God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth [Hardcover ed.] 110847067X, 9781108470674

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God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth The legacies of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth remain influential for contemporary theologians, who have increasingly put them into conversation on debated questions over analogy and the knowledge of God. However, little explicit dialogue has occurred between their theologies of God. This book offers one of the first extended analyses of this fundamental issue, asking how each theologian seeks to confess in fact and in thought God’s qualitative distinctiveness in relation to creation. Wittman first examines how they understand the correspondence and distinction between God’s being and external acts within an overarching concern to avoid idolatry. Second, he analyses the kind of relation God bears to creation that follows from these respective understandings. Despite many common goals, Aquinas and Barth ultimately differ on the subject matter of theological reason with consequences for their ability to uphold God’s distinctiveness consistently. These mutually informative issues offer some important lessons for contemporary theology. Tyler R. Wittman is Assistant Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY (USA). His research and writing concentrate on issues surrounding the theology of God’s perfections, the Trinity, and Christology. His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Systematic Theology, Modern Theology, and Pro Ecclesia. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion and the Evangelical Theological Society.

God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth

TYLER R. WITTMAN The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108470674 DOI: 10.1017/9781108556927 © Cambridge University Press 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A cataloge record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-47067-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Jessie. God is very good indeed.

Contents

page ix

Acknowledgments

xi

List of Abbreviations Note on Citations and Translations

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Introduction 1 Confessing That God Is God: The Relation between Theology and Economy The Problem of Confessing God as God The Procedure

3 4 14

Part I  God’s Being and Activity According to Thomas Aquinas 2 Aquinas on God’s Being and Activity Approaching Divine Actuality: Formal and Material Objects The Ways of God: The Formal Orientation of Theological Inquiry Simplicity, Perfection, and the Grammar of Divine Naming God Himself: The Material Object of Theology Inquiry Conclusion 3 Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation Creative Causality and the Question of God’s Self-Correspondence The Principle of Creation The End of Creation

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27 29 32 48 54 71 74 75 79 99

Contents

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The Relation of Creation Conclusion

111 125

Part II  God’s Being in Act According to Karl Barth 4 Barth on God’s Being in Act The Theological Approach to Divine Actuality Necessity and Decision: The Formal Orientation of Theological Understanding Loving in Freedom: The Material Object of Theological Understanding Conclusion: Theology and Economy 5 God’s Self-Correspondence and Barth’s Critique of Nominalism Correspondence as Analogy and Dialectic The Simplicity of God’s Self-Correspondence in Christ 6 Barth on the Electing God’s Relation to Creation The Decree’s Necessity and the Question of God’s Self-Correspondence The Decree’s Form and Content as God’s Internal Activity The Decree’s Form and Content as Christ’s Election Conclusion: God’s Relation to Creation

129 133 135 150 170 176 178 188 199 202 206 220 243

Conclusion 7 Confessing God as God Actuality and Theological Reason Being and Activity Relation and the Confession of God

253 254 269 285

Bibliography

297

Index

313

Acknowledgments

It is a delight to practice here what the book preaches at length: to acknowledge God’s bounteous goodness. Whatever one makes of this study’s claims about God’s goodness, the fact of it at once asserts itself and outpaces anything we might say about it. I’m painfully aware of this as I think about the family, friends, and acquaintances without whom this project would not have been possible. The book is a slightly revised and expanded version of my doctoral thesis begun at Aberdeen and completed at St Andrews under the supervision of the late John Webster. Because he stewarded his gifts well, John’s students benefited from his hedgehog-like focus on what really matters, as well as his humility, patience, humor, and sharp wit. When I ambitioned a more tortured project, John subtly guided me to the more fundamental concerns initially invisible to me. And when I would despair of being able to write on two such formidable figures, John encouraged me to stay the course and insisted that it (probably) would not be in vain. For these reasons and many others, I thank God for John. He is sorely missed. The academic environments at Aberdeen and St Andrews were formative in different ways, and I’m grateful to the faculty who contributed to my positive experiences. Among the many friends and conversation partners I had the pleasure of meeting during the course of my research and writing, I mention only a few: Matt Burdette, Darren Sumner, Adam Harger, Esau McCaulley, Kai Akagi, Alden McCray, Jared Michelson, Andrew Torrance, Joey Sherrard, Tim Fox, Steve Duby, and Daniel De Haan. But the present book would not have been written without the friendship of Tim Baylor and Jordan Hillebert in particular, as well as Carsten Card-Hyatt – all of whom were trusted constants in conversation, ix

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and who knew well the value of putting down the books and picking up the croquet mallets. Special thanks also are due to Marty Westerholm, who more than once offered a sage word that was worth its weight in gold. I do not know four men whose theological intuitions I value more than theirs. Simon Oliver and Fergus Kerr examined the thesis thoughtfully, and in the wake of John’s passing, Kerr and Lewis Ayres kindly advocated for its publication. Marty offered helpful suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript, and at a later stage so too did Scott Swain, Mike Allen, and two anonymous referees. Where I was wise enough to heed these voices, the book’s limitations were eased in some measure. My thanks also go to Beatrice Rehl and her team at Cambridge University Press for taking the book on and patiently shepherding me through the publishing process for the first time. For supporting me throughout the writing of this project (and beyond) with their generous provision, prayers, and love, I am thankful for my in-laws, John and Lisa McLean, and parents, Calvin and Diane Wittman. Above all, I am most thankful for my wife Jessie and our three little boys. Jessie’s bold confidence in the Lord and her adventurous spirit teach me far more than the books do. And the boys not only prayed the book into existence but kept their father busy with far more important tasks. Belonging to these people is the best gift the Lord has given me short of himself and reason enough to never cease thanking “the lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of men” (Ps 107:8).

Abbreviations

General LCL Loeb Classical Library rev. Translation revised trans. My translation s.c. sed contra corp. body of article obj. objection ad reply to objection prol. prologue to question Primary Sources 1 Cor. Super primam Epistolam ad Corinthos lectura 1 Tim. Super primam Epistolam ad Timotheum lectura CD Church Dogmatics Col. Super Epistolam ad Colossenes lectura CTh Compendium theologiae DA Sententiae libri De anima DC Super librum De causis expositio DDN In De divinis nominibus expositio DP Quaestiones disputatae de potentia DT De trinitate DV Quaestiones disputatae de veritate Eph. Super Epistolam ad Ephesios lectura Eth. Sententia libri Ethicorum Gal. Super Epistolam ad Galatas lectura Heb. Super Epistolam ad Hebraeos lectura Ioan. Super Evangelium S. Ioannis lectura xi

xii

KD Meta. Matt. Phy. Psalmo Quod. Rom. SCG Sent. STh

List of Abbreviations Die kirchliche Dogmatik Sententia libri Metaphysicae Super Evangelium S. Matthaei lectura Commentaria in octo libros Physicorum In psalmos Davidis expositio Quaestiones quodlibetales Super Epistolam ad Romanos lectura Summa contra Gentiles Scriptum super libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi Summa theologiae

Note on Citations and Translations

All citations from the STh1 include only part number, question, article, and location where applicable (Ia.1.1.ad1 = STh Prima pars, question one, article one, reply one). Similarly, DP 1.2.s.c. = De potentia question one, article two, sed contra. Citations from commentaries and expositions that are numbered include chapter, lecture, and number (Super Romanos chapter 1, lecture 7, number 123 = Rom. 1.7.123). I tend to quote existing translations of texts with minor, unannounced revisions throughout, occasionally providing my own. For the STh I have used chiefly the translation of the English Dominican Province. The Latin text used comes from the Blackfriars edition for the STh and from the editions listed in the bibliography for all other works. For all texts that do not exist in published form, I have provided my own translations. All citations from the CD2 include only volume number and page, separated by a colon (e.g., II/1:3 = Church Dogmatics, vol. II/1, page 3). Where appropriate, especially when the standard translation has been revised (=rev.) or replaced (=trans.), or emphases restored from the original German, the original pagination will appear after the pagination from the English translation (e.g., II/1:51/54 = Church Dogmatics II/1:51;  Excerpts from St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, © 1948 by Benzinger Bros., New York, NY, are used with the permission of the publisher, Christian Classics™, an imprint of Ave Maria Press®, Inc., Notre Dame, Indiana 46556. 2  Excerpts from © Karl Barth, 1956-75, Church Dogmatics, T&T Clark, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. are used with permission. 1

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Note on Citations and Translations

Kirchliche Dogmatik II/1:54). To improve readability, in the main body of the text I have either provided translations to Barth’s Latin and Greek or used the translations in the Study Edition of the CD. In certain other German sources that exist in translation, I have provided my own translation only where the German original is listed before the English translation.

INTRODUCTION

1 Confessing That God Is God The Relation between Theology and Economy

In Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2010 adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel True Grit, the young protagonist, Mattie Ross, attempts to persuade an auctioneer, Colonel Stonehill, to buy back some ponies traded to her late, murdered father. Stonehill is not as accommodating as one might expect, so Ross goes on the offensive. Not only will he buy back the ponies but he will also fork over reparations for her father’s saddle horse that was stolen while under his protection. Again, Stonehill refuses to see what her loss has to do with him. When she tries to appeal to his sense of justice by comparing him to a robbed bank that tells its depositors they are out of luck, the auctioneer quips without missing a beat, “I do not entertain hypotheticals. The world as it is is vexing enough!” As we know, Ross eventually gets the best of the old colonel. Indeed, she already has him against the ropes because Stonehill has simply begged the question: What do we mean when we talk about the world as it is? What things are, and how they are, is always at least set against the background of what they are not. The opening scene implies this much with its quotation of Scripture: “The wicked flee when no one pursues” (Prov 28:1). The many injustices Ross encounters, like a thief’s rationality and the limitations of the shadowy characters she marshals to her cause, are set in relief against the background of the justice she seeks and eventually finds. Something similar confronts theologians when they attempt to answer God’s act of self-­naming before Moses and so to confess that “God is God” (cf. Ex 3.14). The Nicene Creed emphasizes this identity of God with God not only in its repetition of “one” – “one God, the Father . . . and one Lord, Jesus Christ” – but also in the language of the Son being

3

4

Introduction

the “only-begotten.”1 Part of what we learn from the fourth-­century debates over this confession is that what it means to say “God is God” is always set against the background recognition of what God is not: a creature, a thing alongside other things, an exemplification of something more generic, made up of parts, and so forth – all of which is embraced in traditional teaching about God’s simplicity. If this is so, then it seems that the distinction between Creator and creature is in some significant sense dependent on the very relationship it clarifies. It appears, in other words, that entertaining any thought about God above or possibly without the relationship of Creator to creature is impossible. “God with us” is vexing enough! However, to the extent that Christians wish to deny that God is reducible to this relationship, which is what divine simplicity would appear to demand, then an immediate problem arises: How do we think of God as God consistently in such a way that upholds the Creator/creature distinction? What are the consequences for theological thought and speech of Christian teaching that God is simple and therefore irreducible? What, in short, does it mean to say that God is God? How does one uphold such a thought while nevertheless doing justice to the fact that all knowledge and speech about God is only had in relationship to God as Creator and Redeemer? This book aims to better understand these questions and their answers, but first something more should be said about the shape of the underlying problem.

The Problem of Confessing God as God We can begin to appreciate the broader contours of this problem by reflecting on some of its exegetical and metaphysical dimensions. Theology’s perennial concerns typically involve metaphysical questions, but only because they are first and foremost matters of biblical exegesis. This is no less true for the question at hand. One representative example of why this is so comes from the apostle Paul’s first chapter of his epistle to the Romans, where he addresses the knowledge of God and its corruption by idolatry. The overarching context for this discussion is how God’s wrath has been “revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Rom 1:18). These persons know something about God in the creation because “God has shown it to them” (Rom 1:19–20). Unfortunately, their 1

 Donald Wood, “Maker of Heaven and Earth,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 14.4 (2012): 384–5.

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response to this knowledge is inexcusable because they suppress what they know in unrighteousness, which we discover soon enough stems from idolatry: “For although they knew God they did not glorify him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles” (Rom 1:21–23). Paul’s series of contrasts here are significant: true glory exchanged for mere images, the immortal God exchanged for mere mortal things, and the luminosity of a mind that sees all in the light shed upon them by their Creator exchanged for the darkness of a mind of that sees things only in its own light. As the argument progresses, these exchanges have increasingly dire moral consequences, and the root of it all is a transgression of the First Commandment: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex 20:2; Deut 5:6). The problem Paul identifies is that knowing God is insufficient apart from the moral element of that knowledge eliciting glorification and gratitude to God “as” God (Θεὸν ὡς Θεὸν).2 What is meant by this easily overlooked qualifier is worked out negatively in the verses that follow as people turn to “the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25). Stated positively, however, to glorify God as God is to know and practice the “truth about God” (Rom 1:25), to “see fit to acknowledge God” (Rom 1:28). Both of these phrases amplify what it means to glorify God as God, which we might summarize as the confession that God is what and who God is, whereas everything else is not. First, there is an element of acknowledging the truth about God and what it is that God has revealed in creation: God’s divinity (Rom 1:20). What this includes exactly we are not told, but the progression of the passage suggests that it means at least a basis for the recognition of an immortality, eternality, glory, and righteousness that are not ours. God’s divine nature is something firmly objective, that to which both knowledge and worship of God must

2

 Acts of glorification and gratitude regularly suggest some reference to God’s saving benefits (Rom 4:20; 15:6; 1 Cor 6:20; Ps 24:7–10; 29:1). Something different is in mind here, however, because Paul talks about the ungodly and unrighteous, the referent being to those outside the covenant but who nevertheless have received a general knowledge of God and are therefore “without excuse” (Rom 1:20). Whatever glorification or thanksgiving is in view is that which is owed by rational creatures as such, and so his comments extend minimally to the Gentiles.

6

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conform.3 Second, the glorification of God as God requires that one “see fit to acknowledge God” (Rom 1:28).4 Acknowledgment here involves having and holding to a true knowledge of God’s Godness, retaining it against any and all impulses to replace it or to lay it aside.5 And to see such acknowledgment as fitting or worthy (ἐδοκίμασαν) of God involves not only an approval but implicitly one based upon an act of distinguishing. This is what Paul has in mind later in the same epistle: those in the Church who serve one another in such a way that promotes peace and humility will be “approved (δόκιμος) by men” (Rom 14:18). That is to say, edifying service to Christ distinguishes those whom the church approves from those whom it does not. In this vein, it is “worthwhile” to retain the true knowledge of God because God alone is God and nothing else is: the distinction underwrites the approval. However, distinguishing between the creature and the Creator must find approbation or else it is morally blameworthy. If the distinction stands alone, it has not been acknowledged. To know the truth about God and then to distinguish this truth, to approve it as worthwhile, and so acknowledge it just is to confess God “as God.” What this suggests is that knowing and confessing that God is God requires more than a mere neutral act of intellection but is rather involved with the moral stance of the theologian. How does this figure into the problem at hand? Paul insists on the fact that suppressing the truth about God as God in unrighteousness is the quintessential act of idolatry, which he also maintains is a revelation of God’s wrath. Thus, to the extent that the truth about God is “given up” or “exchanged” for a lie (Rom 1:23, 25, 26), God in turn “gives up” the unrighteous to the debasement of their intellects and desires (Rom 1:24, 26, 28). Though they may profess to be wise, they are in reality “fools” – every bit as blind, deaf, senseless, and immobile as the objects of their devotion (Rom 1:22; Ps 115:3–8). Having failed to retain the truth about God – that is, having failed to discern between creature and Creator  – they consequently fail to discern between right  Johann Albrecht Bengel, Gnomon of the New Testament, ed. M. Ernest Bengel and J. C. F. Steudel, trans. James Bryce, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1860), 20 (on Rom 1:21). 4  Woodenly, “to deem it worthy to hold God in knowledge” (ἐδοκίμασαν τὸν θεὸν ἔχειν ἐν ἐπιγνώσει). 5  One commentator observes that “to glorify God” in Rom 1:21 involves both “die kognitive Anerkennung des Gottsein Gottes” and “die Huldigung Gottes” and discerns how both aspects appear negatively and positively throughout what Paul says in 1:21–28. Andrie du Toit, “Die kirche als doxologische Gemeinschaft im Römerbrief,” in Focusing on Paul: Persuasion and Theological Design in Romans and Galatians, ed. Cilliers Breytenbach and David S. du Toit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 298. 3

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and wrong. They refuse to approve God, and so they instead “approve” what refuses God: envy, murder, strive, deceit, maliciousness, and so much more (Rom 1:29–31). “Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them” (Rom 1:32). This vindicates Tertullian when he argues that “all sins are found in idolatry and idolatry in all sins.”6 The question about how we distinguish between God and creation is therefore an inherently moral question with social and political consequences. Karl Barth makes the observation, still timely, that where “the qualitative distinction between men and the final Omega is overlooked or misunderstood, that fetishism is bound to appear” in which God is exchanged for the creature, and especially the rational creature’s “half-­ spiritual, half-­material creations, exhibitions, and representations of His creative ability – Family, Nation, State, Church, Fatherland.”7 Minimally we can see that failure to confess God as God involves a hostile, intemperate, and indulgent way of life, which suggests on the contrary that the way of life supporting this confession will be intrinsically ascetical in some respects. If confession (ὁμολογία) requires acts of prayer, penitence, and praise (Rom 15:9; Jas 5:16), then theology will be “fundamentally purgative of idolatry” in all its forms.8 A full exploration of these forms and the ascetical acts that resist them is a worthwhile undertaking, but our aim is somewhat more circumspect. Rather what this brief glance at Romans 1 suggests for what follows is that in looking for a satisfactory account of what it means to confess God “as God,” we will have to look at what it means to resist what Augustine calls a “flesh-­bound habit of thought.”9 That is, we will need to explore what it means to temper the mind’s movements and ambitions such that its perception of the truth  Tertullian, De idololatria: Critical Text, Translation and Commentary, ed. and trans. J. H. Waszink and J. C. M. van Winden (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 1.5. 7  Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th edn., trans. Edwyn C. Hoskins (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 50. 8  Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 20. 9  Augustine, De Trinitate [DT], trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2010), 8.2. For Augustine, the problem was as much epistemological as moral: “So then it is difficult to contemplate and have full knowledge of God’s substance, which without any change in itself makes things that change, and without any passage of time in itself creates things that exist in time. That is why it is necessary for our minds to be purified before that inexpressible reality can be inexpressibly seen by them; and in order to make us fit and capable of grasping it, we are led along more endurable routes, nurtured on faith as long as we have not yet been endowed with that necessary purification” (DT 1.3). 6

