How Neo-Thomism Affected 20th Century Trinitarianism (Part Two) - Thesis Continued
We must be clear on what we
mean here: we are not making the common-sense point that theological
sensibilities have changed, and with it the theology expressing those
sensibilities. Rather more importantly,
we are arguing that changes in the theological imagination (for lack of a
better term) have also had a retroactive effect upon how traditional sources
are interpreted, accepted, or rejected—in particular we are looking at how the
construct “classical theism” has been generated. As Henri de Lubac tersely summarizes
regarding a slightly different—albeit related--context: “The building up of … new theory had varying repercussions on
the interpretation given to older texts.”[1] Or in Cyril
O’Regan’s neologism: what we are suffering is an act of “misremembering.”[2] Take, for example, Daniel Costello’s recent
judgment on widespread criticisms of “classical theism” based on the perception
that it fosters (indeed, demands) a cold and detached God due to the “classical
theistic” emphasis on divine impassibility:
Unfortunately in the area of systematic theology, if the
theme of divine impassibility does happen to be mentioned, it is usually in the
form of derision, usually with the evaluation of past sources as inadequate or
overly wedded to past conceptual tendencies.
With such approaches, thinkers try to resolve or improve these sources
rather than entertain or engage them on their own terms … Often … the dismissal
is phrased as a rejection of ‘classical theism.’ This phrase is a catch-all category,
suggesting that previous voices within the tradition operated by means of a
unified account of metaphysics that has as its orienting concerns Hellenistic
philosophical categories … This narrative is both comforting and helpful when
contemporary observers have to wrestle with the fact that for many in the
ancient church the axiom of divine impassibility was prominent in their
God-talk. This linguistic and conceptual
feature can be explained away as an accident of history rather than a category
that was used intentionally and in a qualified way by many within the early
church. The narrative of ‘classical
theism’ is a convenient way of sidestepping the difficulty that is involved in
speaking about historical constructs that address the relationship between God
and suffering. Is it no wonder then that
so many individuals assume this grand narrative? ... [Yet] given that ‘classical
theism’ is an anachronistic category of convenience for labeling different and
distinct voices under one heading, the term fails to account for the
multivalent ways in which divine impassibility functioned for numerous ancient
writers and thinkers, especially those who were able to affirm both divine
impassibility and the legitimacy and
value of the incarnate Christ who suffered in the flesh … [I argue] that the category of ‘classical theism’ [is]
nonviable for contemporary systematics … [Emphasis added].[3]
Castelo continues, and observes
of the “suffering God” debate that: “Historical narrations of the shift [to a
passible God] have ensued with the purposes of establishing some sort of
continuity with the received tradition, but interestingly enough the assessment
of the change has occurred post-factum
to divine passibility’s establishment as the biblical and conceptual norm.” In
other words, “the impulse to affirm ‘a suffering God’ was often applied to, rather than generated from, the inquiry itself,
thereby skewing the ensuing historical findings and reconstructions.”[4] Misunderstanding this difference, “leads to a
veritable tower of Babel,” says Marc Steen.
“Fighting traditional theism at the present time as if it introduced the
notion of an ‘apathetic’ that is, a cool and indifferent God, often seems to be
a battle like Don Quixote’s.” And this
is because of a failure to recognize “the term (im)passibility does not always
and everywhere have one and the same connotation.”[5] “To put it bluntly,” says Rob Lister,
“ancient advocates and contemporary critics of divine impassibility use the
same terminology … but they mean quite different things when they explain what
it means for God to be impassible.”[6]
Nor is
this historiographical critique of the category “classical
This gap
(or perhaps better: gaps) cry out for explanation: what happened to account for
such a disconnect? To fully explain why these gaps between the sources and
their current reception yawns in theological literature is too vast to be
contained in this essay—or even by any individual academic. Our thesis is thus limited: a gap can in part be illuminated by
watching how many participated in, modified, or rejected how certain strands of
late-19th and early 20th-century neo-Thomism interpreted
and presented the entirety of the tradition.
Part of this narrative can be telescoped backwards into earlier changes
that nominalism wrought, as several forms of neo-Thomism are themselves
indebted to nominalist readings of Thomas put into action, though this part of
the narrative will only be touched upon tangentially. Put otherwise: what
passes as “classical theism” is often (though not exclusively) thought through
the reception history of certain neo-Thomist discourse, rather than charitable
engagement with the sources themselves. In order to demonstrate this we will look at
three case-studies or paradigms: the “foundational” nature of philosophy to
theology; the “de Regnón paradigm” of Eastern and Western trinitarianism; and
the effect that Karl Rahner’s “Rule” had on contemporary Trinitarianism with
specific concern given to how the Rule represents the tradition to which it was
formulated as a response. These three
test cases are not totally discrete, but should be seen as three different
interlocking angles that together create the complex “classical theism.” If our thesis is rendered plausible, then the
reception, rejection, or modification of a tradition labeled “classical theism”
and the concomitant moves made in systematic theology, will need to seriously re-consider the extent
to which it remains in fidelity to the tradition it presumes to comment upon. It is the concern of this essay to simply
point out the historiographical connections.
