Contemporary Trinitarianism Part 5: A New Orthodoxy?

Part of the intellectual and spiritual labor any theologian has to go through when dealing with contemporary trinitarianism (or any historical epoch of trinitarianism, really) is the struggle with the question on the impassibility of God. Originally I wasnt planning to include this in the short contemporary trinitarianism series I have been going through, but I actually, surprisingly enough, received several emails relating ideas and asking questions regarding how the impassibility question may or may not relate, and so I decided finally to write a post on it. This will be (mercifully to the reader and myself) shorter than most of the previous posts. This is for a number of reasons that have both to do with the nature of this series itself, and the material content involved in the question of the "suffering God." First, a large portion of speaking of the "vulnerability' of God is already contained within the so-called Hellenization schema, which briefly went over earlier. Thus only specific pieces of God's passibility need to be spoken of, closely related as it is to the supposed "recovery" of authentic Christianity from the vices of the Hellene additions. The second reason for brevity here is that, frankly, I have not read enough of the literature which suffers from something of an embarrassment of riches. Thus I will stick to a few programmatic points in regards to how the rise of what R. Goetz skeptically called in 1986 the "Rise of a new Orthodoxy" relates to Trinitarianism and the so-called "declension narratives" so vital to the production of contemporary formulations.

To give a more personal touch to it I should speak of my own intellectual biography in this area a bit in order to register my angle on it. More or less the first few "academic" pieces of theology I read as I entered my undergrad education came through the works of Pannenberg, Jenson, Gunton, Moltmann, Alan Lewis, and Arthur C. McGill. I felt after reading these various works a sort of mischievous pleasure insofar as they allowed me to feel armed with a sort of knowledge of the traditions mishaps which would justify certain limited intellectual rebellions from my evangelical heritage which I had grown somewhat annoyed with. This led, in various combinations, for me to originally (without any first hand knowledge) start taking a sightly skewed vision of early theology and metaphysics as these fossilized and disengaged theories of God which needed, despite their obvious brilliance in many areas, revision in light of the bible and more "contemporary" categories like relation. In certain respects I still hold on to this expectation: theology is always theology on the way, so to speak, in need of revision, reevaluation, imagination, and new application. Yet as I arrived in seminary into several excellent historical theology courses (Patristic theology in particular) under Dr. Jon Robertson, I remember being immediately presented with an alternative vision regarding what the Fathers were saying and the issues they were dealing with. In fact Dr. Robertson's constant admonition to me to ignore what I have read previously and treat the sources for what they are in themselves and in their historical contexts in many ways is responsible for my current interest in genealogy and its relation to contemporary formulations. Through many courses and independent studies I slowly came to be aware how perceptions of early theology were skewed by the narratives within which they were presented. I have maintained my first love of contemporary theology, and it is precisely for this reason I have become so fascinated by historical theology. It is only by astute attention to the sources that systematic theology can adequately move toward its goal; haphazard characterizations hardly due justice to its task.

I also to a certain extent agree that theology must be done "after Auschwitz" so to speak, that is, in light of the grotesque suffering encountered in the last century but I should note two things: on the one hand, without being callous to such horrors, I must agree with David Bentley Hart that there is a certain sense in which Auscwitz told us nothing which we did not already know, theologically speaking. On the other hand, I agree with M. Sarot that Moltmann's use of Elie Wiesel's account of the boy being hung in Night is disingenous, and doesnt align with my own reading of Wiesel's heartwrenching book. First of all Moltmann says the event was at Auschwitz, when in fact it was at Buna. And secondly he records, for those unfamiliar with the story of the lynched boy, that this experience was a religious one for Wiesel when in fact, though Wiesel did not deny God, he was not comforted by the "God on the gallows" but lost faith in the gentle, merciful God he had up until then believed in. This is a less important point, I suppose, but that example of Wiesel's story is so rampant among those who espouse a passible God that it seems to me to almost be an insult to Wiesel to try and make him into the Jewish equivalent of Bonhoeffer. At any rate, without deciding ultimately on the question of the suffering of God, I would like to unearth several misconceptions and "traditional" narratives that are used which in my opinion mischaracterize traditional theology.