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does not compromise that truth. Intellectual temperance belongs to this question in both classical and modern forms: Augustine argued the problem was that things “cannot be expressed as they are thought and cannot be thought as they are,”10 and for the German Idealist tradition following Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Jacobi, the problem was that the mind’s conditioned and finite concepts compromise apprehension of the infinite and unconditioned in the very act of thinking.11 The task of rendering the distinction between Creator and creature is thus bound up intimately with the habits and movements of thought one employs to render it. Thus far we have suggested that the problem underneath the question of how we confess God as God is bound up with an apostolic concern to avoid idolatry and carries implications for the moral-­intellectual habits and stances of the theologian. We may now grasp some of the metaphysical aspects of this problem by reflecting on the underpinnings of a realist commitment in Christian theology, that is, theology concerned with what is really the case. As a science, theology attempts not only to give a coherent account of reality but also to set forth rationally how its various statements correspond to extralinguistic affairs.12 What is real does, to this extent, exercise a critical function on the nature of theology’s systematic claims. In the face of competing visions of reality, however, Christian theology ventures distinctive claims based upon its equally distinctive articles of faith. Doubtless, some of these articles render Christian claims more distinctive than others: belief in creation is at least formally held in common with Judaism and Islam, but belief in Jesus Christ’s full deity, or the reconciling and re-­creative efficacy of his Cross and Resurrection, leave no room for such formal similarities. So regardless of its formal proximity or distance to other forms of belief, Christian confession depends on the deliverances of divine teaching that shape its understanding of reality, and this understanding is in important ways distinctive. Indeed, part of Christian theology’s claim about what is real is that the church exists in the sphere of divine teaching. This contributes to the reasons for Christian theology’s realist concern with what is, even if it does not exhaust them. For to say that theology depends on the deliverances of divine teaching just is to invoke the axiomatic belief in the reality of God’s presence and activity, a necessary condition of Christian confession. “I am with you always,” Jesus promises his disciples  Augustine, DT 5.4.  Frederick Beiser, Hegel (London: Routledge, 2005), 163. 12  A. N. Williams, The Architecture of Theology: Structure, System, and Ratio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 10 11

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and by extension the church built on their foundation (Matt 28:20; Eph 2:20). And since “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8), God remains active always and everywhere; love is actual or else it is not love.13 Paul can thus write to the church at Rome with confidence: “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38–39). Furthermore, since theology takes it that God is the founding reality of all other realities, then it inevitably seeks to relate what is actual to what is most actual (actualissimus), and thus to the reality of God in its midst but not merely in its midst. Love “is from God,” but “God is love” (1 Jn 4:7–8); God loves us in Christ “before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4), and Christ is both “before all things” (Col 1:17) and “above all” (Jn 3:31). Metaphysical concerns are thereby intrinsic to theology in the sense that it attempts to understand things in light of their principles (principia). As a science that seeks to “reduce” or trace things to their first principle and final end in accordance with divine instruction, theology’s concern with the actual terminates in its concern to see all things in relation to God in some respect. This state of affairs characterizes theology in two ways that will prove important for our inquiry, and which also drive us deeper into the problem Paul diagnoses in Romans 1. First, theology’s dependency on the articles of faith means that it is responsive to God’s gracious initiative in revealing himself through his covenant with Israel, and the gifts of himself in the missions of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Theology is thus marked by its religious responsibility to God as an act of worshipful gratitude, as we have already seen. Given divine teaching, what follows for theology is not further divinely inspired teaching but rather hearing, receptivity, and confession of that which has been given “once for all” (Jude 3). The mode of this confession is further shaped by the fact that it responds to the presence and activity of God. This inseparability of divine presence and teaching is part of the reason why the Christian church celebrates Christ’s giving of his body and blood together with a conviction of Christ’s presence in her midst, however this is understood. Second, theology’s responsiveness to the generosity of God’s teaching assumes something of a “speculative” character. There is an obvious sense in which theology should not be “speculative,” where this is understood  Ingolf U. Daferth, Becoming Present: An Inquiry into the Christian Sense of the Presence of God (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 140.

13

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Introduction

pejoratively to consist in unchecked curiosity: theology seeks only to know its subject matter with an intimacy proper to its givenness and thus without departing from theology’s essential dependence on the Giver.14 When properly tempered, theology receives its goods from God’s hands and does not seek prideful mastery over what is real, nor does it seek to find something more fundamental than what it is given. A negative example along these lines might be the search for determinate “possibilities” in the divine mind from which the actual world arose. If reflection on what is possible is known only in light of what is actual, then the latter retains its material priority.15 Theology therefore seeks to perceive truth by seeing into the actual insofar as it is given to see, and in this sense it is speculative as rational analysis of a matter to the extent that it is given for such analysis (ratio ratiocinata). But to what extent does God give himself to be known? Here God’s actuality exercises some sway over what a theological culture will consider impoverished and excessive forms of speculative reason. Where the deposit of Christian teaching is assumed to be exhausted in reflection on the benefits of Christ and the history of God’s works, or where the inhibition on theological inquiry posed by divine incomprehensibility precipitates a despair of the question of God in himself, then speculation will be considered vainly curious where it ventures statements encroaching on noumenal matters. The assumption here is that what is really real is fundamentally or exclusively phenomenal or historical, which might minimally be another way of saying that well-­ordered theological reason will be absorbed with God’s effects. Alternatively, some denial of divine incomprehensibility might consider  See here Paul J. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 50–74. 15  On the connection between actualism and the grammar of creation as gift, see John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2013), 108–12. For a cogent philosophical defense of actualism over possibilism that nevertheless allows for discussion of “nonactual possible worlds . . . logically constructed out of the furniture of the actual world,” see Robert Merrihew Adams, “Theories of Actuality,” in The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality, ed. Michael J. Loux (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 190–209 (203). The ontological priority of actuality in theology has been challenged most notably on eschatological grounds by Eberhard Jüngel, “The World as Possibility and Actuality: The Ontology of the Doctrine of Justification,” in Theological Essays, trans. J. B. Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 95–123. Ingolf U. Dalferth echoes Jüngel to an extent in “Possibile absolutum: The Theological Discovery of the Ontological Priority of the Possible,” in Rethinking the Medieval Legacy for Contemporary Theology, ed. Anselm K. Min (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 91–129. However, neither author seems invested in the kind of possibilism presented here. 14

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speculation impoverished when and where theology fails to name God in a fashion adequate to God’s own self-­knowledge. Here the reality to which theology responds is but another instance of the intramundane realities with which we are familiar. Then there are configurations located between these extremes, and such are the configurations that we will investigate in this book. But already theological reason’s encounter with what is real bears two notable features: its responsibility to acknowledge in gratitude God’s presence and activity as God, and its responsibility to acknowledge God in a way that corresponds to the mode in which God gives himself to be known. The critical problem for theology in this respect, as opposed to philosophical apologetics or philosophy of religion, does not concern the possibility of divine self-­revelation, but rather precisely what the mode of that self-­revelation’s actuality is and what constitutes a proper response to it. So again we confront the question: How do we confess God as God? As we can now see, precisely what the phrase “as God” means is not self-­evident because it might mean “as God is in himself” or “as God has revealed himself,” or something else. Whatever it means to confess God as God must be discerned carefully and argued accordingly. The foregoing suffices as a preliminary outline of the problem underneath the question of how we are to confess God as God in such a way that upholds the Creator/creature distinction. By no means is this outline exhaustive of the issues, which will acquire greater texture throughout the course of this study. What this brief canvassing of matters shows us is that the problem of confessing God as God involves concerns about both the moral and intellectual orientation of theological inquiry as well as the objective reality to which it is oriented. This book proposes to address the problem by looking not only to considerations of theology’s object, God, but also to theology’s construal of the relation between theology (θεολογία) and economy (οἰκονομία).16 For our purposes theology and economy correspond to God’s nature and God’s works, respectively. It is by means of the coordination of theology and economy, after all, that  For an introduction to this central theme, see Michel R. Barnes, “Oeconomia,” in Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, ed. Everett Ferguson, Michael P. McHugh, and Frederick W. Norris, vol. 2: L–Z (New York: Garland, 1997), 825–7; John Behr, The Nicene Faith: True God of True God. The Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2, part 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 208–15. For its semantic uses in Scripture, see Hermann Cremer, Biblico-Theological Lexicon of New Testament Greek, trans. William Urwick (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1895), 450–1; J. Goetzmann, “οὶκονομία,” in New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis, ed. Colin Brown, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), 253–6.

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theological inquiry assumes a disposition with which it views its object and subsequently seeks to articulate rationally what it has seen. Where one locates the standpoint and dispositions of the theologian relative to theology’s object involves judgments about how moral and intellectual virtues are operative in and relevant to theological reason. Different configurations of theology and economy likewise entail different construals of what is given for theology to see into and perceive with grateful adoration. In brief, the argument is that a proper configuration of theology and economy requires two things: first, that theology exhibit how God’s perfection does not require his relation to creation; second, that theology depict the intelligibility of God’s perfection in himself in such a way that licenses the claim that God would be God in undiminished perfection and goodness without creation. Hence we must ask: Does it suffice to articulate God’s perfection as set forth in God’s works, or must we confess something about God’s perfection as logically antecedent to and possibly obtaining without those acts that ground created reality? In some way, theology must retain some priority over economy. However, it is imperative that the priority in view eschews any configuration that sunders theology from economy as much as the opposite. Our coordination of theology and economy succeeds with respect to both requirements when it enables the consistent and thorough acknowledgment of God’s qualitative distinction from creation in its statements and in those statements’ conceptual form. The critical norm for these criteria and the judgments that will satisfy them is a concern to confess God as God, and thus as qualitatively distinct from creation ontically and noetically: God is not in a genus (Deus non est in genere). As we will see, this critical norm is bound up with how one interprets and deploys the doctrine of God’s simplicity, the notion that God is wholly and consistently God and therefore irreducible. In other words, failure to prosecute consistently the thought that divinity is not generic risks the corresponding failure to confess God as God (rather than merely as the horizon for practical judgments, political hopes, and so forth) in our thoughts: “Everything depends on God’s not only being recognised as the one who is unique, but on His being treated in the way which is His due, as the One who is unique . . . It is not an easy thing to apply [knowledge of God’s uniqueness] with the required universality.”17 To conclude our introduction to the problem of confessing God as God, we may ask two further questions: What is the character of this knowledge, and what is its requisite universality?  II/1:445.

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First, the character of our knowledge of God is not comprehensive or univocal. For the sake of clarifying the issue, let us grant for the moment that what “God as God” means minimally is that God exists in and of himself. Confessing God as God entails a certain kind of knowledge that God is God in and for himself and why or how this is so without pretending to be adequate to God’s own knowledge of this state of affairs. The heresiarch Eunomius of Cyzicus provides a good example of what theology must avoid at this point. In his study of the doctrine of divine simplicity in the fourth century, Andrew Radde-­Gallwitz argues that Eunomius was driven by a concern to acknowledge God “as God really is” that could easily be confused with the concern outlined earlier. For Eunomius, theological epistemology has a “debt” it can only repay by “acknowledging God as God really is,” which means that such acknowledgment has to satisfy a definitional knowledge of “what the object known really is, not merely what we perceive it to be or how it relates to us.”18 Eunomius’s account entails the denial of divine incomprehensibility because it presumes to know God as God knows himself. If we maintain divine incomprehensibility, then we must acknowledge that there is no knowledge or confession of God as God “really is” in the Eunomian, definitional sense. The secret things still belong to the Lord, whereas “the things that are revealed belong to us” (Deut 29:29). We do not know God’s innermost being as God knows this, because theology cannot claim to be adequate to God himself but only to God’s revelation. In scholastic language, theology is ectypal, not archetypal, knowledge. However, Eunomius’s reckoning with the debt we owe to God in our confession lights upon truth; indeed, some such reckoning is part of the tradition’s perennial concern to maintain the Creator/creature distinction. In the terms set forth here this reckoning consists in the proper coordination of theology and economy because this distinction registers the thought that God may not be reduced to God’s works, or self-­revelation. Crucially, however, the knowledge this confession entails is not the kind of knowledge Eunomius presupposes; it consists not in comprehensive knowledge of what God is, but in the proper kind of knowledge that (ὃτι) God is and how (ὅπως) or why (διότι) this is so (along with how God is not).19 In short, theology has to reckon with honoring God as God ectypally, and so without pretending  Andrew Radde-­Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 87–112 (97). 19  Basil the Great draws distinctions like these to counter Eunomius’s overly ambitious realism. Radde-­Gallwitz, Transformation of Divine Simplicity, 125f. For example, see St. Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius 1.15; 2.3, trans. Mark DelCogliano and 18

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to thereby know “God as God” archetypally. It is how best to account for the judgment that God is “as God,” which the argument of this book strives to discern. One of the implications of this restriction on the character of our knowledge is that whatever we have to say about God’s self-­ identity in and of himself, it can only arise from within that relation God has established with creation. Second, the universality of this judgment we seek to secure responds to a distinction Anselm draws prayerfully between the actual and conceptual indivisibility, or simplicity, of God: “For whatever is made up of parts is not absolutely one, but in a sense many and other than itself, and it can be broken up either actually or by the mind – all of which things are foreign to You, than whom nothing better can be thought.”20 When Anselm attempts to confess God’s utter distinction from creation in terms of God’s simplicity, he recognizes that this confession must hold true for what theology says about God as an extramental reality (“actually”) and how theology thinks about this reality conceptually (“or by the mind”). Hence the universality with which we must acknowledge divine actuality: God’s distinction from creation shapes the church’s confession of God as God consistently when it affects that confession actually and conceptually, ontically and noetically. As William Desmond reminds us, “An idol is no less an idol for being wrought from thought and concepts as from stone or gold or mud.”21 Confessing God as God therefore involves not only what one confesses as true of God’s being and activity but also how one thinks and speaks this truth.

The Procedure Navigating complex issues like the one we have outlined requires one to think in a positive theological register, saying something about what theologians should do in the present. However, one is always better equipped for such speaking only after having carefully listened first, not only to Scripture but also to significant thinkers in the Church’s history. Just so, this book aims at diagnosing two influential approaches to this critical problem for the sake of contemporary appropriation. We will do so through a critical analysis of the coordination of theology and Andrew Radde-­Gallwitz. The Fathers of the Church, vol. 122 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 114, 133–4. 20  Anselm, Proslogion §18, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, eds. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 98. 21  William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), ix.

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economy in Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth and how this helps us better understand the problem and the issues attending it, as well as what we might say in their shadow. More will be said about why these two thinkers have been selected in a moment, but we should note at the outset that they both demonstrate a keen concern with the problem in question and an eye for its systematic dimensions. One of the chief lessons we have to learn from both thinkers is that the intelligibility of God’s relation to creation depends on materially prior teaching about God’s fullness in himself such that questions about God’s relation to creation are bound up with questions about divine act and being. That is to say, the question about God’s distinction from creation is first and foremost a question about God’s perfection and not about the relation between God and creation as such. To get at these issues we have to look at divine being and act, theology and economy. Each theologian’s thought about the relation between divine being and act is conceivable within a pattern of divine “self-­correspondence,” which is understood in what follows as a hermeneutical device for tracing the forms of continuity between God’s inner life and the extension of this life to us in time.22 Correspondence therefore traces the relation between act and being between its internal and external poles. Essential to the process of tracing this relation between God’s act and being are divergent interpretations of the classical insight that God is not only a “prior” actuality but also a pure actuality (actus purus). Here again we see how divine simplicity figures into this problem directly and indirectly. Among other things, commitment to a notion of pure act ensures the inseparability of theology and economy as much as it seems to raise questions about their distinction. In the right hands, however, this notion has always been teased apart to discern the precise nature of this  distinction. Aquinas and Barth are exemplary in this regard. Investigating how each theologian approaches God’s pure actuality reveals further differences concerning not only how to distinguish theology from economy, but the proper scope of theological reason as well. How precisely God’s external activity corresponds to God’s inner life thus finds different answers in Aquinas and Barth, and these differences illuminate the difficulties and possibilities involved in confessing God’s qualitative distinction from all things consistently. Oversimplified for the sake of 22

 The notion is appropriated from Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth, trans. John Webster (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 36.

