Martin Shields’s second point is, in my view, the most important of all. He argues that God is no Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Macmillan, London, 1871, chapter 6.)
Most of us agree with Alice that large anthropomorphic eggs sitting on walls don’t get to use words with completely different meanings. Words mean what they mean. And that’s Martin Shields’s second great concern:
2. This particular theological framework [i.e. claiming God is impassible] ultimately appears to diminish the status of God’s revelation: God reveals in human language but, when referring to God, the language cannot mean what it means in all other contexts. It is no longer perspicuous in any real sense. If God is a speaking God and relates to us through language—if human language itself finds its roots in God—then this would seem to have implications for language about God in his revelation to us. Ultimately, notions of absolute impassibility call into question the effectiveness of God’s ability to communicate with us. This is particularly troubling when essentially passible language is said to have an impassible meaning!
“This is particularly troubling when essentially passible language is said to have an impassible meaning”: it’s a great point. Passible and impassible are so different from each other (can we passible creatures really even grasp what a genuinely impassible Person might be like?) that to say that the Bible’s passible language for God is actually impassible is to do a Humpty Dumpty.
I’m sensitive to the criticism, and have no desire to join Humpty Dumpty on his solipsistic wall; I doubt there’d be room for us both, he’d probably fall off, and then there’d be tears and scrambled eggs before bedtime.
However, and it is a really big ‘however’, we could take ‘passible’ and ‘impassible’ out from the sentence and replace it with almost every other attribute that distinguishes God from creation: “essentially finite language is said to have an infinite meaning”, “essentially time-bound language is said to have an eternal meaning”, “essentially material language is said to refer to someone who is pure spirit”, “essentially creaturely language is said to have a Creator meaning”. And when we do that, we begin to see that there is something wrong with that principle itself.
God is God. Human language is the product of finite, time-bound, material creatures. It is a communication and cognitive tool fitted for being part of and working within a finite, time-bound, material creation, and that, except when it speaks of God, refers to finite, time-bound, material created realities. When that same language speaks of God, then either God is a finite, time-bound, material creation or, to use the words in point 2, “when referring to God, the language cannot mean what it means in all other contexts”.
Protesting about too-clever-by-half theologizing warping the meaning of words beyond recognition may seem like it is a defence of the ‘plain sense’ of Scripture. Humpty Dumpty can’t make words mean so many different things; words mean what that say. And so a word has to mean the same thing when applied to God as when it applies to everything else, or else it is no longer perspicuous.
But I’d suggest that this concern plays neatly into the hands of one of the bigger conceptual presuppositions behind a lot of modern atheism: good old Kant. The presupposition is that human language just cannot speak about something that is not part of our space-time system, and human reason can’t reason about it either. Speech of a ‘God’ who is ‘outside’ the universe/multiverse is, strictly speaking, nonsense. The words have to mean what they mean what they mean when speaking of anything else—so they can only speak of creatures inside the framework of creation. God is either another creature, or speech about him is, quite literally, meaningless and non-rational. From here, we get Freud’s view that God is simply a projection of human qualities upwards, the idea that faith is just a leap into the unknown, and much of the rest of the unbelieving nonsense we have to put up with in the modern world. Finite, temporal, material creatures cannot talk about an infinite, eternal creator who is Spirit without breaking words in the process. Therefore, as Pope advised, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is man.” (‘An essay on man: Epistle II’, London, 1733-34.) Just give up on God-talk altogether as a chimera.
I would say that precisely because human language is grounded in God in some fashion, it can do what the concern denies: our words can mean something different when speaking of someone who is not a creature, and yet still communicate some kind of profound positive content when speaking that way. A word does not have mean the same thing when applied to God or else it means nothing. Creaturely language can genuinely mediate knowledge of divine reality.
Let me offer a couple of illustrations. When I say God ‘creates’, ‘knows’ and ‘exists’, these terms all mean something radically different than when they are used in any other context.
God creates simply by speaking things into existence. That is nothing like how any creature creates; we actualize possibilities using pre-existing materials (both physical and cognitive) that God called into existence by speaking. Those are radically different realities, being named by the same word with at least as big a difference as speaking of passible ‘anger’, ‘grief’ and ‘joy’, and impassible ‘anger’, ‘grief’ and ‘joy’. Do we really want to run this principle against ‘create’ and say the language has to mean the same for God as it does for us or else it isn’t perspicuous?
When I say God knows something, he never learns it. It is not that God didn’t know it and now does. Furthermore, our knowledge of things is highly limited and provisional: we grasp aspects of things, but get that much of things remain hidden. We never know the essence of anything. God’s knowledge is nothing like that. He knows it as a whole—from every angle—in its essence, and always has. So does the word mean the same thing when used of God and used of us? Just how small do we have to shrink God to fit him neatly into the rule that the words mean the same thing when used of him as they do in every other context?
When I say things exist, I speak of contingent realities. That is, I speak of things that do not have life in themselves; nothing in creation had to exist, and it does not exist eternally nor does it exist necessarily. As a Christian, I believe that everything that ‘is’ was created—brought into existence by an act of God. Nothing continues to exist under its own power either; everything continues to exist by the goodwill of God. So whenever I speak of ‘existing’, in every context I speak of this reality—of a derived, created, contingent existence. But when I speak of God’s existence, I speak of something very different; I speak of someone who has life in himself—who just is. Does the word really mean the same thing when it refers to God as when it is used in all other contexts?
When speaking of God, I’d suggest that language gives us more options than those offered by little girls and large talking eggs. We don’t have to choose between either words mean exactly the same thing when they are used of God as when they refer to everything else, or else they are not perspicuous. Those two choices lead to a practical atheism even though they get to look at different scenery en route. Because language is grounded in God, God can use it to speak about himself. And we are able to just ‘get’ that the words mean something different, even as we also ‘get’ that they mean something the same at the same time.
That ‘third way’ is the way of revelation.
Hi Mark,
Maybe you could articulate how this is any different to an apophatic theology. It looks as if you are saying “God is …. but not like any other …. we know.” Are we able to make unqualified statements about God at all then?
(PS: To other solapanel users: is there any way to subscribe to the comments without making a comment yourself?)
Hi Nathan!
You can get all The Sola Panel comments by subscribing to our comments RSS feed:
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Hope that helps!
Hi Mark,
Naturally I’ll have some reservations about what you’ve said. But let me go straight to what I see is the nub of the matter. Ultimately the problem I have with impassibility is not that language is expected to mean something slightly different when applied to God, but that it is meant to mean something substantially different — almost the opposite to that which it would normally mean. If God is said to be angered by our actions, but that is then supposed to mean he is in no way affected by our actions nor changed, it seems there is little left in the semantic range of “angered” for us to be able to attribute any real significance to the assertion!
And here, in the end, is my problem. Back in your original post you stated the following (emphasis mine):
I think the claim that God is not “in any way affected” is the problem — it retreats too far from the modern tendency to viewing God as far too passible. I don’t think either extreme is biblical (see Shields’ Slippery Slope Axiam). I’ve just been listening to a take by Don Carson on Openness of God Theology in which he suggests that the best classical definitions of Impassibility incorporate more subtlety than I see in your comment that he is “in no way affected” by creation (and specifically us).* In adopting this extreme the knee has jerked too far!
So my title for a post at this point would have to be something like “when a word is used of God, it cannot mean something completely unrelated to that meaning which applies when it is used in all other contexts.” I realise that’s not going to cut it as a title to a blog post, however, it’s too long and inelegant!
———
* The comments are found in the few minutes after the 47:35 mark in this talk.
Hi Nathan,
Well, apophatic, or negative theology argues that when words are used of God they mean nothing like what they mean when they are used of us (language used of God is ‘equivocal’). Nothing can be positively predicated of God. When we say, “God is good”, the most we can say is that “God is not evil.” It would in fact be more accurate to say that God is not good than to say the reverse, so different is the meaning of ‘good’ when it applies to God.
Negative theology tends to be favored by mysticism, liberal theologians who still want to have a place for genuine encounters with God (i.e. less outrightly unbelieving than a Spong), and some people with a penchant for philosophic theology.
While I’ve made a couple of rhetorical overstatements in this post that could be taken that way (e.g. “That is nothing like how any creature creates”) I think it should be clear that that’s not what I’m angling for.
Martin Shields and I would both be examples of cataphatic/kataphatic or positive theology – we can know positive things about God, we can say what he is not just what he isn’t.
The way Martin Shields has been arguing would arguably fit more with univocal use of language – that is, when a word is used of God its core meaning has to stay the same as when it is used of us. God is ‘good’, we are ‘good’ and there’s some core meaning of ‘good’ that carries through. e.g.:
Hence his argument has tended to be: either semantic transfer is fairly substantial (univocal) or the language is not perspicuous (equivocal).
I’m arguing for analogical language for God. The words mean something similar when used of God but not the same.
So God is a something, but not like all other somethings.
And both need to be there. God really and truly is a something. But God is not another item in your creaturely set, he’s radically different from all other somethings.
My argument is that you have to avoid equivocal language (Negative theology) or you say nothing of God (hello Kant). And you have to avoid univocal language (Martin’s kind of Positive theology) or you end up with a materialistic, creaturely view of God. Only analogic language allows the kind of Positive theology that I think Scripture offers.
As to whether I can make unqualified statements at all about God, it depends on what you mean. I believe that God is the original and the source of everything we are and have. So, in my view, the qualifications come when we say things about us – Human beings can be powerful, good, fathers etc, but not like God is.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Mark.
I’m afraid that I’m going to have to (very respectfully) disagree with both your position and Martin’s. Let me see if I can outline more clearly what I believe is a third (and more reformed) way through this semantic entanglement
I think that I agree with you in your assessment of Martin’s univocal use of language (although I suspect he would want to qualify what you have said about him above) and that using language in this way tends towards a very creaturly view of God.
I don’t think, however, that you have avoided apophatic theology in your formulation. You’re position is essentially (at this point) no different from the analogia entis of the scholastics. The problem with saying, as you have done at least twice now,
is that immediately we are forced to qualify in what way the words are similar, and in what way they are different. If you try to do this, you quickly discover that it is an impossible task to positively qualify their differences. You are left with only negative statements about God.
Perhaps an example might help. God is good. But not good like a good book – he isn’t enjoyable to read. And not good like a human – he doesn’t conform to the moral order for which he was created in relationship to his creator. In what way is God then good? He is in fact not good in any way in which we might apply the word to anything else. So God’s goodness fits into a semantic category all on its own, and is therefore beyond our ability to define. As far as I can see, this is where the analogia entis leaves us. He is good perhaps in some way similarly to us, but we can’t say positively how.
If you read the sections of Calvin that deal with God’s nature then he comes to the same conclusion. Calvin will vehemently deny the comparison of God’s nature with any created thing when he writes against idolatry (Inst. I.xi). Throughout such passages Calvin will utilise words like “incomprehensible,” “indescribable,” “beyond our understanding” etc. He will even go so far as to claim that proper worship of God is to lift our minds beyond any physical reality. When it comes to a description of God’s nature, Calvin will leave us with no more help than a very nebulous “God is Spirit,” by which he doesn’t seem to mean much more than “God is not like anything else.”
However, what prevents Calvin from descending into apophaticism at this point isn’t the analogia entis, Calvin won’t resort to this at all, in fact. What saves him at this point is his strong distinction between person and nature. When Calvin discusses the goodness of God (Inst. I.x.2) he claims that God is good in precisely the same way that we are good, because his goodness is seen in his personal relationship to us. The language can be univocal at this point because God is truly in his persons how he is towards us. Ultimately it’s the incarnation that allows us to speak positively of God, because it is the incarnation that proves that human language (and indeed humanity in general) is a fit vehicle for the description of God – as he relates in his persons.
This allows us to avoid Martin’s creaturely God as well. The incarnation doesn’t reveal the divine nature. It reveals the divine persons – the divine Son in human nature – through whom we meet the Father and the Spirit. Thus we know God personally, and positively – but we don’t know at all what God is in Christ.
Therefore, if we are speaking about the nature of God, then I think I am going with your use of language. We are going to be left with an equivocal use of language. Perhaps there is a sense in which the analogia entis will help us. I doubt it, but someone smarter than me will have to figure that out.
However, if we are speaking about the persons of God then I am going with Martin. God is a person in the same way that we are because we are created in his image for a personal relationship with him, and because the second person of the trinity took on human flesh, and human language, in order to reveal the Father.
Hey what a great discussion,
I just had a few thoughts:
1. Generally I’m with Mark on analogy here, but every now and then I come across a word or concept that makes me think – “that could be univocal”. Of course I can’t think of any of the darned things atm
but Mark, can you be sure that we can rule out univocality prima facie here?
2. On a tangential note Michael Horton somewhere makes a nice distinction between literal and univocal speech which seems to help: eg. God “literally” sees everything that happens but this is not to say that my understanding of “see” is univocally applicable to God (light, retinas etc). I’m not sure how far that helps with the screaming difficulties of passibility but it helps with some things, I think.
3. Just on the apophatic/negative issue. I think Nathan might be treating negative theology as too monolithic. There is certainly apophaticism that seeks to transcend creaturely categories and find God in the darkness of unknowing. But there is also a much healthier kind of scholastic via negativa which acts as a qualifier to positive theology (via eminentiae). Here we might say the Son is the true and literal Son of God but we immediately have to surround that with negative statements: his birth isn’t temporal, or involve a mother or generic…
But the negation doesn’t mean the positive truth is dissolved, it just means that we trust God that he has created us in such a way that the word “Son” can have adequate meaning for us despite those disanalogies – perhaps even that our sense of that meaning might be enhanced by noting those negativities.
Hi Mark, Nathan,
Now I don’t mind being labelled, but I do prefer it if the labels are accurate, so I do take exception somewhat to being mislabelled, and I feel that’s happening here. So I’d like to clarify.
First, I’d like to appeal Mark B.‘s description here:
OK, now I don’t think anywhere that I claimed the transfer has to be “fairly substantial” but that there has to be some overlap. I’m really just arguing that the use of language cannot be entirely arbitrary in the Humpty-Dumpty sense. If that’s not the case, communication cannot be possible. In other words, I’m happy with analogical as well — the connection, the semantic overlap actually still exists.
However, where we differ is that I think that in your application of impassibility to some language about God you go beyond analogical language and read some of this language with an almost antonymous meaning to the normal use of the terms. In your defence you claim that “Human language is the product of finite, time-bound, material creatures” but (paradoxically) also that “because human language is grounded in God in some fashion” (your emphases). If the latter is true in any sense, then we might reasonably expect that there would be some overlap and so that passible language used of God may actually count against the perfectly impassible description of God you offered in your first post on the topic. (On that front I’d be interested to know what you think of Carson’s description of that extreme representation of the doctrine as being out of line with the best historical representations of impassibility.)
The main problem is that we’re approaching this theoretically. In principle your claims sound good and by and large I agree with your explanation as a valid approach. The problem I have is that when the rubber hits the road and we look at the actual biblical texts and the ostensibly passible language they use of God and consider what you require them not to say about God, I think you’re forced to depart from an analogical use of language in any meaningful way and instead become Humpty-Dumpty.
Then Nathan (following your cues) wrote:
<blockquote>This allows us to avoid Martin’s creaturely God as well.</block>
In light of what I’ve actually written this really is quite an absurd comment (which I find somewhat offensive). My comments, for example, about “God’s arm” make it clear that not only do I not think God has a physical arm, but that “arm” isn’t used with reference to human beings to describe only the limb. It is used of God in the same way it is used in other contexts (such as “strength, power”).
Hi Martin,
I apologise. I wasn’t trying to offend. I was trying to introduce a new category to the discussion in a succinct way, and to add a reformed perspective to what has been so far a very classical debate. Since it is impossible for me to write 1000 words in a post (and have anyone read it) I thought I would draw on what was already going on in the discussion (see Mark’s earlier post):
To be fair, I did already object on your behalf to this characterisation earlier in the same post:
I understand that your position, as with Mark’s also, is nuanced. But this fact also makes them very difficult to restate succinctly. Therefore I have relied, as with most discussions in life, on the ability of the context of the discussion to carry the nuance.
