A Grace Dispelled (Part One)
[I wrote this essay on a theo-ecological ethics a year or two ago. It is both lengthy and, paradoxically, underdeveloped. My basic goal was to justify the need to develop a responsible ethic towards the preservation and stewardship of nature, while nonetheless overcoming the liberal ideal that we can "save" nature, and the conservative (often Dispensational) Christian idea that since God is going to eradicate everything at judgment anyway, we should just let the world burn.) Thus this essay is not great, and I am not satisfied with how it turned out. Nonetheless, I felt I should post it, get a feel for responses--if any. Enjoy! (Or not...but be kind)]
Sweet
is the lore which Nature
brings;
Our
meddling intellect
Misshapes
the beauteous forms of things
–
We
murder to dissect.
(William
Wordsworth)
With the
exponential rise of environmental awareness in the popular consciousness it
seems in some sense inevitable that the question of the proper relation between
humanity and world should be broached by theology. Nor is this merely capitulating to the niche
trends of the era by bringing into theology a theme originally alien to
it. Rather, given that theology’s proper
“object” is the Creator and Redeemer, the universal scope of this enterprise
demands the nature of the question itself.[1] The breadth and complexity inherent in this
type of theological investigation may
also be a prime reason why many have neglected to think through the relation
theologically, accepting—or rejecting—ecological solutions while nonetheless
leaving the basic horizons within which these questions and solutions are posed
unexamined.[2]
In
order to perhaps correct or resituate the dialogue within a more theological
framework, it will be the goal of this essay to briefly sketch a theological
evaluation of nature and its relationship to man and God. In so doing a brief history will be offered
to demonstrate how certain trajectories of thought have been introduced which
perhaps mitigate a properly theological understanding of reality, and hence
truncate any attempt at a theological ethics of ecology by allowing certain
presuppositions about the nature of
nature, of man, and even of God, to reside undisturbed in the background making
for very superficial argumentation. In
doing this we will mainly avoid many of the issues which are trenchantly
repeated as points of interest, such as global warming, alternative fuel
sources, and the like. This is because
the statistical and pragmatic issues which conglomerate around these topics are
broached within often implicit pre-conceived horizons which establish a priori the limits and trajectories of
possible interpretations of the data. In
the words of D.H. Knight, the oddity of our current situation is the
“suppos[ition] that we all know what end has been agreed upon and have now only
to concern ourselves with how to get there, and so with comparing one means
with another,”[3]
without examining the paradigm which dictated the telos itself. These
contextual paradigms are themselves what this paper will question. It will ultimately be shown that we must have
a robust view of nature and our caretaking of it, not because nature is itself
divine, nor because of any misguided notion that we can save the planet, but
because nature is a medium of communion between God and man, its beauty and
harmony created by the utter delight of God are living, historical analogies to
the Divine beauty, and we, as Imago Dei,
are its stewards who try to faithfully offer creation back up to the Creator.
I. A
Veil of Nature, Full of Grace
Is creation
sacred? Or to put it more in current
parlance, is nature sacred? Or is it merely the aggregation of so many
quanta which might be manipulated and given meaning by the subjective
disposition of man? In order to
demonstrate the possibility of a conclusion when the question is posed thus,
there is the clandestine presupposition, seemingly so commonplace at our far
end of history, that there is a
division between the sacred and the secular, which must somehow either be
abrogated or reinforced. The disjunction
between the two can be seen in various ranges of discourse, from the political
divide of religion and state, in the supposed antagonism of science and
theology, and even in certain degrees within theology itself when the
relationship between nature and grace is discussed. It is the initial contention of this essay,
however, that the difference between the sacred and the secular must first be imagined, it must be constructed,
theorized, created. Whereas it seems such a natural separation in our modern culture, it must be noted that the
divide between what we might so often view as the empirical world of nature
over against the speculative and spectral cosmos of metaphysics, or the realm
of the human as opposed to the Divine, is itself the end product of a
paradigmatic conceptual negotiation
on how to view existence in itself, one perhaps inimical to an authentic
theology of creation.