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contrast, Aquinas maintains that God’s external acts correspond to God’s internal being, whereas Barth maintains that God’s external acts correspond to God’s internal acts. How one configures these correspondences bears upon how one relates theology to economy, and thus how one distinguishes God from creation both ontically and noetically. This terse summary will acquire more nuance and context throughout the course of our study, but it isolates a further question that will come to the fore in  our analysis: How do God’s internal acts relate to God’s being? To what extent is God’s actuality logically prior to the ineffable movement of God toward us voiced in the doctrine of God’s decree, providence, or predestination? This asks the crucial question about what we will call God’s absolute self-­consistency: How is God the self-­same God in every divine activity, internal as well as external? It therefore registers the question about the correspondence between act and being on a primordial level and asks, “Are God’s internal acts that include a reference to creatures logically consistent with God’s perfection and therefore demonstrably acts of God?” How is it that we know we have to do with God and not with a mere appearance when we encounter God’s actions of nature and grace that constitute our history? This question in particular will assume greater significance in the later parts of the present study and in its conclusion. Hearing what the church has said about these issues equips us better to say something in turn. Therefore, both diagnostic and prescriptive reasons motivate this book’s historical-­systematic approach to the problem of confessing God. The first reason is diagnostic, turning to voices of the past for the sake of seeing where reflection in the present may have forgotten certain of its responsibilities or may have neglected certain questions with insufficient warrant. To this extent, this book sets forth three issues related to a positive dogmatics of God’s perfection that have received scant attention in contemporary treatments of the doctrine of God. These include (1) the moral determinations of theology’s inquiry into divine being and activity, and the function of metaphysical reasoning to serve positive doctrinal reflection; (2) the significance of divine self-­consistency in addition to divine self-­correspondence for the doctrine of God; and (3) how questions about God’s relation to creation require attention to confessing God as God by rendering intelligible God’s distinction from creatures both ontically and noetically. Exactly how these issues have been neglected will emerge over the course of the study where they prove most relevant to the analysis, and so need not detain us further.

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The second reason is prescriptive: to discern an account of God’s perfection that neither separates nor divides God from creatures, but which nevertheless enables us to confess the depths of God’s intimacy with creatures without violence to God’s distinction from them. The present study shares the classical conviction, voiced by several contemporary theologians and philosophers who have sought to recover it, that God is qualitatively distinct from creation and that God’s relation to creation must be “non-­contrastive” and characterized by “non-duality.”23 This means that God is not a thing alongside other things, and so God’s agency in and among creatures does not crowd out or frustrate created agency in the way that two creatures may displace one another. Aquinas and Barth share these same convictions, which we may summarize in three notes. First, God’s qualitative distinction from creation means that the distinction itself may not have been because God’s perfection to which the distinction gestures is not dependent on creation. This is not to say that God’s perfection might have been identical to creation under different circumstances, but rather that God’s intrinsic perfection is such that it would be undiminished if there were no reality distinct from God’s inner-­triune reality. Put differently: “God differs to the point of being the non-­other” (a statement that conceals as much as it reveals).24 God’s distinction from creation is itself unique (sui generis), not a distinction within creation. This fundamental point leads to another, which is that God’s activity in creation is not a zero-­sum game with creatures in which divine movement compromises the integrity of creaturely movement. The two are not in competition because God is not another item in the  See here Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982/Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 1–52; Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (New York: Blackwell, 1988), 40–8; David B. Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 129–42, 217–33. 24  Jean-Yves Lacoste, La Phénoménalité de Dieu: Neuf etudes (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2008), back cover (with obvious allusions to Nicholas of Cusa). In itself, this statement is also ventured beyond the confines of Christian theology. For example, Emmanuel Levinas maintains a version of this same affirmation: “God is not simply the ‘first other,’ the ‘other par excellence,’ or the ‘absolutely other,’ but the other than the other (autre qu’autrui), other otherwise, other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other.” Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 64. We are interested here not in the formal affirmation of difference, but what material claims about God’s perfection mean for that difference. 23

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Introduction

universe; God is not an automated bowling ball on a billiards table. Therefore, rather than pushing them aside, God’s movement of creatures vivifies their self-­movement and instigates no contest of wills. A fundamental compatibilism characterizes the relation of divine and human agency on account of the fact that God’s difference from us is not that of a bigger and more powerful version of created agency. Finally, these convictions lead to the insight that God’s distinction from and yet relation to creatures entails creatures’ “non-­reciprocal relation of dependence” on God, who gives to all “life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25).25 While Christian teaching maintains that there are relations constitutive of God’s life – particularly the relations intrinsic to God’s triunity – this confession has traditionally stood or fallen with the denial that God’s relation to creation is constitutive for the Father, the Son (in particular), or the Holy Spirit. God’s relations to creation are constitutive of creatures, but not of God. The question, of course, is how such metaphysical insights are coordinated with the character of God’s perfection as enacted in the missions of the Son and Spirit, and not merely with formal ideas of a “maximally perfect being.” How does a positive dogmatics of God’s perfection, encompassing questions of God’s self-­ correspondence and self-­consistency, support or hinder these crucial affirmations? And vice versa? Framing these questions within the traditional distinction between theology and economy is an attempt at rendering answers with greater material specificity. Analysis of the relationship between theology and economy in two theologians who share these convictions serves the constructive task of articulating an account of God’s triune perfection that enables us to confess God as God, and thus with an eye on its theological distinctiveness. To conclude our overview of the problem this book addresses and the procedure by which it does so, some brief remarks are necessary concerning the selection of interlocutors and texts. Why Aquinas and Barth? We have already noted that both thinkers in their own ways were concerned with the problem of how to confess God as God, and by virtue of their unique gifts were able to see the various dimensions of the problem. This in itself makes them profoundly instructive if we are to give serious attention to the systematic and metaphysical elements of the problem. Primarily, then, we focus on these thinkers because both share  Sara Grant, Toward an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-­Dualist Christian, ed. Bradley Malkovsky (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 40; cited in Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 134.

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a perennial set of sound theological convictions: a concern that theology arises from patient attention to Scripture, that theology is transparent to moral instruction on the Christian life, that theology is ontologically invested, that teaching about God’s perfection is fundamental to the proper confession of the gospel, and that “God cannot be compared to anyone or anything. God is only like himself.”26 Beyond this, there are a couple of ancillary reasons that might be mentioned. Both theologians represent primary points of reference for contemporary reflection on the doctrine of God, and so remain generative sources of constructive theological inquiry.27 And there is the additional value that many increasingly see these theologies as fruitful for ecumenical dialogue.28 However, the primary reason for focusing on Aquinas and Barth is that each offers a substantive account of Christian teaching that is systematic in scope, profound in insight, and sufficiently comprehensive enough to lay the issues bare. Despite what gains there may be in focusing on these thinkers in light of the ancillary reasons mentioned, the present approach to both thinkers looks to them for insight into how systematic theology should undertake a well-­ordered doctrine of God in the present. Beyond these reasons, perhaps more should be said about the ways in which reflection on both thinkers facilitates a dialogue between medieval and modern intellectual contexts. Those looking for such reflections may find them handled sensitively elsewhere, but they would distract ultimately  II/1:376.  To mention only a few, one thinks here of projects as diverse as the following: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s trilogy; Robert W. Jenson, Knowledge of Things Hoped For: Sense for Theological Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vols. 1–2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 1999); George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984); Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001); John Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (London: T&T Clark, 2012); John B. Webster, God without Measure, vols. 1–2 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015); Christopher R. J. Holmes, The Lord Is Good: Seeking the God of the Psalter (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2018). 28  See, variously, Henry Chavannes, The Analogy between God and the World in St. Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, trans. William Lumley (New York: Vantage Press, 1992); Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, eds., Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic–Protestant Dialogue (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). 26 27

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Introduction

from what we seek to do here, which is to engage the material claims of these thinkers as theologians. This is not to pit such factors against one another competitively, but only to stake out this book’s central concerns. While we cannot know what Aquinas would have made of Barth, we know well that and how Aquinas was important for the latter. In Barth’s lectures on The Theology of John Calvin, he states in passing that the Reformers’ sense of their own historical moment was situated in a relatively concrete practical context rather than that of the “great philosophy of history.” As a chief example, he points to their neglect of “the man in whom they must have recognized . . . as their most dangerous opponent, the true genius of the Catholic Middle Ages . . . Thomas Aquinas.”29 Barth admits the creativity this afforded the Reformers, but he considers it a lapse of judgment. Rather than focusing their attentions on “late scholastics of the age of decline,” they should have focused on the man behind all these figures, and therefore on the “spirit of the Summa, on the Gothic cathedral and the world of Dante.”30 Barth believed that those who were not in danger of becoming scholastics had no right to pass judgment on scholasticism.31 In his own way, Barth would follow this advice. Eventually this led him to engage the Protestant scholastic tradition in a depth that made him quite strange to his peers, but it led him first to engage Aquinas. At his first academic post at the University of Göttingen, Barth was introduced to Aquinas by his colleague Erik Peterson, and he would continue to wrestle with Aquinas throughout the remainder of his career. Barth did so not because he was trying to get to the heart of Roman Catholicism or medieval theology, but rather because he saw in Aquinas, as Amy Marga has shown, someone “who approached the holy mystery of God in God’s divine otherness and Gegenständlichkeit [objectivity] in a way that Barth saw that he could learn from.”32 On the very questions surrounding the problem of confessing God as God, Barth thought he had much to learn from Aquinas on how best to deploy the “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and creation.33 This was true not only as concerns the objective aspects of the problem, but also the moral-­intellectual aspects: “The attitude of humility and of asking  Karl Barth, The Theology of John Calvin, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 22. 30  Ibid., 22. 31  Ibid., 26. 32  Amy Marga, Karl Barth’s Dialogue with Catholicism in Göttingen and Münster: Its Significance for His Doctrine of God (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 29. 33  Cf. the preface to the second edition of Barth’s Römerbrief in Barth, Romans, 10. 29

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God to give of God’s being in the task of theological reflection, which was so central to Barth’s entire career, was learned, early on and in part, at the feet of Thomas.”34 Though separated by drastically different social and intellectual contexts, then, both thinkers stood before the same “holy mystery” and yet said different things. It is this standing and speaking that interests us here, rather than the contextual questions as such. We must not reduce the differences to matters of intellectual context, but neither are these factors completely irrelevant. Only their relevance is ancillary to the material claims themselves. While our focus on the material claims of these theologians concerning the problem at hand does not excuse us from careful interpretation and commentary, it does entail certain limitations of the current study that should be stated at the outset. First and foremost, our focus is topical and conceptual, whereas the range and depth of each theologian are far greater than the concepts under investigation. Central elements and motifs of each theologian surface in an analysis of God’s being, activity, and relations, but equally central aspects must be left aside. Comparatively little is said about analogy, the relation between nature and grace, or biblical exegesis, for example, despite the fact that any comprehensive analysis of each thinker must address such topics. It is true that these elements ultimately cannot be avoided in a study such as the present one, nor should they be. But that does not mean that they must occupy center stage. The method of approaching these two figures corresponds to one of two primary tasks for systematic theology. If theology is “biblical reasoning,” as John Webster has argued, then it has both exegetical and dogmatic or systematic moments. The second moment, systematic reasoning, is a form of biblical reasoning extended into an analytical idiom that enables theology to articulate synthetically what it has learned from Scripture: the subject matter (res) and its interrelations.35 In the conclusion we will suggest how the concepts analyzed are grounded in biblical exegesis, but the focus throughout is on the conceptual dimensions of the dogmatic task. Since the conceptual focus is attended by consideration of historical figures, it is further clarified by the distinction between “de re” and “de facto” interpretation.36 For our purposes, the main import of this distinction concerns how the former isolates concepts for prescriptive analysis and how the latter integrates concepts with an author’s intellectual,  Marga, Barth’s Dialogue with Catholicism, 33.  Webster, “Biblical Reasoning,” in Domain of the Word, 130–1. 36  Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 94–9. 34 35

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Introduction

historical, and sociopolitical context for primarily descriptive analysis. Ideally the two forms of interpretation are inseparable: interpretation of an author’s claims is best undertaken from within the horizon or at least against the background of de facto interpretation, and the latter is most useful when it informs our own engagement with the same (or at least similar) exigencies to which the original arguments were directed. In this way, the two modes of interpretation inform one another. However, it is crucial to distinguish between the two, at minimum for the simple reason that whereas historians are tasked with understanding, philosophy and theology are tasked with decisions  – and turning to understanding for the sake of deciding is no longer mere history.37 So while the terms of our study do not neatly compartmentalize systematic and historical theology, our focus on the conceptual matter in our authors’ texts neglects some aspects of de facto interpretation to an extent. Second, the limitation noted carries a corollary: the materials under analysis are necessarily selective and as such not exhaustively representative of either thinker. The investigation will center on the first part of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, and key section-­ paragraphs of Barth’s Church Dogmatics – primarily from volume II – that focus upon divine being and activity. The inquiry consists of two parts treating the thought of Aquinas and Barth, respectively. The first part of Part One and Part Two consists of walking through a key, but narrow, text and observing how each thinker coordinates the material and formal objects of theology while establishing the basic principles of divine being and activity. The remainder of each part consists of a more synthetic approach to a variety of texts that seeks to show how each theologian construes God’s self-­correspondence and the relation to the world this construal implies. Our analysis of Aquinas focuses primarily on the Summa theologiae and the Disputed Questions on Power (Quaestiones disputatae de potentia Dei). Aquinas’s opening tract of the Summa, the so-­called treatise “on the one God” (De Deo uno), along with his questions on creation and simplicity in De potentia, receive the most attention but are supplemented routinely with parallel texts. The narrowing of texts is somewhat more important for the analysis of Barth, not only because the Church Dogmatics contains a considerable amount of internal development but also because the relationship between Barth’s earlier and later thought is a subject of continuing investigation. Our analysis of Barth focuses on  Cf. Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd edn. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952), x.

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§§28–33 from both volumes of Church Dogmatics II, where Barth treats the doctrines of the divine perfections and election inclusively within the doctrine of God. These sections in particular offer Barth’s most focused reflections on the issues addressed in this book related to God’s being-inact and his relation to the world, but they also serve as a window into a generally unified thought spanning two volumes which are often taken to represent a major shift in his thought. Irrespective of what significance one attributes to Barth’s doctrine of election, it is positively correlated to his doctrine of God in some way, and our analysis will suggest that this owes at least in part to how he conceives of God’s self-­correspondence. While other texts could certainly provide distinct windows of access into Barth’s thought, either from the early volume I or the later volume IV, no other selection of texts could provide us with a more focused and unified reflection on the topic at hand. Whatever the disadvantages of this selection of texts, they are only ameliorated by the kind of comprehensive analysis of Barth’s whole thought that we cannot undertake within the narrow confines of this study. Therefore, this investigation aspires to sufficiently provide a comprehensive and accurate analysis of its topic as found in each thinker in these texts, notwithstanding what either thinker may say elsewhere or about other things. William James’s famous remark about Hegel applies equally to either Aquinas or Barth: “The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of his procedure, someone will accuse you of misunderstanding it.”38 This is inevitable and to be expected with such towering figures, but the controls placed on the study through its narrow focus and responsibilities should minimize the kinds of objections that could be raised against the procedure. Finally, while the analysis will be of interest to specialists, engagement with specialist literature is strictly for the sake of elucidating the topic at hand and not for speaking directly into discussions and debates. In the next chapter, we will set forth Aquinas’s approach to the questions of God’s being and activity by looking first at his formulation of theology’s object and how this leads him to characterize God’s intrinsic perfection, as well as the moral interest attending his argument. The following chapter shows how this bears upon God’s relation to creation, taking up some subterranean issues concerning God’s self-­correspondence and the metaphysics of relations. Subsequently, three chapters examine the same issues in Barth: how he approaches the object of theology and 38

 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 46.

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Introduction

the significance this has for God’s intrinsic perfection, how Barth understands divine simplicity and the correspondence between God’s being and act, and how this affects God’s relation to creation as set forth in Barth’s doctrine of election. With the analyses behind us and the insights they afford us in hand, we will then turn to a constructive consideration of the problem of confessing God as God. It is to these several matters that we may now turn.

