Divine Perfection

How can we know if God exists? Is the existence of Godphilosophically demonstrable, and if not, is the act of faith a fundamentallysubjective decision? After the rise of the modern sciences and the decline ofclassical metaphysics, modern philosophers influenced by Immanuel Kant’scounsel against speculative pretension have often proposed theoreticalagnosticism as a basic intellectual norm. Religious faith can then becharacterized as something nonrational.

In the darkness of modern skepticism, Karl Barth saw the­opportunity to assert a classical theological truth: We are saved not by thestrength of our reason but only by the ­initiative of God’s grace. The questionis not “How can we come to know God by our own powers?” but rather “How has Godmade it possible for us to know him uniquely through divine revelation,in the history of Jesus Christ?”

Then he took things a step further. In a postmodern era, theagnostic mind reels before the challenge of interpreting reality. Ultimately,this is a sign that we depend fundamentally upon knowledge of who Christ is,not only to understand who God is, but also to understand ourselves and ourworld. Concentrated on Christ, theo­logy becomes the modern discourse thatunifies all human learning.

In his clear and illuminating book, Scott Swain, a professorof systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, takes seriously the­Barthian project and seeks to ­evaluate it on a precise but profound point:Who, according to Barth, is God? To seek an answer, Swain examines one ofBarth’s most distinguished interpreters, Robert Jenson.

Swain deftly tells the story of how this contemporarytheology of God developed, its roots in Barth’s own writing and Jenson’sdistinctive interpretation of Barth’s views. The tone of the book is serene andmagnanimous. The analysis is lucid. The author loves theology and wants tocommunicate an appreciation of the subject to his readers.

As it turns out, Robert Jenson has some pretty innovativeideas about God. First, he believes that in the modern era, the Church Fathers’ideas about divine attributes, traditionally dear to Catholics and Protestantsalike—such as divine perfection, simplicity, eternity, and immutability—have tobe evaluated anew in light of a narrative reading of the Gospel. In the MiddleAges and early modernity, these notions were not scrutinized sufficiently. Theyare metaphysical concepts left over from premodern, non-biblical philosophies,something Jenson called the “unbaptized god” of the Greeks.

Second, if our knowledge of God is based exclusively on thehistory of Jesus Christ and not on pre-Christian philosophies, then the humanattributes of Christ in time also tell us what God is in his very nature andbeing as God. This is what Bar­thians call the genus tapeinoticum, thegenus of humility: If Christ lives a historical life as man, obeys, suffers,and dies, God is in some way subject to temporality, obedience, suffering, anddeath in his very nature as God.

Traditional dogma affirms that Christ is one divine personbut that there is a clear distinction of natures in Christ, human and divine.The eternal Son of God has truly suffered and died, but he has done so byvirtue of his human nature (suffering in both body and soul). In his deity, theSon of God remains unchanging in splendor, goodness, and power.

Jenson does not deny the distinction of natures in Christ,but he does make the human nature in some way a pure cipher of the divinenature. If Christ lives a historical life and suffers as man, then God is alsotemporal and suffers in his very essence as God. If as man Christ obeys theFather, then as God he also obeys the Father, and there is obedience ­eternallypresent in the Holy Trinity. If Christ as man is subject to death on Good Friday,then death is an event that occurs in the very being of the godhead.

Critics wonder if this theology distinguishes adequately thedivine and human natures of Christ. Does it inadvertently depict Godanthropomorphically, so as to refashion a god in the image of man?

Swain makes three points of special importance in evaluatingJenson’s project. First, Jenson is right to claim that the problem of speakingabout God in our “post-metaphysical” era is a fundamental challenge, but weshould evaluate differently than he the historical importance of the classicaldivine ­attributes.

In Second Temple Judaism hundreds of years before Christ, a“philosophical Judaism” made use of Greek philosophical terms to speak in adisciplined way about the God of the Bible. The language of the New Testamentalso drew on this philosophical vocabulary, a fact the Church Fathersrecognized as they continued a careful discernment of places of contact betweenclassical philosophy and divine revelation.