Again, apologies if that has offended you, or if I have misrepresented you. I didn’t want to re-hash Mark’s post about how your the use of language your are proposing can lead to a creaturly view of God.
It’s not really my intention to label either you or Mark – in fact, I’m just utilising the labels Mark has already provided (univocal, equivocal) in an attempt to show that in reformed thought you will get a very different answer to the question that the two of you are debating depending on whether your topic addresses God’s person or nature.
Hi Martin,
pfft. There’s no appeal. It’s my thread, look it’s got my name at the top and everything. *Takes Tongue Out Of Cheek.* Ahem, couldn’t resist that. Okay, moving on
Picking up this concern:
I think you claimed that in your first comment in this thread:
And I think you are a classic example of the univocal position on language. That’s not really an insult of you. As I’ll try and acknowledge when I interact with Nathan’s comment to me, univocal is the basic way modern theology (especially Evangelical theology) has understood language for God. The core meaning of the terms have to carry through. Carson is quite explicit on this – can’t remember where I read it, but he distinguished between two types of analogical language, one of which has a big univocal core and claimed that as a basic way of speaking about God. My view is the odd fish from a modern perspective. I think no core meaning carries through from us to God, and yet the language isn’t equivocal, it really does predicate something real of God. From a modern perspective, that’s like me saying that I prefer nouns to verbs because they’re blue whereas verbs are a delicate shade of pink – hence why Nathan called me on it.
I conclude this in the next comment.
Concluding
Well, Carson knows he rejects classical impassibility. His ‘best historical representations’ means something like ‘those ones that look like a prototype of the conservatively passible God favored by contemporary Evangelicalism.’ That’s fine, he’s calling it as he sees it. But I think he’s redefining impassibility in such a way as to make God passible, it’s just that God is really really godly in the way he expresses that passibility.
I disagree with Shields’ Slippery Slope Axiam. A genuinely slippery slope needs to be avoided. The first step is potentially fatal. Taking the first step locks you into fundamentally new approach/view/theology etc, it’s just a question of how rigorously you’ll work out the new principles inherent to your position. A false slippery slope is another thing entirely. One can ski up and down that to one’s heart’s content.
While I will tend to argue in black and white, either-or terms, that is a teaching tool. I think the human brain is basically wired to go A, not-A, and, sometimes, here’s a third option that moves the debate onto different ground (thank you Hegel). But I don’t go “Ooh! Look! People are emphasising passibility too much! I need to get as far away from that as I can!” And then move to the other side of the theological room. I loved Moltmann’s The Crucified God when I read it. I was a card carrying member of the “The Incarnation Was a Genuinely New Thing For God” club. I find the idea of a God who suffers when I do, who feels my pain, intuitively attractive. I am, in this as in everything, a child of my time, a Gen Xer. But in this, as in every other area, as far as I am self-aware, my conscience is captive to the Word of God. My position is ‘extreme’ because the modern God is so very human, even outside the Incarnation.
I think God is genuinely angry, joyful, sorrowful etc. I think he is those things impassibly but really. In my posts I implicitly gestured to what the focus of “is not ‘in any way affected’ ” is when the posts focused on God’s other-centredness in creation and in his commands to glorify him and when I highlighted that God isn’t harmed or benefited by our actions. I passed over the questions of emotions in God altogether as not a particularly useful way to start thinking about the issue – the centre of the idea needs to focus on God’s acts, particularly creation, law, and salvation. I never offered a philosophical defense based on God’s simplicity, the nature of eternity, or the like. The arguments were grounded in God’s goodness, love, and exhaustless riches. So my position as argued is a long, long way short of ‘extreme’.
I will wait until the next post, before tackling impassibility again on my terms but in the mean time let’s pick up anger:
<blockquote>If God is said to be angered by our actions, but that is then supposed to mean he is in no way affected by our actions nor changed, it seems there is little left in the semantic range of “angered” for us to be able to attribute any real significance to the assertion!<blockquote>
Anger is not just a creaturely and material reality, it’s not even just a physical reality, it’s a biochemical reaction. My impression, as a person blessed with great ignorance about medicine, is that there is a particular part of the brain that initiates anger and speaks to another part of the brain that does the heavy lifting. That then creates a whole range of physical reactions throughout the body, and flushes some kind of chemicals into the brain such that, apparently, being angry impairs higher cognition similarly to drug taking. That’s what anger is. I suspect if you damage the right parts of the brain you could impair someone’s ability to get angry, and if you increased the right chemicals you could artificially create anger.
So is it even possible for someone who does not have a body to get angry in any meaningful sense? What would that even look like? What would a non-physical anger look like? My hunch is to chase that question seriously might start to push someone into ‘impassible anger’ territory fairly quickly from a whole other route. God is spirit. There’s no body. So, even if he’s passible, it’s going to be hard to push a lot of the ‘core meaning’ through from us to God.
Hmpf, missed that this bit was addressed to me:
I don’t think you think God is a creature. The ‘you end up with’ is fairly important, it’s intended to open up a significant gap between your view and where I think the view of language I think is inherent to it ends ups.
I do think that a univocal view of language for God results in God being, for all intents in purposes, a creature in the basic substructure of one’s concepts. But that is an issue that I probably have with most modern believers and the problems it causes are more system wide than with a particular individual.
To the degree that I led my brother Nathan into temptation I apologise. I don’t think you, Martin, have a creaturely view of God. And if anyone got that impression from reading my comments, I apologise to you for leading you astray.
Hi Andy,
Great to ‘meet’ you again, and great to have you in the discussion.
In terms of your point 1, I’m not committed to analogy language a priori, so I can’t really rule anything out prima facie. But I’ve committed myself in the post to say that ‘is’ doesn’t even mean the same thing when we say “God is”. So I suspect that I’m pushed into a bit of a corner there.
I love point 2. Very helpful. I’ll try and add that to my bag of tools.
As to point 3, if you’re right about Nathan then it’s likely my fault as I think I taught him the relevant part of the course at Moore. In the interests of encouraging people to stand strongly in the positive theology tradition I probably didn’t even acknowledge that there is a right and proper place for a negative theology that actively repudiates wrong assertions of God i.e. as a servant to positive theology. I focused basically on mysticism where negative theology seeks to go beyond positive theology. I’ll make the necessary adjustments if I teach on such matters again someday.
Mark, Andy,
Thanks for your replies. I’d like to clarify what I am saying about apophatic theology. Perhaps I can respond to both at once via Mark’s summation:
The concern I have isn’t whether there is a place at all for negative theology – of course there is. My concern is on what basis we might make positive statements about God.
Martin is arguing (if I can try to summarise two threads and a weeks worth of comments) that something intrinsic to the nature of Biblical language and exegesis means that the words about God in Scripture convey a fundamentally positive and univocal meaning. I don’t think we can sustain this as a basis for cataphatic theology for reasons Mark has already covered. (Martin, if I haven’t done you justice then please correct my summation.)
Mark, you on the other hand, seem to be arguing that our basis for positive statements about God is some version of the analogia entis – that there is some meaning that carries through in words about God from words about us. (Again, I was the one who introduced the term analogia entis, so if you feel it doesn’t do you justice then forgive me. I’m happy with the label ‘equivocal’ except that you need to clarify in what way it equivocates.)
I’m not arguing that this approach always leads to an unhelpful form of apophaticism. I’m arguing that if you follow this view of language, and begin cataphatic theology on this basis alone, then all you end up with is apophaticism in the end. You don’t end up being able to say anything positive about God because of David Hume’s critique.
The fact that this isn’t where you, Mark, ended up:
only serves to prove the point. You are talking about personal categories, and the reason our language about God works so well when we use personal categories is that God is a person. Not in some way different to us being persons. But in exactly the same way that we are persons.
You’ve implicitly snuck in another basis for your argument. You are no longer arguing about the nature of language, you are arguing from the nature of God. But since you have done that, you’re not needing to use equivocal language anymore for these concepts. This is univocal.
When Jesus drove the money-changers out of the temple, God was angry in exactly the same way that we are angry (except without sin). If you are speaking in personal, relational terms, then of course there is an analogia entis. The incarnation proves it.
Its only once you re-introduce non-personal terms:
that you are forced to move back into equivocal language. And my argument is that once you do this then you are doing apophatic theology.
The point I am trying (and it seems failing) to convey, is that it’s not the nature of language that is the primary defining category of this debate, but the nature of God.
P.S. Mark: From memory we didn’t discuss this topic in the Creation/Providence course that you taught. So however crazy I am, the blame is all mine.
Hi Nathan,
I appreciate your apology and clarification. I understand the limits imposed by the need to provide relatively terse replies, my main concern was over the impression others reading the thread may have about my position.
On to Mark B.‘s comments:
Perhaps you would clarify this by explaining what you think is meant when the Bible says God is angry such as in Exod 32:9–10; Num 25:3; Deut 9:8, 20; etc.
The problem is that your definition of anger has nothing to do with what the Bible means when it talks about anger, whether of people or of God. I can affirm with as much certainty as is ever possible that no biblical author ever understood “anger” in terms anything like these terms, they are entirely anachronistic. “Anger” in the Bible is never associated with such physiological effects, and reading it as such would be akin to reading Gen 1 and expecting it to teach you 21st century physics.
Consequently, your subsequent questions:
are largely irrelevant to the biblical texts. What does “anger” look like in the Bible? That is quite different and seems rarely to make recourse to physical (let alone physiological) aspects of anger (so Deut 29:27; 31:17; Judg 2:14ff). God’s anger is always in response to actions of people or nations, it is explained through his subsequent actions toward those people or nations. In the OT there is little explicit distinction made between God being angry and human beings being angry, except in the extent of the repercussions.
Hi Martin,
As you are aware, I have certain reservations about the direction Mark’s thought is running. However, I trust the irony of your verse selection in response to Mark’s point about the physicality of anger isn’t lost on you. You said:
From memory, I think you know Hebrew pretty well. So you already know that the Hebrew idiom expressing anger in both Ex 32:9-10 and Num 25:3 is for God’s “nose to get hot”
I’m pretty sure that we can say with some confidence from the idiom חרה־אפי that the Hebrew authors and audiences understood anger at least a little bit in physical terms. Perhaps not with the scientific biochemical precision that Mark has elaborated, but nevertheless…
Hi Nathan,
I had a feeling someone would pick me up on this!
You are, of course, right about the idiom — in part. The problem with idioms is that it is easy to commit the etymological fallacy when deciphering them. A broken heart is rarely a description of a serious cardiac complaint! So while the roots of the idiom lie in concrete concepts, it is not quite so clear that the idiom in common use would have necessarily conjured up the physicality of its etymology.
I do distinguish between physical and physiological, however, so that the medical explanation Mark gave remains irrelevant in understanding the Bible because neither the human author nor the audience would have associated the terms with this meaning. Furthermore, the choice of language most likely reflects not “anger” but the manner in which it was sometimes manifest such that it became an idiomatic reference to anger in all forms.
Nonetheless, my question about what Mark B. thinks it means in reference to God remains.
Hello Nathan,
I have really enjoyed your comments to me in this thread. I think they have the potential to push the conversation up another whole notch, so thank you. I’m not sure how many comments it is going to take me to deal with everything you’ve raised, but I think we need to settle back for a very long trip.
Before we settle in, as someone who has regularly had people take offence at how I’ve said things on threads, I find using the scare quotes ’ ’ useful when I want to distance myself from something I’m saying in a thread. We’re so used to journalists stating the side they like without the quotes and the side they don’t like with the quotes that just using the quotes can often remove possible offence. e.g. ‘Martin’s “creaturely” view of God’ or ‘Mark’s “mystery” view of God’ I think takes most of the sting out of a one word summary. It seems to have cut down on the number of people I’ve unnecessarily offended, so something like that might work.
Hee! I love third ways, and especially when they’re more reformed than me.
So the student has exceeded the teacher! Well then my young padawan, the force is clearly strong with you, lead the way. (And another thanks is in order: I always wanted to say that.)
You had to go and introduce analogia entis into this whole debate didn’tcha? This is going to take some words to address, because there’s a huge amount at stake here.
Okay, for those reading along who live in the real world, analogia entis means something like ‘analogy of being’ and the idea at stake is usually explained as there being some kind of correlation between creation and Creator – the creation is something like the One who called it from nothing, and hence language means something similar. Human power is a little like God’s power, human goodness is a little like God’s goodness etc. So language for God is analogical because it draws upon this analogy in reality, in existence, between us and God – we are a little bit like God.
Behind such an idea is the notion of causality – cause and effect. God is the cause of creation, creation is the effect, and an effect will share some of the characteristics of its cause. Or to put it in a different approach again, works express nature. Human beings are only capable of doing human works, but those works truly express human nature – they are have human fingerprints on them. God’s works express his nature. So creation is good because it is a work of the good God – God’s attributes are displayed in a creaturely way in creation.
Karl Barth famously identified Aquinas as being based upon an analogy of being and levelled pretty well every theological cannon he could find at the concept. For Barth, such an analogy would mean that there was some other basis for knowing God than the Lord Jesus Christ. It would mean that creation itself points to God (natural theology), and that that link forged by the act of creation is what enables any knowledge of God to take place. All of that was incompatible with Barth’s desire to establish that God is free in his relationship with us – that God is Lord.
In it’s place, as far as I can see, Barth still insisted that language for God had to be analogical (please take note! – an analogy of language without the analogia entis) but suggested an analogy of faith, or analogy of grace as the bridge that made language work. There is no ‘landing place’ for God’s Word in the human person, God effectively ignores creation and doesn’t work with it. There is actually no way at all that language can be used to speak of God – the gulf between us and God is absolute and infinite. God creates the path specially in redemption. The Word of God creates the landing place in the person, it creates its own path between us and God.
To Be Continued..
Response to Nathan part 2
Continuing:
Such an approach really helped his ‘core task’ – freeing the Word of God from its Babylonian Captivity to Liberal scholarship. There is no basis in reality for us to know God. We have no resources at all to speak of God or know him. And so we can’t create revelation, we can’t initiate it, and we can’t stand over it and judge it. Revelation is accountable to no-one and nothing other than itself – it is its own ground for justifying itself. It is free, it is Lord. You can’t disprove God’s Word by science, history or the like, and you don’t need to get into all that stuff to apologetically defend it. You just proclaim the Word and it does all the work itself.
With this in mind, you can see why so many people in Sydney feel drawn to Barth when they read him. Emphasising that God is in control in his revelation to us, that apologetics is a kind of unbelief and entirely useless for creating faith, that the Word of God preached creates faith and justifies itself and so we can ignore challenges from science, philosophy, history, social science etc, and that there is no other, more basic, ground to know God than Christ all gels with a lot of the concerns of ‘Sydney Anglicanism’.
My problem is that people don’t seem to prepared to face up to the cost of Barth’s approach. You get a lot, but in life you get what you pay for, and Barth’s price-tag is pretty steep. A few examples:
The biblical gospel is history. It is a statement about what happened in space and time in this world we live in. This means it doesn’t simply justify itself, at least some of its ground comes from outside itself. If Christ’s bones were discovered the gospel is gone. You need an empty tomb for the gospel to be true. Paul doesn’t say in 1 Cor 15, “The resurrection of Christ is true because the Word of God says so.” He doesn’t even say, “It’s true because an apostle says so, so pull your heads in.” He says (implicitly), this happened in the world we live in and you, my original audience, can confirm it by talking to a whole bunch of witnesses. Barth’s system implicitly sets up a ‘two truth’ approach – something is true in the ‘real world’ and yet when God speaks, for the purposes of hearing and obeying the Word of God (and only for those purposes) something else is true. Even if the bones of Christ were discovered the preacher would say, “Christ is risen” and the congregation would respond, “He is risen indeed” – because the Word of God entirely justifies itself and never has to give account to anything outside itself. It creates its own landing place and the contingent facts of history are irrelevant.