Part I GOD’S BEING AND ACTIVITY ACCORDING TO THOMAS AQUINAS

2 Aquinas on God’s Being and Activity

The purpose of Part I is to outline the way Thomas Aquinas understands the confession of God as God and the many theological and metaphysical issues involved with this confession. We will therefore need to analyze his account of God’s being and activity, and how teaching about God’s self-­sufficiency grounds God’s relation to creation. Aquinas understands God’s relation to creation to follow upon considerations of how God relates to himself in the simple blessedness of the Trinity. The tight coordina­ tion of theology and economy we find here is among the most influential in the tradition, arguably representing a tidemark in scholastic theology because of its careful balancing of metaphysical, dogmatic, exegetical, and moral concerns. Aquinas’s handling of many topics and concepts recurs in subsequent generations of scholastic theologians and provides common points of reference for both Catholic and Protestant theologians. Careful attention to Aquinas’s notions of divine act, being, order, and relations will therefore provide a solid framework for understanding the broadly scholastic contours of these matters Barth encountered when he turned to the Middle Ages and the post-­Reformation divines to help him find a critical edge on the Protestant liberal tradition. Even more importantly, we see here a very careful, nuanced appreciation of what is at stake in confessing God as God, and no less impressive an answer as to how one is to think and speak before the holy mystery. Our present task is to survey relevant elements of Aquinas’s doctrine of God that help us to access his thought on how God’s relation to creation is only intelligible in light of materially prior teaching about God’s self-­sufficiency. This is the means by which we will encounter Aquinas’s answer to the question we posed in the introduction. The focus is on 27

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Aquinas’s doctrines of God and creation as set forth primarily in the first part of his magisterial Summa theologiae in which he treats first God and then the procession of creatures from God. The details of the account await consideration, but its conclusions are easily summarized: Aquinas understands God primarily in terms of God himself in his eternal blessedness, which grounds a circular construal of divine movement and activity that is primarily ordered to God in himself and secondarily to creatures, resulting in genuine relations with creatures in time that are nevertheless understood metaphysically as “nonreal.” So systematic is Aquinas’s thought on matters doctrinal and metaphysical that any number of approaches might suffice to demonstrate such conclusions. Particularly the kinds of approaches to Aquinas invested heavily in his philosophical thought might beckon us to consider only the metaphysics of divine simplicity and relations or a careful parsing of his understanding of participation. However, such an approach would ultimately miss much that is important to Aquinas’s thinking on God’s self-­sufficiency and relation to creation, like the account of divine self-­correspondence we will trace in the next chapter. These matters are only intelligible in light of the overtly theological and moral concerns that animate Aquinas’s inquiry in his treatment of God’s essence. Our inquiry will therefore attend to matters of conceptual clarification and metaphysical intelligibility without divorcing them from the overarching theological and soteriological context of the Summa theologiae. One must not overemphasize Aquinas the “philosopher” or the “theologian” if one is to see Aquinas the thirteenth-­ century Dominican friar.1 This chapter focuses on the first treatise to the doctrine of God in which Aquinas discusses what pertains to the unity of God’s essence (Ia.3–26). The following chapter will treat of God’s self-­correspondence in his creative act and its consequences for God’s relation to creatures. The construal of God’s self-­sufficient life Aquinas articulates in these opening questions bears upon the specific kind of divine self-­correspondence he employs when discussing the creative act, so our analysis of his doctrine

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 Balanced overviews in this regard, informing and consistent with the approach taken here, include the following: Etienne Gilson, Thomism: The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Laurence K. Shook and Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2002); Jean-­Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2: Spiritual Master, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005); Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Thomas Aquinas: Faith, Reason, and Following Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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of God in this chapter is focused on his understanding of God’s perfect life and the way to that understanding. This involves looking at how Aquinas understands the relation between theology and economy, and then how he employs this coordination in his articulation of God’s self-­ sufficiency. After some introductory remarks on Aquinas’s approach to God’s actuality, we identify the formal orientation of his inquiry in the question on God’s existence that opens his doctrine of God. Aquinas proposes to study God’s being in light of his external works, which he analyzes according to their causal efficacy. Native to his formal orientation is a moral concern for the proper acknowledgment of God that precludes idolatry and pride, and which results in pious gratitude and worship. As the course of the argument reveals, only a proper understanding of God’s self-­sufficient divine nature and thus his qualitative distinction from creation enables this acknowledgment in all of its soteriologically relevant force. As Aquinas proceeds to discuss the reasons for the causal texture of God’s external works, he demonstrates the metaphysical intelligibility of divine simplicity, perfection, and goodness. Throughout these questions, he progressively achieves greater insight into the character of God’s self-­ sufficiency that is only fully articulated in God’s possession and enjoyment of his own goodness summarized in the doctrine of divine blessedness. Aquinas’s understanding of divine goodness, and blessedness in particular, forms the basis for his construal of God’s self-­correspondence in the creative act and God’s consequent relation to creation explored in the next chapter, so it is important that we understand their meaning and function in some detail.

Approaching Divine Actuality: Formal and Material Objects Aquinas has two convictions about theology and its relation to questions about life, the universe, and everything that need to be stated at the outset because they shape both the questions and the answers he sets before us. Moreover, these convictions ground the coordination of theology and economy that shapes the inquiry we follow throughout this chapter. The first is that theology should serve those to whom it is addressed by helping induct them into and grow in the Christian life, and the second is related to it: God is the source and goal of everything, the Christian life included. These convictions are nowhere more explicit than in the particular purpose of the Summa theologiae, which is to instruct the novice on the end to which God has ordained rational creatures – an end beyond

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the reach of natural reason because it is God himself.2 This soteriological purpose means that theology (sacra doctrina) requires something more than the mere philosophical sciences, which proceed deductively from known, self-­evident principles to their necessary conclusions. Theology requires the divine instruction of revelation and consequently “proceeds from principles established by the light of a higher science, namely, the science of God and the blessed.”3 Theology is no less a science on that account, but it is a peculiar science whose subaltern character accords with its creaturely estate. Just as music derives the principles of harmony, rhythm, and tone from arithmetic, so, too, theology derives its principles from God’s knowledge that he communicates in grace. The importance of divine revelation places a premium on the interpretation of Scripture, but revelation also directs theology’s scientific reach to the whole of reality since God reveals himself therein. This is why theology is a genuine science (scientia) as well as wisdom (sapientia). Wisdom is “chief among the sciences” because it considers the highest causes of things, in the light of which it can judge (judicare) everything underneath it.4 An architect is considered “wiser” than a brick layer because the former plans the edifice and knows how its parts relate to one another to distribute weight and so forth. Theology is therefore the “wisdom above all human wisdom” because it concerns the architectonic foundations of reality in God. As wisdom, theology must instruct in prudence and the proper direction of all our activities in light of their proper end: “Therefore he who considers absolutely the highest cause of the whole universe, namely God, is most of all called wise.”5 The scientific character of theology means that those who teach theology serve their students with truth, and its sapiential character means that this truth is important to the whole Christian life. Provided with this cosmic reach, Aquinas specifies that theology considers a variety of things within its purview without sacrificing its unity as a science. Instrumental  Ia.1.1. Here our consideration of this material is very restricted, leaving aside questions about the speculative and practical dimensions of holy teaching, as well as its relation to natural knowledge of God. The whole picture is provided masterfully by Jean-­Pierre Torrell, “Le savoir théologique chez saint Thomas,” in Recherches thomasiennes: Études revues et augmentées (Paris: Vrin, 2000), 121–57; Torrell, “St. Thomas Aquinas: Theologian and Mystic,” in Christ and Spirituality in St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Bernhard Blankenhorn (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 1–20. 3  Ia.1.2.corp. 4  Ia.1.6.corp. 5  Ia.1.6.corp. 2

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to this is a distinction between theology’s material object (objectum materiale) and formal object (objectum formale). This distinction is itself crucial to grasping Aquinas’s coordination of theology and economy, and this is precisely the purpose for which he employs it. Aquinas explains when setting forth his account of faith: The object of every cognitive habit includes two things: first, that which is known materially, and is the material object, so to speak, and, secondly, that whereby it is known, which is the formal aspect of the object (formalis ratio objecti).6

What holds true here for the habit of faith is illustrated with the power of sight: the object of sight may be any number of things – a donkey or a stone – but the “formal aspect,” that whereby or on account of which something is an object of sight, is its visibility. Aquinas draws a parallel to theology to note that “holy Scripture looks at things in that they are divinely revealed,” and so in a basic sense divine revelation is the formal aspect on account of which anything is referred to theology.7 When Aquinas takes up the question of theology’s subject, he specifies what it means to say that theology concerns itself with things under the formal aspect of being divinely revealed: “all things are dealt with in holy teaching with respect to God (sub ratione Dei), either because they are God himself or because they are ordered to God as their principle and end.”8 Since revelation is an act of God, then even revelation itself is intelligible only in reference to God. Thus theology concerns what God has revealed: himself and all things in light of God as their Creator and end. Yet there is a material order intrinsic to this material object: “holy teaching does not treat God and creatures equally, but of God principally and of creatures only so far as they are referable to God as their principle or end.”9 All of this is manifest in that theology’s first principles are the articles of faith, and faith is about God. Therefore, the material object of faith is God and other things ordered to God as his effects by which “man is helped on his journey towards the enjoyment of God,” while its formal object is God revealing both himself and other things through Christ, Scripture, and tradition.10 This distinction between the formal and material object of theology is ingredient to the way Aquinas structures his initial tract on the unity of God’s essence. Aquinas’s opening tract encompasses three, and plausibly,  IIaIIae.1.1.corp.  Ia.1.3.corp. 8  Ia.1.7.corp. 9  Ia.1.3.ad1. 10  IIaIIae.1.1.corp; IIaIIae.1.9–10; Ia.1.7.corp. 6 7

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four movements: God’s existence (Ia.2), God’s substantiality (Ia.3–11), the divine names (Ia.12–13), and God’s operations (Ia.14–26).11 The high point of these questions is the final one on divine blessedness because this is God’s summary perfection and serves a key exemplary function for the soteriological aims of holy teaching. It is participation in God’s blessedness toward which the creature strives, and so demonstrating that God is blessed is an essential first step toward considering the creature’s ultimate end and the way to this end.12 As we will see, the doctrine of God’s blessedness enables theology to glimpse the heights of “God himself” (ipse Deus) that is theology’s principal material object. However, Aquinas’s sapiential procedure moves from the ground up and so begins with initial considerations of divine causality and divine “features” like simplicity, perfection, and goodness before tracing these up to the heights of God’s blessed self-sufficiency.13 We follow the order of his procedure in this chapter to demonstrate how the formal orientation of his inquiry coheres with its material object. Though God’s external works are the basis of the consideration of his being, Aquinas nevertheless maintains a distinction between God himself as the principal material object of theological inquiry and these revelatory external works as that inquiry’s formal orientation. Aquinas’s use of this distinction between formal and material objects gives us a glimpse into his precise coordination of theology and economy, and the portrait of divine self-­sufficiency it produces, all of which prepares us for the next chapter’s consideration of God’s correspondence to himself in his act of creation and the consequence of this self-­correspondence for the Creator–creature relation.

The Ways of God: The Formal Orientation of Theological Inquiry The Five Ways and the Acknowledgment of God The core insight that drives most of Aquinas’s first tract in the Summa theologiae is his pervasive sense of God’s actuality. This insight materially  Aquinas explicitly identifies three, subsuming Ia.12–13 within one of its bracketing tracts (Ia.2.prol). 12  IaIIae.prol; IIIa.prol. 13  The language of “features” rather than “attributes” comes from David Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 14–17. Such a designation highlights the peculiar nature of Aquinas’s concepts. As we will see, it is tricky to understand simplicity or perfection as a divine “attribute” since these are the two conditions for the intelligibility of “attributing” anything at all to God. Hence, feature. 11

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informs the intelligibility of God’s being and operations, from divine simplicity to God’s blessedness.14 What Aquinas understands by God’s actuality appears initially in the form of an intensifying causal analysis that leads to a philosophical demonstration of God’s existence as the presupposition of all created existence. Perhaps only Aquinas’s reflections on analogy have generated as much debate as the “five ways” (quinque viae) or proofs for God’s existence one encounters at the beginning of the Summa.15 Understandably so, since the question is located intentionally after the introductory question on the nature of theology and yet set apart from everything that follows. One cannot bypass this question without missing something essential to Aquinas’s overarching intentions, so we do well to begin where he begins. Our interest in the five ways does not concern their philosophical integrity, but rather how they function in Aquinas’s argument to help demonstrate God’s self-­sufficiency. Especially through the moral interest of the question on God’s existence, we see how it initiates an inquiry into divine act and being ordered toward the proper acknowledgment of God in his distinction from and responsibility for creation. The five ways to demonstrate God’s existence do not ambition the kind of proof for which the modern atheist ostensibly waits. Whatever one makes of these different demonstrations, Aquinas intends to show that the existence of God is not self-­evident to us irrespective of how evident it is in itself. After all, the “fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good” (Ps 14:1).16 Aquinas cites the first half of this passage at the outset of his inquiry, and not carelessly. For Aquinas, atheism is primarily a moral disposition when one considers how the world rejects the light of Christ for the darkness of sin: “For wisdom will not enter into a malicious soul, nor dwell in a body subdued by sin” (Wisd 1:4).17 Implicit in the question’s biblical

 Ia.3.2; Ia.12.1; Ia.14.1.ad1; Ia.14.2; Ia.25.1; DP 1.1–2; 3.1; 3.4.ad5; 3.5; 7.3–4.  For an overview of these debates, see Kerr, After Aquinas, 52–72. The details of Aquinas’s arguments are masterfully set forth and analyzed in John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 379–500. See also Gilson, Thomism, 39–83; Ghislain Lafont, Structures et méthode dans la “Somme théologique” de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961; reprinted by Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1996), 40–3; Rudi A. te Velde, Aquinas on God: The ‘Divine Science’ of the Summa Theologiae (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), 37–63. 16  Ia.2.1.s.c. 17  Ioan. 3.3.491; Psalmo 13.1. 14 15

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prompt is its moral character, two observations about which will serve us moving forward. First, the moral culpability of atheism implies an awareness of God available to the natural light of reason but suppressed by sin, and therefore a certain responsibility to God before his works. Aquinas again appeals to Scripture: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20).18 The world is charged with divine eloquence, for the words “have been made” (facta sunt) imply that the universe and its inhabitants are effects that witness to their ultimate cause. Aristotle’s understanding of cause (αἰτία) designates a twofold relationship of responsibility between a source and its effect: the former is responsible for the latter, and the latter is dependent upon (we might also say, responsible to) the former. Hence, metaphysical demonstration of this relationship yields a particular understanding of the things related.19 Such is Aquinas’s use of the notion of cause, seeking to demonstrate God’s comprehensive responsibility for the being of all things and those things’ consequent responsibility to God. God’s existence is therefore demonstrable from an analysis of principles, investigating that on account of which things are not mere quanta but effects: “Hence the existence of God, in so far as it is not self-­evident to us, can be demonstrated from those of his effects which are known to us.”20 Even if the subject of the inquiry is  Ia.2.2.s.c.; Ia.1.6.corp. For an overview of Romans 1:20 in the Summa and the debates over Aquinas’s interpretation, see Matthew Levering, Paul in the Summa Theologiae (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 219–35. 19  Aryeh Kosman, “Understanding, Explanation, and Insight in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics,” in Virtues of Thought: Essays on Plato and Aristotle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 7–26. See also Lawrence Dewan, “St. Thomas and the Principle of Causality,” in Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 61–80. 20  Ia.2.2.corp; Rom. 1.6.115–22. This does entail a certain availability of the knowledge of God’s essential divinity – but not the distinction of persons – to the natural light of reason; see Anna Bonta Moreland, Known by Nature: Thomas Aquinas on Natural Knowledge of God (New York: Crossroad, 2010); cf. Eugene F. Rogers, Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). While Rogers goes too far in denying genuine knowledge of God to the Gentiles, he recognizes clearly the moral imperatives attending knowledge of God in Aquinas’s Romans commentary. One should supplement both Moreland and Rogers with closer attention to Aquinas’s theology of illumination: Matthew Cuddeback, “Light and Form in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Metaphysics of the Knower” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1998); Mathew Cuddeback, “Thomas Aquinas on Divine Illumination and the Authority of the First Truth,” Nova et Vetera (English Edition) 7.3 (2009): 579–602; David L. Whidden, Christ the Light: 18

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not an abstract divinity but the “invisible nature” of the Trinity, it might be suspected still that the inquiry is but a disinterested validation of the faith on rational grounds. However, such suspicions make too little of the role Romans 1 plays in setting the agenda. Closer to the mark is that Aquinas intends to set forth the right functioning of reason in the light of faith. We must reckon properly with the “effects which are known to us” precisely because we are “without excuse” (Rom 1:20; 2:1) and must avoid being “deprived of the light of wisdom” on account of “spiritual darkness” (cf. Rom 1:21).21 It is not that the Gentiles had no knowledge of God before the advent of Christ but that what knowledge they did have was misused in impiety.22 Aquinas notes that their “ignorance” of God was a result of guilt and not vice versa, just as it is for all humanity, so reckoning with God’s effects as effects of God is intrinsic to one’s natural responsibility to God.23 Indeed the commandments to love God and neighbor “are self-­evident to human reason, either through nature or through faith.”24 Failures with regard to God’s existence are ultimately failures to acknowledge God as “the first truth” whom we must worship and obey: “whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin” (Jas 4:17).25 Indeed, those who do “not see fit to acknowledge God” (Rom 1:25) do so actively: “They say to God, ‘Depart from us! We do not desire the knowledge of your ways (viarum tuarum)’” (Job 21:14).26 The chief conclusion we need to draw from this is that Aquinas pursues the knowledge of God’s ways through the five ways for the sake of acknowledging God properly. In turn, the proper acknowledgment of God involves the exclusion of all idolatry and false theology such that one renders to God the worship he is due.27 Second, it follows that the knowledge of God’s ways takes a specific shape for the sake of acknowledging God properly in his acts of nature, grace, and glory. This shape is visible in what the five ways say about divine activity. Throughout the five ways, Aquinas employs the pseudo-­Dionysian “threefold way” (triplex via), and primarily the way of causality (via causalitatis), to reduce the evident effects of the The Theology of Light and Illumination in Thomas Aquinas (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). 21  Rom. 1.7.130. 22  Rom. 1.7.127. 23  Rom. 1.7.123–7. 24  IaIIae.100.3.ad1. 25  Rom. 1.7.125, 1.7.142–3. 26  Rom. 1.8.153. 27  Rom. 1.7.129–45.