In a
certain sense it is true that the proper function of Christianity is to secularize the world—that is, to strip
the world and the finite things in it of the presumption of their divinity.[4] One does not, so to speak, shoot a rocket at
the moon, “if one presumes her to be a deity.”[5] In this
immediate context the “secularization” of the world as a phenomenon is an
inherently Christian enterprise, and
is essentially the theological outworking of the Shema of Israel.[6] Yet in another—and perhaps more
important—sense, John Milbank cautions that “this institution [of the secular]
is not correctly grasped in merely negative terms as a desacrilization.” Rather
The secular as a domain had to be instituted or imagined, both in theory and in
practice…It belongs to the received wisdom of sociology to interpret
Christianity as itself an agent of secularization, yet this thesis is totally
bound up with the one-sided negativity of the notion of desacralizing; a metaphor of the removal of the superfluous and
additional to leave a residue of the human, the natural, and the
self-sufficient. For this negative
conception it is convenient that there should always have been some perception of the pure [secular] remainder…[the
secular] achieved a certain highly ambiguous autonomy with regard to
theology. However autonomization
was…only possible because the new science of politics both assumed and constructed for itself a new autonomous
object…the self-knowledge and self-construction of the secular as power…This autonomous object was, first
of all, ‘natural’…natural law [describing] the sealed off totality of nature…[7]
It is the
construction of this divide that the initial sections of this essay intends to
briefly explore. Indeed, it is not too
far off to say “once, there was no secular.”[8]
It was not a spatial domain, but a time
that existed in the tensions between humanity’s post-lapsarian degradation and
the eschatological consummation of the parousia. Therefore originally any notion of a simple
topographical ordination of discrete units of spatial extension opposed to one
another does not describe the early Hebrew or Christian conception. Gerhard von
Rad published a famous paper in 1936 entitled, “The Theological Problem of the
Old Testament Doctrine of Creation,”[9]
in which he argued that the doctrine of creation was ancillary to the doctrine
of salvation in Israel’s scriptures and history. In other words the concept of creation, and
the ultimate nature of God’s relationship to the world, developed in Israel as
an extension of saving faith in the Covenant God in their developing history
together. As von Rad elsewhere puts it, “the beginning of this covenant history
was dated back to creation.”[10] Whether or not the specifics of von Rad’s
account are true,[11]
it is fair to say that the unique manifestation and action of God in history
and the impression of God as the Creator of the whole world are conceptual correlates: the entirety of creation becomes contextualized and understood in
relation to the sacral action of YHWH.[12]
The sacred,
then, creates the secular by its own manifestation or unveiling (apo-kalypsis): “In a non-modern cosmology, vision is a
function not of the one doing the looking, but of the one looked at, who must
release vision of himself before anyone may see him.”[13] As such there can be no sudden autopoetic
projection, or mantic induction that, by its own strength, might wrest from
deity the secret of its nature. This
noetic path, if attempted, would “contradict the [transcendent] concept of
God.”[14] But the duality of identity of these spheres
is not thereby the same difference as that between two categorical realities,
i.e. between any two things which exist as particulars distinguished by
dwelling in a space comprehensive of
the two, which are thereby contrasted by the third thing, the medium of their
space. Created being, as Barth notes, “cannot affirm itself except by affirming
itself against others…[yet God is
also free] to be present with that which is not God, to communicate Himself and
unite Himself with the other and the other with Himself in a way which utterly
surpasses all that can be effected in regard to reciprocal presence, communion,
and fellowship between other beings.”[15]
God’s Logos, the Son, is the mediator
of creation and sets off a series of particular
relations.[16] As Pannenberg puts it following Maximus the
Confessor, the Logos is “not the
abstract order of the world but its concrete
order. It is so because in the concept
of the divine Logos we cannot separate the eternal dynamic of self-distinction
(the logos asarkos) from its
actualization in Jesus Christ (the logos
ensarkos). The universal Logos is
active in the world as he brings forth the particular logoi of each creature…”[17]
In creating the secular by manifesting itself and thereby inscribing the
difference between the two (i.e. the difference between created and uncreated),
God nonetheless uses the “secular” as
a medium of declaration.