1.) There two basic conceptual approaches, usually unnoticed which go into related older Patristic theology, or the theological tradition generally, to the concept of God's passibility. These are, conveniently enough for our purposes here, representable as two different narrative approaches. The first we have already cover in some length but which bears repeating: the impassibility of God is seen as the encrustation of Hellenistic philosophical concepts upon the dynamic and related concept of the God of the bible. This narrative trope is summarized by Gavrilyuk who calls it fairly straightforwardly "The Theory of Theology's Fall Into Hellenistic Philosophy." (c.f. his The Suffering of the Impassible God). Thus to speak now of a God who suffers with us, who is passible, is often portrayed against a tradition which veiled this truth and is now only being exposed as an idolatry, an inadequate formulation which needs to be reconceptualized and left behind (this is often the position of Open Theists, for example). This narrative is suspect for many reasons already noted in the early post on Hellenization. To add to this, too, would be the incisive criticisms of Thomas Weinandy in Does God Suffer and Gavrilyuk in his aforementioned book both of whom, especially Gavrilyuk, actually represent the struggle against heresy as the continual struggle to maintain an authentic intuition of Christ suffering (docetism of course reduced his humanity, Arianism made the logos an inferior demiurge to keep the true God from suffering, Nestorianism was Arianism shifted a notch, protecting the true Godhead from suffering by establishing two subjects in Christ unified by a sunapheia or "conjunction" of prosopon or manner of appearance, etc...)

2.) The other approach, sometimes closely related to the first, presents itself as slightly more nuanced. It remarks that, for example, Patristic and early theological traditions were not simply "overtaken" by philosophy or the abstract idea of a static and unmoving God. Yet simultaneously it represents the good in the Patristic tradition as now in contemporary Trinitarianism or contemporary Passibilism being fulfilled precisely by passibility. Jürgen Moltmann and Richard Bauckham both often speak like this (Moltmann is often in the first category above as well, which is an interesting tension in the narrative he presents). Thus the connections being drawn to the tradition are often that the authentic intuitions or ideas of the Patristic and traditional sources are being preserved while nonetheless these "cores" are being transferred into ontological and metaphysical superstructure which better express, rather than subvert, the inner logic of the ideas. Yet this simply doesnt work. If you want to be a passibilist, in my opinion, you have to accept that what youre doing is creating an entirely different metaphysical and soteriological schema than used by the Patristic sources in general. To say that, for example, the early Fathers were on the right track with their theology, if only they could have taken that one last step into shedding impassibility is to ignore that impassibility was not merely an exterior or accidental feature of their thought but one of the inner engines of its logic and was one of the main features of their soteriology, namely theosis or deification. In fact many excellent recent studies have come out to show how Patristic theology, so different from our modern conception of systematics, was based upon an entire host of habits of attention and Christian living which formed a complex network of meaning, often based upon the incarnation and impassibility (for more on this see Norman Russel's recent study The Doctrine of Deification in Greek Patristic Tradition; Lewis Ayres Nicaea and Its Legacy). its not about merely transposing their ideas or carrying them forward "one more step," so to speak, but about entirely reevaluating their concepts. Moreover to merely set up the binary of the passible vs. the impassible or Patristic vs. Contemporary passibiists is to mistake the traditions attempt to maintain God suffering in Christ (Gavrilyuk Suffering of the Impassible God).

To carry this analysis a little further we need to establish with the utmost clarity that impassibility, though perhaps not always explicitly in the foreground of discussion, and its relation to theosis and soteriology, was the major driving force behind the Niceno-Constantinopolitan, Ephesian, and Chalcedonian creeds (Pelikan The Christian Tradition vol. 1 p.229). It is in fact the guiding structure for the major fourth century trinitarian and 5th/6th century Christological controversies. Homoousios was not coined for the sheer sake of establishing that no one should say Christ is less than God, but was part of an intricate system of liturgical, baptismal, and soteriological insight that if one was baptized in Christ's name, one should not thereby think they are being baptized into a creature (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines pp.223ff). And further the link of the Son, Spirit, and Father as co-equal and co-eternal was posited precisely via the concept of theosis for soteriology: if the son and the spirit were not equal with God they could not lead one to participate "in" God. This argument led to see Christ as God, and so too, in works like Basil's On the Holy Spirit the same argument then transferred over to the Spirit. What Im getting at here is that there is a much more complex evalutation which needs to occur should someone decide that passibilism is the more convincing option, because on the one hand, they want to affirm trinity, yet on the other they want to jettison the "ladder" which early theologians climbed, so to speak, to get to the conclusion (though of course arguably there are other ways to get there, like Barth's analysis of revelation, etc...) The main point is that this difficulty is seldom seen or dealt with, and, at least to my mind, is a larger issue that cant merely be swept aside as an irrelevancy.