Barth’s argument that if creation formed a bridge then there’d be some other basis for knowing God other than the Lord Jesus Christ only works when you recognise that Barth rejected the idea that we could speak of the eternal Son of God before the Incarnation. For Barth, as far as we are concerned, the Son has always been human. The Lord Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, and in that revelation he is both God and Man, so we have no authority to speak of him other than as Incarnate. But for orthodoxy God created the world in and by and for his Son and Word. Creation and the Son are linked because the Father worked through the Son to make the world. So analogia entis isn’t establishing a basis other than Christ for our knowledge of God. Rather, it simply shifts the issue from Christ’s work as Redeemer, to his work as Creator as the ultimate ground. Redemption is redemption of a world that already exists, it is not the creation of a new one ex nihilo (from nothing). Christ’s work as Redeemer doesn’t stand on its own, somehow creating its own ground to stand on. It builds on and works within the boundaries established by Christ’s work as Redeemer. Barth’s position tends to push people to see an interest in creation as somehow anti-gospel – it pits creation and redemption off against each other. It separates the world from the One by whom and in whom and for whom it was made and in whom it holds together. And that’s chickenfeed compared to making Chalcedon, with its talk of both natures not being changed by their union in Christ, almost unintelligible because you’re not allowed to talk of an eternal Son before the Incarnation.
Response to Nathan part 3
Continuing..
Barth says that language still predicates something of God analogically in revelation. However, there is no basis in reality for that analogy. Creation is ‘good’ and God is ‘good’ but between God’s goodness and creation’s goodness is an absolute and infinite gulf. So what connection is there between our goodness and God’s? Absolutely none. If it were otherwise then there’d be some ground in reality for the Word of God, it wouldn’t have to create its own ‘landing place’ and the freedom of God in revelation would (supposedly) be curtailed. We could then say something about God’s goodness from what we can see about the goodness of creation – natural theology. And that has to be avoided at all costs. So how does the analogy in language work? It just does. It says it does and therefore it does. As soon as the Word of God says that God is ‘good’ the link is established just by the Word of God saying so. It hasn’t changed anything in reality – the gulf is still absolute and infinite, and so there’s no comparison in reality between us and God, but somehow the comparison works in revelation and words can predicate things of God when they really can’t. When it comes to Barth’s theology people sometimes talk about ‘building castles in the air’. I think it’s more like some amazing, stunning, megapolis in the air. It’s so impressive it takes the breath away. But as you keep digging into the foundations you realise that there’s nothing there, it’s built on nothing. Ontology (reality) has been collapsed into epistemology (knowing), it no longer forms the ground for knowledge to occur. And that’s when you begin to feel like chicken little, running around crying ‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling!’
But it’s even worse than that. The analogy of language doesn’t really work. Making truth statements about God like, “God is good” is not really revelation. Revelation and God are identical. God is his revelation in the strongest possible sense. That’s why the Trinity can be derived from revelation – God reveals himself through himself: God, God, and God again. The God doing the revealing is true God, the one in whom revelation occurs is true God, and what is revealed is true God in the same sense as the other two instances. That’s why the Lord Jesus Christ is, properly speaking, the revelation and Word of God, and the Bible is only *ahem* analogically the Word of God. God is not a collection of truth statements, he’s not a collection of 66 books, nor is he absolutely identical to any message those 66 books teach. God is a person, so only a person can reveal God in such a way that you end up with God and not merely statements about God. So the Bible gets us in contact with Christ, but Christ is actually the revelation of God, not anything the Bible might say about God (hence why Barth could acknowledge that the Bible teaches the existence of a personal satan but say that Christians aren’t obligated to believe in such a thing). Barth’s whole enterprise actually makes positive theology penultimate to a new kind of negative theology. We use the positive statements the Bible makes to get us in touch with Christ and at that point we have Divine Reality itself, unmediated by language (and hence reason) at all. An immediate, person to person communion. The writer of the Cloud of Unknowing would be jealous.
The irony here is that people want to say, “No analogia entis there is no similarity at all between creation and God” and yet use language for God univocally. The same people who most are drawn to Barth (or sound like him, even if they’re not aware whose footsteps they shadow) usually are the ones who just instinctively read the Bible as though it says things about God univocally. And yet, of the options, that’s the one thing you absolutely can’t do if Barth is right. Ultimately, language can only be analogical if God creates a path for it in the act of revelation itself. And even that has to be penultimate, for the purpose of taking us beyond itself to an encounter with God in Christ that goes beyond any truth statement made by the biblical writers.
To be continued..
Response to Nathan
Continuing…
The final problem I’ll raise here, is that this approach makes discipleship almost impossible. I’m going to stick my neck right out on this one, but I think it’s the kind of thing that should happen on Sola Panel. For Barth, Revelation gives us the knowledge of God. Revelation is God. But revelation is all about God revealing himself. But for me to act I need God to stop talking about himself for a bit and start talking about me and the world. I need to know who I am, and what I’m supposed to do. But on Barth’s system, all the Bible is doing is taking me to Christ who reveals God. That’s it. Now, I need all of that. But I need more if I am to act – I need to know myself as well. And that’s the big damage I think Barth has caused in Sydney. We don’t have as good a grasp on the idea that theology gives us a knowledge of ourselves – we talk as though the Bible speaks ‘only’ about Christ. He’s not just the centre, the centre has become the whole. (Now, I know that Barth does also say that Jesus Christ is the revelation of humanity as well. Jesus Christ isn’t the true man – the ideal or perfect man who exemplifies what human beings should be. He is the real man – the man who reveals what it means to be human, the man who makes us all human. We are human because of the incarnation of Christ – the appearance of Jesus Christ in history retrospectively makes being human possible. It should be clear that, for me this is still more castles in the sky, and I can’t say how relieved I am that this bit of Barth’s theology has never had a lot of purchase in our circles.)
This is one of the reasons why I think peole are so worried about ‘moralism’ in our circles – and why ‘typical’ Sydney preaching that I have heard often lacks much of a cutting ethical edge compared to all the other resources we bring to our preaching. We preach as though God’s demands on our lives – the moral imperatives in the Bible – are only there to lead us to Christ, they are just another way in which Christ is proclaimed to us. They aren’t meant to bring us into the spotlight of God’s Word, that shines on Christ and on Christ alone. We really struggle with ‘the third use of the Law’ – the idea that preaching and meditating on the Bible’s commands and instructions can actually spur Christians on in the Christian life. For us, imperatives can’t do that, only promises can. You don’t help believers become more godly by exhorting, commanding, or correcting. You can only do it by pointing to the finished work of Christ on the cross.
I’m gong to stick my neck right out now. The irony here is that Sydney’s two arguably most influential sons, the Jensen brothers senior, Peter and Philip, seem to me to be out of step with ‘the Sydney Anglican’ culture as a whole at this point. Their preaching is characterised by its ethical cutting edge. They have tried to encourage people to preach the 10 commandments. They invest serious time into understanding the world in which they live – cultural analysis – and see that what the Bible says correlates to the actual world they live in. They’re good at listening to the enscripturated Word of God, looking at what life is like in modern Sydney and then pointing and saying “That, that there. That’s what the Bible is talking about here. That’s what sin (or godliness) looks like in our context.” It’s christocentric, but it’s not christomonistic. It’s theological but profoundly concerned with ethics, with godliness. It invests a lot into cultural analysis but that isn’t the engine of what’s being said, it’s no pre-critical framework that Word of God has to fit into. They’re hardly clones, but at this point they seem to be in agreement, an agreement whose example helped me debug Barth and the issues he raises. Now there are a lot of people in Sydney who know these two much better than I. So if I’ve managed to read either of them wrong and they’re actually big fans of Barth and his whole enterprise, or even agree with Barth with demolishing the anologia entis then hopefully someone will join the thread and correct the record.
To be continued…
what are you like super-typing-man?
“Barth rejected the idea that we could speak of the eternal Son of God before the Incarnation.”
Are you trying to get Paul Molnar to start posting?
Response to Nathan
Continuing..
With all that in mind, here’s where I stand on angalogia entis
I am very sceptical about Barth’s rejection of natural theology, analogy of being, et al. It’s not so bad that I think, “Barth disagreed with analogia entis so therefore I should agree with it.” That’s just daft. But I do tread very, very carefully – I need some decent reasons to reject something that seems to me to have been assumed by mainstream theology in the early church, the middle ages, and in the Reformation. Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis and his assertion of an ‘absolute and infinite chasm’ between God and creation seems to me to be little more than saying “Oh, and by the way chaps, Kant was right – you can’t get there from here. There’s no basis in reality for human language to predicate things of God.” He’s allowed to do that. But that’s not really theology speaking at that point, that’s German philosophy pretending to be theology. It might be right, but, to me, it seems to be a denial of the very thing Barth claims to be fighting for – pure theology that creates all its own ground. Moreover, in general evangelicals aren’t overly happy with Kant. We don’t think he’s been a great friend to faith. So I’m not sure why we all seem to feel the need to adopt this orphan child of his offered to us in Barth’s swaddling clothes.
Having said that, I’m not particularly committed to an analogy of being either. I just haven’t done the work to chase it through, and it’s such a senstive issue in our context that I’ll hold off until I grasp things well enough to address it. Even if Barth’s wrong as to why it’s wrong (and I’m pretty sure about that) he might be right that it’s wrong nonetheless.
But, at this point in time, it seems to make a lot of sense to me. Creation is good because it is the work of the God who is good. It seems strange to me to go stomping in at that point and say, “Unbelief! Unbelief! There’s no relationship at all between the goodness of creation and the goodness of her Creator!” If Christ is the One in and through whom all things came to exist and be what they are, then I’m not bypassing him by saying that language can speak of God because of the Creator-created relationship. Understood rightly, it seems at least as strongly Christocentric as Barth’s approach.
But I’ll say that I don’t think I have to sign up to any theory as to why language about God works analogically to say that it does. At this stage, I’m fairly confident that language about God has to work analogically. In time I might see what is the reason for that. And that might be the analogia entis. But it might be something else. I’ve been strongly influenced by reading Athanasius and he has some significant things to say about how objects precede words and how the words have to be understood in light of the object they name, not vice versa. It seems to me that the Arians tried the same kind of ‘semantic domain has to carry through’ argument on him that, in different ways, you and Martin have run on me. And Athanasius just blew rasberries at them. He argued for a theology from above, not from below, where the reality of God in Christ shapes the words and gives them a meaning proper to that object alone. The divine reality determines the meaning of words used on him, they don’t govern what he can be by their pre-existing usage. That seems to me, at this point in time to have the potential to create the kind of theoretical framework necessary for analogical language to work without necessarily adopting an analogia entis.
So analogia entis? Pfft. The bogeyman is scarier.
We’ll move on then to the other key issues you raise so well in the rest of my comments that follow.
Hi Nathan,
Apart from the analogia entis you raise some basic concerns about analogical language for God being essentially equivocal.
I don’t think I am forced to do that all. I don’t work out what ‘father’ means by creating a list of all the ways that it differs from every other word. I don’t break every concept down into its bits, determine every bit in the puzzle and then construct a meaning of the word by putting those bits together in the right order. That’s the usual empirical foundationalism nonsense (hello Hume) that I reject completely – despite what you say in your next comment to me, Hume hasn’t disproven anything as far as I’m concerned. I just ‘get’ what fatherhod is. I mightn’t even be able to explain what it is well to someone else. I mightn’t know where all the boundaries of the concept are and answer every possible question about it. But I still ‘get’ what it means to say – “This man is my father.” And when I say, “God is my Father”, I don’t think that I either go, “Here’s the core semantic meaning of fatherhood, and that carries through to God” (univocal approach) or I go “Here’s all the ways that God’s fatherhood is different from all other fatherhoods” (your view of how analogical has to work). I just get that God is my Father. And that’s it’s different but the same as my human father. Discovering those differences and similarities is something that I grow into over time as I reflect, but I start by just getting the reality directly through the word ‘father’ and getting that it’s speaking of something quite different than earlier occurences of the word.
I think words have the power to put me in touch with the reality or concept they name more or less directly. I get a sense of the thing more or less at the start, and over time begin to grasp its shape and boundaries as I get more familiar with it. Objects, especially God, reveal themselves to me through language. They don’t sit there passively as I construct a concept to reach out to them. I think my understanding of language is so different from yours at this point that I can’t find a way to respond to your critique other than to say, “Nup, it’s not like that at all.”
I respectfully disagree with your position here.
God’s moral order in creation is an expression and subset of his own goodness, justice, love, et al. God’s not restrained or contained by his Law, sure. But that doesn’t mean that the goodness of the Law of God is not grounded in the goodness of God. God doesn’t murder. God doesn’t lie. God is love. God does not acquit the guilty or condemn the innocent. Now, God’s goodness transcends his Law, and so somehow the election of his people to eternal life and his passing over the unrighteous is good and just; the existence of sin in the world is good and right; the suffering we undergo that God could stop at any moment is good and right – all at some level above what the Law defines for human life.
But none of that is apophatic. The Law is a genuine expression of the goodness of God – they aren’t arbitrary rules God’s just whistled up for us. They are an expression into this creation of God’s goodness to shape our human life. So God’s goodness simply has to be more than the Law because God’s ‘life’ is not a human life. But God is not less good than the Law or differently good than the Law, it’s just that he’s God and that’s a very different ‘job description’ than we have. He’s good in ways that apply particularly to being God – ways that we just can’t grasp. But if that’s apophatic (negative theology) then that means that God can’t be good until the Law applies the exact same way to him that it does to us. And that really is disastrous – the price tag there for univocal language is just way too steep.
Hi Nathan,
About Calvin:
Okay, I’ve read, and reread I.x.2 and if I’ve got the section and chapter right I can’t see anything that resembles what you are saying here. Can you give me the quotes from there that lead you to say:
God is good in precisely the same way that we are good
That this is because God is truly in his persons how he is towards us.
That the incarnation proves that human language is a fit vehicle for the description of God.
What you’re claiming here runs strongly counter to my impression of Calvin’s theology. My view lines up more with what Paul Helm says in John Calvin’s Ideas, Oxford University Press, New York, 2004 p31
This is far more where I think Calvin is. Helm might have some details wrong, but his basic gist of Calvin’s theology ‘rings true’ of my reading of Calvin. And it’s somewhere around here that I think is probably where I should be as well.
Hello yet again Nathan,
Moving finally to your own thoughtful constructive alternative:
Okay. Martin is wrong because the univocal approach ends up with God as a creature. I am wrong because the analogical approach is actually the equivocal approach and ends up with a God about whom we can’t say anything with positive content. So the third way is to do one bankrupt approach at one point and the other bankrupt approach at another. We can’t say anything at all about God’s omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, immutability, aseity, omnipresence and the like. But when it comes to God’s love, justice, holiness, goodness and the like then “he is good in precisely the same way we are good,” he’s a mirror image of us.
You’ve really stessed this because it appears in your next comment to me as well:
There’s two basic problems here. First is ‘person’. From what I can see, the early church fathers (particularly the Greek speaking ones) didn’t even think the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all ‘persons’ in the same way as each other. One of the Cappadocians (I think) even went so far as to say that there are not Three, but One and One and One. This is because everything that is common to the three persons is part of the being that is common to all three. So if ‘personhood’ was a quality identical in all three persons, then it would cease to be connected to personhood. ‘Father’ ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ aren’t three names in the way that John, Jack, and Frank are for three identical persons. They don’t simply describe some qualities that define three people who are all persons in the same way. They name the reality that is different between each one so named. If you like, the Father is a person in a fatherly way. The Son is a sonly way. And the Spirit in spiritally way. Contemporary social trinities just ignores this and treats them as though they are a community of three individuals who really really love each other. If the three persons of the Godhead were persons in the exact same way we are then you would have tritheism.
The other problem is what seems to be there in your ‘personal qualities’. God is not loving, angry, good, wise et al. in the same way we are. Our anger could never justify sending someone to Hell, even if it was perfect. God’s does. An eternal judgement for sins caused by finite creatures in a finite creation. Jesus’ anger towards the money-changers definitely reveals the anger of God towards them, but it hardly exhausts it. They and us wait for judgement day to see that terror unfold.