Here we see
that the dividing space between the secular and the sacred, not originally
perceived as a third thing, a tertium
quid, was a manifestation of the sacred itself
relating itself by creating an identity of that which is addressed as distinct
from the addresser. “For modern
consciousness, a physiological act—eating, sex, and so on—is in sum only an
organic phenomenon…But for the primitive, such an act is never simply
physiological; it is, or can become, a sacrament, that is, a communion with the
sacred.”[18] And later “For him [the primitive religious
man] it is sacred time that makes possible the other time, ordinary time, the
profane duration in which every human life takes its course.”[19]
God is his own space, and gives the
world its space—the two exist
non-competitively as the finite exists within the infinite simplicity of the
divine essence.[20] Hence “the difference between God and the
world is of such a nature that God establishes and is the difference of the
world from himself, and for this reason he establishes the closest unity
precisely in the differentiation.”[21] Similarly this ontological differentiation
and participation finds conceptual precedent in the traditional Christian
doctrine of creation ex nihilo;[22] “[I]n order to think God as God,” so
the logic goes, “then nothingness, into which God goes out, should not be
equally original with God.” Otherwise it
would attain the dignity of a counter-God.
It is rather literally no-thing (ouk
on) and has no space of its own, and so we must think the difference
between God and the world “as constituted
by God.”[23]
In this
respect the sacred did not note “another world,” as opposed to everyday
experience, but by the infinite relating itself to the finite there opened a
deeper understanding of the finite itself as being allowed to participate in
the infinite.[24] In various ways the finite’s mysterious
“participation,”[25]
in the infinite was a common theme among early emerging pro-Nicene theology,[26]
and provided a strong conceptual precedent, even if formulated in polyphonous
ways, for the early Church’s theologies up to the emergence of the late Middle
Ages.[27] As Etienne Gilson puts it, despite varying
theologies it was a general theme of Medieval thought to understand that “every
cause produces an effect that resembles it…If then, as the idea of creation
implies, the Christian universe is an effect of God, it must of necessity be an
analogue,” and so precisely “every
Christian metaphysic involves the conceptions of participation [of the finite
in the infinite] and similitude.”[28] In a similar manner Paul Tillich
characterizes this period by noting “from Augustine to Bonaventura we have a
philosophy that is implicitly religious, or theonomous, in which God is not a
conclusion from other premises, but prior to all other conclusions, making them
possible.”[29]
The secular received definition by the sacred space and, in the words of
Augustine, stood as “signifying things” which by the restoration of the
theological imagination led beyond material reality into the ultimate reality
and ground of God.
Yet even in
this definition the conceptual difference between the two was not static and
reified, but itself motile and constantly in transit in eschatological progress
toward God; the semeiological quality of anologia
gathered in varying intensities to the surface of the secular by the revelation
of the Sacred was controlled by what Ayres terms an “anagogic” process of
deconstruction, in which the absolute (indeed, infinite) disproportion between
the analogates “creation” and “God” led to the constant inadequacy of any given
analogy and hence the infinite progress of refinement and supplementation in
which the theological imagination constantly strove to perceive, per
revelation, nature in light of the divine telos
toward the Good.[30]
Hence, as a summary, in understanding nature, or the secular “within this
synthesis,” writes Catherine Pickstock
Every abstraction of properties—such as “being,” or
“truth” or “good” or “entity”—from the real, was still concerned with their
instance as universal elements within
the real (as opposed to logical abstractions), while even the act of
abstraction was regarded as an elevation toward that greater actuality and
perfection which characterized a more spiritual apprehension [of the world]. The working assumption was that the finite
occurrence of being (as of truth, goodness, substance, etc.) restricts infinite
being in which it participates. Hence when knowledge grasps finitude in its
relatively universal aspects, it does not simply mirror finitude, but rather fulfills its nature in achieving an
elevation of its reality.[31]
II. A Grace Dispelled: Some Trajectories
In 1917
Rudolph Otto coined his famous thesis about the nature of religion which serves
as a good representative of the contemporary understanding, where he replaced
Schliermacher’s concept of the Universum
with the concept of the holy as the
defining object of religion, defined in contrast with secular experience, i.e.
the antithesis of a religious worldview with a naturalistic one.[32] This followed the general trajectories of,
e.g. Locke, Grotius, Hobbes, and Spinoza who related religion and the secular
as two contrapuntal and autonomous areas and translated this political concept
into a formulation of a specific consciousness of religion.[33] These ideas were not offered merely as an
evaluation of, and prescription for, contemporary views of the relation between
religion and the secular, but were rather presented as analysis indicating more
or less timeless dictation of the very essence of the things themselves.[34]
This
reinterpretation of religion is a weak explanatory device if applied to the
early Christian consciousness of the sacred and the secular, however. Here in Otto the “secular” remains in its
post-Enlightenment definition as that which is the naturally and unmediatedly
(i.e. empirically) visible—as opposed now to the concept of the sacred Divine
who must in His inestimable transcendence reveal and so mediate Himself to be
seen. If the holy is understood both as
the comprehensive theme of religion, and in duality against the secular, then
as Pannenberg notes “religious awareness [in Otto] can easily seem to be
secondary to secular awareness of the [given] world.”[35] The world is supposedly immediate and
constantly visible, and as such the invisible supra-mundane transcendence of
God-who-mediates-Himself seems to hover like a mythological apparition over the
concrete world-structure, to then summarily be pruned away as unnecessary. It is in this way we can make explicit in
terms of philosophy of religion the inner logic of Pierre Simon de Laplace’s
famous earlier comment to Isaac Newton that he had “no need of that hypothesis
[of God]”[36]
to explain the world. But how did this division take place? And what are its consequences for our
understanding of nature?
