucharist), the Bride and Groom (the Word, Christ) are not in full union and their relationship is not initiated or brought to completion. Again, glorious.

In case you thought Maximus the Pelagian, however, he insists, later on in the first forty or so chapters, that:

“1.31 Never can a soul reach out towards the knowledge of God if God himself does not, having condescended, lay hold of it and lead it up to himself. For a human mind is not strong enough to ascend such a distance – as if to seize for its part some divine illumination, if God himself did not draw it upward, as far as is possible for a human mind to be drawn upward, and enlighten it with divine radiances.”[3]

Such union, mediated to the Bride in the mysteries, is more rightly said to be initiated and brought to its end by the Groom, i.e., Christ. It is Christ who reaches toward the Christian and pulls him up to union with Himself. Christ gets the credit and the glory for the Triune work he completes in us, using the mysteries, to do such work.

Amen, amen, and amen!

For those who want a deep spiritual nourishment beyond the steady flow of contemporary, popular Christian literature (much of which misses the point), turn to the ancient fathers for the golden honey of biblical wisdom. Turn to the Tradition, and be satiated.

[1] St. Maximus the Confessor, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology (Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2015), 51.

[2] St. Maximus the Confessor, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology (Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2015), 53.

[3] St. Maximus the Confessor, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology (Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2015), 61.

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Maximus the Confessor on The Lord’s Prayer

Alex Renner

–

Maximus the Confessor’s commentary on the Lord’s Prayer is a short, edifying, worshipful read. The preeminent eastern theologian’s interaction with what is going on theo-logically in the words of The Lord’s Prayer is illuminating of the pre-Modern outlook concerning the Son’s salvific incarnation and our subsequent participation in the Trinity’s life. He writes,

“Indeed this prayer contains in outline, mysteriously hidden, or to speak more properly, openly proclaimed for those whose understanding is strong enough, the whole scope of what the words deal with. For the words of the prayer make request for whatever the Word of God himself wrought through the flesh in his self-abasement. It teaches us to strive for those goods of which only God the Father through the natural mediation of the Son in the Holy Spirit is in all truth the bestower, since according to the divine Apostle the Lord Jesus is ‘mediator between God and men’: Through his flesh he made manifest to men the Father whom they did not know, and through the Spirit he leads the men whom he reconciled in himself to the Father. For them and on their account, he became man without any change and he himself worked and taught many new mysteries whose number and dimension the mind can in no way grasp or measure.”[1]

Maximus’s insistence that “the words of the prayer make request for whatever the Word of God himself wrought through the flesh in his self-abasement” is the most profound statement in this small passage here, since it remarkably proclaims that the Lord’s Prayer’s telos goes beyond merely providing a structure for prayer but is itself a proclamation of the fulfillment of the Son’s economic workings. In other words, the Lord’s Prayer is itself a sort of gospel proclamation which tells of Jesus Christ’s working out within himself of the perfection of humanity through his own human life, death, and resurrection. Glory to God for such a wonderful insight.

Maximus continues, outlining the meet response to such reflection on God’s gracious salvation:

“He gives adoption by giving through the Spirit a supernatural birth from on high in grace, of which divine birth the guardian and preserver is the free will of those who are thus born. By a sincere disposition it cherishes the grace bestowed and by a careful observance of the commandments it adorns the beauty given by grace. By the humbling of the passions it takes on divinity in the same measure that the Word of God willed to empty himself in the incarnation of his own unmixed glory in becoming genuinely human.”[2]

Our response, fueled and given by the grace of God through the working of Jesus Christ and the Spirit, is one of worship and obedience. In worshipping and obeying, the human Christian ascends to greater levels of participated divinity in a reverse manner to how Christ condescends from the heights of his divinity down to his finite humanity. Thus is the whole Christian life: one of deifying ascent from one glory to the next, fulfilling our purpose as little Christs.

May we each individually become an εικον of our Lord: the divine and human God-Man.

[1] George C. Berthold, Trans., Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1985), 102.

[2] George C. Berthold, Trans., Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1985), 103.