More than that, we acquire goodness, wisdom, love, mercy, justice and the like from outside us. They are qualities we can have more or less of, and acquire from outside ourselves. But Christ is Wisdom. God is love. These aren’t just qualities God acquired. God has eternally been identical to these attributes. That’s why he’s the source of all these things in us and in creation – we acquire them through participation in God. This step in your position goes far beyond anything anyone has alleged about Martin’s univocality. This really is to make God’s personal qualities – his morality, so to speak – purely and entirely human. I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that this is ‘more reformed.’
This is where I stretch out my hands from within the folds of my robe, shoot lightning from my fingertips at you and declare, “Feel the power of the analogia entis!”
Andy, you’re a riot.
Heh. I wish. I am not going to count the hours responding to Nathan’s comments at the level I thought they deserved has taken. This is all cut and paste from stuff already typed.
LOL! Please! No more! If this discussion goes up too many more notches I’ll agree to anything.
Mark, it’s OK. Go ahead and breath now.
There’s no way I can reply seriously without some thinking time. Let me reply therefore right now, unseriously:
Oh I think I have still some ways to go yet, master. I can state using absolutely unequivocal language that if I wrote this much for one comment then no-one would read it.
Classic dark side of the force mumbo-jumbo. The only reason why, I can see, that you spent 4000 words explaining Barth on the analogia entis is to subtly tell me that I’m being Bartian and not Calvinist. Not that it wasn’t a fascinating ride. It was. And maybe I am. I’m going to have to think about the glasses through which I’m reading Calvin a little more. (I will get back to you on Inst I.x.2!)
Seriously thank you so much for the time and energy it must have taken you to reply in this way. I am going to attempt a serious response to all of this, but I have a lecture to prepare right now, (ironically as it turns out on the attributes of God), so its going to take me a day or two, and about 5 re-reads.
I enjoyed reading this a lot, Mark. I’m not really up with Barth, though every time I encounter his fidei vs. entis (false) antithesis I have a very similar reaction to what you seem to be articulating.
I would like to talk to you more about the notion of analogy some time (maybe outside of this context.
Again. Great discussion, guys.
Hi Andrew,
You’re welcome, I’m glad some people have appreciated that. I feel sorry for those who felt like that discussion just became entirely undigestible. And I’d love to be sharpened on analogy – it’s an area of got down to work on in the future.
Hi Nathan,
Heh. Very nicely played.
Well, I do suspect that your reading of Calvin is suffering from a bit of eisegesis. I think in our circles there is a bit of a tendency to have the ‘Calvin of faith’ and the ‘John of history’ – Calvin seems only ever to agree with us. It’s as though when we look we keep seeing our own image at the bottom of a deep well…
But dropping 4000 words on Barth on analogia entis onto a thread just to imply something to you? I think I still have enough of Aussie directness to just say something.
No, I was trying very hard to keep analogia entis out of the discussion altogether. Trying to tackle it properly would require the sort of thing I just did – spam the thread with some ridiculous tome.
But once I’m accused of holding to the analogia entis my suspicion is that I have to respond, and do so moderately comprehensively. That’s because my impression is that, even people who say that they disagree with Barth still take on this bit with genuine fervour. Analogia entis, even though few people are confident that they know what on earth it means, is the one thing most people are sure is wrong. It’s like being accused of making the Golden Calf, or blaspheming the Holy Spirit. It’s indefensible, and there’s no coming back from it. So I had to not just defend myself, but go on the offensive and try and show why Barth just shouldn’t be followed here. Different context, I would have taken a different response. But once you introduced that issue, my hunch was that I needed to get all my ducks in a row. And they needed to be pretty aggressive ducks too. They needed to show their teeth.
Martin, I know you’re waiting on a comment from me about anger and God. I owe Karen the next post in this new semi-series. I’ll finish that, then turn to your recent comments. I apologise for the delay.
@Mark – … it would be grossly misleading to imply that Barth has no ethics, now, wouldn’t it?
And I think it would be wrong and massively unhelpful to say things like
“…that’s the big damage I think Barth has caused in Sydney…”
If people’s thought resembles Barth in some way, I think this is by coincidence, or indirectly.
Hi Martin,
My view is much the same as yours I suspect. God’s anger means that his stance towards people has changed, that some kind of judgement is now imminent. And this isn’t something God just does as an act completely disassociated from himself, a judgement that God just ‘does’ at arms length from himself. He is invested in that stance and in the judgements that then ensue.
Where we may differ, is that I can’t go from that to pontificate on what’s happening in God’s ‘internal world’. The distinction between God as he is in himself and God as he is toward us must be upheld as vital. God is more than we can ever know. But God as he is toward us is genuinely grounded in and an utterly truthful expression of who God is in himself. So emotional language tells me what God is like in my relationship with him – how we ‘experience’ God so to speak. It doesn’t give us a window into eternity. But it isn’t make believe either.
Moving on to the question I posed to you.
I claimed that we know anger is grounded in our physical biological nature and is a product of the body and brain working together. I asked in what sense is it meaningful for us to then say that someone who is pure spirit and so without a body, physicality, or matter is angry.
To which your response was:
And when Nathan challenged you on this, on the grounds of the Bible’s general approach of saying that people ‘thought in their heart’ or ‘felt with their bowels’ you argued:
Three thoughts come to mind at this point:
1. We are fairly sure that we think with our brains. That is not an idiomatic reference for us. It arises from our observation of the world. If we assume that ancient peoples, like the Hebrews, evidenced the same desire to observe their world and understand it, and were more limited in the tools they could use to investigate the world, then their noticing that strong emotional reactions often manifested strong physiological effects was a pretty darn important clue in understanding it.
How many times have I heard an OT guy talk about how “It’s strange to us to talk about feeling with your bowels, but if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. When we feel things strongly, we get a strong sensation in the pit of our stomach. And so it makes sense to think that that is the seat of our emotions.” That’s not idiom, it is a view of how emotions are generated by that part of the body that most seems to undergo change when strong emotions appear.
So I think the far more likely view, especially given the OT’s strong pro-body stance, is that emotionality was seen to be integrally tied to having a body – that it was part of the core semantic meaning of the term. So I don’t think I’ve been as anachronistic as you claim.
I’ll finish this in the next comment.
Hi Martin,
To conclude…
2. But let’s assume you are right. The biblical writers never saw anger or other emotions as grounded in our physical reality. For them it was just a thing that was entirely disembodied – a function of a competely immaterial mind or soul, and so could just naturally be used univocally of God.
The problem I raised is then still with us. I asked that, given what anger means for us how meaningful is it to speak univocally of someone with no biochemistry or brain getting angry. You said. “Bzzt. Wrong question. The Bible doesn’t share our view of anger.”
That doesn’t solve the problem. That now adds a second problem to the original one I posed. And that is:
How meaningful is the Bible’s portrayal of anger to us?
Language, you argue, can only be used univocally, and the core semantic meaning has to go through. Here we stand, with a word ‘emotions’ and with other words like ‘anger,’ ‘compassion’ ‘grief’’ and the like, all of which we understand to be products of the brain and the body – products of our physical and biological reality.
Here stands the Bible, which has no concept of that at all, according to you. In your words (my emphasis):
If that is the case, then. ‘Emotion,’ ‘anger’ ‘compassion’ ‘grief’ and the like should not be the words translators use to translate the Bible into English. Our emotions don’t exist in the Bible. The Bible’s ‘emotions’ don’t exist in the world we live in as moderns with a knowledge of medicine. The language is equivocal, not from the Bible to God, but from the Bible to us. Emotions that are not the product of our biology and brain chemistry is not part of our core semantic meaning.
3. And 2 exemplifies my problem with the whole univocal approach. It is an example of why modern people can’t understand how translation can work – how can meaning be passed over from one language to the other. An univocal view of how language works will always tend to see language as bounded within itself, not open to be stretched or extended by things outside its already existing semantic use.
Applied to theology, univocal view of language is theology from below. The way we already use the words create absolutely unbreakable boundaries into which revelation is allowed to fill. God can pick and choose which words he uses to tell us about himself. But he cannot tell us anything about himself that is not already part of our experience of the world. And I really do think that this is simply disastrous for our knowledge of God. God simply can’t reveal himself as anything more than “Man writ large.” Language simply won’t allow it. This view of language is, (which, as I’ve said, isn’t ‘yours’ it’s the default view for modern theology) in my view, a big reason why Liberalism keeps on sitting there as this never-dying Hydra. Our view of language encodes the presuppostions that makes Liberalism possible and from which it derives its vitality and persuasive power.
Thanks again Mark, for a fascinating, thoughtful and obviously time consuming reply. I’m a little over-awed. I didn’t even get this much feedback on my 15,000 word final year project (which was on Calvin by the way, but in a different area). Having learned the hard way – I believe I wrongly called you a heretic once before when you told me that Veronica Mars was as good as Buffy – I’m not prepared to just jump right out and say that you’re wrong again. But nevertheless I am going to attempt something of a systematic reply in no related order to the way you set out your points: Firstly let’s talk about Barth. I’ll springboard from there to respond to your thoughts on my take on Calvin. Then we’ll head back to the analogia entis and finally I’ll come back to your response about language, after which I will once again (and with somewhat more care) argue for my initial position. Hopefully this will cohere into something of a seamless reply. And I’ll do it all while tapdancing and juggling.
Apologies in advance, this will be a long post. And furthermore I lack your considerable skill as an engaging writer. But I don’t want to concede discussion just because you can post engaging long replies and I can’t. I’ll try to be entertaining.
So, Barth. I really enjoyed your historical/critical take on Barth’s agenda. In fact, I agree. You should write a book – I’d set it as set-reading for my doctrine course. I’m not kidding. I think that’s all I want to say about your first four posts. I thought you were just giving me the theological sight-seeing tour until I got down a few more posts and realised that you were actually calling me Barthian! (Which is great. I’ve never been called Barthian before.) About this I have two things to say.
Firstly, it’s too much to assume that if I sound Barthian at points then I share his entire theological agenda. I’m not really interested in refuting natural theology, or even in undermining the analogia entis in general. I certainly am not on board with the whole enterprise of undermining liberal theology by distancing revelation from history. (You already know this about me, but those reading the thread probably don’t.) My argument has apparently come across as the Barthian denial of the analogia entis. But it isn’t. Just because I mention the incarnation and revelation together in the same sentence, and mutter something about “God as he is towards us” doesn’t mean that I’ve fallen down the Church Dogmatics rabbit hole. It just so happens that my year at college was taught the Doctrine of God by Gerald Bray, not by one particular other faculty member who may or may not be slightly more Barthian in his viewpoint. And I trust that, as this post develops (perhaps ‘unravels’ may be a better verb…) I will be able to reflect the distinction between the two reformed positions which I think is going on in my head.
And secondly, as you will have noticed from Michael’s comment already, there are lots of folk round these here parts who are a tad sensitive about the Barthian label. You should be careful before throwing it out there. Especially before you throw it at me, since as you know quite well, I’m not even from these here parts. And also, as you probably don’t remember but possibly could, every time I wrote a doctrine essay at college (you did read at least two of them) I argued against Barth.
(Continued…)
(Sigh… it copies and pastes without paragraph spaces…)
Having disposed of the prolegomena, let’s move on to Calvin. You have accused me of eisegeting Barth into Calvin, so I have some theologically toothed ducks to unleash here as well. Permit me to reboard the scenic route bus.
When it comes to both Christology and the Doctrine of God, the strength of the reformation formulation, and Calvin in particular, is that, without abandoning the traditional categories (eg. Christology ‘from above’ or ‘from below’), they supplement them with a strongly salvation-historical theme. Calvin’s Christology is a significant development on Chalcedon. Whereas the Fathers focus on Christ’s role of mediator in relationship to his human nature (eg. Gregory of Nazianzus – “what is not assumed is not healed” ), Calvin does not attach the role of mediation either to Christ’s humanity, or to his divinity, but to his person as divine Son. As he develops his Christology in Institutes II.xv-xvi, you will notice how Calvin relates the function that Christ performs (prophet, priest and, in this example, king) to both his human messianic role (eg. II.xv.4,) as well as to his divine sovereignty (eg. II.xv.5).
What’s more, to speak this way of Christ is not to speak simply about what Christ does. And it is to say much more than what Christ is. Rather it is Christology proper. For Calvin, Christ does not become mediator when he becomes man. Christ is, as the eternal second person of the Godhead, mediator. And he is functioning in that capacity before the foundation of the world (see, for example, his comments on Christ as the mediator and author of election in Institutes III.xxii.7 ). There is a time before Christ was man, and against Barth I’m very comfortable speaking about the pre-incarnate Christ. However there was no time when Christ was not mediating the Father to us.
It is this Christology, combined with his conception of autotheos that forms Calvin’s theological basis for positive statements about God. [For those still reading along, autotheos means “God as he is in himself”. Calvin was claiming that when you meet the Son, you meet all of God.] That Christ acts for us in his function as mediator is proof that God himself is eternally for us. In fact this is precisely where Calvin takes us next in the Institutes (II.xvi.3). We know God the Father loves us, because we have seen from history that Christ has acted for us. Calvin relies on this theological move all the time. Commenting on Luke 19:41, Calvin claims that Jesus weeping over Jerusalem reveals something true of the Father’s love and compassion even though only the human nature of Christ is capable of tears.
This, incedently, is also why Barth is quite wrong about Calvin’s God being a Deus nudus absconditus [a purely hidden God]. Calvin’s God is accommodated to us and revealed to us in Christ, who mediates between God and man. The two natures of Christ, to be sure, enable such a mediation to occur. But it is not the hypostatic union that mediates. It is the person.
This means for Calvin, the doctrine of revelation is not anchored in figuring out the natures of Christ. Calvin has neither the time, nor the need for theological and philosophical speculation on the essential being of the Godhead. Rather, revelation of the Father is anchored in the person of Christ. And we know and understand the person of Christ the same way that we know and understand other people – we experience them in history (maybe directly, maybe indirectly). When we meet the historical Christ, we meet the eternal Father because God is as he is towards us.
(Continued…)
(Continuing in reply to Mark’s enormous reply. Don’t blame me
)
Now I am ready to answer your charge about Institutes I.x.2. It is this foundation that underlies Calvin’s whole doctrine of revelation. OK. So he doesn’t drag out “mediation of Christ” in Institutes I because he doesn’t want to get ahead of himself. But he does flag that this is the place he is going to end up:
For now he will talk about “God in Scripture,” but when he does this he is still talking about the same thing: God as he has acted towards us in history. The reason he can be so sure that God’s actions in history accurately reveal the immanent God is because of the mediation of the second person of the Trinity.
These then are the very un-Barthian glasses through which I am reading the early chapters of the Institutes. I’m not saying that it’s all about the man Jesus Christ. I’m not saying there is no natural revelation. I am saying that Calvin is sure of what God is like because of the way God has acted towards us in Christ. And furthermore, Calvin knows that mediation has always been through Christ which enables him to draw on God’s other actions in history as personal revelation of Christ (and therefore God) also.
But that’s the key. It’s a personal revelation. This is quite different to the direction that you (and the Church fathers) took this line of thought:
Christ mediates creation. We all agree on that. But the question is what he mediates to it? The Church Father’s had no recourse to answer this except “all of God” because Christ’s role and person were so intimately tied to the hypostatic union – to what he is. Christ as mediator was Christ the god-man. This isn’t true for Calvin though. Calvin’s very prominent separation between person and nature means that, for him, Christ is mediator according to his person and therefore what is mediated is personal knowledge of the Father and the relationship between the Father, Son, Spirit and creation. We don’t learn from Christ what the essential nature of God is. And if we don’t learn it from Christ, we aren’t going to learn it from creation apart from Christ either.