It will be left to a successor essay—tentatively titled “The Secret
Fears of Our Trinitarianism” to look at how the undermining of these histories
will play into systematic-theological formulations and revisions.
[1] Henri De Lubac, The
Mystery of the Supernatural trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Cross Road
Publishing, 1998), 6.
[2] Cyril O’Regan, The
Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity (New
York: Cross Road, 2014), 13ff.
Misremembering is not “forgetting,” it is rather an act that in the very
gesture of affirming memory suffers “a failed form of thought.” It thus distorts what it attempts to preserve
in the act of preservation itself.
[3] Daniel Castelo, The
Apathetic God: Exploring the Contemporary Relevance of Divine Impassibility (Eugene:
Wipf and Stock, 2009), 40-41.
[4] Ibid., 10.
[5] Marc Steen, “The Theme of the ‘Suffering’ God: An
Exploration,” in Jan Lambrecht and Raymond F. Collins, eds., God and
Human Suffering (Louvain: Peeters, 1990), 86-87.
[6] Rob Lister, God is
Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (New York:
Crossway, 2012), 32.
[7] Fergus Kerr, After
Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), viii:
“Thomas’ God, far from being the static entity of classical theism, is so
‘dynamic’ as to be describable primarily with verbs.”; Cf. Rudi Te Velde, Aquinas on God: The Divine Science of the
Summa Theologia (Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 85; cf. 172: “There is
something in Thomas’ conception of God as ipsum
esse per se subsistens that does not fit very well into the picture of
‘classical theism’. Classical theism, as
it is usually understood, tends to view God as an absolute entity existing
independently of the world. The theistic
God looks more like a being, a
‘self-contained substance,’ above and apart from the world, than the pure
actuality of subsistent being itself.
From Thomas’ perspective, this would mean that the independence of God, as over
against the world of finite beings, is conceived wrongly. It is as if the character of subsistence,
attributed to a theistically conceived God, is a logical expression by means of
which we think of God as separated from the world, as a distinct reality, while
Thomas intends to express by subsistence that the being of God is separated through itself from all other
beings. The difference is crucial. For Thomas, God is not ‘separated’ from the
world as a subsistent entity conceivable apart from his causal relationship to
created beings; it is as cause of all beings that God ‘separates’ himself from
all his effects by distinguishing those effects from himself. In this sense the ‘concept’ of God is, in
truth, the concept of the relationship of God and world, conceived as an
ordered plurality of diverse beings, each of which receives its being from the
divine source of being. For Thomas there
is no way of thinking of God concretely outside this relationship. The independence, or absoluteness, of God
characterizes the way He relates as cause to all other things; it is the
independence of the perfect goodness of God, who is not under any obligation or
necessity to fulfill himself by creating, but who acts out of his own goodness,
establishing all other things in being by letting them share in his own
perfection.”
[8] Vanhoozer, Remythologizing
Theology, 94.
[9] Vanhoozer here explicitly borrows and modifies a phrase
coined by Paul Gavrilyuk in The Suffering
of the Impassible God.
[10] Vanhoozer, Remythologizing
Theology., 93.; Similar charges have been leveled at Process Philosophy by
Medieval historian David Burrell “Does Process Theology Rest on a Mistake?” Theological Studies 43 (1982), 129—noting
what Process Philosophy often castigates as “Classical theism,” bears only
superficial resemblance to a much more robust phenomenon (“a hodgepodge that
bears little historical scrutiny” in his words), he asks: “wherein lies the
appeal?” On the next page he answers his
own question by noting that despite Process philosophy’s own
self-understanding, it was reacting not to classical theology, but to the
abstract God of both Liberalism and more conservative strands of Natural
theology, where the trinity and incarnation “were already vestigial myths”
(130). This “merely monotheistic” God seemed both distant and abstract, and was
anachronistically retrojected as implicit in Patristic and Medieval language of
transcendence and its concomitants. From such a vantage point,
“classical treatments of divine transcendence, shorn of their intentional side
as developed in the doctrines of Incarnation and of Trinity, could appear to be
in need of radical revision. But in
retrospect it might appear that so drastic a revision was required only because
the earlier [modern, liberal] surgery
had been so radical [Emphasis added]” (ibid.).
[11] Brian Davies, An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 1-21.
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