The initial
difficulty in attempting to pinpoint the historical moment at which something
goes awry is an elusive art that is seldom done well. Here we cannot hope to give either an
exhaustive nor a definitive narrative regarding how a broadly conceived
theology of participation eventually gave way to our contemporary situation,
nor is this narrative meant to suggest that all aspects of our current
understanding, or the trajectories that led us here, are in themselves negative
or to be undone. Rather in the light of
the main thesis of this essay that we are to be ecologically minded toward
nature because it is a medium of our participation and communion with God, a
few general principles can be identified which have shaped our contemporary
mindset in ways that need to be understood and deconstructed in their
familiarity, in order to perhaps reveal that these modern assumptions of ours
regarding nature—that it merely consists of empirical quanta to be manipulated,
for example, are themselves constructed
viewpoints which have been inculcated through a type of epistemological habit
or training, and which are themselves perhaps not germane to a Christian ethic
and understanding of creation.
In
an attempt to narrate the pedigree of this separation, some have striven to
point out an initial instability inherent in post-Nicene theology itself,
citing to various effects the supposed increasing conceptual separation between
how we understand God-in-Himself (theologia)
separate from the world, and God-for-us in revelation (oikonomia), and hence the corollary decreasing significance of God
for understanding finite reality once the latent instability itself became an
explicit theme.[37] Others have attempted to point to the
conceptual deficiencies of prominent thinkers like Augustine[38]
or in the later Scholastic textbook tradition of separating theological
treatises “On the One God” from “On the Triune God,” effectively separating
what can be logically or rationally understood of God’s unity and attributes
from the Trinity, which can only be known through revelation—thus creating an
implicit disjunction between faith and natural reason.[39]
Though
these narratives have several important truths to them, by and large they have
been shown to contain inaccurate generalizations.[40] For example Colin Gunton levels the
accusation against Aquinas arguing his form of analogy itself, the “erection of theological structures independently of
Christology and pneumatology,” was the underlying cause of modern atheism.[41] Gunton believes that Aquinas made the
assumption that two sorts of knowledge have access to the same being of God,
such that one form (rationality) is immediate and the other (faith) is mediate
via revelation.[42] But Nicholas Lash points out that the
“rational” doctrine of God in Aquinas is not knowledge of God, but of the logic of the knowledge of God, a
“retrospective demonstration of the proper use of concepts…grammatical notes
upon the Church’s reading of scripture.”[43] As Robert Jenson puts it, the so called
“Five-Ways” proofs as independent rational ascertainment of God have to be
relativized by the first questio’s
founding stipulation “that all knowledge of God is dependent on divine
initiative” so that the “[proofs] do not start with a nature or world grasped
from a perspective neutral to faith.”[44]
Perhaps
a more accurate first trajectory to cite then would be the rise of voluntarism
and nominalism which became increasingly codified in the Scholastic debate
about the reality and nature of universals.