God, in his essence, is a mystery. There’s just simply no way around this. And for this reason Calvin will never collapse the immanent trinity into the economic trinity. That’s not to say that Calvin has no place for the apophatic formulations we use when we talk about the nature of God. In fact, for Calvin it is very important to be apophatic at this point because otherwise we will be lead into idolatry (I.x.2-4). We must say that God in his nature is invisible, and immortal, and imperishable and, yes, impassible as well. But this isn’t positive knowledge of God. This is simply saying “God isn’t like us.” More than that. This is saying God in his being is not like us, and we have no way of getting to what that being actually is like – we have nothing that mediates the divine nature to us.
So having layed the groundwork, let me respond directly to your reading of my reading of Calvin:
Yes, this is an oversimplification and I actually needed to be more careful with exactly what I stated. I don’t think it was unfair given that I was trying to be brief. But nevertheless, you are correct. What I should have said was that we understand God’s goodness in precisely the same way that we understand each other’s goodness. God’s goodness may be qualitatively different, but we know what it means to call God good because we experience God’s goodness in history. God is good in the way that he is good towards us. This would seem to me to be Calvin’s point in I.x.2:
(Continued…)
(Hello again Mark… I think by now you will be the only one still reading.)
Replying to your next critique:
This was my point, not Calvin’s. Apologies for confusing you (once again a result of my own lack of perspicuity I’m sure). But it’s still true. Jesus comes to exegete the Father (John 1:18). If language is incapable of relaying that information to us, then he can’t do his job.
At this point I think I am ready to positively declare that in fact I was not doing a Barthian exegesis of Calvin, and that the only thing I was reading into Institutes I.x.2 was Institutes II.xxv – which Calvin flags as his grounds for the discussion anyway.
(Continued…)
(Continuing…)
Let’s move on then to the analogia entis. I think it should be obvious already that in I.x.2 Calvin is clearly not interested in establishing God’s goodness beginning from any kind of analogy. Rather, he wants to point at the world and say “Look at the way God has treated you! He’s good to you!” For Calvin our knowledge of the personal attributes of God is an experiential knowledge. I don’t know what God is like because of an analogy. I know what God is like because I’ve encountered him.
The analogia entis whether its valid or not really has no place in Calvin’s theology. I suspect, along with you, that Calvin wouldn’t completely deny the concept. But he would certainly qualify it. Firstly Calvin would point out that neither we nor creation are unmarred, and so the analogia entis is going to be a problem from the start. I think this gets at the heart of your argument for supporting the analogia entis:
So creation looks good to you? Great. To me it looks pretty terrible. I see earthquakes and famine and death and poverty. If I made the alternate argument – that creation was bad because it was the work of a God who is evil, then it wouldn’t seem the least bit strange to you to stomp in at that point crying “Unbelief! Unbelief!” Because you really do believe that there is no relationship between the evil of creation and the character of the creator.
But you can’t have it both ways. If the analogia entis is the foundation for our knowledge and language about God, then how shall we decide which parts of creation are worthy analogies? It’s even worse than that, because mankind’s natural state is such that we don’t even know goodness when we comes across it (eg. Rom 1:32)
Oh sure, we make recourse as Christians to the pre-fallen world, and a pre-fallen man, and therefore a good God. But this won’t do for an analogia entis, because we have no epistemological access to what it was like. It’s precisely for this reason (and not the transcendent gap) that whenever Calvin moves towards Natural theology his claim is that it is enough to leave us culpable and then to do no more. His commentary on Acts 17 is an example:
I suppose we might argue that redeemed mankind has some claim to build a positive knowledge of God from an analogia entis. But then, why would you bother? The analogia entis will always be – by the very nature of an analogy – a sketchy and fuzzy basis for language about God at best. It will always require qualification. The redeemed person has personal and experiential knowledge of God’s goodness, which is so much better a foundation than the analogia entis.
(Continued…)
(Continuing again to Mark…)
We are getting to where I have a huge problem with the way you have described language working. Putting aside such sophisticated arguments as this one:
Let’s begin here:
But I don’t believe this is true for a second. You don’t just ‘get’ what fatherhood is. You know what a father is because you had one, presumably. Even if he wasn’t around (and I have no idea, my sincere apologies if this is a sensitive topic for you) then you’ve seen other ones. Knowledge of concepts comes from experience. That’s how language works. Not from analogy. And if you know God as Father it is because you’ve experienced him as Father, not because the Bible tells you to call him Father and then you have to go scratching round down here looking at other Fathers to compare him to.
As soon as you use analogy as a basis for knowledge, you have to qualify it if the concept is going to be clear to your audience. I can give a sermon illustration, but if I don’t relate it to a central point then it’s just an anecdote. This was the point I was making about good books and good people. An analogy of “good” doesn’t help us say what good is. To know “good” I have to experience someone being good.
Furthermore, the Biblical language of the personal attributes of God doesn’t work by analogy. It’s working by experience. We understand God’s righteousness because we have seen him act righteously (Rom 3:25-26). We understand God’s goodness because we have seen him acting in a good way (Mat 5:45). And we understand God’s love because he loved us (1 John 4:9). And this is the same way that I understand your attributes – your love, or your justice, or anyone else’s. So, maybe you were right in your assessment: “analogia entis? Pfft.” The boodyman is more useful.
(Continuing…)
Hi Michael,
Great to have your input again.
Heh. I absolutely agree.
And it is a great comfort to me that I did no such thing. Just before I go to bed at night, I look at myself in the mirror, nod to myself in the sage-like way that us Jedi Masters do, and say, “Mark, another day without bearing false witness against your neighbour Barth you have gone. Hmmmn” (I’m still working on the “Hmmmn” – at the moment it sounds more Kermit than Yoda, but I’ll get there.)
I said. “this approach makes discipleship almost impossible.” And I’ll stand by that. I think (and I’m hardly alone here) that his theology makes ethics almost impossible.
Now it is also true that Barth had ethics, and a lot of what he writes on that topic is genuinely illuminating. But Barth also believed that Christ was raised from the dead and I didn’t take time out to go “now, while Barth seems to establish a two-truth approach he actually did believe that Christ was raised from the dead in the world we live in” or hedge every other criticism I made. It isn’t an academic paper, it’s a comment thread on popular-level blog. I don’t want to hedge every positive thing I say, and I don’t see the need to hedge every negative thing I say. We don’t speak that way outside of the Academy.
I made no statement about Barth’s ethics, simply about how easy it is to move to ethics from his theology. If people jump to conclusions about Barth’s ethics from that, it is because they filled in the silence at that point and wrongly resolved an ambiguity in my text – an act that I’m sure those sympathetic to Martin’s position on the thread on theological method and exegesis will be quick to challenge. But if someone read the words wrongly, I apologise to you for being grossly misleading in what I implied about the great German.
Picking up this concern:
Yes, if it’s just coincidence it’s wrong and massively unhelpful. However, if Barth’s influence is such that he has had this impact indirectly then I really need to ramp up the strength of my concerns – the problem’s even worse than I thought!
Either way, I think you can only really establish that this is a coincidence by offering a superior explanation of the phenomena. I think it would be right and massively helpful if you took the time to explain what you think are the factors causing the things I’ve pointed to, and why Barth has had no influence at all, and the resemblance to his thought is mere coincidence.
(Continuing in reply to Mark…)
The other qualification that I believe Calvin would make to the analogia entis — and this is a very pertinent one for our discussion on immutability – is that we have a personal, mediated knowledge of God. We do not have any access to the eternal being of God. Calvin’s distinction here between being and person really helps quite a lot.
Of course there is no analogia entis in the strict sense of the word entis. We have no access to what God is – and we have no experience of God’s nature. “No one has ever seen God.” We only know that he is not like us. When Christ comes he comes in human nature. He shows us the persons of God, but he doesn’t reveal the nature of God. He shows us God veiled in flesh. And this is why all of our words describing God’s being are negations – an apophatic tradition – immutability, invisibility, imperishability, etc. God in his being is not like us, and so there is no analogia entis that is going to help with these concepts. This is fine – we need this apophatic tradition to avoid idolatry as Calvin points out, again in I.x.2.
And this is where I, again, respectfully disagree with your position on language. If you are trying to understand God’s goodness from creation, separate to his actions towards us, then this does leave you with an apophatic theology. Not because God is “up there” and we are “down here.” But because even if creation still reflects something of the goodness of God (as we surely believe it does), not everything in creation is good. And even if it was, we would still be the kind of people to call good bad.
However if you take on board Calvin’s basic premise, that God’s personal attributes are revealed in his action towards us because the second person of the trinity mediates this knowledge to us, then you can positively (cataphatically) say what God’s goodness is – it is the kind of goodness that sends the rain on the just and the unjust. It is the kind of goodness that sends his only son so that whosoever should believe in him would not perish. God is as he acts towards us. (And this is the premise which I have accused you of sneaking into your argument without acknowledging.) For Calvin, cataphatic statements about God are not built from natural revelation, they are built from personal experience of the Christ who mediates the Father.
But you can’t take on this premise without acknowledging the flip-side of Calvin’s coin. Christ only mediates personal knowledge of God. He doesn’t mediate ontological knowledge of God. It is important that we can make ontological statements about God. But if we are saying “God is immutable” then this statement has a very different epistemological basis than saying “God is good.” We experience God’s goodness. We know nothing of his immutability except that he is not like us.
(Getting near the end now…)
(2 to go Mark, you brought this on yourself
This then is the basis of my claim for a “third, more reformed” way in the immutability debate. Undoubtedly my own carelessness with the language I was using is what made it come across as Barthian, rather than reformed. And I do acknowledge that I phrased some things quite poorly, and even misunderstood some of the points that I was trying to make. So thank you for forcing me to think more closely.
However, in the core of my argument I’m going to stick to my guns here. Or was it toothed ducks? I can’t remember.
And yes, the third way is indeed to do one bankrupt approach at one point and the other bankrupt approach at the other. Even though I wouldn’t have quite put it like that. In reformed theology there in fact is a different epistemological basis for statements about what God is, as opposed to who God is. Different epistemology ultimately grants different types of language.
When the Bible talks about the personal character of God it is using univocal language to whatever extent we use univocal language in everyday life. If you want to be pedantic (and clearly, Mark, you do at times), then there isn’t really such a thing as univocal language at all. You can say that nobody is good in precisely the same way that anyone else is good. What it means for you, Mark, to be good is a little bit different than for me; since you are a father you have “goodness” obligations to your son. But I think that is stretching the concept of analogical a little too far to be useful. For all practical purposes, we know and understand God’s goodness in the same way that we know each other’s goodness – because we observe it in his actions. God is as he is towards us. And therefore our language about this concept is univocal.
But when the Bible talks about the ontological being of God then it has to use equivocal language. We have no epistemological access to God’s being, and so all that is left is equivocation. We can say “he is omnipotent” but we can’t point to his omnipotence in history. We just have to end up talking about his “mighty hand and his outstretched arm.”
(Continued…)
Ultimately we can return to where we began. It is Calvin’s concept of Christ as mediator, not according to nature, but according to his divine person that drives this distinction, rather than a Barthian over-reaction to liberal scepticism. You can probably argue against Calvin’s Christology if you like. After all, it really is a significant development on Chalcedon. But I don’t see how, if you accept the Christology, that you don’t end up at this point.
And besides, it really helps. As I pointed out in the other thread, when discussing immutability it allows us to separate the doctrine from the question of whether God does, or does not have feelings. The issue comes to the fore in David’s question: is Christ immutable? If we say “Christ is God” then we have to say yes (at least if you agree with the doctrine of immutability.) But if we say “Christ is man” then we have to say no because change is part of what it means to be man. Clearly when we speak of immutability we are speaking of something that belongs to his nature and not his person – or else we would have all kinds of logical contradictions beyond the innate mystery of the hypostatic union.
But if I ask “Was Christ angry at the money changers in the temple in his humanity or in his divinity?” Then surely everyone will agree that this is a category mistake. Anger is a personal attribute. Christ was angry in his whole person and not specifically with respect to his humanity or divinity.
I realise, after having come to the end, that some of what I have said in this very long reply is a pretty drastic revision of where I was at before. I’m not trying to hide a revisionist history under the guise of clarification. Thanks Mark, for forcing me to think through these things more deeply. I think, however, I really did need to clarify that I wasn’t being Bartian. And I don’t think that my fundamental position has changed much.
And yes, I’m going to stick with the description “more reformed.” I am offering a third, more reformed, alternative than either you or Martin in understanding the language we use about God, and the way we will talk about God.
I fully expect you to come back at me again. If I write 1000 words and get a 6000 word reply, I shudder to think how many words you will write about this post.
But then, maybe you will just do the smart thing and concede the point
Besides, I can kill you with my brain.
“the great German”…
…Swiss, please!
A superior explanation? It is this. Evangelicals are concerned about soteriology, and justification in particular. They don’t want anything to compromise this. Hence the rhetoric against worship language etc, and against natural theology and apologetics. And against Catholicism and charasmaticism – they threaten to undo the absoluteness of justification by faith ALONE. Barth’s concern was revelation, not so much soteriology.
There’s a resemblance perhaps, but only in that these are both Protestant positions of a kind. It is, as I say, massively unhelpful to paste labels like this, really!
I think you ought to hedge. Your comments here are lengthy and detailed in any case. And you risk saying misleading things like ‘Barth’s theology makes ethics almost impossible’…
Blessings
MPJ
Nathan, you said
and this may be true, some of the time, in this present evil age. But “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Cor 5:17) So that for the Christian, new creation has begun and now is, so that our knowledge of God, and therefore our language about him, is informed by our new creation status in Christ.
I feel I want to talk about being “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) at this point but I am not sure I understand what this means, so will say nothing.
Hi Gordon,
Thanks for joining the discussion. I’m sincerely honored that you bothered to read that far through my post. I truly thought I would have a readership of (maybe) one. But someone has to call Mark out occasionally. Its good for him
I think I addressed this concern a little further down:
Hi Nathan,
Wow, the student really has exceeded the teacher! It looks like a great argument, I’ll catch my breath, chew it over carefully and try and write something brief in response so Matthias website doesn’t collapse under the weight of the electrons we shovel on it.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think you have to keep apologising for either your ability or the quality of your writing. You’re more than holding your own.
True. But you haven’t done so for years. And it looks like you’ll probably never do so again. Apparently they could take the sky from you after all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVZnakJJEUU
Hi Michael,
Okay. Are these exclusive concerns? Or might Barth think that revelation is a saving act? And might Evangelicals think that justifiation by faith alone might also require a commitment to Scripture alone?
It’s not really clear to me how one goes straight from protecting justification by grace through faith to rejecting apologetics and natural theology. So I struggle a bit with the explanation – I’m not sure that it purely falls out of a poorly held concern with soteriology. I think other concerns might need to be there, and those other concerns (such certain positions held on the topic of revelation) might result in what we see.
Either way, this explanation seems potentially misleading and could possibly afford to be hedged. Barth was concerned with ethics, for example, not just revelation.
Hi Mark,
Let me ask this question to clarify your position: can we make God angry through our actions (or inactions)?
But this is very different from what you were saying earlier — you were talking brain chemistry and other factors and so using this to distinguish between our anger and what could be postulated of God. Yet the ancient understanding of anger, while it may have been recognised as sometimes resulting in some physical manifestation, was not rooted in physical cause but in response to external stimuli (e.g. Jonah 4:1). “Anger” in the ancient world was not code for “chemicals are doing certain things in my brain” — in fact it is not code for this in most modern usages. So even if the language used to describe anger makes reference to physical manifestations of anger, it would be a mistake to claim that anyone in the ancient world believed that anger always and invariably gave rise to a specific set of physical manifestations. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to claim that they believed that the physical manifestations of anger were the cause of anger.
Hence your physiological account of the causes of anger really has no relationship that I can see with anger as a concept in the Bible.
Again I think your expressing this the wrong way around (although you start off right by rooting the sensation “feeling things strongly”). I doubt that anyone held that emotions were generated by that any of the body. Anger was not generated by one becoming hot. It may be true that, were you to try and test this out by heating someone’s nose, then they would become angry. But I don’t think that everyone who was ever angry in ancient Israel became so because someone had heated up their nose! They became angry and the language used to describe this employed physical terms without implying either any a physical cause or even a universal manifestation of anger! If you spit the dummy do you really spit a dummy?