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created order to their first principle, God. For instance, in the first proof Aquinas looks at physical motion and the requirement that “whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another.” Metaphysically, Aquinas broadens “motion” to include any reduction of potentiality to actuality and invokes the unsustainability of an infinite regress to conclude that there must be “a first mover, put in motion by no other” and hence pure actuality (actus purus).28 The notion of pure act is a metaphysical statement about the intelligibility of divine actuality, and while it is intrinsic to everything that follows, it must be understood correctly. Pure act as such is not an abstract governing principle for the doctrine of God, nor does it locate God within a generic class of activity or modality: “whatsoever is defined is comprehended by the intellect of him that defines it; and God is incomprehensible to the intellect. Hence it is not a definition of God when we say that he is pure act.”29 The modest character of pure act clearly requires something beyond itself to specify how it informs us of the God who discloses himself to Moses: “I am who I am” (Ex 3:14).30 This same God is, after all, the one who fulfills his covenant in Christ. To this end, the remaining proofs demonstrate that God exercises a necessary efficient, exemplary, and final causality. In particular, these forms of causality serve to account for the actuality of the Father, Son, and Spirit in the mystery of God’s eternal life and in the acts of creation and salvation. In this respect, the five ways disclose the ways of God and thereby aid the pursuit of acknowledging God against the spiritual darkness of idolatry and impiety. The consequence of this insight is to reveal the causal texture of God’s external activity, which we recognize in the form of efficiency, exemplarity, and finality.31 This neither merely maps causality onto God nor subsumes God underneath a genus of causes. The qualitative distinction between God and creation requires that we speak of God as cause only circumspectly, which becomes apparent as the inquiry progresses. Noticeably absent is any reference to material or formal causality because God is not a part of the creature, nor is he simply the highest instantiation of causality.32 Only efficient, exemplary, and  Ia.2.3.corp, 3.1.corp.  DP 7.3.ad5; Ia.3.5; CTh I.26. 30  Ia.2.3.s.c. 31  Ia.2.3.corp. 32  There is only a specific sense in which God is a formal cause, if one maintains that exemplar causality is not a fifth cause alongside Aristotle’s four. Aquinas distinguishes between two modes of formal causality, depending on the cause’s relation to its effect. First a formal cause may be intrinsic, as is the case with accidental or substantial forms where the form is part of a composite with matter. In a second mode, the formal cause 28 29

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final causality is suited to explain God’s acts in nature, grace, and glory, and this is precisely the function of these causes within the theological aim of the Summa theologiae. Without understanding God’s actuality as that which exercises this kind of responsibility toward creation, the being and activity of God in Christ and the sacraments are unintelligible. Hence, when Aquinas arrives at the Christology of the third and final part of the Summa he explains the hypostatic union, Christ’s meritorious work, Christ’s resurrection, and the efficacy of Christ’s grace in and through the sacraments by appealing to the textured causality of God’s actuality he establishes here.33 The five ways (quinque viae) thus serve our understanding of the way of truth (viam veritatis) Christ opens for us “whereby we may attain to the blessedness of eternal life by rising again.”34 What may be taken away from these observations is that the causal shape of the analysis lends the inquiry its formal orientation: God as principle is extrinsic to that which imitates it, in which sense “a form is called an exemplar” (Meta. 5.2.764). Aquinas clearly denies the intrinsic mode of formal causality to God: on account of God’s creative causality, his deity is likened to the efficient and exemplar being of creatures, but not their substantial being (STh Ia.3.8.ad1). He thus explicitly denies that God is the esse formale of things, for they participate in his being as effects do their causes but not as parts do their whole (DDN 5.1.629–30; DP 7.2.ad5; SCG I.26). In those cases where Aquinas likens God to a formal principle, he immediately specifies his meaning as extrinsic formal cause: God’s wisdom is likened to a formal and effective principle of things, “just as works of art proceed from the wisdom of the artist” (Ia.9.1.ad2). The Word who is the wisdom of the Father contains the divine ideas from which the world proceeds as a work of art. As such, the Word is like the exemplar form of creatures, “but not the form that is a composite part” (Ia.3.8.ad2). Thus, whenever Aquinas refers to God as a formal principle or cause, he means “exemplar” or “extrinsic formal cause.” In this regard, Aquinas is most specific when he states, “God is the efficient, exemplary, and final cause of all things” (Ia.44.4.ad4). See Vivian Boland, Ideas in God According to Saint Thomas Aquinas: Sources and Synthesis, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 69 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 255–7; Gregory T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 33–41; Michael J. Dodds, Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 11–44. 33  E.g., IIIa.1.1–3; IIIa.50.2.ad3; IIIa.56.1.ad3; IIIa.60.3. See also Simon Oliver, Philosophy, God and Motion (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 131–7; Bernard Blankenhorn, “The Place of Romans 6 in Aquinas’s Doctrine of Sacramental Causality: A Balance of History and Metaphysics,” in Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life, ed. Reinhard Hütter and Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 136–49; Corey L. Barnes, “Aristotle in the Summa Theologiae’s Christology,” in Aristotle in Aquinas’ Theology, ed. Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 199–203. 34  IIIa.prologus.

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and end of creatures, and so God as understood in his revelatory acts. However, as the inquiry unfolds it becomes clear that the proper acknowledgment of God demands that we grasp theology’s material object without conflating it with this formality. God’s qualitative distinction from all things announced in the five ways is alone the horizon against which God becoming man without ceasing to be God is intelligible. Beyond this, a particular understanding of this qualitative distinction is required to make sense of creation and salvation, and so the inquiry resolves upon teaching about the blessedness of the Trinity. Therefore, within this pursuit of the knowledge of God’s ways there is an increasing insight provided into a particular understanding of theology’s material object as requisite for the proper acknowledgment of God  – an understanding that will require a strong affirmation of God’s qualitative distinction from all things and his freedom to have possibly existed without them. Aquinas opens his doctrine of God with a principal analysis of God’s external activity that seeks to trace the effects of divine action to their foundation in God’s being on account of a moral exigency. Cumulatively, the five ways emphasize God’s transcendence of, and therefore preeminence within, the cosmic nexus of causes and effects. Knowledge of God’s ways is achieved inchoately through the recognition of God as the ultimate efficient, exemplary, and final cause of all things. Intensifying analysis of this causality and its correspondence to God’s being is ordered to the proper acknowledgment of God that distinguishes him from all idolatrous conceptions of deity and creatures alike. Thus, Aquinas’s initial inquiry is focused on understanding what it can about God’s essence through a scientific reflection on God’s relation to the world, which is the formal orientation of his inquiry relevant to our analysis. God is thought from within the relationship of responsibility toward creation in which God reveals himself, but this formal orientation of theology is not coincident with its material object. Theology’s sapiential character means that it traces divine being and activity as it reduces God’s effects to their principle in God’s essence in itself, for its material object is God himself.35 Only this increasing awareness of theology’s material object as God himself apart from creation enables the proper acknowledgment of God in his distinction from and relation to creation that the inquiry pursues through its formal orientation. Having demonstrated the textured causality of God’s external activity in Ia.2, Aquinas proceeds to analyze the reasons for this dynamism in God’s internal being. Such analysis focuses on “how he is  Ia.1.7.corp.

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or, preferably, how he is not.”36 This peculiar announcement prefaces the tract on divine simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinitude, immanence, immutability, eternality, and unity (Ia.3–11). In particular, divine simplicity, perfection, and goodness provide a worked example of the intensifying insight into theology’s material object through its formal orientation. These features function to justify formally God’s causal responsibility for creation while progressively characterizing God’s qualitative distinction from all things. Since these features color the other divine attributes and enable the intended acknowledgment of God through knowledge of his ways, we focus on these in the remainder of this chapter.

God’s Simple Perfection We have just seen that in the inquiry into God’s existence (an sit) Aquinas argues that God must be acknowledged properly qua divine through an intensifying analysis of God’s ways, intelligible metaphysically in the form of efficient, exemplary, and final causality. Immediately following this inquiry are questions on divine simplicity (Ia.3), perfection (Ia.4), and goodness (Ia.5–6). Before proceeding, we need to observe two things about the order of these questions, which is of some importance for their function. First, whereas Ia.2 corresponds to the way of causality, the question on simplicity (Ia.3) and those on perfection and goodness (Ia.4–6) correspond, respectively, to the way of negation and way of eminence (via remotionis and via eminentiae). This serves to highlight at the outset the particular relationship between simplicity and perfection operative throughout Aquinas’s doctrine of God. Tracing the relationship between God’s activity and being through an analysis of the principles of divine activity demands corresponding moments of negation and affirmation. In the conceptual form of our knowledge of God, we must strip away that which speaks to imperfection in God’s activity and affirm eminently that which testifies to God’s perfection. Second, the questions on divine simplicity, perfection, and goodness secure the intelligibility of God’s indivisible, manifold causality by providing for their unity and foundation. Divine simplicity prefaces the questions on perfection and goodness by stipulating that God does not exercise efficient, exemplary, or final causality divisibly from one another. Rather, God’s simple actuality exercises  Ia.2.prol. This apophatic statement must be balanced with how Aquinas evaluates questions two through eleven in the prologue to question twelve: “Having considered how (qualiter) God is in himself, it remains to consider how he is in our knowledge” (Ia.12.prol).

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a responsibility toward things we can only recognize in the form of diverse causes, but these are as indivisible from one another as God’s activity is from his being. Divine perfection, then, provides the foundation for God’s efficient and exemplary causality: God grants things their existence in distinction from him (efficiency), and this perfection of their existence preexists in God both virtually and formally (exemplarity). Finally, God’s goodness includes the efficiency and exemplarity of divine perfection while also providing the reason for God’s final causality: all things desire God as their ultimate end because God is desirable, prompting them to reach out for him through their own forms so that they may be conformed increasingly to his image. More will need to be said about each of these in turn, but this preliminary overview suffices to show how these questions function and why they occupy a privileged location. Namely, they provide for the formal intelligibility of all God’s external acts and help secure the proper acknowledgment of God in his qualitative distinction from all things, which involves a unique form of predication that respects this distinction. In these respects, simplicity, perfection, and goodness function as the primary colors of Aquinas’s doctrine of God, for which reason we may focus on these three without losing too much of the larger picture of questions two through eleven. Our analysis is further restricted to these features of God’s being insofar as they ground the character of God’s external activity and contribute to the sought-­for acknowledgment of God through the knowledge of his ways. In this section, we focus on how simplicity and perfection inaugurate reflection on God’s distinction from creation and provide the two main pillars for how theology respects God’s divine nature in its thought and speech. Simplicity and Irreducibility Turning to divine simplicity, Aquinas’s first concern is to begin justifying God’s qualitative distinction from all things announced in the five ways through the notion of irreducibility. The result of the first way, that God is pure act, functions to disclose the philosophical intelligibility of God’s simplicity and entails the denial of any and all composition in God.37 This already signals that simplicity is a strictly negative piece of theology, a negation and in no way an affirmation about God’s being and activity: “we  For a more detailed treatment of simplicity, see Serge-­Thomas Bonino, “La simplicité de Dieu,” in Istituto San Tommaso: Studi 1996, ed. Dietrich Lorenz (Rome: Pontificia Università San Tommaso, 1997), 117–51; Tyler R. Wittman, “‘Not a God of Confusion But of Peace’: Aquinas and the Meaning of Divine Simplicity,” Modern Theology 32.2 (2016): 151–69.

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often use negations to define simple things . . . not because negation is of their very essence, but because our mind first of all grasps composite things, and cannot come to know simple things except by denying compositeness of them.”38 If simplicity functioned positively, it would tell us something about how God is (quomodo sit) rather than how God is not (quomodo non sit).39 Simplicity is thus even more austere than the notion of pure act which is used to support it. However, the metaphysics of pure act are ministerial, serving the ends of biblical interpretation and the acknowledgment of God’s divinity Scripture enjoins upon Israel and the Church. This is most visible in how Aquinas begins and concludes the question on divine simplicity. The question opens by asking whether God has a body, since Scripture speaks to God sitting (Isa 6:1), standing (Isa 3:13), having some spatial location (Ps 34:6; Jer 17:3), and so forth.40 Such passages seem to suggest that God might be corporeal, but Aquinas resists this interpretation on the grounds that it neither makes sense of Scripture nor divine actuality. First, Jesus says expressly that “God is Spirit” (John 4:24), and “A spirit does not have flesh and bone” (Luke 24:39).41 Aquinas reads both statements straightforwardly to suggest that the corporeal language should be interpreted metaphorically, and not without reason: overly literal readings of corporeal language historically result in painting over God’s qualitative distinction from creation with some shade of pantheism.42 Pursuing the proper interpretation of these passages, Aquinas employs the metaphysics of pure act to argue that the notion of divine corporeality is untenable. The opening article is representative of how Aquinas employs the notion of pure act, where he marshals three basic arguments that parallel the first of the five ways.43 The first argument states that God is the first unmoved mover and since all bodies are moved, then God cannot have a body. The second argument builds on this conclusion metaphysically as did the first way, by broadening motion to its analogous application of any reduction of potentiality to actuality. Since actuality is prior to potentiality, then as the first existent God is also prior to and without any potentiality. As act without any potency, God is not divisible into more  Ia.10.1.ad1.  Ia.3.prol. 40  Ia.3.1.obj.1–5. 41  Ia.3.1.s.c.; Ioan. 4.2.615. 42  Ia.3.8.corp. For historical background on such positions, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 23–31, 42–7. 43  Ia.3.1.corp. 38 39

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basic parts that stand to one another in act–potency relations. The final argument builds on this and notes that the soul stands to the body as act to potency and is therefore more perfect, for which reason God cannot have a body any more than he can have potency or divisibility. As the form of the argument suggests, that God is pure act and the first principle of all things means that he is not ordered to anything else as potency to act, nor is there any potentiality or possibility presupposed to his actuality. Any form of categorical composition  – physical, logical, or metaphysical  – represents some more basic division between act and potency, and is therefore inapplicable to God. The remaining articles of the question on simplicity walk this line: as pure act, God is not composed of whole and parts, supposit and nature, matter and form, genus and species, substance and accident, nor essence and existence.44 Only the denial of all such composition maintains the insight into God’s divinity that there is nothing more absolute or fundamental than God. Composition characterizes all created quantities, whose intelligibility is disclosed through a reflective consideration that reduces them to their principles. Confessing God’s simplicity excludes any such reduction and thereby distinguishes God from the domain of created things and the patterns of thought that disclose their intelligibility. Simplicity is therefore crucial to the faithful interpretation of Scripture and the proper acknowledgment of God. As Aquinas concludes the question on simplicity, he presses the point about God’s qualitative distinction into full service. God is not only free from parts internally but also free from being part of a greater or homogenous whole externally. In other words, God’s irreducibility also means he is not reducible to the first in a series with his effects. God’s distinction from the world means that he must not be understood as forming any substantial composition with other things, as if God were the world’s form or soul: it is “not possible for God to enter into the composition of anything, either as a formal or a material principle.”45 The reason for this denial pertains to the acknowledgment of God’s distinction from all things Aquinas is seeking to procure. Where God is understood as part of a larger whole, even if God is given superlative forms of preeminence within this whole, God is not acknowledged in his qualitative distinction from all things. The reason is that the way God relates as pure act is not the way that any other act relates to another. Aquinas illustrates this point  Ia.3.2–8. For analysis of the arguments, see Peter Weigel, Aquinas on Simplicity: An Investigation into the Foundations of His Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008). 45  Ia.3.8.corp. 44

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with the example of a matter–form composite. It is conceivable within the domain of created quantities, and therefore compositions, to understand something having precedence over others as a “primary part” in a qualified sense. In different respects we could consider either matter or form as this primary part. For example, matter as potency precedes form as act when their composition is understood as coming into being. But in this scenario, matter is not unqualifiedly preeminent and antecedent to this composition because in a more ultimate sense actuality precedes potentiality.46 Conversely, then, it is conceivable that form would be the primary part since matter participates in form and depends upon it in their composition. Yet even in this scenario, form fails to be unqualifiedly primary: “as that which participates is posterior to that which is essential, so likewise is that which is participated.”47 In other words, the very intelligibility of any composition demands that the parts have only a relative primacy or preeminence vis-à-vis the other parts, whereas God is primary without qualification and thus absolutely. Moreover, outside their composition form and matter are not independent or subsistent quantities. As we will see, however, Aquinas’s doctrines of divine goodness and blessedness in particular demonstrate that God could be the whole of existence without creation. Because God could be the whole of what is, God relates to and is distinct from all other things uniquely. This exclusivity is further voiced in the question on divine unity (Ia.11), which, together with simplicity, brackets the intervening substantial features. Whereas simplicity highlights that God is what he is indivisibly and undividedly, unity adds to this that God is an indivisible and undivided whole or unity.48 Simplicity pertains to the intelligibility (rationem) of unity because what is one is an undivided whole, and only “what is simple is undivided, both actually and potentially.”49 Thus, what it means for God to be a whole is that his being is indivisible and one. The scriptural authority of Aquinas’s account sheds further light on the exclusivity with which God is a whole: “Hear, O Israel: the lord our God, the lord is one” (Deut 6:4).50 Just as this confession involved the denial of any gods  Ia.3.1.corp.  Ia.3.8.corp. 48  Ia.11.1–2. 49  Ia.11.1.corp; DC 21. The simplicity of God’s unity means that divine unity is not the apotheosis of a numerical quantity but that God’s unity is opposed only to that multiplicity representing a potential division (Ia.11.2.corp.). The unity in view is therefore still the unity of the Trinity, as Aquinas states explicitly (Ia.11.4.s.c.). 50  Ia.11.3.s.c. 46 47

