Dialectical Theology and the Mystery of God

"The best theological grammar available to describe [the divine reality] is dialectical and full of reversals."

Thus George Hunsinger, in his essay on Karl Barth's conception of eternity, to be found in the excellent Disruptive Grace, p 193.

But what does dialectical mean here?

Hunsinger is attempting to describe a central theological method deployed by Karl Barth to think about God.  We could perhaps describe it as 'back and forth theology'.  Back and forth theology looks one way, and then looks the other.  It may therefore appear to be full of contradictions; it might seem to continually double back on itself.  Take a quote out of context - take a 'back' without a 'forth' - and it may well seem outright heresy.  Sounds risky - so why pursue it?

For Barth, dialectical theology has to be pursued because there is no other way to give a reasonable account of the revelation of God which we see witnessed in Holy Scripture.  A cracking example is his treatment of the Christology of the canonical gospels (which he broadly equates with the so-called Alexandrian and Antiochene schools; possibly unhelpfully from the perspective of historical theology).  He looks from the synoptic perspective (that this man is the Son of God) to the Johannine perspective (that the Son of God is this man) and continually switches between them.  Neither perspective is possible to reconcile to the other fully in thought or concept, but both are necessary to do justice to the descriptive account of God's action in Christ which we see in the gospels.  So we have to be continually back and forth, back and forth; not balancing one against the other, nor trying to achieve a synthesis, but always mentally moving.  This is not because there is any actual division in Christ; it is simply because our conceptual systems cannot adequately capture the mystery.

The same is true in the doctrine of the Trinity.  Barth moves from the One to the Three and back.  "Since the reality of God's oneness and threeness cannot be reconciled in thought, a 'trinitarian dialectic' must be devised in which statements to the one side are continually 'counterbalanced' by statements to the other." (Hunsinger, 192, referencing CD I/1, 269).  The same method is at play in Barth's account of God's simplicity and his multiple perfections.  Taking both seriously as they are presented in Holy Scripture prevents us from attempting to close the conceptual system and describe God using only one term and not the other.

A word of caution: "Note that Barth does not think God's being is dialectical or antithetical in itself, only that our minds are incapable of grasping its unity through a single principle or system." (Hunsinger, 193).  Our essentially dialectical systems of thought do find their resolution, but it is not in a higher concept or a deeper system of thought; it is in the being of God himself.

I think this is important.  In much of the theological retrieval going on today - the attempt to recover the classical doctrine of God - I think genuine advantages of modern theology are being lost.  In classical theism, God is considered to be ineffable; but I think there is a danger that he is in fact very well understood in that system.  He is simply(!) the concept of ineffability.  That is to say, at some point in the essentially complete conceptual system, there is a need for a border, a conceptual ground which essentially belongs to the system - and to such a concept, everyone gives the name God.  Barth's dialectic points, I think, to the living God who is genuinely know-able, but not susceptible to conceptualisation, not a being we can capture in our ideas even if we can genuinely describe him as we follow his own self-description.

Barth thinks his method is essential because Scripture directs us that way.  I think he's right.  One of the difficulties I have with classical theism is the way in which it resolves the apparent tensions in the biblical witness by enforcing a conceptual one-sidedness - for example, we explain away all the biblical references to God's emotions by simply declaring them to be unreal; for they must be so, if we are to achieve a conceptual consistency with the idea of God's impassibility.  For Barth, we rather press on down both roads, taking seriously God's self-revelation in both ways - leaving, admittedly, a system of concepts which is open-ended in a way which is frustrating to us, but leaving the mystery of God's own being intact.  And note that whereas the classical system, by making much of God's self-revelation unreal, leaves us with mystery without true knowledge, Barth follows Scripture in claiming (on the grounds of revelation) real knowledge of God without transgressing the mystery.  What the Bible says about God is true, even if I cannot think it out into a whole system.

Back and forth theology is, to my mind, simply theology that is constrained by God's self-revelation in Christ, as witnessed in the Old and New Testaments.  That should be okay in anybody's book, right?