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Eberhard Jüngel on Theology, Language, and God

Alex Renner

I recently purchased John Webster’s Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology, and have been wildly pleased with what I have found and read there. Amidst my daily perusing of the best anthology of Barth’s work in English today – The Essential Karl Barth by Keith Johnson – I find that reading Webster’s intro on Jüngel is a helpful supplement for illuminating certain points of Barth and for understanding how those after him built upon and developed his theology. Jüngel, in my opinion, functions as a sort of theological son to Barth: he builds upon his good points, elucidates emphases of Barth’s which aren’t totally clear in Barth’s writings, and critiques Barth when he thinks he is in error. I find many aspects of Jüngel’s life and work exciting, too. Both of Jüngel’s mentors, for example, Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger, have inspired much of my own life, language, and thought. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, though I have only read portions of it, has solidified certain convictions I was playing around with when meditating on the relationship between human subjectivity, hermeneutics, and theological method. Needless to say, too, Barth’s writings have had a similar yet greater effect on me.

I found much to appreciate in the opening chapters of the book. Webster writes, commenting on a few core ideas of Jüngels’,

“The essence of God is nothing other than the essence of the one who works and reveals… The history of the man Jesus constitutes nothing less than the inner life of God, the very place where God’s trinitarian relatedness is played out before the world… God’s way of being himself is by being God for us. It is this which lies behind the concept of ‘correspondence’ (Entsprechung) which Jüngel uses to describe the inseparability of God’s immanent life from his economic operations. For if God ‘corresponds with himself’ in the event of revelation, then his revealed being pro nobis is nothing other than his immanent being pro se.”[1]

Jüngel emphasizes, then, the same point put forward by Barth, Rahner, and the Nicene theologians, that who we receive by faith in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ is none other than the Eternal Son of the Trinity. If we want to say that the Lord Jesus is truly “in the form of God” (Phil. 2:6) as we meet him by faith, then who God is in His economy (i.e., in Jesus) is who He must be in His ontology (i.e., in His Triune life). If “Rahner’s Rule,” that who God is in His life (i.e., who He really and truly is within Himself) is who He is in His activity or workings towards us, is to be upholded and maintained then we must affirm Jüngel’s point here: “The history of the man Jesus constitutes… the very place where God’s trinitarian relatedness is played out before the world.” The theological implications of this simple formula are tremendous. Furthermore, the statement that “God’s way of being himself is by being God for us” finds deep soil in Barth’s same case: who God has chosen to be in His act of love by uniting Himself with humanity in Jesus Christ is “God-with-humanity.” In other words, God’s incarnation in Jesus is the point at which God chose to forever be united with humanity in intimate union. God will never again be Himself without being God-with-humanity.

Going on to illuminate more of Jüngel’s core ideas, Webster discusses Jüngel’s elucidation of revelation from a different yet similar angle. Jüngel seeks to answer the question, in a truly post-metaphysical vein (with heavy overtones of Heideggerian ontology language): How is it that humans can speak of God “as object”? Jüngel’s contention with “traditional,” metaphysical accounts of God are that they subject God to metaphysical categories foreign to the subject itself (i.e., God) and inevitably treat God as an object to be analyzed. As a theologian of the inductive vein, convinced that theology can only proceed and take its cues from the nature of the divine subject in question rather than from general principles applied to the subject, Jüngel proposes that the only way humans can speak of God’s being-as-object is through the utter and total subjection of theology’s speech about God to the ways in which God has already allowed Himself to be spoken of. Webster includes a quotation I think should be given here in full (from Jüngel’s seminal work God’s Being is in Becoming):

“God’s being-as-object is his being-revealed. God is thus the object of knowledge insofar as he has interpreted himself. And insofar as God has interpreted himself in his revelation and so made himself the object of knowledge of God, he has also made man into the subject of the knowledge of God… That means… that God’s being-as-object is not the result of human objectification of God… He is only objective as the one who has made himself objective.”[2]

Moving on to Jüngel’s position on theological language, which I thought was particularly illuminating, Webster lays out the centrality of the idea of metaphor in the theology of Jüngel. Following Heidegger, Jüngel argues that the literalistic boundaries which Western thought has placed on the conception of truth has stifled theological language and theologians’ understanding of just what can be rightly said concerning God. However, theological language is not therefore transcendent of human speech. Theological language is and can only be decidedly human. Webster comments,

“Jüngel insists that language about God must be authentically human language. Of course, he is firm in the conviction that language about God is only possible on the basis of God’s revelatory utterance, and that such language does not take its rise from within human language since it is demanded of man from beyond the horizons of worldly discourse. But he affirms with equal conviction that language about God is not the suspension of human language or its devaluation. Language about God is certainly not immanent within the structures of ordinary human speech. Yet it does not so transcend those structures as to lose its human character. Language about God is a demand which goes against the grain of man’s natural linguistic resources; yet it is not thereby less but more human than ‘ordinary’ discourse.”[3]

Theological language is human language in the highest and most true sense.