Whereas, as we saw in the first section, finite reality was theorized by
early theology to participate in a transcendental realm of meaning, goodness,
and beauty, and thereby derive its quality via its reference and partaking in
these structures, nominalism “largely severed the perceptible world from the
analogical index of divine transcendence, and thus reduced divine freedom to a
kind of ontic voluntarism…such that creation and revelation could be imagined
only as manifestations of the [arbitrary] will
of God.”[45]
For Duns
Scotus this meant that the meaningful order of the world, as opposed to say,
the Thomistic account, was less assuredly rational because it had no link to
God’s essence.[46] Here the theological focus was on the
absolutely free—even capricious—voluntative capacity of God to act
unconstrained even by His nature. But
with this metaphysical separation came both the focus on finite reality and its
particularities in and of themselves
in Scotus’ concept of haeccity
(thisness),[47]
and the linguistic strategy of analogical qualitative description of reality
shifted to a focus on the univocal
character of an existence entirely composed of objects of force capable of
being primarily denoted in purely mathematical and quantitative terms.[48] No longer existing viz-a-viz reference to the
Divine,
Finite being is now regarded as possessing in
essence “being” in its own right (even though it still requires an infinite
cause), when the mind abstracts being from finitude, it undergoes no elevation,
but only isolates something formally empty, something that is already a
transcendentally a priori category
and no longer transcendental in the usual medieval sense of a metaphysically
universal category which applies to all beings as such…For this reason, [being] now represents something that is
simply “there” without overtones of
valuation, although it also represents something that must be invoked in
any act of representation and so is in this new sense “transcendental”…once the
perceived relationship between the transcendentals has undergone [this shift],
to abstract to the Good tells us nothing concerning the divine nature…Scotus
opens up the possibility of considering being without God.[49]
William
of Ockham radicalized these starting positions of Scotus, denying that
universals exist at all (even in Scotus’ form of the abstract universal quality
of existence), “all that exists [Ockham] averred, are individual things or
singular beings, that is, substances and their sensible qualities. To exist means to be an individual,” hence
universals are merely linguistic denotations collating individual things under
concepts.[50] To ascribe actual existence to these
universals is to reify mental abstractions thereby multiplying entities without
need, violating his principle of “parsimony” famously known as “Ockham’s
razor.” This included “Being”[51]
which is simply a mental heuristic adding nothing to the understanding of any
given exemplar.[52] Nature proceeded to become increasingly
“naturalized” or secularized,[53]
as Ockham’s nominalism bestowed increasing degrees of autonomy to science and
theology. Now formalized along the lines
of investigation of quanta, nature no
longer contained moral or metaphysical value,[54]
which was seen by many of the nominalists including Scotus and Ockham to be
relegated to theology understood as a science of revelation or cognitio practica dealing with the
practical cognition and theoretical investigation of the highest Good.[55]
A
second trajectory can be seen beginning at roughly the same period and having
an interestingly parallel effect on understanding the relationship between the
sacred and the equation of that which was “natural” with the secular. Originally “the difference between spiritual
and temporal authority [was seen as] a difference of time, not space: spiritual
authority [dealt] with the eternal, temporal authority with the provisional
measures necessary between the first and second comings of Jesus Christ.”[56] However with the revival of Roman law in the
twelfth century, resources for an argument that Pope and church held
subordinate roles to the political commonwealth emerged.[57] Coercive government began conceptually to be
endowed with permanence by utilizing terminology related to the state as a
static institution separate from both the ruler and the ruled. Whereas earlier Augustine had “demeaned” the
state as a providential adjustment to man’s corruption only provisionally valid,[58]
the temporal and temporary nature of this arrangement began to be spatialized
and stabilized with the permanence of a “naturalized” order, losing its
eschatological reference and being defined as a space essentially separate from
the spiritual,[59]
which began more and more to be internalized
as separate from the world and restricted to the subjectivity of the
individual. “In the modern era, the
national state would arise as the autonomous bearer of lethal power over
bodies, and the church would take its place as the caretaker of souls.”[60]
The
other side of this same movement can be seen in the positive theological
trajectories of Lutheranism, and to a broader extent in all of the Magisterial
reformers. As one example we might take Luther’s reaction to the Memmingen
articles in the Peasant revolts beginning in 1525. Despite the revolts arising in large part
because of a perceived affinity between the peasants overthrowing their
oppressors to Luther’s “here I stand,” in regards to Catholic doctrine, Luther
rejected the articles on the ground that they all “dealt with worldly matters
in the name of Christ,” by which Luther emphatically disassociated the gospel
as he understood it from all worldly justice and material gain.[61]