The Potter and the Clay

We reached Jeremiah 18 on Sunday at CCC.  Various commentators find the chapter puzzling.  It starts with Jeremiah at the potter's house, observing how he shapes a vessel - and then, crucially, re-shapes it when it goes wrong.  The message conveyed by the image is one of sovereignty.  God is the potter, Israel/Judah is the clay.  God is able to (re-)shape his people just as easily as the potter is able to (re-)shape the clay.  The emphasis here is on ability: the potter can shape the clay, he has the power.  In other passages in Scripture where the potter/clay image occurs (Isaiah 29:16, Isaiah 45:9, Romans 9) the weight falls on the idea of right: the potter has the right to shape the clay, and the clay cannot reasonably question the outcome.

This is a high account of God's sovereignty: always free in relation to his creatures; always in the right in relation to his creatures.

What puzzles commentators is that the application in Jeremiah doesn't seem to fit this picture.  To be sure, in verses 7-10 the potter is still the one shaping and re-shaping nations.  But in doing so he is responding to their actions; he is conditioned by their prior response to his word.  If a sinful people show themselves penitent, God will 'relent' of the planned judgement; if a righteous people do good, God will 'relent' of his planned blessing.

How do we read passages like this, which show God responding to his creatures?  Particularly when they come in such close proximity to such clear statements of unqualified sovereignty?

One time-honoured way is to deny one half of the picture.  We can define God's sovereignty in such a way that he is not in fact sovereign; the potter can only do so much, at the end of the day, with the clay he's got.  This is the route taken by classical Arminian and (semi-)Pelagian theology (and I am aware that Arminians don't want to be lumped together with semi-Pelagians, but I can't for the life of me see the difference).  In these models, God is understood as exercising a great deal of power and grace, but with the final say in the outcome resting on human decision.  It's hard to see how this fits with the image: the potter must respect the autonomy and free-will of the clay?

Or we deny the other half, as various strands of (Hyper-)Calvinism have tended to do, and as is (I thnk) implicit in Classical Theism more generally.  God is sovereign.  He only appears to relent in response to human action and decision.  He condescends to appear as a responsive God, when in actual fact he remains absolutely unconditioned by human decision.  The potter makes what he's going to make, and the clay simply has no influence on what happens.  This seems better to preserve some of the use of the potter image (especially in Isaiah and Romans), but ultimately doesn't seem to fit with the use made of the image in Jeremiah.

As is often the case, I think we tie ourselves in knots by starting in the wrong place.  If we start with the Unmoved Mover, the god of Aristotle, the Unconditioned Absolute, a god in the abstract - well then, how can this god possibly 'relent'?  In this model, it seems to me, god pretends to be relational, pretends to be responding to his human creation, but really he's just absolutely still, being all absolute, behind the scenes.  Great.

If on the other hand we start with humanity per se, the Idea of the Human, the human in the abstract - well, the idea of the potter's power over the clay is humiliating.  It can't be accepted without significant qualification.  But the god who is leftover at the end of this process of thought doesn't seem like the potter at all - doesn't seem like a god, to be honest.  Just a god at the margins, a god who revolves around - well, me.  Great.

But if we ditch the abstraction, and read both God and humanity from the particular place where both are revealed - Jesus Christ - then whilst we don't get to jump over all the mystery of divine/human interaction, we do get an understanding of the dynamics involved.  What if the paradigm of potter/clay interaction is in fact the incarnation?  Consider the way the passion narratives are told.  Jesus is dragged around from here to there, and yet very clearly he is in control.  He responds to his people and their rejection of him, and yet this is exactly the eternal plan of his Father.  Is all this in appearance only?

When we start with Jesus, we can see that God is indeed absolute - but he is such as the loving, relational, immanent Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.  He does indeed respond to his people - but he does so as the sovereign Lord of Heaven and Earth.  We need him to be both.  He has revealed himself to be both.  This is not just a doctrinal knot to untangle; it's the very best news.