3.) Moreover the very concept of apatheia or impassibility have been gravely misunderstood: God is not immutable because he is "still" but because he is active. To many who believe that in order for God to be personal he must be "reactive" this may not make the sale, but it is an important point nonetheless. Weinandy writes

What the critics consistantly fail to grasp is that God's immutbility is not opposed to his vitality. Nor need one hold together in some dialectical fashion his immutability and his vibrancy, as if in spite of being immutable he is nonetheless dynamic. Rather, it is precisely God's immutability as actus purus that guarantees and authenticates his pure vitality and absolute dynamism. (Does God Suffer? p.124)

In fact part of the misunderstanding is that an immutable, impassible God is therefore without feeling or emotion. But this is not the case. Gavrilyuk and Weinandy demonstrate thoroughly that it functions more like an apophatic qualifier, ensuring that God always has authentic emotions like love, mercy, and forgiveness rather than simply being a stoic lump of essence contemplating itself. In this manner it would be a mistake to interpret "impassible' or "immutable" along the lines of other so-called "attributes" like love, patience, etc... because it is essentially a control-category interpreting the meaning of those other attributes, not one among many. It indicates that God is always infinitely love, always infinitely Himself in act. In the words of David Hart:

The freedom of God from ontic determination is the ground of creations goodness: precisely because creation is uncompelled, unnecessary, and finally other than that dynamic life of coinherent love whereby God is God, it can reveal how God is the God he is; precisely because creation is needless, an object of delight that shares God's love without contribution anything that God does not already possess in infinite eminence, creation reflects the divine life, which is one of delight and fellowship and love; precisely because creation is not part of God, the context of God, or divine, precisely because it is not "substantially" from God, or metaphysically cognate to God's essence, or a patos of God, is it an analogy of the divine in being the object of God's love without any cause but the generosity of that love, creation reflects the beauty that eternal delight that is the divine perichoresis and that obeys no necessity but divine love itself. (Beauty of the Infinite p.158; c.f. David Bentley Hart "No Shadow of Divine Turning: On Divine Impassibility," in Pro Ecclesia 11 (spring 2002): 184-206).

4.) Finally it is somewhat ironic that the remark of the "self-sufficient" aseity of God is a mark of the Hellenization of the bible, when in fact historically speaking the "infinitization" of God was an innovation of Christian theology (c.f. Hart's Beauty of the Infinite). Most specifically the idea of God being infinite and perfect stemmed from an analysis and outworking of the doctrine of creation. Ted Peters as one example, complains that the notion of the a se or independent God who only after creation comes to relate to us is a figment of the Greek philosophical mind. Now certainly there are certain structural similarities with, say, Aristotle's notion of God as thought contemplating itself. Yet ironically what Peter's complains as a Hellenization is precisely the opposite of the historical reality: it was a Christianization of philosophy. John Zizioulas in his Communion and Otherness, Vladimir Lossky in The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, William Lane Craig in Creation Ex Nihilo, Wolfhart Pannenberg in Systematic Theology vol.2, David Hart in Beauty of the Infinite, John Cooper in Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers and Grenz in The Named God and the Question of Being all adamantly espouse the idea that God as an independent, volitional agent, who did not create the world out of necessity (i.e. emanation), pre-existent matter (ex materia) or the like, but was in His own infinite Trinitarian perichoretic fullness the creator in gratis of the world ex nihio, is something that was a marked innovation in the philosophical tradition, which would have considered the idea an absurdity. To speak of God's independence, transcendence, or even immutability in this sense then, is not so straightforwardly a case of genetic alteration of Christianity by philosophy, but is even more plausibly the reverse case.