It should, of course, be noted right away that Luther was opposed to rebellion,
not social justice and human rights per
se, nevertheless he “denied that human rights have anything to do with
Christian rights…he firmly resisted the slightest diminution of the
transcendental character of religion.”[62] In a broad way, a general atmosphere of
thought extended the “sola fide,”
principle to mean, “in faith man…is so oriented to the infinite God that his
manifestation in some finite form…is ruled out.”[63] For faith to be authentically itself, it had
to deny any perception of God amongst finite things. Even Christ only revealed God sub contrarius, that is, under His
opposite. Protestantism “builds its
temples and altars in the heart of the individual, in the sighs and prayers he
seeks for the God who denies Himself to intuition because of the risk that the
intellect will cognize what is intuited as mere thing.”[64] Hence Ozment observes
In the late Middle Ages the traditional mixing of
the sacred and the profane, largely from the side of ecclesiastical power…was
finally overcome. Whether medieval
theologians dealt with the relationship between reason and revelation, nature
and grace, laity and clergy, or royal and ecclesiastical power, they had
invariably envisioned a secular-religious continuum…[and] did not think of two
fundamentally different spheres…In the later Middle Ages the integrity and autonomy
of the secular world was firmly established: the spiritual became truly
spiritual, and the profane ceased to be merely profane…nature came to mean
something positive apart from its perfection by grace, and the natural world
was no longer obliged to realize itself in the supernatural.[65]
A final
trajectory adds to the general matrix of the first three when we view the
philosophical “turn to the subject,” or thinking ego as the central reference
for existence. Though often René
Descartes is castigated as the founder of modernism and the metaphysics of
subjectivity,[66]
recent scholarship has cautioned against this obloquy by demonstrating how the cogito argument is situated within a
total metaphysical and systematic conception of the infinite,[67]
and by situating Descartes’ thought itself within broader trajectories of Latin
Scholasticism so that it is possible to perceive that he remains to a degree a
“scholastic” thinker.[68] In fact it has been argued that Descartes’
methodological skepticism was in large part a reaction to the Voluntarist’s
picture of a capricious—and possibly even deceptive—God.[69] Nonetheless it is a matter of historical
record how his predecessors actually interpreted
him. Regardless of his original
intentions, Descartes’ philosophy of the subject was taken up by Kant, and the
original dualism of the res cogitans
(thinking thing) and res extensa
(extended/material thing) was transcendentalized into the difference of the
unifying transcendental apperception of the subject, and the noumenal realm of the thing-in-itself.[70] The basic meaning behind the split remained
the same, however, in that “thereafter the trustworthiness of the world could
be secured for reflection only within the citadel of subjective certitude as an
act of will. The transcendental turn in
philosophy…[meant] the truth of the world could no longer be certified by the phanein of what gives itself to thought,
but only by the adjudications of the hidden artificer of rational order: the
ego.”[71]
[1] Robert Jenson. Systematic
Theology Vol. I: The Triune God. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997) p.20
[2] On the semantic function of
the contextual horizon of hypotheses for understanding any given particular
content of meaning, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science trans. Francis McDonagh
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976) pp.160ff; 309-314; 332-345.
[3] D.H. Knight The Eschatological Economy: Time and the
Hospitality of God (Grand Rapids, Eerdman’s Publishing, 2006) p.176.
[4] Robert W. Jenson Systematic Theology Vol. 2: The Works of God (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999) p.112ff; C.f. Pannenberg Systematic Theology vol. 1:172ff; vol. 2:9ff; Hart Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of
Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, Eerdman’s Publishing, 2003) p.125ff.
[5] Jenson, Systematic Theology 2:112.
[6] Pannenberg Systematic Theology 1:151-187.
[7] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular
Reason 2nd Ed. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006) pp.9-10.
[9] Gerhard von Rad, “The
Theological Problem of the Old Testament Doctrine of Creation,” in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other
Essays (London, SCM, 1963).
[10] Gerhard von Rad OT Theology 2 vols. (London, SCM, 1975) vol.1 p.139
[11] Comparable theories can be
found even amongst those who would reject von Rad’s acceptance of the
Documentary Hypothesis regarding multiple layers of redaction/authorship in the
Pentateuch. See, e.g. John Sailhammer The Pentateuch as Narrative (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 1995) p.81.
[12] As a specific example it
could be argued that the 7-day Sabbath structure was read-back as a Creation
ordinance itself. Regardless of whether
this is the structure provides an understanding of the six days of the week by
Sabbath on the seventh, which becomes the sacral point of view, or context, to
understand the importance of the other days.
[13] Knight The Eschatological Economy p.166
[15] Karl Barth Church Dogmatics ed. Geoffrey W.
Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance (New
York: Continuum Books, 2009) II/I p.313.
[16] Jenson ST 2:99
[17] Pannenberg, ST 2:63
[18] Mircea Eliade, Willard R.