That is why this makes no sense in light of the biblical use of this language:
Because they are not products of the brain and the body they are reactions of a person to circumstances and events (cf. Job 7:11). As I’ve argued, any “core” meaning of these terms was not then and is not now generally understood as something which is a product of our physical bodies.
Nathan said
Ah, soz, so you did. Should of read a bit more thoroughly.
I’m not sure I want to be as casual about this as you then proceed to be. If we are being changed from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor 3:18), then the knowledge that is being revealed to us is becoming better, greater and stronger from moment to moment. Yes, Col 3:3 and all that, but even now we feel the approach of Col 3:4.
Anyway, carry on all, I’m just adding to the static at the moment.
Hi Nathan,
Great post – this is clearly getting unwieldy!
I can’t do this justice here but I’d like to push you a bit more on Calvin here. I don’t actually think he’s the great personalist that you (and Gerald Bray – is he an influence here?) are suggesting.
Firstly Calvin seems a little unclear on the relationship between the office and the person of the mediator. You want to say it is his person that mediates – and I think Calvin does sound like that sometimes, but let’s also remember that Calvin (and this is a position that he seems to have invented AFAICS) says that the mediator’s office will end (Institutes 2.14.3). How does that align with his person being the central issue?
Calvin isn’t much different from those who precede him here. The things Christ does and receives are purely for us (he doesn’t need them cf. Institutes 3.1.1). And if we say that it is his being the Son that gives rise to his being revealer as Christ then amen! – and this is better than Chalc.– but Calvin scarcely invented this! This idea is the basis of all exemplarist theology from Irenaaeus to Maximus to Aquinas and the Franciscans etc etc.
Please note, I really like that you are wanting to stress personalism. But I think Jonathan Edwards is a better candidate for your *reformed* views
I’d also like to talk about analogy
I think the answer here is that God exegetes his own symbols. So, analogia entis only works when viewed in the light of analogia fidei. I don’t think anyone here would want to suggest a natural theology that can work apart from Scripture.
Of course we can push it further too. Christ as the fulfiller of every category means that analogia entis cannot be understood properly apart form analogia Christi. So we need all three!
btw is that true that Veronica Mars is as good as Buffy?
Whoda thunk you could combign Joss Whedon and Trinitarian theology? Sounds like theology at Moore is a little different from what we have down here.
@Andrew: My 2 cents (and I think Mark B will agree with me from all reports!): Veronica Mars is even better than Buffy. Season 1 is terrific. Season 2 is even better. Unfortunately Season 3 flops; I don’t know why but they started losing ratings, and the network really tied the producers’ hands. VM fans hope that one day Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell will be able to make the VM movie.
Hi Andrew,
Gotta go with Karen here. Veronica is as good as Buffy at her best. Don’t even compare to whingy “I can’t deal” Buffy of seasons 4-6.
I wondered at what point I would have to start providing references
Obviously I have brought out Bray a couple of times in the impassibility discussion. And there are a number of people I might mention. But my main influence for reading Calvin (especially on Christology), and for understanding reformed dogmatics, has been Richard Muller. I suspect that Muller is well enough known that I don’t need to say too much more. If you’ve read Christ and the Decree you will recognise Muller’s fingerprints all over my post.
Perhaps I am misled, but I was under the impression that the strong person/essence distinction in Calvin’s thought was something fairly well recognised. I’m pretty sure even Warfield comments on it as something characteristic and novel of Calvin in his book on the Doctrine of the Trinity.
Actually, in the most humblest and meekest possible way I can say this next sentence; I think there may be a few minor inconsistencies in Calvin’s Christology. Perhaps even that is saying too much. Perhaps it would be better put that there are questions that were not asked in Calvin’s time, which expose certain tensions in his thought.
One of them is the question of subordination. I can’t develop this fully without another thousand words, but the issue is essentially this: If Christ is, from eternity, mediator, then is he also from eternity subordinate to the Father? Calvin, of course, goes to great lengths to avoid this in his formulation of authotheos, but as far as I can see its kind of still hanging out there by the end of Institutes II.
Maybe some modern Trinitarian thought can help us. We clearly have to say that it is not essential to the second person of the trinity that he be mediator – or else we have lost the aseity of God. God would have had to create so that the second person could mediate. Therefore, the Son takes on his role of mediation by agreement, logically (but not temporally, since we are still in eternity) subsequent to the decision to create.
Paul Helm explores this whole issue in his essay inEngaging the Doctrine of God. Worth a read, and possibly correct, but its not Calvin’s solution. Calvin doesn’t really see the problem.
I think Institutes 2.14.3 gives us a hint that Calvin may have gone this way if the question had been asked. Mediation is something that belongs to the person of Christ, not the flesh of Christ, but it is still something he took on and therefore it is still something he can relieve himself of as well – at the proper time.
Whether you want to agree with Calvin on this point is a different issue. I’m not sure I do. But I’m not sure that I can say anything about it more satisfying than that.
I’m afraid I don’t really have anything very intelligent to say about this. I think I’m happy for you to find a-posteriori uses for the analogia entis. To be honest, I don’t really see the point of trying. Once we know God as Saviour we already know that he is good. We don’t really require an analogia entis to tell us that anymore. But as an intellectual exercise, I suppose it might be an interesting thing to take up.
If you don’t mind me asking, where is “down here”?
Hi Nathan,
Thanks for that thoughtful response. First things first:
Well that’s all very good news.
Yes, let’s try to forget back-from-the-dead Buffy. btw Nice “take the sky…” ref from MB too. My wife and I are just rewatching Firefly atm
I think we are in agreement on Calvin being a bit blurry. I haven’t read that Muller book but he’s a scary person to disagree with. I’ll leave it there but I think we can do better than Calvin.
You know I have 95,000 words on these topics
? If you send me your email I can send you a short paper that I gave last week which has bearing on the second Q (mine is gesundheit and then at and then ajmd.com.au).
I think the key is to see salvation history as a contingent addition to the life of God: a free gift given from Father to Son (and returned); a re-presentation of the divine persons in their distinct roles/subsistences in the created sphere.
You gotta see the whole picture. This means ITS ALL CONNECTED (yes my eyes are wild). Creation and Revelation and Salvation are all designed to fit together. Everything finds its meaning in Christ. Nothing is ad hoc or merely reparative. We don’t have to chose between “nature” or “revelation”. But I should stop.
I’m studying at Ridley and lecturing at BCV.
Hi Nathan, Andrew, Karen,
Ah, I feel in geek heaven.
Buffy vs Veronica Mars. I see them as equal but different, neither is in any essential way inferior to the other.
Veronica Mars maintains a consistency in quality that Buffy the Vampire Slayer doesn’t, and the enjoyment average is higher overall than Buffy. Seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy in particular require a lot from you for what they give back.
Veronica far more than Buffy is a true example of a ‘feminist hero’ – she works within the constraints of being a woman. Whedon, as always, cheats and makes his female leads more physically able than any man.
Veronica Mars doesn’t toy with playing to male voyeurism the way Whedon likes to either.
Veronica Mars has a far richer and more nuanced moral and relational insight on display than what Buffy the Vampire Slayer can pull off in a deliberately silly world of urban fantasy and cheerleading chosen ones.
Veronica’s relationship with her dad deserves an award. For all Whedon keeps producing groups of friends led by a surrogate father figure, not even the Simon-River relationship is as exemplary.
But:
Veronica Mars was even less able to navigate the problem of moving from High School to life after graduation than Buffy or even Gilmore Girls pulled off. Seasons 4-7 of Buffy might be less fun than 1-3. But there actually was a seasons 4-7.
Veronica doesn’t have anything like the versatility of Buffy – a musical, very silly episodes, evil twins, “the Body” episode, an episode without speech. Buffy pushes the envelope on what you can do and keep an audience with you. And over seven years that ‘high risk’ strategy (like having a depressed, disengaged, main character for an entire season) counts at least as much as consitency in quality.
Whedon is trying to actually say something about life in his shows. Veronica is simply trying to entertain using a sophisticated view of morality and life. And that’s a lot easier.
Nathan,
I’m trying to get things set up with my real ‘job’ here before our second child arrives (which could be any day – so if I vanish completely from the virtual world for a few weeks don’t be suprised). I’m also a bit weary from how much I’ve done on Sola recently in my ‘spare’ time, and am trying to reread key sections of Muller and Helm before I respond. It’ll be a little while yet – I’ll probaby continue things with Martin and David in the meantime. But my first impressions were (scarily – deja vu of our trinitarian discssions years ago) in line with Andrew Moody. I suspect I’ll take a lot more words to say what he could say in a couple.
Andrew,
Concise, sharp, and enjoys my jokes. Feel free to hang around any thread I’m on Andrew
Possibly not as much as you might think. I think putting Whedon and Trinitarian theology in the same thread would cause a reaction among most faculty somewhere between rolling their eyes and wishing they were dead so they could roll in their graves…
Hi Mark,
Are you back in Sydney? I knew you must have finished your study by now, but I wasn’t sure when you were getting back. Will you be taking up your old post?
AWESOME news Mark
A very hearty congratulations from an ex-neighbour. I hadn’t heard at all.
Yes, you’ve been a machine. And in every single post you’ve also been exemplary in the level of helpfulness, encouragement and care that you’ve taken in commenting to people. I’ve really appreciated just how clearly everything you do has been constructive and thoughtful towards the people you’re interacting with. Thankyou so much for giving us all an example of how to run a healthy and edifying on-line theological discussion. I’ve never seen one work like this before, and it’s really because of you.
Take your time. I’m working three jobs myself and I can’t really afford another two days like it took me to write the last post. Anyway, if we up the ante much more then I’m going to have to start doing fresh research just to keep engaging. In that case we would probably do better to take this debate to a theological journal somewhere. If I’m going to have to spend hours of research time before I can post anything, then I may as well try and get some academic credit for it
I suspect we’ve already lost a significant proportion of the solapanel readership anyway, just through sheer length of replies.
Fair enough. As always, I’m really happy to be corrected on Calvin and Christology. It will take some convincing: I’m pretty sure that I’m in the ballpark. But I’m open to it.
I did my 4th year project on the relationship between election, atonement and Christology in reformed dogmatics, and so I’ve spent an enormous amount of time with Muller, and more than a little with Helm over the last year and a half. Call me a sadist, but I’ve got a copy of Muller’s Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics arriving sooner or later. I’m desperately looking forward to getting into it
But that’s not to say that I pretend to have understood everything, or even most things. You’re brain is significantly bigger than mine, and Muller is significantly complex, so if you do get around to polishing it all up (and I realise that may be a big “if” given your current situation), and you think I’ve misunderstood something critical, then I welcome the ensuing discussion.
Thanks again Mark. Go take some well earned rest
*sobs inconsolably*
Yes, I must have finished by now.
No, we’ve got at least a year left, and that’s only if I can write a lot faster than most doctoral candidates can. There was an extra year and half worth of stuff I’ve had to do that no-one foresaw before I could get down to business. It was wothwhile and all, but, no I haven’t finished…
Stripped of a bit of hyperbole, you are very welcome. What we’re doing is a bit of experiment for me – I think if we work hard on building up the relational capital as we discuss things we can sometimes maintain serious discussion over important issues with serious disagreements.
But that really is a team effort. Everyone is contributing to that. As ‘host’ of the thread, I’m trying to create a hospitable environment, but you guys are the ones who are shining in how you’re taking that and running with it, IMHO.
Oops. I’ve committed the cardinal PhD related sin, haven’t I? Sigh.
Other classic moments: tabula rasa; vampire willow; vampire willow again when she get’s dragged into this dimension, only to have the scooby gang go to all the trouble of putting her back – straight onto a stake; the musical episode re-emerging in a flashback—and explaining how the mustard got on the shirt in the first place!!!; “Thankyou for making time in your busy life to come here and get in the way of mine,” Come to think of it – nearly everything Anya ever said; Giles’ swordfight with a skeleton under a green mystical cloud of Anya’s making, surrounded by bunnies; Giles: “There’s a certain dramatic irony attached to all this. A synchronicity that borders on predestination, one might say.” Buffy: “Fire bad. Tree pretty.”
Aaah. These are a few of my favorite things.
Hi Martin,
Apologies about the delay.
Yes? No? Maybe? You’re going to have to start venturing some definitions of terms at this stage, I suspect. Of course I’m going to say ‘Yes’ to that question. But given that I believe that the Bible’s language is accommodated to our limitations then that may or may not be the answer you’re looking for.
What do you mean by ‘make’ and ‘anger’ for a start?
I agree on this. I’m not sure why what I wrote inspired this as a rebuttal. I’m sure there’s a good reason, but I’m missing the link. If I said, “We think that the brain creates our mental processes and thoughts” have you really rebutted me by saying that no-one thinks someone can generate thoughts by heating up my head?
It might be that it’s preparation for this next bit, in which case we can just focus there.
So it’s a straight either-or? It’s a reaction of a person to an event, and therefore, even in the modern world, we don’t see emotions as having anything to do with our physical bodies? Physical bodies aren’t a necessary component of emotions, disembodied personhood explains everything?
I am a bit sceptical about this theory. The entire field of psychiatry would seem to be predicated on the idea that emotions such as anxiety and depression can be diminished by drugs. We give people electroshock therapy to relieve extreme cases of depression and they get better. Now, I’ll agree that stopping being depressed when you’ve have electricity poured through your skull is a reaction of a person to an event. But the person is invariably anaesthetised when it happens. I’m not sure it is a deliberate personal choice to stop being depressed. It seems to be pretty well entirely a function of body and brain without much involvement of the person at all.
The old ‘sanguine-choleric-phlegmatic-melancholy’ system goes back a long way and thought that emotional tendencies were due to an imbalance of one of the four humours that made up the body. Again, that looks very much like grounding emotionality in the body as part of the core semantic meaning of the concept.
I suggest again, that it is part of the basic semantic meaning for both the ancient world and now that emotions had a strong physical component – a body was needed for emotions to occur. And if you want to maintain that the Bible uniquely doesn’t think that but holds to a disembodied person who just reacts to events but happens to be in a body when they do so, then my argument that there is no relationship between the Bible’s view of emotions and ours holds tight.
But whichever way the anger argument cashes out, I still would like to hear your response to my concerns about the univocal approach to language about God. Even if we disagree about the concrete example (anger), the abstract principle should be clear enough. In my words from earlier:
Hi Mark,
Yes? No? Maybe? You’re going to have to start venturing some definitions of terms at this stage, I suspect. Of course I’m going to say ‘Yes’ to that question. But given that I believe that the Bible’s language is accommodated to our limitations then that may or may not be the answer you’re looking for.
What do you mean by ‘make’ and ‘anger’ for a start?</blockquote>
Since words derive their meanings from an interplay of their contexts with their semantic range, to provide any precision we’d need to examine specific instances of the terms in context (see below). As a starting point, a lexical definition I’d be happy with for “anger” is “a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility.”
As for “make” let me point to the use of the hifil of כעס, (k’s) often rendered “to provoke to anger.” A good example of the use of this term which highlights the issues is found in Deut 32:21 which reads thus, speaking of Israel:
The verse parallels the action of the people in provoking God with God’s response, to provoke the people reciprocally. “Make” or “provoke” here then implies causation, that the emotion (jealous/anger) is a response to the actions of the other (the people/God). Another legitimate (but awkward sounding) way to translate the terms is “cause to be jealous” or “cause to be angry.”
The parallelism makes this verse particularly interesting in the context of our discussions.
I think you’re missing my point. I’m not disputing whether there’s a physical, neurological, or physiological aspect to anger. What I’m disputing is whether that component is implicit in the use of the term “anger” in either the modern world (in normal conversation rather than in medical conversation) or in the ancient world. I’m not even disputing that some physical manifestations of anger in the ancient world would sometimes have been associated with anger. What I’m disputing is the relevance of this information to the understanding of references to either divine or human anger in Scripture. I doubt most people in the modern world think of the chemical operation of the brain in association with anger unless the conversation occurs in a very specialised context or else they’re explicitly prompted to make the association. Consequently, as I said, this information is not particularly relevant to understanding the meaning of anger in the Bible.