Classical Theism

This is a tentative post - and if it doesn't read like it, that's just because I like to make strong arguments!  It's tentative because this is a set of some of my problems with classical theism, a position held by almost everyone in the history of Christian theology prior to the twentieth century.  So I'm up against the consensus, and that is not a safe place to be.  So I invite contradiction and argument.  I would be happy to return to the fold if anyone could show me biblically why it is right to be there.  In the meantime, this is, I guess, where I stand.

1.  Classical theism starts with the distinction between Creator and creature.  God is fundamentally 'other'; he is 'unlike' us at an ontological level.  There will be no disagreement from me regarding this distinction.  My only question is whether it is the right place to start.  I think it serves very well as a conclusion, but rather less well as a presupposition (this will be a recurrent theme).  When Scripture talks about God's 'otherness', it is not advancing a metaphysical position, but saying something about God's character.  Isaiah 55:8-9 is a great example: God is not like us - but what does that mean?  In context, it means that God forgives his people's sin!  He is unlike us, because he forgives.  In fact, the way in which God is most unlike us, according to the NT, is that whereas we grasp, from our lowly position, at power and prestige, he lays aside his glory to come near.  When we stand before the Son of God in his triumphant humiliation on the cross, then we can surely say that God is utterly unlike us.  Never would this have entered into our minds.  Here - and I would suggest only here - do we see that there is a distinction in being between Creator and creature that we could never bridge.

2.  Classical theism in its evangelical mode, ironically, doesn't make enough of the Creator-creature distinction.  When it comes to thinking of God, evangelicals who are committed to classical theism want to make sure that we are disciplined in continually observing the distinction between Creator and creature.  "...[W]e can think about God in an appropriately different manner only with considerable self-conscious effort", suggests Peter Sanlon in Simply God: Recovering the Classical Trinity.  This is a theme which recurs throughout that book.  It will be hard work to think of God as uniquely other.  It stands behind the whole understanding in classical theism of analogical language: when we attribute qualities like 'love' to God, we do so analogically, purifying them of the imperfections which naturally attach to human love.  But is this work really sufficient to get us over the infinite divide?  Despite the talk about the importance of revelation in evangelical versions of classical theology, I am reminded of Pseudo-Dionysius or Bonaventure, who both envisage an ascent to knowledge of God by way of denial and purification of concepts.  That is not a compliment: apart from the fact that this idea of an intellectual/spiritual ascent sits very uncomfortably with the gospel of grace, the God these two figures arrive at is essentially defined in the end as a nothingness.

3.  Classical theism assumes too much knowledge.  When, for example, we are instructed to purify our concepts of whatever smacks of imperfection, or when we are told that God could not have certain attributes in certain ways because this would imply imperfection, where is the idea of 'perfection' coming from?  How can you or I know what perfection looks like?  One hears a lot from classical theists about how we fail to attain to the lofty classical vision because we intuitively think God must change, or must be passible, or whatever, if he is to be love. But to my mind, the classical God looks just how I would intuitively imagine God to be, if it weren't for his revelation in Christ: big, aloof, utterly beyond.  What is counter-intuitive is the God of weakness, God in the manger, God on the cross.  Classical theism seems to know what God must look like before it sees what God does look like.

4.  Classical theism seems to hide God behind his revelation.  Here I want to tread especially carefully.  I am aware that classical theists would see what I am about to say as a distortion of their thinking.  I am aware that classical theists do not hold, and indeed explicitly disavow, the conclusions which I think follow logically from their starting point, so let me be very clear: I do not think that classical theists believe that God's characteristics and attributes as described in Scripture float above, and are ultimately not connected to, the real, simple God sitting underneath them.  It is just that I am not sure they can really avoid such a picture in practice.  The doctrine of analogy is an attempt to get around this problem, by saying that the attributes of God are analagous in some way to those attributes as we know them in humanity.  So, that God loves means that there is something in God which is analagous to human love.  Great, but what does that mean?  Given that the classical concept of God requires us to drop almost everything that usually makes up the concept of love - and requires us to somewhat explain away those aspects of the biblical story which look most like love to us - what are we really able to say about God?  It seems to me that the language of the attributes becomes a smoke-screen, behind which there sits a God who bears no relation to the concepts used to describe him.  I think it would be reasonable to extend this critique even to the Persons of the Trinity.  Again, I don't think classical theists think this, but I think their starting position makes them incapable of effectively overcoming the gap (created by them!) between God's revelation and God as he is.