Jesus says in the gospel of John, “I and the Father areone,” and “before Abraham was, I am,” appealing to notions of being and unityin order to articulate his own identity as God. It is Christ himself whoprovides warrant for the use of Greek ­philosophical language to speak about whoGod is.

Second, Jenson rightly insists that God has revealed who hetruly is in and through the Incarnation of the Son. The historical life ofJesus gives us true knowledge of the inward life of God the Holy Trinity. It isunderstandable, then, that we ­question the usefulness of the traditionallanguage of the divine attributes. The notion of divine perfection, forinstance, insists on God’s infinity and eternity. This can make God seem­remote from the world, precisely when what we want to affirm is that God haslived a finite, temporal life among us.

Nevertheless, as Swain points out, this traditional languageis essential. It is only because God utterly transcends history that his freedecision to become a human being in time is also a decision of grace: “Far fromimplying a distance between the Word and the world, the Word’s distinct mannerof transcending the world implies a distinct manner of intimacy with theworld.”

Jenson’s project of historicizing the divine nature risksmaking the economy of salvation seem essential to God’s own identity. If wetake this idea to the extreme, God does not choose to become incarnate frombefore the foundation of the world. Rather, God is just the history of Christin time. Consequently, salvation is no longer offered to us through a freedivine decision ( sola gratia!) but is something necessary to who God is.

Third, Swain acknowledges that Christ should be at thecenter of evangelical preaching, as Barth and Jenson affirm, but argues thatfor this we need classical traditions of premodern thought that they reject.“To find words and concepts adequate for stammering about this gloriousreality, we must pursue the path of ressourcement, mining the resourcesavailable in the storehouse of the church’s exegetical and theologicaltradition.”

Toward this end, Swain counsels against Barth’s rejection ofthe “analogy of being,” the idea that we can know truths about God beginningfrom the philosophical consideration of creation. How is God the Creator bothlike and unlike created reality? Thomas Aquinas pursues this kind of reflectionin his metaphysical ­arguments concerning the one God. Such reasoning leads toa strong sense of the divine transcendence and of the Creator’s realdistinctness from his creation.

Likewise, Swain advocates for the use of the traditionaldistinction between “divine processions” and “divine missions.” It is one thingfor the Logos and the Spirit to proceed from the Father from alleternity: The Trinity is this eternal procession of persons. It is anotherthing for the Son and the Spirit to be sent into the world in time. TheIncarnation pertains to the mission of the Son, sent into the world.

If we confuse the two orders, we end up saying that what Goddoes in time (the Incarnation) is constitutive of God’s essence (the eternalprocession of the persons). We then historicize the life of God as such,identifying the Holy Trinity with the history of salvation.

The conclusions of Swain’s book are tactfully stated, butquite stark. Protestant theology even after Barth has failed to find an idiomin which to describe God in a fully modern way. To do so, the Church needs tograpple anew with its scholastic heritage, which includes strong metaphysicalclaims about God. We cannot go back to a premodern era, but to go forward weneed to do a much better job of recovering the essential wisdom of the past.

Jenson presupposes that much that we find in patristic andscholastic metaphysics is inadequate—even antithetical—to the interpretation ofthe Gospel. This is a formidable challenge, one that many forms of modernCatholic theology fail to face in earnest. To answer it, we must be willing toadvocate even today for the perennial importance of the classical metaphysicaltradition. To speak about God the Holy Trinity in the midst of the modernworld, we have to speak also, in part at least, about human philosophicalknowledge of God, about God’s simplicity, ­eternity, immutability, infinity,and so on. How many Catholic theologians are willing to do this today?

If Jenson and Barth are not right in all things, thenperhaps figures like Bonaventure and Thomas are more important than is commonlyperceived. The medieval masters attained to a careful balance of faith andreason, one that gave due emphasis to the mystery of God as both three and one,and to the mystery of Christ as both divine and human.

How do Christians reappropriate their thought today, inidioms our contemporaries can come to understand? The initial answer is: by­studying the medieval masters in earnest. The good news is, if we want to findout who the God of the Gospel is, we don’t have far to search. We find a trueportrait of him in the Tradition of the Church.  

Thomas Joseph White, O.P., is director of the Thomistic Institute at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.