I highly recommend the works of Jüngel, and this small introduction, to you. Along with the rest of the dialectical theologians, Jüngel stands as a voice which points a way forward (albeit imperfectly) for future theological speaking in this post-metaphysical moment.

[1] John Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 17-18.

[2] Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being is in Becoming (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2014), 57.

[3] John Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 40.

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Paul Tillich, Faith, and Theological Reflection

Alex Renner

The end of my last post includes a quotation from Paul Tillich’s Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality which puts forth Tillich’s position on the compatibility between philosophy and theology. The central thesis of this little book is that philosophy and theology can, in fact, coexist, and are, even further, codependent on each other’s relevance and success as human thought projects. As a lay evangelical theologian, I went into reading his work with a cautious skepticism (which I was right to do), but nevertheless found some insights – about both philosophical investigation and theological speaking – which I thought would best be to throw out there and discuss.

A personal note: later this summer, I plan on flying up to Wisconsin to complete an audited class on the patristic doctrine of Participation at an Anglican seminary. My interest in the patristic vision, generally, stirred my interest in this, and so you can imagine that when I got to Tillich’s section on Participation (and our current age’s rejection of the participatory outlook) my interest piqued. He writes,

“In terms of the history of philosophy, it is a nominalistic ontology which has determined philosophical empiricism from the high Middle Ages to the present moment. Being, according to this vision of reality, is characterized by individualization and not by participation. All individual things, including men and their minds, stand alongside each other, looking at each other and at the whole of reality, trying to penetrate step by step from the periphery toward the center, but having no immediate approach to it, no direct participation in other individuals and in the universal power of being which makes for individualization… one thing must be emphasized. It is a view of reality as a whole.”[1]

Indeed, Tillich! While I have serious reservations about the attempts by many contemporary theologians (most of whom stem from high-church backgrounds) to revive the sort of participatory outlook so-long espoused by the Christian tradition, Tillich does a great job here of outlining the general philosophical air we breathe now: one which chokes us on our own scientistic individualism.

In the next chapter, Tillich displays his presuppositions concerning the nature of religion (Christianity including), but says some thought-provoking things that have real theological implications. He writes, concerning man’s tendency to anthropomorphize:

“There is no type of religion which does not personify the holy which is encountered by man in his religious experience… In the moment in which something took on this [sanctified] role, it also received a personal face. Even tools and stones and categories became personal in the religious encounter, the encounter with the holy. Persona, like the Greek prosopon, points to the individual and at the same time universally meaningful character of the actor on the stage. For person is more than individuality. ‘Person’ is individuality on the human level, with self-relatedness and world-relatedness and therefore with rationality, freedom, and responsibility. It is established in the encounter of an ego-self with another self, often called the ‘I-Thou’ relationship, and it exists only in community with other persons.”[2]

What struck me about this section of the reading is the utter truthfulness of his argument. As one who places himself (generally) within the Reformed theological camp, I place a high value on the proposition that humans, when left to their own devices, will 100% of the time fashion idols for themselves. Calvin’s whole “The heart is an idol factory” meets me with a hearty Amen. Humanity does not and cannot go on long without worshipping anything and everything as long as it is not the God revealed in Jesus Christ. We fashion ideological, material, and emotional gods for ourselves like hotcakes: it is our basic function as corrupted beings. Yet, the Eternal Son’s incarnation as Jesus Christ proclaims an insane and wonderful truth to us, that neither does God seek to be an impersonal God to us; in matter of fact, humanity cannot even come to know or understand a God who does not condescend to our human ways of knowing, thinking, speaking, and being. There is a double edged sword brought out by reflection on Paul Tillich’s assertions here: humanity both cannot understand a God who would require them to either transcend or escape their humanity (since there literally is no way for us to know or be known except in ways appropriate to our mode of being), yet humanity continually and doggedly insists on making created puppet-gods who conform to who we believe god should be (which ends, every time, in an anthropomorphized idol).