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alongside God (Exod 20:3), so confession of God’s simple unity leads the believer to the truth by excluding errors and false understandings of divinity.51 As an indivisible unity, God is not composed like the quantities of this world and does not form a whole with anything else. God’s unity is irreducibly unique and thus as unrepeatable as God himself, considered as both his unity with his being and the unity of his being with his act. Acknowledging God in distinction from creation therefore requires that one confess God’s simple unity. Perfection and Participation Thus far Aquinas has sought to secure God’s distinction from creation through the affirmation of God’s simplicity, the absence of all composition in God’s being and activity. Despite the success he achieves in the question on simplicity, he has not fully secured the acknowledgment of God that the knowledge of God’s ways requires. Left alone, the bare statement of divine simplicity is in danger of compromising God’s distinction from creation because it compromises God’s perfection. Aquinas’s reasoning is that simplicity by itself does not entail perfection: after all, formal being (esse formale), or the being common to all creatures, is simple but not perfect because it requires matter to subsist. Hence, a study of God’s perfection must follow simplicity “because simplicity in corporeal things is imperfect and part of something else.”52 That is, the structures in which simplicity is intelligible to us prevent us from grasping the crucial element that God’s simplicity demands: that God neither is nor can be part of something else, and that he thus enjoys an absolute primacy in himself. When Aquinas denies the “most foolish” idea that God might be the formal being of things in the final article of simplicity, he gestures toward the subsistent character of God’s being apart from all other beings.53 The reason God is not reducible to or composed with any potency–act parts and wholes is that God is subsisting actuality itself, and to say this requires that we affirm and not merely negate things about God. Indeed, materially “the idea of negation is always based on an affirmation, as evinced by the fact that every negative proposition is proved by an affirmative: wherefore unless the human mind knew something positively about God, it would be unable to deny anything about him.”54 Aquinas thus  SCG III.118.  Ia.3.prol. 53  Ia.3.8.corp. 54  DP 7.5.corp; Meta. 4.8.644; Sent. I.35.1.1.ad2. Additionally: Mark Johnson, “Apophatic Theology’s Cataphatic Dependencies,” The Thomist 62 (1998): 519–31; 51 52

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considers it axiomatic that positive convictions about God’s preeminence discerned in the ways of causality and eminence fund negative theology. In order to grasp this complementary function of simplicity and perfection, we need to see how Aquinas demonstrates divine perfection and the function it plays relative to God’s creative activity. We need to see first how perfection grounds God’s plenitude and how this plenitude grounds all positive predications made in Scripture and in theology’s attempt to render those statements intelligible synthetically. Explaining why this is the case, Aquinas again leads with Scripture: God creates humanity in his own image (Gen 1:26), and our eschatological glorification is bound up with our likeness to God (1 John 3:2).55 These passages point not only to the ontological aspect of God imprinting something of his own likeness on the things he creates but also the moral-­ eschatological aspect that is intrinsic to this ontology: rational creatures become perfected the more they conform to God’s likeness in actuality. This is why we are to be “perfect” like our “heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48), a point Aquinas articulates with his metaphysics: “a thing is perfect in proportion to its state of actuality, because we call that perfect which lacks nothing of the mode of its perfection.”56 At a rudimentary level, then, God’s pure actuality renders intelligible the fact of God’s perfection, but it leaves open precisely what perfection means. To explain this further, Aquinas appeals to the doctrine of creation and the metaphysics of being (esse). Brief consideration of each point serves to orient us to the basic meaning of divine perfection. In the first place, divine perfection refers us to the doctrine of creation. Since God creates all things, his perfection is the virtual source of all perfections “because any perfection found in an effect must be found also in the cause of that effect.”57 Aquinas observes two ways this is true, thereby accounting for how all created perfections radically preexist in God’s Torrell, Spiritual Master, 25–52; Gregory P. Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God: Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay of Positive and Negative Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 49–74. 55  Ia.4.3.s.c. 56  Ia.4.1.corp; Matt. 5.12.553–8. He develops the point theologically in his doctrine of the imago Dei (Ia.93); on which see D. Juvenal Merriell, To the Image of the Trinity: A Study in the Development of Aquinas’s Teaching (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990); John P. O’Callaghan, “Imago Dei: A Test Case for St. Thomas’s Augustinianism,” in Aquinas the Augustinian, ed. Michael Dauphinais, Barry David, and Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 100–44; Torrell, Spiritual Master, 80–100. 57  Ia.4.2.corp.

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plenitude of being, both virtually and formally. He explains this with the example of how we recognize similarities obtaining between causes and effects, which share a similarity of form. This similarity is pronounced in the instance of a “univocal” cause, in which there is a sameness of form between cause and effect, like when humans beget humans. Obviously God’s causality is not like this, but more like the similarity of form that exists between the “equivocal” causality of the sun and the heat, life, and light that it begets in its various effects. The similarity here is thin, however: God’s causality is like the sun’s in that God’s perfection is the source of all other perfection “in a more eminent manner.”58 Even the example of the sun falls short of depicting God’s creative causality because God does not partake of the perfections he communicates like the sun partakes of heat and light. God’s creative causality remains as distinct as God himself. In the second place, then, divine perfection refers us to the notion of being. God’s being (esse) and therefore his perfection is subsistent through himself (per se) and does not partake of anything else – a point Aquinas anticipates in the question on divine simplicity.59 The notion of being is crucial to Aquinas’s metaphysics and his doctrine of participation, but for our purposes we need only grasp its basic function for the affirmation of God’s perfection and how it serves to distinguish God from creatures. Hans Urs von Balthasar describes being as “a celebration of the reality of the real, of that all-­embracing mystery of being which surpasses the power of human thought, a mystery pregnant with the very mystery of God.”60 Aquinas is never quite so baroque, but he certainly agrees. God is that which is “most real and most true,” and so being translates this insight into the language of metaphysics.61 Literally esse means “to be,” but it carries several other meanings, the most important of which is the very “act” of existence (actus essendi) by which something is in actuality.62 The first and most primordial act of anything is its act of being, its existence, which is why act is above all prior to potency: What I here call being (esse) signifies the highest perfection of all, and the proof is that act is always more perfect than potentiality. Now we understand no signified form to be in act unless we suppose that it has being. Thus we may consider  Ia.4.2.corp; SCG I.28; CTh I.21–22; DDN 13.1.967.  Ia.4.2.corp; Ia.3.4; DDN 13.1.962. 60  Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. IV, The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, trans. Brian McNeil, et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 407. 61  Ia.44.1.corp. 62  Ia.3.4.ad2. On its further meanings: Wippel, Metaphysical Thought, 24–5. 58 59

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humanity or fiery nature as existing potentially in matter, or as existing in the power of an agent, or even as in the mind; but when it has being it becomes actually existent. Hence it is clear that what I here call being is the actuality of all acts, and therefore the perfection of all perfections.63

Nothing is more fundamental for Aquinas than this act of existence itself, for without it nothing can be or be in act. As that by which everything that is exists, being takes on a universal significance for the consideration of things metaphysically within the participated structure of the cosmos. In every created entity, there is a composition of essence and existence (esse), the latter relating to the former as act to potency and therefore as perfection to imperfection.64 Essence designates what kind of thing a being (ens) is, while its act of existence (esse) renders it real. We can know what a human is and therefore understand its essence, but this understanding does not include a human’s actual existence. The real distinction in things between essence and existence highlights the fact that being/existence (esse) is in things not essentially but by participation, which carries the corollary that things have an ontological indigence considered in themselves.65 Aquinas reasons from this that whatever is had by participation belongs to something else essentially, and “whatever is found in something by participation must be caused by that in which it is found essentially.”66 This is the logic of the fourth of the five ways – another reason why only in God are essence and existence identical: God creates the participations of being (esse) that are the whole of reality distinct from him. Rather than positing a subsistent form of being that serves as the formal being of each creature, Aquinas says God alone is subsistent being itself and hence the only possible cause of all things that participate in being. All things other than God “participate” in being, not in the sense that God is the innermost “part” of creatures but in the sense that nothing created is identical  He continues, “Nor may we think that esse in this sense can have anything added to it that is more formal and determines it as act determines potentiality: because esse in this latter sense is essentially distinct from that to which it is added and whereby it is determined. But nothing extraneous to esse can be added to esse, for nothing is extraneous to it except non-­being, which can be neither form nor matter. Hence esse is not determined by something else as potentiality by act but rather as act by potentiality” (DP 7.2.ad9). 64  Sent. II.1.1.2.corp. 65  Ia.19.3.ad4. Moreover, esse is an accident in creatures, “not as though related accidentally to a substance, but as the actuality of any substance. Hence God himself, who is his own actuality, is his own esse” (Quod. II.2.1.ad2). Esse is not therefore a categorical accident; it is simply nonessential to everything other than God. 66  Ia.44.1.corp. 63

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with its existence.67 God creates finite similitudes of his own perfect being, which is the ground for all analogical predication – including the statement that God is or that God is good.68 God’s identity with his own self-­subsistent being therefore accounts for two things. First, it secures further the distinction between God and creation because God is subsistent apart from creation and not therefore imperfect in his simplicity. Second, the formulation of God’s self-­subsistent being demonstrates why God is the formal source and exemplary cause of all created perfection, on account of which we may positively attribute to God whatever is perfect in his creatures. The acknowledgment of God over against idolatry requires the insight into his simple perfection, and chiefly the complementarity between simplicity and perfection grounding the unique grammar that respects this acknowledgment.

Simplicity, Perfection, and the Grammar of DivinE Naming We are now positioned to see how simplicity and perfection operate in a complementary relationship and how this relationship supports Aquinas’s characteristic pattern of divine naming.69 The complementarity  As Wippel explains, participation in esse can carry three meanings: (1) to participate in esse commune, the abstracted common being shared by all creatures; (2) to participate in Ipsum esse subsistens by likeness or imitation as effects do their causes; and (3) the participation of things in their own esse considered as their act of being. Wippel, Metaphysical Thought, 120–1 (generally, 110–31). 68  Nevertheless, God’s revelation as qui est ultimately signifies that God is, but it does not tell us what God’s act of existence is because “we cannot clearly know the esse of God any more than we can clearly know his essence” (Ia.3.4.ad2). 69  Rudi te Velde characterizes the relationship between simplicity and perfection as “dialectical” since these two features are the means through which we come to knowledge of God by way of discerning his likeness in the otherness of the things that God is not, his effects. te Velde, Aquinas, 77–90. The way te Velde employs this is harmless enough. However, some would prefer to avoid the use of dialectic in this regard. For instance, Erich Przywara contrasts logical and dialectical modes of thinking: logical thinking grasps what is given (Logos) to thought in its immanent self-­identity, whereas dialectical thinking looks at what is given only by opposing or contrasting it with what is other. However, Przywara argues, dialectical thinking is easily refined (he cites Hegel) to the point where the contradictions between antitheses make way for a higher identity. Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014) §5.3, 195. Only analogical thinking, operating on the basis of the principle of noncontradiction, avoids sheer opposition and self-­identity. Metaphysically this is grounded in actuality (ἐνέργεια), which is distinguished from the contradictory realm of pure possibility and just so “is” and therefore is not “not” (Analogia Entis §6.5, 206–16). Creaturely 67

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of simplicity and perfection is most visible in how they each contribute to the proper pattern of thinking and speaking about God’s being and activity. Again the exigencies of Scripture are never far from view: Scripture speaks of God both concretely and abstractly; Christ is the “Son of the living God” (Matt 16:16; Ps 84:5) and is also “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:16; Prov 8:35).70 Respectively, simplicity and perfection account for Scripture’s use of both abstract (life) and concrete (living) predicates: We can speak of simple things only as though they were like the composite things from which we derive our knowledge. Therefore in speaking of God, we use concrete nouns to signify his subsistence, because with us only those things subsist which are composite; and we use abstract nouns to signify his simplicity. In saying therefore that Godhead, or life, or the like are in God, we indicate the composite way in which our intellect understands, but not that there is any composition in God.71

The difference is important because it enables us to affirm two things in accordance with simplicity and perfection. God’s simplicity requires that we affirm God is life in the sense that God is not distinct from his life, precluding any sense in which God might be reducible in part to some form “life.” Conversely, God’s perfection means that God is self-­ subsistent life and thus that God is “living.” Aquinas parses the difference between abstract and concrete predications in terms of actuality’s perfection: abstractly considered, the form “life” is imperfect because it is not subsistent and therefore cannot effect the perfect operation of living: “heat does not make hot, but a hot thing does, and wisdom does not think wisely, but a sage does.”72 Hence, abstractly “God is love” (1 Jn 4:16) because love is not more basic than God and concretely God “loves” (John 3:16) because his life is the perfect operation of loving. actuality is “energetic” in two directions: “passively by virtue of its backward relation (ἐπ᾽ ἀρχήν) to possibility, actively by virtue of the forward relation (τέλος) implicit in its “having an end in itself” (ἐντελέχεια)” (Analogia Entis §6.5, 209). Actuality is thus in a state of noncontradiction through its separation from possibility on the one hand and its ordering toward an identity yet to come on the other. This dual relatedness of actuality shows us that analogical thinking on its basis operates in the “immanent dynamic middle” suspended between contradiction and identity (Analogia Entis §6.5, 216). If Przywara is right, “dialectical” might be an ambiguous descriptor for the relation between divine simplicity and perfection. Hence, I use “complementary” or “reciprocal” in what follows. 70  Ia.3.3.s.c.; Ioan. 14.2.1868–70; Matt. 16.2.1375. 71  Ia.3.3.ad1; Ia.13.1.ad2. 72  DC 22; Ia.4.2.corp.

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Equipped with this understanding of negative and positive theology, Aquinas lays the foundation for thinking and speaking about God in a manner that respects God’s distinction from creation. Chiefly the simplicity–perfection relationship requires us to affirm things of God and then deny that these things apply to God in any of the ways with which we are familiar. This interplay thereby throws into relief the limitations of human language, and so created structures and modes of thought, to capture the qualitatively distinct reality of God. Aquinas stresses that this does not sacrifice the truthfulness or adequacy of speech about God  – otherwise, theology would be impossible  – but it does remind us that its truthfulness and adequacy is not like the precision with which we speak about anything else. The tension between simplicity and perfection therefore supports a grammar that sustains the acknowledgment of God as God. From the foregoing, Aquinas affirms that God’s distinction from creation entails that all true statements about God are either metaphorical or analogical but never univocal.73 We need not present everything that Aquinas says about analogy and predication but only what is necessary to explain how he thinks about the correspondence and distinction between God’s being and activity. Most crucial in this respect is how his convictions about God’s qualitative distinction from creation find expression in lessons learned from the culture of medieval speculative grammar in particular.74 Fundamental to the intelligibility of Aquinas’s theological predication is a threefold distinction between how something exists (modus essendi), how we understand it (modus intelligendi), and how we speak of it (modus significandi).75 The threefold division represents a causal chain: the mode of our speech owes to the mode of our thought, which in turn is characterized by the mode of existence proper to both the knower and the known. As creatures with a determinate mode of existing, our knowledge of things is always irreducibly conditioned by our creaturely mode on the one hand and the creaturely modes of what we know on

 Ia.13.4–6.  More generally, see Irène Rosier, “Signes et sacraments. Thomas d’Aquin et la grammaire spéculative,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 74 (1990): 392–436; Henk J. M. Schoot, Christ the “Name” of God: Thomas Aquinas on Naming Christ (Leuven: Peeters, 1993); Seung-­Chan Park, Die Rezeption der mittelalterlichen Sprachphilosophie in der Theologie des Thomas von Aquin. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Analogie (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 334–52. 75  Ia.13.1–3. 73 74

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the other.76 And so it is with our speech. If Thomas describes a bird to us, his speech is characterized by the creaturely mode of the bird’s being and the creaturely mode of his understanding consequent upon his human mode of being. Everything he could tell us about the bird would conform to the universal context of created being (even if Thomas is talking about a phoenix). But what about when he attempts to speak of God? Immediately Thomas encounters a problem, because whatever he might say about God has a creaturely mode of signifying due to Thomas’ creaturely modes of understanding and being. The problem is that created modes of signifying are inapplicable to God because of the strangeness of God’s “mode” of existing, which is self-­subsistent and thus incomparable to anything known within the context of created being.77 One strategy of circumventing this problem might be to attribute to God the signified thing (res significata) of any given perfection while denying to God the mode of its signification. In essence, this strategy banks on the possibility of attributing to God the “thing” (res) of a perfection in isolation from its creaturely “mode” (modus). The problem is that this strategy is not radical enough, forgetting that behind the mode of signifying there remain the modes of understanding and being. This attempted solution therefore fails because even if Thomas denies the mode of signifying of a perfection to God, he would not thereby access a “univocal core” of meaning because he cannot escape wholly either the constraints of his mode of  For example: “cognita sunt in cognoscente secundum modum cognoscentis” (IIaIIae.1.2.corp); “intellectum est in intelligente immaterialiter, per modum intellectus” (Ia.85.1.ad1); “receptum est in recipiente per modum recipientis” (Ia.84.1.corp). However, our understanding does not always conform to the known object’s modus essendi (Ia.14.6.ad 1; Ia.85.1.ad1). 77  To the extent that we may speak of God’s “mode” of existing, we are speaking analogically of God’s self-­subsistent being as wholly determinate, in distinction from the pure indeterminacy of matter without form and the limited determination of finite acts of being through form: John Tomarchio, “Aquinas’s Division of Being According to Modes of Existing,” The Review of Metaphysics 54.3 (2001): 612 n.76. While Aquinas will say that God’s proper mode of existing is to be self-­subsistent, and thus unique, he elsewhere seems to deny any and all modality to God’s life (contrast, for example, Ia.12.4.corp and Ia.13.11.corp). Rocca focuses on the latter such statements and argues that God is properly modeless, and all statements to the contrary are “loose” or “oxymoronic.” Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 342 n.26. Tomarchio makes the more compelling case that the applicability of “mode” to speak of God’s self-­subsistent being conforms to the general rule of analogy and is not subsumed underneath some more general concept of modality to which all things are subject. The force of this is to equate God’s mode of existing with self-­subsistent esse itself, which enables Aquinas to characterize God’s self-­subsistent being as wholly determinate in its self-­subsistence but no less infinite, unlimited, and perfect on that account. The mode of God’s esse qualitatively surpasses that of creatures and so cannot be measured by them (Ia.14.1.ad3). 76