There is other stuff - for example, I think classical theism only makes sense on an Aristotelian metaphysic, which makes it a philosophical cul-de-sac of the sort which Christian doctrine must avoid - but those are my main problems.

What would be the alternative?  Is our thought about God to be less disciplined than the admittedly rigorous system of classical theism demands?  Is God in fact more like us than we thought?  Where should we start?

Our thought about God must indeed be disciplined: strictly disciplined.  The discipline is: look only where God has revealed himself.  Learn God only from the place where God is seen.  "A Christian ought not to seek or find God otherwise than in the Virgin's lap and on the cross", said Luther.  It is in the face of Christ that we see God.  It is in the history of Christ's birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension that we are to see who God is and what God is like.  Here God has come down to us.  We are far safer taking our language for God from his coming down, than from any attempt spiritually or intellectually to climb up to him.  I would encourage my friends who are committed to the classical vision to consider carefully what it means when Paul discourages the Roman Christians from seeking to ascend or descend to bring Christ down or up, rather than focusing on the word of faith which is near to us.  I want to encourage them to take seriously Christ's rebuke to Philip: has he been with us so long, and yet we don't know him?  Don't we know that we are to see the Father in him, and him only?

Advent theology

Recent conversations I've been having with people around the merits (or demerits) of classical theism have driven home to me again that theology, like everything the church is called to do, is an advent discipline, which is to say, it's grounded, provisional, and eschatological.

Theology is grounded because it is based in the original advent of Christ.  We in the church have seen something of God, and therefore we must speak.  Because it matters that we speak faithfully - that what we say conforms to what God has revealed - we have theology, a discipline which aims to critique our talk about God so as to achieve that faithfulness.  What that means is that theology is far from being an anything-goes affair.  The real God has really revealed himself, and it matters that when we speak of him our speech reflects his revelation.

Theology is provisional because we live between the times.  We look back to Christ and rejoice in what he has done, but we acknowledge that we still await our redemption.  That means that we have to recognise two things.  One is our own continuing sinfulness and weakness.  Everything that we say is open to critique, and nothing that we say will perfectly express God's being and action.  The other is the movement of history.  Things that were said in the church yesterday cannot just be repeated today as if they definitely still made sense.  Human speech which was faithful to God's revelation yesterday may be unfaithful if simply repeated verbatim today.  It is not as if God has changed!  But in this between-the-times world, nothing stands still for long.  Words change their meaning, cultural resonances shift, philosophies rise and fall.  We must speak today, knowing that the church of tomorrow must speak again and afresh.

Theology is eschatological because we look forward to seeing Christ.  On that day, theology will become defunct, as we will know even as we are known.  Or, to put it another way, the human discipline of theology will give way to the divine theology, which will once and for all correct our faulty notions and purify and complete our stumbling efforts to speak.  Faithful theology looks forward to its own dismissal, its service done and no longer required.  The goal, after all, never was theology as a discipline, but knowledge of God as a relational reality.

Karl Barth on Divine Simplicity

Karl Barth addresses divine simplicity as part of his teaching on the unity of God (CD II/1, 442ff.).  God is one.  That implies, on the one hand, his uniqueness; on the other, his simplicity.  But what does 'simplicity' mean for Barth - and what does it not mean?