Trask, The Sacred and the Profane: The
Nature of Religion (Florida: Harcourt Inc., 1987) p.14. Eliade’s analysis is quite brilliant but is
admittedly tilted towards the priority of secular knowledge, namely that early
man was certainly to be considered homo
religious yet nevertheless this analysis is still pertinent because from
this religious orientation Eliade wants to distill common anthropological
insights. This in itself is not
improper, for if man is fundamentally oriented to God this cannot be completely
absent or remote from even secular analysis.
Nonetheless the assumption here, much like Otto’s work, is that the
sacred is subordinated to the more primary secular modes of explanation, and so
in many respects in terms of sociology remains an “etic” explanatory device.
[19] Ibid
p.89. This reference is specifically to
the mythical consciousness but its general idea is still applicable to
Christianity, even though Eliade notes that Christianity changed the concept of
primal time by its notion of the eschatological and historical action of God.
[20] Pannenberg ST 1:411.
[21] Karl Rahner, The Foundations of Christian Faith: An
Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. Trans. William V. Dych (New York:
Crossroads Publishing Company, 1982) p.62
[22] C.f. Paul Copan and William
Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific
Exploration (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004)
[23] Eberhard Jüngel. God as
the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified
One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism. Trans. Darrel L. Guder. (Grand Rapids, Eerdman’s Publishing Co. 1983)
p.224
[24] The difference here would
then be, as Pannenberg writes, that “religious awareness stands in opposition
to secular awareness only because the latter is not aware of the fact that
finite objects are conditioned by their being carved out of the infinite and
defined by it.” (Systematic Theology
1:140)
[25] David Burrel “From Analogy
of ‘Being,’ to Analogy of Being,” in Thomas Hibbs and John O’Callahan eds. Recovering Nature: Essays in Natural Philosophy,
Ethics, and Metaphysics in Honor of Ralph McInerny (Indiana: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1999) p.258 writes: “The role of participation, then, is to
remind us that there could be no such set of [analogical] terms were the
universe itself not derived from a source from which all that is, and notably
what is perfect about what is, flows. So
the ontological ground of the set of terms lies in the fact that all that is
participates in the One from whom everything derives, and their proper use [as
analogy] demands that we bring this grounding fact to awareness.” Normal Russel The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (New
York: Oxford Press, 2006) p.2 has a similar judgment of the ontological
implications of the topic when he writes “Participation occurs when an entity
is defined in relation to something else.
For example, a holy person is an entity distinct from holiness, but is
defined as holy because he or she has a share in holiness.” Ayres in Nicaea
and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth Century Trinitarian Theology (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004) p.324 also shows agreement in this basic
conceptual definition: “The context for appropriate analogical predication is
awareness of a created order whose principles lie in God…Because God is
understood as not extrinsic to things—the distinction between God and world not
placing God as a peculiarly distant ‘thing’—we use analogical predication here
analogically…[such a conception] of speech about God is interwoven with a particular
account of creation as participation.”
[26] Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy pp.312ff
It should be noted that Ayres cautions against reading these
similarities as attempts to build a “Christian ontology,” but rather as various
similar strategies to answering certain sets of contextual questions. Either way the conceptual tools these
established are pertinent here.
[27] Steven Ozment The Age of Reform 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of
Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1981) pp.180-181; 242-243.
[28] Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1936) p.95, 96.
[29] Paul Tillich A History of Christian Thought: From Its
Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism ed. Carl E. Braaten (New
York: Simon and Schuster 1967) p.185.
[30] Ayres Nicaea and Its Legacy p.284; c.f. David Bentley Hart’s recent work The Beauty of the Infinite, in which he
draws extensively on Gregory of Nyssa’s concept of the constant epektasis or “stetching-out” of being
towards God.
[31] Catherine Pickstock,
“Postmodernism,” in The Blackwell
Companion to Political Theology ed. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh
(Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) p.473. Emphasis mine.
[32] Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York, Oxford
University Press, 1958).
[33] Knight The Eschatological Economy p.176.
[34] William Cavanaugh The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular
Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009) p.83
[35] Pannenberg Systematic Theology 1:140.
[37] Catherine Mowry Lacugna God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life
(San Francisco: Harper SancFrancisco Publishing, 1991) esp. her beginning
narrative leading up from Nicaea to Gregory Palamas pp.1-205.