While there are numerous other sections of the book that I could comment on, I think his page-long discussion of the nature of faith presents some good, final theological-meat to chew on:

“Faith, in the biblical view, is an act of the whole personality. Will, knowledge, and emotion participate in it. It is an act of self-surrender, of obedience, of assent. Each of these elements must be present. Emotional surrender without assent and obedience would by-pass the personal center. It would be a compulsion and not a decision. Intellectual assent without emotional participation distorts religious existence into a nonpersonal, cognitive act. Obedience of the will without assent and emotion leads into a depersonalizing slavery. Faith unites and transcends the special functions of the human mind; it is the most personal act of the person… Biblical faith is the faith of a community, a nation, or a church. He who participates in this faith participates in its sumbolic and ritual expressions. The community unavoidably formulates its own foundations in statements which reveal its difference from other groups and protext it against distortions. He who joins the community of faith must accept the statements of faith, the creed of the community. He must assent before he can be received.”[3]

Perhaps this sort of definition of faith is at the heart of my insistence that the center of all theological language be Jesus Christ; it is why I am an avid reader of theologians like Karl Barth, Thomas F. Torrance, St. Athanasius, and the Cappadocian Fathers. Faith, says these figures, is real faith when it is a movement of the Christian’s being, when the intellectual assent which comes through prolonged theological reflection has a purpose and a mission. When simply joined to the ever-lethargic-and-hardly-ever-for-a-noble-purpose school of (in the end, anthropomorphizing) philosophy, theology becomes corrupted by the boundaries of the theologians’ study, the place which should be the locus of ministry and outreach. When evangelicals are lambasted by other sections of the Church on the grounds of some form of anti-intellectualism, I almost want to shout back “Because we have seen how y’all do it, hold’ up in your studies while the widows starve in your pews!” I will proudly wear the badge of anti-intellectual if it means my theologizing must always, always, always have practical ministry application, which is exactly what an absolute Christocentrism will accomplish for the ministry-minded theologian.

Ironically, Tillich realizes the problem that biblical (Christian) theologians have with philosophical speculation’s attempt to wed itself to the theological task. He writes,

“The Bible often criticizes philosophy, not because it uses reason, but because it uses unregenerated reason for the knowledge of God.”[4]

[1] Paul Tillich, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1955), 17.

[2] Ibid., 22-23.

[3] Ibid., 53-54.

[4] Ibid., 56. 

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Barth on Theology

Alex Renner

From Church Dogmatics II/2: here Barth gives a few preliminary remarks before expounding his unique (and revolutionary) take on the Reformed doctrine of Election.

“Theology must begin with Jesus Christ, and not with general principles, however better, or, at any rate, more relevant and illuminating, they may appear to be: as though He were a continuation of the knowledge and Word of God, and not its root and origin, not indeed the very Word of God itself. Theology must also end with Him, and not with supposedly self-evident general conclusions from what is particularly enclosed and disclosed in Him: as though the fruits could be shaken from this tree; as though in the things of God there were anything general which we could know and designate in addition to and even independently of this particular. The obscurities and ambiguities of our way were illuminated in the measure that we held fast to that name and in the measure that we let Him be the first and the last, according to the testimony of Holy Scripture. Against all the imaginations and errors in which we seem to be so hopelessly entangled when we try to speak of God, God will indeed maintain Himself if we will only allow the name of Jesus Christ to be maintained in our thinking as the beginning and the end of all our thoughts…”[1]

If Christological and Trinitarian Theology do not function as the central paradigms through which all other Christian doctrines are seen and interpreted, Barth says, the Christian theological project is doomed from the start. Since, for Barth, Jesus Christ is the unique and perfect and fully-revealing event of God’s-revealing-of-Self, to speak and presuppose (as the rest of the Western theological tradition does) that there can be true, substantial, or good things said about God apart from what is revealed in Jesus Christ – like what is propounded in so called “natural revelation” – is to take the wheels off the theological vehicle at the very beginning of the race. While Barth definitely aligns himself more with the Eastern Christian spirit of theologizing in this regard, his relegation of God’s-revealing exclusively to the Logos of God (Jesus Christ) even further separates him from the wider Christian tradition. Nevertheless, Barth is correct (albeit with a few caveats as to the locus of where Christ is to be found and subsequently interpreted).

The way Barth distinguishes himself from most all other theological methodologies is by refusing to subject his theological reflection to the “general principles” of philosophy and the analytic tradition’s conceptual structures, generally. Theologians would do well to see that the general direction of theological reflection today – a decidedly “post-metaphysical” direction – is not (surprise!) the spawn of Satan, but in fact should be seen as the heart of the task of the first-millennium-Church’s enterprise. Post-metaphysical theology, though it is admittedly being interpreted and applied in harmful and unbiblical ways, presents a better and more promising direction for the theologians who would uphold the absolute validity and infallibility of the Scriptures (all of which speak of Jesus Christ). Karl Barth points us towards where theology should be heading all the time: Christ, Christ, Christ! Any conceptual or philosophical shackles that would keep Christ caged should be done away with, destroyed, and left to the ashes of history.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 4-11.