To illustrate this, how many modern dictionaries, when discussing the meaning of anger, refer primarily to physical causes or manifestations? Here’s my most easily accessible reference:
A quick check of a few others confirms this impression. Consequently I see no evidence to support this claim:
To be continued…
Anyway, moving on to your final question:
The problem is that I’m not convinced that what most mean by “analogical” language is at odds with the way I argued language operates. That’s because I suspect that few theologians would claim that analogical language imbues terms with meanings entirely unrelated to their “normal” usage. Furthermore, some of your later posts and, perhaps more perspicuously, the paper by Kevin deYoung that Sandy pointed to, seem to suggest that passible language does convey passible meaning in God’s relationship with creation. Impassibility is then restricted to God’s inner nature (DeYoung, for example, says “As we talk about God‘s emotional life we must keep this in mind: his changing external emotions are but a reflection of his inner, unchanging nature and character. These emotional changes in God relate to the temporal changes in his creatures.”). I’m reasonably happy with the ideas espoused by DeYoung. You may well also be in agreement, and perhaps then it was more my misreading of your initial presentation that precipitated much of this discussion.
So, for example, I think this is well put:
My position is that language used of God cannot sensibly be claimed to have no real connection to the “normal” use of that language (I note that you previously characterised my position as requiring a “core” meaning be carried over, but I have never made this claim, I’m not sure a “core” meaning can be said to exist — that sounds almost Platonic). The difficulty here, I guess, is the assertion that such language does not reveal anything of the inner life of God, only his interaction with his creation, an assertion which I see in both what you’ve written and the writings of DeYoung and others on impassibility. This, then, implies that the meaning of the passible language used in Scripture of God does actually share a significant semantic overlap with the language when used of creatures.
Yet, while I think this is what you’re saying in some places, I have some difficulty reconciling this with your assertion that such a view of language is disastrous for our knowledge of God, for he cannot be more in our understanding than “man writ large,” unless that specifically refers to language used of intra-Trinitarian relationships or God as he is in himself rather than as he is toward us. If that’s the case I’m not sure there’s a big problem because I’m not sure that much is said of that aspect of God’s being. Perhaps I need to re-read everything (which has become quite a task) or else maybe you can highlight where I’m misunderstanding you.
Hello Nathan,
I think I’m finally in a position to venture a few responses to your giant missive in response to my giant missive. I’ll try and be a lot, lot briefer than before, and I‘ve tried to only pick out the things I think really matter. It’s still going to be long I’m afraid, and I’m recovering from illness so it isn’t going to have any bells or whistles to go with it. I’m also going to just assert things about your position rather than qualify with ‘it seems to me.’ It’s not ideal, but just getting this argument out at the moment doesn’t leave much extra to smooth the presentation. Andrew has raised the bigger issues that I think matter, but dealing with them will just make this completely unwieldy, so this supplements his terse observations.
1. I wasn’t calling you Barthian. I can see why you might think that dropping 4000 words onto a thread attacking Barth might be saying something about you. Unfortunately, that’s just the kind of guy I am. I was defending myself against a charge that I believe in analogia entis in a context that, in my experience, believes that analogia entis (if it’s had the misfortune to even hear of such a thing) is the Golden Calf. Even my accusation of eisegesis was just a way of saying ‘I think you’ve read univocal language into Calvin’ – and that’s broader than Barth.
I do think that the attack on analogia entis comes about with Barth, and that it has no place in the Reformed tradition before him. Attacks on the analogia entis are invariably a signpost saying “Barth was here.”
If you read Turretin Electnic Theology on the communicable and incommunciable attributes you find the analogia entis clearly affirmed (Vol 1 p190 in my version); seems to me you find something similar in Hodge’s Systematic Theology Vol 1 Chapter 5, a clear affirmation of the principle in Berkhof Systematic Theology p54 and Shedd Dogmatic Theology p275. Barth points at Aquinas, but it’s right through Reformed and evangelical theologising. They generally talk about attributes, not nature and being, but it is much the same concept.
For me, that’s part of what those 4000 words were about. The idea that our goodness, power, existence is in some small way a copy of God’s seems to be to be basic to our Reformed and Evangelical heritage, even as they stand on the shoulders of the Fathers of the Early Church. It’s not just there, it’s considered to be very important.
2. I think you’re reading of Calvin is strongly flawed at one point. It wouldn’t have affected your 4th year project (I think) but it does cause problems in this discussion. I agree with your basic take on Calvin’s approach to person and salvation-history, and I agree that Muller’s fingerprints are all over your treatment. I think that Muller’s treatment of Calvin seems basically right. However, I was at times struggling to see his criticisms of the Early Church as on the money. They didn’t seem as well grounded in the patristic texts as his statements about Calvin seemed to be.
The problem is that you seem to collapse nature and essence together as though they are the same thing in Calvin. A number of times you argue that Christ reveals God personally but not in his nature, or even not in his ‘essential nature’ – combining the two terms. For example:
But Calvin seems to quite clearly distinguish between God’s nature and his essence:
Institutes 1.2.2:
Here Calvin rejects those who inquire into the essence of God and encourages us to inquire ‘what kind of being God is’ and ‘what things are agreeable to his nature’. This is hardly atypical for Calvin, if needed, I can produce more quotes to this effect. For Calvin, God’s being and nature, while grounded in his essence (which is something we cannot know), are God as he is towards us, and knowledge of them is mediated to us.
Hi Nathan,
Continuing…
So Calvin’s view is not this strong contrast between person and nature that you maintain but a strong contrast between person and essence, with nature having this intermediate position between the two – strongly grounded in essence and so ultimately unknowable, but very much God as he is towards us. You can find similar discussions in the Reformed divines I’ve pointed to above – as they discuss whether the attributes are descriptions of God’s essence (generally yes, but then dealing with how we can know them if that’s so) and whether or not they blur into each other because of God’s simplicity (usually no, again with discussion). All of that is incompatible with your ‘more Reformed’ third way.
So for Calvin, as for the fathers, Christ mediates knowledge of God the Father – all of who God the Father is towards us, both personal knowledge and being/nature knowledge. And the Reformed tradition has generally followed Calvin at this point. I think that is fairly fatal for your position overall – at least as far as appealing to Calvin for it.
And that seems just common sense. On your view, I cannot see how Calvin can speak at length in positive terms about God’s providential care for the elect, or about how God can and does answer prayer. Those aren’t ‘personal’ qualities on your description, they are connected to questions of omnipotence and omniscience, things, which you seem to suggest, Calvin has nothing positive to say as it is all negative theology.
3. Your concept of ‘person’ in Calvin seems to have too much content to it. Here again, I agree with Helm (who I’m indebted to btw – this is a bit of a Helm vs Muller debate being mediated through us, although I‘m not sure that Muller really addresses these questions directly). Calvin is 16th Century, not 20th. And so he shares the same view as the church fathers – ‘person’ as it applied to the Godhead has very little substantial content to it. Picking up Institutes1.13.6:
And 1.13.17
What is a ‘person’ when applied to the Godhead? Something that distinguishes Father, Son, and Spirit and is something other than essence. There is ‘some distinction’. Yes but what is it? It is some distinction between ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ that is not essence. That’s all folks. It is almost the crystalised essence of negative theology.
Where you (Nathan) see negative theology in Calvin (to do with nature and being) he is in fact cataphatic – positive theology. And where you stake everything on univocal positive theology (to do with ‘person’ in the Godhead), Calvin is in fact almost entirely negative theology. ‘Person’ is a term that Calvin wishes he could drop altogether, as 1.13 makes clear. It only exists to repudiate Sabellian heresy, and does so as minimally as possible – the magnitude of the mystery reminds us of the soberness to be employed in using the term. So to make ’person’ the great univocal, expansive centre of Calvin’s theology of God’s self-revelation seems to founder at this point. I think you’ve read a modern social Trinitarian concern for how persons in God can form the basis for our community life back into Calvin’s use of the person. But he’s patristic and medieval, not modern. That’s part of the ‘eisegesis’ I was referring to earlier, not so much Barth (who, for all his faults, can hardly be seen to be in danger of tritheism, which is the problem of this view of personhood in the Godhead, not when Barth comes so close to modalism which is the opposite heresy).
So when you introduce your anger analogy – was Christ angry in his divine or human nature – and say, ‘category error’ because anger is to do with ‘persons,’ then that only works if 1. You work with a concept of emotions and not passions vs. affections – and that’s anachronistic to read into Calvin because ’emotions’ comes centuries after him. 2. You have a fairly modern view of ’person’. Take ’person’ out of your example and replace it with ’hypostasis’ or even Calvin’s preferred word ’subsistence’: ‘anger is a subsistence category’ or ‘anger is a there is some distinction between Father and Son category’ and you start to see the problem with your example.
Hi Nathan,
Almost there!
Take anger out and replace it with will and you see the same issue. Does Christ will something in his human or divine nature? Well, he wills it as a person – will has to do with personhood, persons will. But Calvin, as with the Christian tradition before him, is committed to one will in the Godhead. Three wills, one for each person, is tritheism. In the Godhead will seems to be something held in common, an aspect of the essence. Hence why Calvin in 1.13.18 endorses the patristic analogy of the Father as the fount, the Son as the Wisdom and arrangement, and the Spirit as the energy and effecter – an analogy that has to do with how one will occurs in three ways in the three persons. ‘Person’ in classical Christian theology about the Godhead is not the ever expanding concept it has become in our hyper-psychologised world.
So I think your third way is still not very reformed at all. It is univocal when it should be far more guarded, and is negative theology when it should have expansive positive content.
4. We seem to be speaking at cross purposes about how analogia entis functions on my view and what your alternative is.
My complaint about Barth was that he says: ‘good’ is meaningless when applied to God. There’s no connection between saying ‘God is good’ and ‘creation is good’. You could pick another word, ‘God is xilpotic,’ and make as much sense and have as much relationship to ‘creation is good’. But, says Barth. When these words are applied to Jesus Christ then the words work. Now ‘God is good’ and ‘creation is good’ are analogies. The words somehow have meaning now when they somehow didn’t before. To this idiocy, I said “Nein!” Words either work or they don’t. They either describe reality or they do not. They don’t only work under certain conditions. Either we use the same words to name these realities in God or we forge new words that should be used only for God.
Your response seems to be to say that the words work because we experience God in Christ:
These reasons you give aren’t why the words work. They are why we have any authority to use those particular words. You are, I think, answering a different question to the one I’m trying to address. Obviously I’m not wanting to say, ‘We look at a sunflower and go, Boy! God is perfect and infinite moral excellence!’. But it seems as though that is what you think I’m saying – that creation gives us the authority to say things about God’s character and nature, natural theology.
My point is much simpler. When you experience God’s personal qualities in Christ, you have to find words to name those realities you experience. Which names do you choose? And why? I am saying that words like ‘good’ ‘love’ ‘holy’ ‘just’ and the like were chosen for us because they were true and genuine names for the reality that we experience in Christ. Even if revelation had never occurred those words would still have been the right words to use if anyone had tried to say anything about God. And they are right because ‘good’ means something substantially similar in various contexts it is used in.
If your answer is really addressing this question then it would be saying something similar to Barth: The words really, really don’t work. To say ‘Creation is good’ and ‘God is good’ is entirely equivocal. But once Christ has mediated the knowledge of God and we experience it, somehow now the relationship between God’s goodness and our goodness is so close that God’s goodness is almost entirely like ours. It wasn’t that way before, but it is now that Christ has mediated the knowledge of God. Words have changed in how they work when referring to God.
My point is simply to do why words work, not with what authorises us to use them. Everything that exists in this world was created by God and he was the source for its qualities. And so language about God is meaningful when revelation takes place. Your position seems to be, words are inherently equivocal when used of God but revelation changes language and makes it univocal.
Hi Nathan,
Concluding!
5. Finally, we move to the issue of analogical language itself, which is where the issues between us really are huge. Let’s start by clearing up one issue you raise:
No, I believe that there really is a relationship between the evil of creation and the character of the creator. Evil is the rejection of the goodness of the creator. Evil can only exist because God is good. Evil has no existence of its own, it can only ever be a perversion of the good creation God made. The relationship still exists, it simply exists asymmetrically.
But, at another level, I also believe that the creation that we have, with its evil and death and poverty is an expression of the goodness of God. Everything that happens is ordained by God, and God only wills what is good. At some level beyond what we can grasp, these things are consistent with the goodness of God. And again, that seems to be a fairly consistent position of Luther, Calvin and the later Reformed tradition. Because I hold to God’s goodness, justice, love and the like being analogical to ours and not univocal, the problem of evil doesn’t bite me (or I would suggest, Calvin) the way that it seems to bite the contemporary scene.
You think that the goodness of God is just like our goodness, that it is revealed univocally? As you say:
But, unless you are very not Reformed, God is behind the death, the famine, the volcano, the poverty. All of those things are part of our experience of God in this world. Once we are a believer and see with the lens of Scripture, all such things become testimonies to us of who God is to us. So how do those things square with your univocal view of God’s goodness?
Every person who suffers, suffers on God’s watch. Every person who dies, dies on God’s watch. God could stop the suffering, could prevent the deaths. And if his goodness was just like ours – ‘good’ is univocal when applied to God – then we would have to say that by not stepping in to prevent a death or suffering that could be prevented God is shown to be not good. God’s Law requires us to intervene under those circumstances, and so if God’s goodness is just like ours, then he should too. So the existence of evil and suffering is evidence against the goodness of God.
From what I can see (and Helm has really helped here, although I was intuiting this for a few years now) this big problem of evil is almost entirely due to a commitment to univocal language for God. ‘Good’ must mean basically the same thing when applied to God as when it applies to us – which means that God is answerable to his Law in the much the same way we are. But God is not answerable to his Law, he is not under his Law. He is Lawgiver and Judge, not fulfiller of the Law. The Law expresses God’s goodness, but does so in a way fit for humans. God’s goodness goes beyond the Law because he is not human. And so there are big places where we can’t see how something is good, (like God not electing everyone to salvation when he could) but where we are committed to say that it is true nonetheless. Only analogical language makes that possible. Univocal language really does reduce God down to the level of a creature, in your case it has left you with the view that we know nothing of God’s power or eternity or knowledge, but that God is a moral agent just like us, entirely bound by his own Law.
As I said at the start, this is all in the wrong tone, so please take some of the ‘bite’ out. But I’m conscious that time is ticking away before comments on this thread will be closed and wanted to move things forward again. I think your comment was terrific, even though we disagree strongly at multiple points.
Hi Mark,
Thanks once again for a thoughtful response. I’m going to need some time to continue this discussion. I simply can’t get to this right now. (I suspect you wont mind too much, being sick and busy as you are.)
I’ll get back to you when I can.
Nathan
Hi Martin,
Thanks for your latest response. Not sure how much longer our window for this thread will be open, but maybe we’re starting to move closer on the bigger issues, if not the mechanics, so I’ll start on those bigger issues first:
1.
Yes, at the level of our experience of God, we can speak of God having emotions (but, I would argue, not passions – you seem to switch between emotions and passions as though they are interchangeable). But as Christians tend to speak as though the emotional language of God fairly self-evidently is giving us a window into God’s ‘inner life’, and start writing songs, preaching sermons, writing theological tomes et al that push the implications of emotionality for God as far as possible, there becomes the need for impassibilists to start stressing just how radically differently that language must look like when it is applied to God that way. And that will in turn start to hit your alarm bells because then you will again think that, for impassibilists, the words mean something radically different when applied to God. And I would say they do mean something radically different when applied to God as he is in himself, but only something significantly (but not radically) different when applied to God as he is towards us – how we experience God in space and time. In our experience of God he has emotions without passions, whereas we have emotions with passions – a significant but not radical difference.