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understanding or the creaturely modes of being proper both to him and the things in which he finds the perfection in question.78 This manner of signifying apart, Thomas still understands goodness as a creature, and the goodness he understands is from created things. The content (res) of any perfection attributed to God is inseparable from that perfection’s mode of being as found in creatures, for apart from creatures we have no knowledge of God’s perfections. Bound as our mode of understanding is to the creaturely conditions of the perfections we understand, we cannot access the manner in which they exist in God. Since the mode of being causes the mode of understanding, then the manner in which we understand God introduces an irreducible reserve to our language. This reserve consequently requires us to deny of God not only the mode of signifying of what we say but also the mode of being of perfections as we know them. Aquinas states this concisely: “everything we affirm of God may also be denied of him, because they do not befit him as they are found in created things and as they are understood by us and signified.”79 All three elements are present here: the mode of being, the mode of understanding, and the mode of signifying. And on account of all three, our language is irreducibly contextualized and thus only points analogically to a God “who transcends all our contexts.”80 No more than green can escape being a color can we escape being creatures, nor can our thought and speech escape wholly the creaturely structures in which we operate.81 Consequently, univocal language is only possible were creatures to cease being creatures. Since there is no bird’s-­eye view of reality from which we can see clearly what makes us creatures and what makes God God, then we cannot speak as if we had such a perspective. Our speech inevitably fails to describe God so comprehensively or precisely that we could ever mistake our words with God’s Word. That said, theological predication happens all the same, and ingredient to this occurrence is God’s creative causality by which he invests things with a certain likeness to him according to analogy.82 Some perfections  Burrell, Aquinas, 8–10; Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 349–52. Aquinas does not invoke the dimension of the modus essendi as often as my analysis would suggest, so this presentation of his thought is more systematic and generalized than what one finds in Ia.13. 79  DDN 5.3.673, emphasis added. 80  Burrell, Aquinas, 10. 81  Ia.13.12.ad3. However, our intellect can exceed the manners of signifying and understanding to some extent. See DP 7.2.ad7; Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 343-4. 82  Ia.13.5.corp. 78

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do not inherently carry a creaturely mode of signifying, and these apply to God “literally.” On account of God’s perfection the names of such perfections apply “properly to God, and more properly than they belong to creatures, and are applied primarily to him.”83 However, these perfections exist in God “in a more eminent mode than can be understood or signified.”84 Furthermore, on account of God’s simplicity we must deny to God everything associated with created, finite modes of existence. Put otherwise, we must always be conscious that in attributing a perfection’s content (res) to God, we do so according to the notion (ratio) in which this content is known to us in and through the things God has made. The content therefore genuinely applies to God excessively in accordance with the way of eminence, but the notion by which we apprehend this content falls short of God’s mode of being and must therefore be negated according to the way of negation/remotion.85 God’s creative relation to creatures thus provides the context for our speech about God, in which we say things of both God and creatures “according to the relation of a creature to God as its principle and cause, wherein all perfections of things pre-­exist excellently” in a simplicity and unity that transcend our understanding.86 Theology consequently employs a variety of ways to speak about God without ever losing sight of God’s qualitative transcendence. These observations will become relevant in the next chapter when we see how Aquinas manipulates the distinctions between mode (modus) and thing (res) to discuss the intersection of divine being and activity internally and externally. In particular, features like simplicity and perfection enable Aquinas to characterize how we think and speak about God’s operations of knowing and willing without overemphasizing either the positive or negative elements of our knowledge of God. The consequence is that he is able to describe God’s activities of knowing and willing with nuance, and so do justice both to the fact that God is pure act and yet not any pure act with which we are familiar. Most immediately, however, this grammar accounts for how Aquinas discerns a multitude of perfections in God’s simple unity. Although God is a unity in himself, we only grasp this unity in its manifold external effects and so describe his being through a variety of notions (rationes) that are not synonymous with one another.87 This is merely the consequence of not being able to see God as  Ia.13.3.corp.  Ia.13.2.ad2. 85  See especially te Velde, Aquinas on God, 98–118. 86  Ia.13.5.corp; Ia.13.2.ad2; Ia.13.12.ad3. 87  Ia.13.4. 83 84

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he is in himself, but only through his effects as through so many prisms.88 Theological language concerns what is real, but only in relation to what is most real as its principle and end. Therefore, God’s being is an immeasurable excess of meaning which our words can no more circumscribe than any tower could reach heaven. In this respect Aquinas’s speculative grammar might be understood as serving the acknowledgment of God by showing how human language cannot pridefully storm the heavens since it now stands under the just judgment of the God who confused it (Gen 11:7–9).

God Himself: The Material Object of Theological Inquiry Thus far we have seen how Aquinas demonstrates God’s simplicity and perfection relative to the metaphysics of pure act and how this fuels an understanding of God’s distinction from and relation to creation as its Creator. Simplicity demands that God is not actually or possibly part of the world, and perfection demands that God is self-­subsistent in his distinction from creation. Through an analysis of God’s causal responsibility for the world, Aquinas shows that our knowledge of and speech about God demands reciprocal moments of negation and affirmation. This complementary relationship funds a speculative grammar that protects against prideful excesses in our thought and speech, thereby serving the acknowledgment of God. However, the analysis is incomplete if left at simplicity and perfection. Aquinas has still to investigate God’s being through causal analysis of his external works’ order, which brings him to God’s goodness. With the teleological implications of goodness Aquinas leads the novice into a deeper understanding of theology’s material object as “God himself” (ipse Deus). Moreover, as becomes clear in the significance of God’s goodness for his life in the notion of divine blessedness, God himself is increasingly identified with and conceivable as God’s eternally full life apart from his relation to creation. For these reasons goodness especially enshrines our understanding of theology’s material object as intrinsic to Aquinas’s sought-­for acknowledgment of God and brings us to the knowledge of God’s self-­sufficiency. Therefore, this second half of the chapter is divided into two sections. First we complete the thought Aquinas begins in his causal analysis of God’s external activity and discover in divine goodness the most basic foundation in God’s being for his  Ia.13.12.corp.

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external activity and self-­sufficiency. Second we put this discovery to use by showing how the possession and enjoyment of God’s goodness entails God’s blessedness, on account of which God is free and thus radically distinct from creation.

God’s Goodness The discussion of God’s causal responsibility toward and distinction from creation begun in the questions on simplicity and perfection is incomplete until it resolves into divine goodness, one of the most important divine attributes in the Summa theologiae and the summit of considering both divine causality and perfection.89 Divine simplicity admits “diverse notions of causality” while denying any composition of different causes rooted in different principles internal to God’s essence, as if one form of causality could exist or be effective apart from the other two.90 Simplicity thus accounts for the unity of God’s causality, but without divine goodness God is intelligible as merely an efficient and exemplary cause by virtue of his perfection. However, exemplar causality already implies final causality and so requires that the inquiry move on to something more. It is only in divine goodness that the first and norming cause (finality) explains the full causal density of God’s works while also providing the grounds for God’s transcendent freedom. If divine perfection provides a head to the body of divine simplicity, then divine goodness is the crown. We must therefore pause over God’s goodness because of its central importance and function for the rest of Aquinas’s theology.  Lafont goes so far as to claim that theology in the STh is but the “reception and mediation of God’s goodness: revelation and reason, history and nature are unified in this unique source; it is the unity of God’s goodness itself, the source and end of all creatures, which explains and makes possible the recourse to faith and reason, history and nature.” Lafont, Structures et méthode, 485. Aquinas’s thought on goodness is among the most significant for his theological aims in the STh, so his treatment is quite subtle in its distribution and development. For lengthier expositions on key aspects, see especially Jan A. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 290–334; Fran O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 89–113, 188–212, 225–74; Rudi A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 3–65; Bernhard Blankenhorn, “The Good as Self-­Diffusive in Thomas Aquinas,” Angelicum 79 (2002): 803–37; Corey L. Barnes, “Ordered to the Good: Final Causality and Analogical Predication in Thomas Aquinas,” Modern Theology 30.4 (2014): 433– 53; Daniel Shields, “On Ultimate Ends: Aquinas’s Thesis That Loving God Is Better than Knowing Him,” The Thomist 78 (2014): 581–607. 90  DP 7.1.ad3. Aquinas notes that the “the simpler and more formal a being is, the nobler it is and the more it is prior and a cause of other things” (Meta. 11.7.2263). 89

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Aquinas moves from an initial question on the common meaning of goodness (Ia.5) to how goodness befits God (Ia.6). The formal order of the inquiry reflects Aquinas’s concern for the proper interpretation of Scripture, and not an attempt to subsume God underneath more general considerations. God’s goodness is evident straightforwardly from some standard texts to which Aquinas appeals: “You are good and do good; teach me your statutes” (Ps 119:68); “Give thanks to the lord, for he is good” (Ps 136:1); “There is only one who is good” (Matt 19:17).91 More importantly, at another level there are eschatological texts Aquinas associates with goodness. In a sermon for the Feast of All Saints, Aquinas explains that in glory the saints “do not delight in a temporal thing, but in God, the foundation of every good.”92 The saints delight in the Almighty as they eat and drink at the Lord’s table in his kingdom (Job 22:26; Luke 22:30), which renders them blessed (Luke 14:15). Aquinas explains, What is eating at God’s table? It is to delight in and to be refreshed by the same thing by which God is refreshed. And what is the thing by which God is refreshed? It is his goodness. When you are refreshed by the goodness of God, you eat at God’s table – and this is the happiness of the saints.93

These eschatological associations of blessedness, enjoyment, and delight with God’s goodness are bound up with the notion of desirability. Aquinas finds a harmony between Aristotle’s definition of the good as consisting in a thing’s desirability and what Scripture says about God’s goodness: “The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him” (Lam 3:25); “for me it is good to be near God (adhaerere Deo)” (Ps 73:28).94 Such texts along with others suggest to Aquinas that rational creatures seek God and find in him their eschatological enjoyment, delight, and blessedness because God is good. However, the reason why rational creatures so seek God is also related to the very goodness of creation.95 While much is happening throughout Aquinas’s inquiry into the common meaning of goodness and its applicability to God, we may summarize the significance of these questions for our analysis by focusing on what goodness does for the doctrines of creation and eschatology. The intelligibility of goodness is poised between these two doctrines, requiring  Matt. 19.1.1580–82; Ia.6.2.obj2; SCG I.38.  Beata gens, in Thomas Aquinas: The Academic Sermons, trans. Mark-­Robin Hoogland (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 305. 93  Beata gens, in Academic Sermons, 305–6. 94  Ia.6.1.s.c.; IaIIae.109.6.corp. 95  Ia.73.3. 91 92

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a careful negotiation that does not neglect one for the sake of the other. Ultimately recognizing God’s goodness as the source and goal of all goodness achieves a relatively balanced treatment of both doctrines by helping to secure the proper acknowledgment of God. We can see this by tracing first how the coextension of goodness with being relates to the doctrine of creation and then showing second how goodness’s final causality relates to eschatology. Identifying God’s goodness as the foundation and principle of these doctrines results in the proper construal of God’s distinction from and relation to creation, thus cementing the acknowledgment of God sought throughout the questions on God’s existence, simplicity, and perfection. Once this construal is in view, we will conclude our treatment of goodness by looking at how it unifies God’s causal responsibility for creation while also speaking to God’s self-­sufficiency apart from his external works. Aquinas demonstrates goodness’s relevance for creation through an engagement with the transcendental tradition at the beginning of his inquiry. Here he affirms the convertibility of goodness with being (ens) partly because revelation requires it: “everything created by God is good” (1 Tim 4:4).96 This point in particular is important to emphasize over against the contemporary dualist heresies to which the Dominicans addressed themselves.97 Goodness is not opposed to being, and material beings in particular, but has an intimate relationship with creation and so supports creatures’ dignity and worth.98 Adopting Aristotle’s view that goodness consists in a thing’s desirability, Aquinas argues that existence is desirable because it is a kind of initial perfection, and so anything is good insofar as it exists or has actuality.99 Rational creatures in particular  Ia.5.3.s.c.  Bauerschmidt, Thomas Aquinas, 107; John Inglis, “Emanation in Historical Context: Aquinas and the Dominican Response to the Cathars,” Dionysius 17 (1999): 95–128. Aquinas also seeks to articulate an alternative to the Platonist thesis that goodness is more extensive than being: Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy, 306–14. 98  The creature’s desire for God “is partly because of the dignity of our human nature and partly because of the defect of it. For the rational creature surpasses the other creatures because it can stretch out to the enjoyment of God, something no other creature is capable of. Thus we read in Lam 3.24: “‘My portion,’ he has said, ‘is the Lord of my soul.’” Some seek their portion in the world, like honors, esteem. But the Psalmist says: “Clinging to God is my good” [Ps 73.28]).” Emitte Spiritum, in Academic Sermons, 145. 99  “Inasmuch as they exist, all things are good. For everything, inasmuch as it exists, is actual and therefore in some way perfect, all actuality being a sort of perfection. Now we have shown above that anything perfect is desirable and good. It follows then that, inasmuch as they exist, all things are good” (Ia.5.3.corp). Cf. Ia.73.1; DV 22.1.ad4; Ia.5.1.corp; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics I.1.1094a3 (LCL 73: 2–3). 96 97

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have two kinds of actuality or perfection: one which is theirs by virtue of their entitative being (actus primus) and another that designates their operations of knowing and willing (actus secundus). The latter is more perfect than the former, though they are both forms of perfection: “the less perfect is always for the sake of the more perfect: and consequently as the matter is for the sake of the form, so the form, which is the first act, is for the sake of its operation, which is the second act; and thus operation is the end of the creature.”100 The fulfillment of a being in its primary act is achieved through that being’s operations in secondary act. Hence, Aquinas draws a distinction between “being-in-act”  – primary actuality, or a being’s act of existence – and “being-in-operation” – secondary actuality, the extension of a being’s act of existence into its operations of knowing and willing.101 The distinction applies strictly to created being. Creatures are therefore in act in a twofold sense: entitatively by virtue of their forms or the existence (esse) of their forms, and operatively by virtue of their powers and operations. Aquinas applies these two senses to being and goodness in order to articulate their convertibility, but each primarily refers to one sense. Therefore, the unqualified notion of being primarily denotes primary act, whereas the unqualified notion of goodness primarily denotes ultimate actuality (secondary act). Yet since things are good insofar as they are in act, then in a qualified sense relative to one another, “a thing’s primary actuality is a sort of goodness, and its ultimate actuality a sort of being.”102 Goodness therefore admits of intensities in creatures, accounting both for how created things are good as such and grow in that goodness in proportion to further actualization.103 Consequently, being and goodness are coextensive because both denote actuality. This coextension means that something is good according to its primary and secondary actuality, and so everything is good qua created. Nevertheless, “the word ‘good’ expresses a notion (ratio) of desirability not expressed by the word ‘existent.’”104 This idea of goodness’s desirability  Ia.105.5.corp; Ia.73.1.ad1. On the distinction between actus primus et secundus, see also Ia.48.5; Ia.76.4.ad1; Ia.77.1; IaIIæ.3.2. 101  te Velde, Participation and Substantiality, 42. For the broader metaphysical horizon against which these statements are poised: Joseph de Finance, Être et agir dans la philosophie de saint Thomas, 3rd ed. (Rome: Université Grégorienne, 1965), 214–53; Philipp W. Rosemann, Omne ens est aliquid: Introduction à la lecture du ‘système’ philosophique de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain-­Paris: Éditions Peeters, 1996), 62–71. 102  Ia.5.1.ad1; DV 21.5. 103  Ia.5.1.ad3. 104  Ia.5.1.corp. 100

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leads Aquinas to resist making goodness coextensive with being tout court, in part because of the aforementioned eschatological associations of goodness throughout Scripture. Though humans possess an initial goodness in the primary act of their natures, they also yearn for the eschatological fulfillment of their natures in an end that transcends the created order.105 This leads Aquinas to demonstrate, second, the teleological dimension of goodness and how it is distinct from being as a final cause.106 This teleological significance is already visible in how goodness is desirable and thus the end for the sake of which all things are in secondary act. Goodness has the intelligibility (ratio) of an end (finis) as that which all things desire, and since ends are said to move in the manner of a final cause, then goodness exercises final causality in things.107 The notion of goodness (ratio boni) in terms of finality and desirability therefore accounts for the inclination of creatures toward the fulfillment of their natures, or their fullness of being. Since this inclination drives human action, final causality “is first among causes, for no agent acts except for some end . . . Hence the end is called the cause of causes.”108 Thus Aquinas resists making goodness merely coextensive with being; the two are coextensive in the order of predication, but not in the order of causality. Considered as a cause, goodness is prior to being as act is to potency. If everything desires goodness in the sense that they desire their full actuality, then the good toward which they strive must be an external actuality (aliquid aliud) that prompts their striving and perfects them.109 This external dimension of goodness represents its eschatological significance and so points to how God as the highest good (summum bonum) is responsible for the eschatological consummation of creation.110 With these implications of goodness for creation and eschatology in view, we can synthesize their relevance for God’s goodness and the proper acknowledgment of God it entails. Indeed, the relevance of goodness for   Ia.73.1.corp. “Now it is manifest that in the whole created universe there is no good which is not such by participation. Hence, that good which is the end of the whole universe must be extrinsic to the whole universe” (Ia.103.2.corp); Meta. XII.12.2629. 106   Ia.5.4; Ia.6.2.s.c.; Augustine, DT 1.2. 107   Ia.5.4.corp; Ia.5.4.ad2. 108   Ia.5.2.ad1. Further: O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius, 99–109, 241–50; Blankenhorn, “The Good as Self-­Diffusive in Thomas Aquinas,” 806–27; de Finance, Être et agir, 188–94. 109   Ia.6.3.corp. 110   Ia.6.2. All desire terminates in God, even when it does so unwittingly: IaIIae.5.4.ad2; IaIIae.5.8. 105