That God is simple "signifies that in all that He is and does, He is wholly and undividedly Himself." (445)  God is not composite.  He is not composite in the three Persons of his existence, nor is he composite in his distinguishable attributes (or as Barth prefers to call them, his perfections).  God is never distant from himself, never in conflict with himself.  He is always all of himself in all his fullness.

The divine simplicity also implies divine lordship.  "Nothing can affect Him, or be far from Him, or contradict or withstand Him, because in Himself there is no separation, distance, contradiction or opposition." (445)  Being completely and unconditionally the Lord of himself, God is the Lord in all other relationships and situations.

So far, so classical.  Where does Barth differ from the tradition, if indeed he does?

In his brief sketch of the historical origins of the doctrine, Barth points out that the early church clarified its doctrine of divine simplicity as it grappled with the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation.  His complaint is that already in Augustine, and throughout the periods of Catholic and then Protestant Orthodoxy, the doctrine comes to be developed in "a purely logical and metaphysical" way (446), no longer anchored in the gospel.  This is problematic, because a purely logical and metaphysical doctrine of simplicity both points away from the Holy Trinity toward a generic theism, and "leads to an underlying nominalism or semi-nominalism in the doctrine of the attributes" (447) - that is to say, the wealth of perfections in God cannot be taken with full seriousness, even where the attempt is made to do this.

The issue here is whether the concept of simplicity is still flowing from revelation, or whether it has become detached and absolutised.  Whilst it is true and necessary to say that God is simple, "the assertion of the simplicity of God is not reversible in the sense that it could equally well be said that the simple is God." (449)  The mere idea of simplicity will not serve us well here.  "In Scripture, the utterly simple is 'simply' God Himself in the actuality, the superior might, the constancy, the obviousness, or even more simply, the factuality, in which He is present as God and deals as God with the creature, with man." (457)

Barth's critique is that the idea of simplicity has replaced the actually simple God.  Who and what, then, is God?  For Barth, the important thing is to resist every instinctive feeling for what God ought to be like, or what simplicity must imply, and to follow Scripture.  That leads him to ground his doctrine of simplicity in the fact that the prophets and apostles all heard this one God and found themselves called to obedience.  And in each case, it was the same God.  In all his words and works, he is found to be himself.  He is trustworthy.  "And He is not merely casually or accidentally trustworthy, so that He could also be untrustworthy.  On the contrary, He is trustworthy in His essence, in the inmost core of His being.  And this is His simplicity." (459)  Barth goes on to equate God's simplicity with his faithfulness.  When we say God is simple, we say that in all his multiple words and works he is the same God, wholly himself and the whole of himself in every act.  It is God's 'simple' faithfulness that warrants and draws forth our 'simple' faith. (460)

The key thing, for Barth, is that we get things in the right order: that we hear God's self-witness in Scripture and acknowledge that in every way he is always himself, and therefore that he is simple.  God himself will determine what his simplicity means, what it means for him to be wholly himself and the whole of himself in all his ways and works.  We don't get to decide on the basis of an analysis of the concept of simplicity what God can or can't do.  We can't use simplicity to go behind God's revelation.

The Creator/creature distinction

We would not know that God stood infinitely above us unless God in Christ had decisively bridged that infinite gap.  It is not natural or obvious to think that God is profoundly other; in fact, most of the deities of the ancient world look like big human beings, and nowadays we worship normal-sized human beings, which is to say, ourselves.  It is only by making infinite descent that God reveals himself to us as the one who dwells in unapproachable distance.  It is only by taking on our nature in Christ that God shows his nature to be qualitatively different from ours.

The ironic result is that it is only from a position where God has enabled us to speak of him in very human terms that we see that our human thinking and speaking is entirely inadequate to grasp him.  We don't first know God as infinitely different (how could we?  what concepts would we deploy?) and then breathe a sigh of relief that he accommodates himself to us.  We see God in Christ in the manger and on the cross, and then we understand that this God whom we see here in the flesh is beyond us, utterly beyond us.

The only reason we know that there is a stark distinction between the Creator and the creature is that Jesus Christ has in his own person united the two.