2.
Well, if you cast your eyes over the last part of my most recent set of comments to Nathan, it might become clearer. My concern continues to be that if language works the way you and Nathan claim it does then God can only reveal himself to us as a man, or at least, as a creature. God can’t reveal himself as omnipotent, omniscient or omnipresent, as immortal, as goodness, as love, as truth. The best he can do is reveal himself as very very powerful, very very knowledgable, fairly ubiquitous, as living a very long time, and as someone perfectly good, loving, and truthful. We don’t really have language that can speak of someone who is the quality of love or goodness, where the person and the quality are identical, so to have the quality is somehow to have the person. We don’t have language that can speak of someone who has always existed. We don’t have the language to speak of someone who can do anything.
Nathan gets this problem, hence his attempt to solve it with his reading of Calvin. He jettisons our knowledge of everything to do with God that has to do with God’s nature (which for him seems to be non-moral qualities, God’s goodness is apparently not part of his nature as far as Nathan is concerned
). Power, knowledge, immortality and the like – the words used there of God are purely equivocal. We don’t really have any idea what those words mean. But when it comes to God’s moral qualities (what Nathan calls God’s personal qualities) then it is pure univocal – God is good in the exact same a human being is, is angry in the exact same way a human being is. At that point he rejects an analogia entis and replaces it with an univocia entis – God is exactly like us.
But if God is good just like us, then he has to act like us. He really should stop all the suffering and death and the like. We have to when we see it and are able to, so God has to as well. And if God is good just like us, then he is not the source of goodness, love and the like in creation, he is merely someone who exemplifies those traits perfectly.
But God is more than just someone who is perfectly good. He is goodness itself. He’s not just a perfectly good, staggeringly intelligent, and very long lived person with powers beyond those of ordinary mortals. God is God – and so in everything he reveals to us in words, the further we track that word back to God the more it goes beyond anything that we can have a semantic range for.
It’s those kind of issues that, while I mightn’t be explaining them clearly enough, are for me at stake in the univocal vs analogical language issue. I mightn’t know what it means to any great detail to say that God is eternal and is all powerful and is love. But those words do say something true and meaningful that they cannot say if language has to work univocally. The reality of God is still presented to me in those words on the analogical view, even if that reality cannot be found in the lexical range of how the word is normally used. But if words have to work univocally then normal lexical range rules supreme and we cannot know God as anything more.
3. In terms of our worked example of anger. I’m okay with your definition of anger being applied to God as long as it is understood that it is focusing on our experience of God, rather than what is going on in God on the inside. On that issue I’m apophatic – I don’t think we have any idea one way or another.
In terms of Deut 32:21, and Israel’s behaviour causing a reaction within God, the issue is far bigger than impassibility. Classical theology has said that God’s eternity is not timebound. So what for us is A followed by B followed by C does not occur like that God. God is not part of our time framework. Whether that also means God does not experience sequence I don’t think anyone should assert strongly one way or the other. But God isn’t in time like us, is a fairly important piece of orthodoxy. Add in God’s perfect foreknowledge of events (like people’s sin), the Reformed tradition’s biblical conviction that God ordains everything that occurs (like people’s sin), and (I would add) the fact that God is spirit and not embodied, and I’d be careful before seeing the language of Deut 32:21 as a window into eternity.
If God has always known something is going to happen, indeed ordained it to occur, does God really react to it? Was he happy before and now is angry in and of himself? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe something else we can’t even comprehend. I don’t think the Bible is trying to address that kind of question. Passages like this are a description of what it’s like on planet earth to be in relationship with God having sinned. The description is true, is grounded in what God is truly like, but it’s a word for human beings about life in this world. It’s not a tour of the heavenlies. We experience that as a sequence in time, but that gives us no idea at all, one way or another, how God experiences that same set.
As far as the physical dimension goes, I’m not sure either of us is going to convince the other. It seems as though it is just obvious to you that no one ever thinks of emotions and bodies except in unusual circumstances. It seems to me just obvious that our modern view of emotions involves bodies and physicality. It’s one of the reasons why Sci Fi tries to portray sapient computers and robots as either emotionless or with some special software/hardware to create artificial analogues. It’s why people are told exercise helps with depression. And why all sorts of strange remedies and solutions have been offered throughout history to address emotional problems. The fact that we don’t mention it all the time, or that the bodily dimension doesn’t occur in a dictionary is simply an indication that it’s assumed, not that it’s not there. Here’s the first definition for hunger that google gave me:
There’s no explicit suggestion of it involving a body here either. But we’d agree that it was assumed.
I think it is the same with emotions. We really, really do know that emotions as we experience them require a biological body and brain. It might not be the first thing we highlight, but it is basic to our view. We take illegal drugs to be happy, legal drugs to ward of depression and anxiety. It’s a natural link for us. But I can’t see how I can prove that to you. One either sees that or one doesn’t.
Hi Mark,
Thanks again. You are certainly facilitating a very stimulating discussion. I must say it’s nice to have shifted out of the Barthian camp. I think, if I’m reading you correctly, I’m now somewhere in the “wannabe Barthian but aint quite” camp
Once again I’ll venture a response, and I’m going to ask for some clarification about some of the things you have said before I respond further.
1.The Analogia Entis
I think that very soon our discussion on this topic is going to move into areas that, I’m pretty sure, neither of us wants to go. It’s your fault. You brought up Turretin. (Gee, what a surprise. You found the analogia entis in the most scholastic theologian of the protestant tradition. It’s like finding the pope in the Vatican.) But sooner or later, if we are both claiming the reformed tradition, then we’re going to start talking about Calvin and protestant scholasticism. Since I don’t want to have to hit that debate with you (umm… ever), and since it would so far remove us from our original discussion, let me respond along a completely different tack:
I agree that protestant authors use the analogia entis. But I don’t think this fact helps you in the way you think it does. I’ve never been against the analogia entis as an a-posteriori construction, I have simply said that I don’t see the point anymore. Once you’ve been saved, you know God is good personally without needing an analogia entis/<em> to tell you. The insurmountable problem with the idea isn’t the transcendence gap (as in Barth), but the sin gap (as in Calvin). We should be able to know something of the creator from creation, but we can’t, because sin renders the knowledge unusable. This is the way Calvin goes every time with the concept – natural theology without special revelation renders you guilty. That’s all its good for. Berkhof uses the <em>analogia entis in exactly this way in the passage you pointed out (Systematic Theology, p54). His whole point is that there doesn’t exist any suitable foundation for the study of the attributes of God except God’s special revelation in Scripture.
I think you would probably agree so far. (You don’t seem to be arguing for a natural theology of the attributes separate from special revelation. ) The problem that we are having is in using that Special Revelation. How do we apply meaning to the words in the Bible? What is ‘goodness’ when we apply the concept to God?
It’s at this point that you want to run back to the analogia entis for help. Apparently we just ‘get’ want goodness, Fatherhood etc. are because we were created in order to ‘get’ them. And it’s at this point I’m objecting because this is no longer a consistent position. You can’t deny that the analogia entis reveals to us that God is good (because we are too sinful to see it) and then turn around and argue that it does reveal to us what that goodness is and what it means! We don’t see God’s goodness in creation – we pervert it – and therefore we don’t understand the meaning of ‘good’ via creation either.
By assigning meaning to the words we use to describe God’s attributes starting from our fallen ability to interpret a broken creation, I think that this is essentially where you end up. There is no basis in natural revelation even to assign meaning to the words of Scripture. The fact is that we aren’t good. We aren’t loving. And so if we take our concepts of these words from the world around us and apply them to God when we read in the Bible “God is good,” then we end up with a perverted idea of God. Either that or we end up saying “God is good, but not good like anything else we know of.” We need a different basis for assigning meaning to these words than that:
Actually, sort of, yes. I am arguing that we can’t understand ‘good’ from the world around us (because neither it, nor we are good), and we don’t just ‘get’ it. So how do we understand God’s goodness? What can we fall back on? I want to fall back on demonstration. God demonstrates his goodness. God demonstrates his love. This is how we understand goodness and this is how we understand love in every other case as well. And I’ve already pointed out that this is exactly the way Scripture expects us to understand the attributes of God (eg. Rom 5:8).
(Continued…)
(…Continuing)
It’s only after God demonstrates his love that we finally begin to grasp what true love even is (1 John 3:16). Before this demonstration we did not even have the conceptual framework to begin to describe God. Whatever words we applied to him – even if we, or the Bible, used the word ‘love’ – would have been saying something false of God because we would have had a deficient concept of that word in our heads. A God after our own image, if you like. An analogia entis.
Sigh. I think we will disagree on this forever. God’s goodness isn’t the question yet. The question at the moment is how we understand it. In this respect it is univocal. ‘Good’ doesn’t mean substantially similar things in these contexts. Once God has acted in a good way towards us, it means exactly the same thing as someone else who has acted in a good way towards us. This is NOT because God’s goodness is exactly the same as our goodness. It is because good is as good does. When we say ‘God is good’ we are not directly describing God’s ontology. We are describing, firstly, the way God acts towards us in individual acts. I know God’s goodness, firstly, not in abstract principle, but in the context of real, experienced relationship. This is how I know your goodness as well
That we can apply this at all to the nature (ontology) of God requires another supposition entirely. It’s at this point that we have to move to back to Calvin: that God is in himself as he acts towards us in Christ. We can move via this principle – but not before we have this principle – to an ontological statement about God and say, finally, “God is good.”
(Continued…)
(…Continuing)
2. The ‘Personal’ Attributes
To be honest, I’m not 100% sure that I’m reading you correctly in the section where you deal with Calvin, nature and essence. So this is more of a request for clarification. It’s these statements that are confusing me:
Are you saying:
a) Christ reveals all of everything God is? (The first quote, if I read it one particular way.) or
b) Christ reveals all of who God is as he is towards us (person and nature) but not essence (The second quote, and maybe the first if I read it the other way.)
I don’t think you are saying (a) because you have already said that the essence of God is unknowable. Thus it is unmediated. But I don’t think you are saying (b) because that seems to me to be too close to the point I am making. Christ doesn’t mediate everything there is to God. We only know God as he is towards us – this involves who God is, but not what God is. You even used the phrase “Christ reveals all of who God is.”
I think, if I am reading you correctly, that you are saying God has person (what I have been calling person), nature (what I have been calling essence and nature synonymously) and essence (which you claim I have overlooked.) Furthermore you are saying that there is nothing we can know at all about the essence of God. And that all of the attributes (power, immortality, invisibility etc as well as goodness, justice and love) belong not to the essence of God, but to the nature of God? And this nature of God is who God is.
If that is correct, is this what you think? Or is this what you think Calvin is saying, about which you don’t necessarily agree? I want to respond to this, but I also want to make sure I am clear on what you are saying before I do. So for now, I’ll move on.
(Continued…)
3. Hypostasis and Person
Some of what I want to say here will have to wait on your clarification of the previous section, but I think we can get started nonetheless:
Yes, you and Andrew seem to have both implied this. In the face of objections from two very smart people, I’m prepared to at least do some more reading before I sprout any more ignorance
I’m not really sure it’s as fatal for my case as you are suggesting, even in Calvin. I think we are still going to need to be able to talk about attributes of God that are applied to his essence/nature (pick a word) as opposed to his hypostases/persons. And this has been standard in orthodox theology at least since Chalcedon. Take for example this clause from Chalcedon that speaks of the ‘properties’ of the natures and their relationship to the person/subsistence:
Clearly Chalcedon envisages that there are some things that pertain to “godness” and some things that pertain to “manness” and through the hypostatic union, the one subsistence ends up with both of these sets of attributes. (I won’t even get into what Chalcedon thought it was specifying by the phrase “Person and subsistence” if for the ancient world, as you claim, they are synonymous terms. )
Interestingly, Berkhof applies this directly to the question of impassibility, which is where this whole discussion began, and the point I have been making all along (The History of Christian Doctrines, p107):
I have more to say about this as well, but I’m going to need to wait first for your clarifying remarks on the previous section. I don’t really have the time to discuss a position if its not what you are really saying.
Thanks again, Mark. I’m enjoying the interaction very much. Please don’t feel pressure to respond quickly. I’m happy for you to take your time.
Nathan
Hi Mark,
I’m not convinced that this is as clear cut as you suggest. For one, there are hints that we may have cognitive abilities which allow our understanding and use of language to transcend the limitations of our immediate experience (e.g. Eccl 3:11). I don’t think that you’ve demonstrated that human language is inherently so limited as you presuppose when making your case. Ultimately, theological tomes are replete with language seeking to describe exactly what you say we cannot, and assuming they attain some level of success, your assessment would appear to be overly pessimistic.
What this means is that we may not have comprehensive understanding, but the fact that you can object to certain explanations of the nature of God suggests that you do afford these ideas some semantic content. If your use of language is truly equivocal then translations ought to be something like this:
This way we’ve removed the possibility for some unsuspecting reader to accidentally impute something to God based on the misapprehension that ἀγάπη in the first clause has any relationship to ἀγάπη in the second. Of course if it does have some connection then that is exactly what I’m claiming of language about God and I cannot see that you have any biblical basis for your claim that human language is incapable of speaking about God.
ISTM that the only escape from the problems your view poses is to argue that the Bible only ever speaks of God in relation to creation, never as he is in himself. If that’s the case, then the Bible is comprehensible, but if there are passages that relate the latter, they are necessarily (on your view) incomprehensible because the language is equivocal!
Why this might be so isn’t clear to me since it would seem that the proposition is comprehensible as it stands. We may not have a comprehensive understanding of all it entails, but we don’t know if that’s a limitation of language or a limitation in what is revealed, do we? Similarly, when John writes “God is love,” any dissatisfaction with the meaning of the assertion cannot automatically be attributed to the inadequacies of human language, it may be the inadequacies of our exegesis or else simply that John does not expand on the proposition.
Furthermore, your assertion about the inadequacy of human language is built upon conclusions reached using human language and from reading human language.
I don’t disagree with this, but it does make me wonder why we’re not praying still that the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami would not have happened?
Actually, in making this statement you are already assuming something specific about the relationship of God with time, so I don’t think that you can even say that “it does not occur like that [for] God” with absolute certainty!
This raises the question of whether the Bible affirms this or is this an extrapolation of the biblical data? There’s no doubt that God ordains many events, but does it then follow that all events are ordained? Can God ordain choices such that the outcomes of the options are so constrained that they do not disrupt God’s purposes, or is there only one path from A to B (God is certainly depicted in Scripture as knowing the outcomes of choices which were not made)?
ISTM that questions like these illustrate the manner in which a theological framework can overstep the evidence and subsequently control readings without sufficient warrant.
Again, I think you miss the point. It is not a question of what we “know.” It is a question of what we understand when reading within a specific literary context. I maintain that most people, regardless of whether they’re aware of the physiological and chemical aspects to human emotions, will not appeal to these aspects in normal conversational use of terms like “angry.” It is this which is relevant when reading texts which are not specifically discussing physiology. If we read Deut 32:21 (and other similar passages) in that way we do the same injustice to that text as we do when we read Gen 1 as a scientific text.
Hi Martin, forgive me if I’m not understanding this – I’m pretty desultory in my attention to this discussion, excellent though it is.
But I just wanted to clarify the relationship between (1) your opposition to systematic frameworks and (2) your commitment to strong semantic divine/human correspondence between language such as “anger”.
My question is whether you can defend the correspondence without committing yourself to a framework? What you seem to be doing above is sort of floating the possibility of God’s temporality and contingence as a *potential* rebuttal to Mark as if the uncertainty helps your case against his classical theology. But don’t you need certainty here too? If God’s anger really is like our then don’t you really need to say that it does “come” and “go” sequentially?
I realise there might be some additional possibilities that I am not aware of here. Maybe you are envisaging the possibility of, say, a special divine supertemporality (or something else of that nature)? But I would have thought in that case that saying “God is literally angry like us – but in a way we cannot fully understand” takes us back to analogy. (Or at least what I want to get out of the term).