[38] Colin Gunton in his essay
“Augustine, The Trinity, and the Theological Crises of the West,” in Promise of Trinitarian Theology 2nd
ed. (New York: T&T Clark Publishing, 1997)
pp.30-55 largely lays the blame upon Augustine and his Trinitarian
legacy (p.31). Robert Jenson in The
Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Eugene: Wipf and Stock,
2002—originally published 1982) p.116ff apparently independently develops a
similar critique of Augustinian Trinitarianism but this is subsumed under
Jenson’s broader critique of the tradition of the timelessness of God.
[40] For recent defenses of
Augustine see Michel Réne Barnes “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian
Theology” in Theological Studies 56
(1995) 237-250; Lewis Ayres Nicaea and
Its Legacy ch.15; I would like to thank Evan F. Kuehn for also sending me a
copy of his article “The Johannine Logic of Augustine’s Trinity: A Dogmatic
Sketch” from Theological Studies 68
(2007) pp.572-594 which also is acting as a rebuttal against late 21st
century critiques of Augustinian Trinitarianism.
[41] Colin Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many: God,
Creation, and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993) pp.138-139
[43] Nicholas Lash “When Did the
Theologians Lose Interest in Theology?” in Theology
and Dialogue: Essays in conversation with George Lindbeck, ed. Bruce
Marshall (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
[44] Jenson ST 2:155-156.
[45] Hart, Beauty of the Infinite p.133.
[46] Stanley Grenz The Named God and the Question of Being: A
Trinitarian Theo-Ontology (Westminster, WJK Press, 2005) p.56.
[48] Oliver Davies A Theology of Compassion: The Metaphysics of
Difference and the Renewal of Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001)
pp.96-97.
[49] Pickstock “Postmodernism”
p.474
[50] Grenz The Named God p.61.
[51] Henry J. Koren, An Introduction to the Science of
Metaphysics (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1955) p.23: “The nominalists
and conceptualists consider the concept of being as a pure figment of our
intellect and therefore without any
objective values. This position
makes true metaphysics impossible.” Emphasis added.
[52] Grenz The Named God p.62.
[53] W.T. Jones’ term, quoted in Ibid p.64.
[54] Koren, Science of Metaphysics p.23.
[55] Pannenberg Theology and the Philosophy of Science
pp.232ff.
[56] William Cavanaugh “Church”
in The Cambridge Companion to Political
Theology p.398.
[57] Ozment Age of Reform pp.144ff.
[59] Catherine Pickstock After Writing: On The Liturgical
Consummation of Philosophy (New York: Wiley Blackwell Publishing, 1998)
pp.135-166; C.f. Cavanaugh “Church” p.398.
[60] Cavanaugh “Church” p.399.
[61] Ozment The Age of Reform p.281ff.
[64] G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge trans. W. Cerf and
H.S. Harris (Albany State: University of New York Press, 1977) p.57 cited in
Jüngel God as the Mystery p.72.
[65] Ozment The Age of Reform p.181.
[66] This attribution is made too
numerously to document. Take as one
example Nancy Murphy, Theology in the Age
of Scientific Reasoning (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990) p.201.
[67] The most thorough recent
revisionist work on Descartes is undoubtedly Philip Clayton in his massive
study of modern concepts of God in The
Problem of God in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2000) pp.51-114;
C.f. also Pannenberg ST 1:113ff and
esp. pp.350-354: “The argument of Descartes has been subjected to the
persistent misunderstanding that the certainty of the cogito is the basis of the proof…it ascribes to Descartes a view
which Locke pioneered and Kant developed.
Descartes did not make a sure subjectivity which is independent of the
thought of God the basis of certainty about the existence of God. Instead, he was close to the tradition of
so-called ontologism that goes back to Augustine and which makes the intuition
of God the basis for all other knowledge. The Meditations begin with the cogito,
but this does not mean that it is the material basis of all that follows. It simply serves as Descartes’ fundamental
thesis that the infinite is the condition of all finite things…the idea of God
as the idea of the infinite is the condition of the conceivability of everything
finite, including the Ego itself.”
(351-352).
[68] Pickstock, “Postmodernism,”
p.472. C.f. the bibliography related to
the numerous revisionary studies she cites on pp.484-485.
[69] Jüngel God as the Mystery p.116n.20.
[70] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God trans.
Philip Clayton (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Co. 2001) p.51.
[71] Hart, Beauty of the Infinite p.135.
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