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both of these doctrines requires for its intelligibility that goodness maximally befits God.111 In turn, this affirmation is part of recognizing God’s distinction from creation as its Creator and redeemer. Understanding what makes things good requires us to move beyond their phenomenal immediacy and recognize the superabundant principle of goodness in something beyond individual, finite goods. Per his account of God’s perfection, Aquinas argues that all goods participate in a first good that is good by nature and not by participation.112 It is paramount to acknowledge God as this first Good for reasons we should expect at this point. Mistaking the principle of goodness with something finite is to fail to “honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom 1:21), because it is evident by nature that God is the “cause of all good things” (cf. Jas 1:17).113 Sin’s root in pride consists in making one’s ultimate end either mutable goods or even the attainment of the supreme good, thereby making an idol of temporal things or one’s own being and activity.114 Resisting such idolatrous ingratitude means confessing that God is the first Good who is “good essentially.”115 Recognition of God’s goodness is thus intrinsic to the recognition of God’s distinction from creation because it is part of distinguishing creatures from their Creator (Rom 1:25). At the same time, goodness implies the need for eschatological fulfillment in created natures. Precisely because God’s goodness is the ultimate final cause of all created being, then God must be fully actual as the end toward which all things tend. If God were not identical to this end or merely associated with it by anticipation, then God would be subject to eschatological consummation by something beyond himself. Aquinas equates this position with nonsense: “He is not directed to anything else as to an end, but is Himself the last end of all things.”116 That which is the universal end of all things must be pure actuality, for which reason God is the end of things “as something pre-­existing that is to be attained.”117 This preexistence means that God’s goodness is fully actual in himself and not in any way determined by his internal or external activity: “In his own existence, God has the fullness of his goodness.”118 Recognition of God’s  Ia.6.1.  Ia.6.4.corp; Eth. I.1.11. 113  Rom. 1.7.127; Rom. 1.6.117. 114  IaIIae.84.2.corp; Shields, “On Ultimate Ends,” 602–7; Rom. 1.7.130. 115  Ia.6.3.corp. 116  Ia.6.3.corp. SCG III.74: “Quod non est, non potest esse alicuius causa.” 117  SCG III.18; Ia.5.2.ad4. 118  DDN 4.1.269; Rom. 1.7.144. 111 112

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goodness is thereby also intrinsic to the recognition of God’s distinction from creation as its consummator at the end of the age. Only God “satisfies you with good” (Ps 103:5) because only “the divine goodness is an end immeasurably surpassing created things,” infinite, and subsisting through itself alone.119 Aquinas says this finality of God’s goodness is evident to all in light of the things God has made, and so the recognition of God’s nature for which all are responsible includes the acknowledgment of his essential goodness.120 To summarize: goodness is poised between the doctrines of creation and eschatology to the extent that it enables us to see how all creatures are good and yet stretch out for something beyond themselves on account of their goodness. Aquinas observes that there are idolatrous ways of understanding these truths, ways that lead to mistaking creatures for the Creator. Therefore, acknowledging God requires us to confess him as the supreme Good who is immeasurably distinct from all forms of primary and secondary act as the Alpha and Omega. With the recognition of God’s goodness, Aquinas is finally positioned to articulate how God acts as the final cause of everything. Here he appropriates from Dionysius the idea that goodness is self-­diffusive (bonum est diffusivum sui).121 Above all, the concept shows how God’s goodness accounts for the fact that all things desire God because and as God kindles and inflames this desire for its eschatological consummation in beatified vision and enjoyment. Again Aquinas believes Scripture discloses the heart of the concept: “You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing” (Ps 145:16).122 By opening his hand God diffuses his goodness and thereby satiates the creature’s desire throughout the whole course of its conformity to God’s image. Aquinas thus finds the notion implicit in what Scripture says about the gift of God’s love for us and our love for God: “God’s love has been poured (diffusa) into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5), by virtue of

  Ia.25.5.corp; IaIIae.2.8.corp; IIaIIae.24.8.corp; IIaIIae.27.3.   Rom. 1.6.117. 121   Ia.5.4.ad2; Sent. I.34.2.1.ad4; Sent. III.1.2.5.s.c.; Sent. III.2.1.2.qc1.ad2; Sent. IV.46.2.1.qc2; SCG I.37; SCG III.24.8; DV 21.1.ad4; DC 23. For more on the background to this concept, see Lawrence Dewan, “St. Thomas and the Causality of God’s Goodness,” Laval théologique et philosophique 34.3 (1978): 291–304; O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius, 215–24. 122   Rom. 2.1.182, where Aquinas also appeals to Lam 3:25 (cf. Ia.6.1.s.c.). See also Ps 104:28, “when you open your hand, they are filled with good things” (cf. 1 Cor. 4.2.201). 119 120

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which we love God in turn (1 John 4:16).123 Hence the diffusion of God’s love speaks to how God prompts “the first of the inward movements” of the heart in its “inclination to good, i.e., love.”124 The notion of the good’s self-­diffusion renders the movement of God’s love metaphysically intelligible, but it is also open to misunderstanding. Some interpreters of Aquinas believe even he fails to escape the necessitarian implications of the concept: if goodness just is self-­diffusive, then it seems as if God is inevitably Creator by virtue of his being.125 If true, this could easily compromise God’s distinction from creation, so our understanding of God’s creative diffusion must be compatible with God’s freedom. Clarifying matters here helps us to see how the proper understanding of the good’s self-­diffusion serves to solidify the acknowledgment of God initiated in the five ways. We have noted already that it is pride which leads one to mistake the ultimate end with one’s own being and activity in attaining the supreme Good.126 Since God’s goodness enables the acknowledgment of God that resists such prideful idolatry, the knowledge of God’s goodness and its diffusion discloses more intimately the sense in which God’s essential goodness in himself – not the possession of God  – is the ultimate end of the rational creature because it is the ultimate end of God’s will.127 We will return to this theme and the freedom of creation in the next chapter; here our focus is on the groundwork for that discussion as it is worked out relative to the causality of diffusion. What we need to consider briefly is how the self-­ diffusiveness of goodness involves efficient, formal, and final causality within certain contexts, but with a decided priority on finality that obtains in all contextual applications of the concept. Grasping this contextual difference enables the concept of self-­diffusiveness to apply to God’s goodness without introducing elements of formal and efficient causality, which would make it absolutely necessary for God to create. How then does Aquinas understand the causality of goodness’s self-­diffusion? On its own, diffusion implies efficient causality, but broadly the concept applies to all  Rom. 5.1.392; Ioan. 16.7.2159. Aquinas associates our loving God by God’s love with the doctrines of predestination (Rom. 8.7.733–4) and the Spirit’s work (Ioan. 16.1.2069). 124  Gal. 5.6.330. 125  See the discussion in Blankenhorn, “The Good as Self-­Diffusive in Thomas Aquinas,” 803–6. 126  IaIIae.84.2; IaIIae.89.6; Shields, “On Ultimate Ends.” 127  DP 3.15.ad14; DP 2.1.ad14. 123

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causation.128 Properly speaking, in any action the end is ultimate and carries a priority over efficient causality, so “goodness is described as self-­diffusive in the sense that an end is said to move.”129 First and primarily, then, goodness “diffuses” by moving things as a final cause. At the same time, in the context of explaining God’s causal responsibility for creation Aquinas notes that goodness’s finality encompasses both efficient and formal causality: “presupposed to the aspect of goodness are the aspects of efficient and formal cause.”130 By “formal cause” Aquinas means “intrinsic formal cause” and therefore refers to a created agent’s substantial form, which serves as the proximate principle of goodness in everything that is good by participation. Hence Aquinas articulates how the diffusiveness of goodness in the context of creation includes both efficient and intrinsic formal causality while maintaining the priority of final causality. In this context goodness’s self-­diffusiveness means that by virtue of moving things as a final cause, God’s goodness prompts a created agent toward the actualization of its form by virtue of that form, thereby eliciting the efficiency of those secondary acts by which the agent stretches out toward the perfection proper to its nature. From the good that is an agent’s substantial form, its primary actuality, further actuality pours forth efficiently in response to the vitalizing actuality of the Good that is the agent’s end. Actuality is thus “self-­expansive” in the sense that it increases efficiently in response to the finality that lures it, which itself must be actual.131 Consequently, the Good external to the agent is the prior final cause that prompts the good internal to the agent to move toward the fullness of being that is its perfection. In this diffusion, divine actuality summons created actuality to act. Even on the horizontal plane of creation, we witness something of the same diffusive causality of goodness. To the extent that a teacher can prompt her pupils to the actualization of their forms as they grow in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, she thereby diffuses the good she possesses. Now since the form of any created agent is a participated likeness of God’s goodness, then this mysterious communication of goodness within the cosmos mimics distantly and deficiently the creative goodness that is God himself. God’s goodness is supremely self-­diffusive in the sense that out of love for his own goodness he creates likenesses of his goodness that are thus ordered to God as their

  DV 21.1.ad4.   Ia.5.4.ad2. 130   Ia.5.4.corp. 131   O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius, 247. 128 129

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ultimate end.132 For this reason, God’s goodness is “the first exemplary, effective, and final principle of all goodness.”133 However, it is important to recognize that diffusion chiefly renders intelligible the intraworldly communication of goodness and God’s external communication of goodness to creation. Provided the context of creation, Aquinas will therefore confess the fittingness or aesthetic resonance of the incarnation on the grounds that “it belongs to the notion of the highest good to communicate itself in the highest manner to the creature.”134 In no way does this diminish his denial of the incarnation’s necessity.135 It does, however, raise the question of how the concept of goodness’s self-­ diffusion or self-­ communication applies to God apart from the context of created being. Aquinas observes carefully that as it concerns the very notion of goodness, “diffusion is not to be understood as implying the operation of an efficient cause but rather the status of a final cause.”136 Aquinas leaves unspoken what should be most obvious: the diffusiveness of the Good that encompasses efficient and formal causality only applies when God as final cause acts on things that are not fully actualized but only in potency to their ultimate perfection – and this only happens in the context of creation.137 That is to say, diffusiveness as such does not necessitate this context. Absent the supposition of creation, goodness designates nothing more than an end  – and God’s goodness is his own end. It is clear, then, that considered in himself God as good need not creatively diffuse his own goodness because no final cause can prompt God to any efficient actualization of some divine form; God is pure act and “pure goodness itself.”138 The subordination of efficient to final causality in the rational intelligibility of goodness as such establishes God’s creative freedom as well as the applicability of diffusiveness to God’s goodness apart from his acts of creation and salvation. The revelation of the Trinity in particular discloses how there is internal to God a complete self-­communication of God’s goodness from the Father to the Son and from both to the Holy Spirit.139 This infinite communication or diffusion necessitates nothing other than itself, for which reason God  Ia.19.2; DP 3.15.ad14.  Ia.6.4.corp. 134  IIIa.1.1.corp. 135  IIIa.1.3. 136  DV 21.1.ad4. 137  Ia.5.2.ad2; Blankenhorn, “The Good as Self-­Diffusive in Thomas Aquinas,” 808–27. 138  DV 21.4.ad9; DC 9. 139  DP 9.9.s.c.; DP 2.1. 132 133

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is free from any inevitable outward emanation. Faced with the objection that God “cannot deny himself” (2 Tim 2:13) and must therefore necessarily diffuse his goodness, Aquinas responds: “this would not follow if he did not communicate his goodness, for nothing of his goodness would be lost if it were not communicated.”140 Thus goodness leads to the affirmation of God’s perfect being prior to and apart from all his ways with us, and just so the acknowledgment of God as the principle and end of all things who remains distinct from them because their existence is not absolutely necessary to him. After the analysis of divine goodness, Aquinas proceeds to derive the remaining substantial or entitative features of God’s being from the principles he has already established related to divine actuality. These other features – infinitude, immutability, and so forth – continue to emphasize both God’s responsibility toward creation and yet his qualitative distinction from all things. However, what we have already seen in simplicity, perfection, and goodness suffices to grasp the basic thought operative in these questions. Aquinas begins his inquiry into the doctrine of God through the formal orientation of considering God’s revelatory works through a causal analysis that discloses the texture of those works’ efficacy. The inquiry is nevertheless set within the context of the proper acknowledgment of God that requires an increased understanding of its material object as God in himself in distinction from all else. God’s goodness in particular begins to shed some light on this, but the process will reach its heights in this initial treatise when considering God’s blessedness.

God Himself as God’s Blessedness Through his causal analysis of God’s external activity, Aquinas determines that God’s responsibility for creation is justifiable on account of his simplicity, perfection, and goodness. These are also the reasons why God is qualitatively distinct from creation and yet involved with it intimately as its beginning and end. Consideration of the entitative or substantial features of God’s being in Ia.3–11 precedes consideration of God’s operations in Ia.14–26 because the former indicate the modality of the latter. Hence Aquinas proceeds to discuss God’s knowledge and will while also affirming that these are identical with God’s being and yet somehow distinct from one another, clearly employing the consequences   DP 3.15.ad12.

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of divine simplicity and perfection. We will return to these consequences in the next chapter, when we see how Aquinas employs his speculative grammar to discuss the intrinsic distinctions within God’s pure actuality. In this section, we turn the corner on our present discussion by focusing on how divine goodness characterizes God’s operations of knowing and willing and thus provides the basis for God’s blessedness and therein the acknowledgment of God Aquinas pursues. At the beginning of the treatise on the divine operations, Aquinas says that holy teaching has to account for how both “immanent” and “transitive” operations apply to God.141 Among the former none is ranked higher than God’s blessedness, which serves as the capstone perfection characterizing the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God’s blessedness gives the theologian the summary material significance of God “in himself” as it applies to the unity of God’s essence, for which reason it immediately prefaces the treatise on the distinction of persons. Divine beatitude therefore characterizes the unique self-­sufficiency of God as he relates to creation, which we will trace in the following chapter. Intrinsic to the intelligibility of divine blessedness is how the operations of God’s intellect and will relate to God’s goodness. Therefore, in setting forth God’s blessedness, we also look briefly to these operations’ function relative to goodness. The tract devoted to God’s operations terminates in God’s blessedness, thereby concluding a thought that begins with God’s knowledge. The operation of God’s intellect depicts how it is that God possesses his own goodness and knows of this possession, both aspects being intrinsic to God’s blessedness. We see this in Aquinas’s initial reasoning about divine beatitude: “Blessedness is God’s above all. For we understand the term to mean nothing else than the perfect good of an intellectual nature which is conscious of its sufficiency in the good it possesses, and which, should it encounter good or ill, is master of its operations.”142 Focusing on two relevant elements of this definition – possession and mastery, or freedom – suffices for our analysis. The first is the note of God possessing his own goodness, which he does by an act of the intellect. Aquinas construes the function of the intellect metaphysically as possessing in some way those things that it knows, for the intellect receives the intelligible species of the known object into itself and becomes united to what it knows.143 This is why the beatific vision is that whereby the saints attain their ultimate  Ia.14.prol.  Ia.26.1.corp. 143  Ia.85.1–2. DV 2.2.corp: “something is known by a knower by reason of the fact that the thing known is, in some fashion, in the possession of the knower.” 141 142

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end, for they see God and thereby possess God in a manner appropriate to their finite natures through an intellective act.144 Upon possessing that which they desire, they consequently enjoy God forever. The eschatological state of blessedness therefore involves three moments: sight, possession, and enjoyment, respectively answering to faith, hope, and love. Thus Aquinas says: “the blessed have this triple gift in God, for they see him and seeing him they possess him, holding him forever in their sight, and holding him they enjoy him as their ultimate end fulfilling their desires.”145 While God has no desire in need of fulfillment, or faith, hope, and love that must be perfected, his blessedness is nevertheless the pattern and exemplary cause of ours. For this reason we understand God to be blessed because his intellect “holds” (capit) preeminently in his own being all that is “desirable” in any blessedness – namely, his own goodness.146 Furthermore, God needs nothing else to know and possess his goodness: “God knows himself through himself.”147 Thus God “returns to his own essence maximally” by knowing himself, needing no other to whom he might turn to recognize himself or to achieve a fuller actuality.148 Aquinas is here stating the logic of divine aseity: God’s knowing is wholly self-­originating and full in itself, needing nothing outside itself. In God, knower, knowing, and known are identical and presuppose no distance or differentiation that must be overcome. God’s knowing and willing are identical with God’s being so that the divine operations do not stand to God’s existence as secondary act to primary act, because this would suggest some element of transitivity: God is pure act and so his being is the reflexive knowledge and love of the Trinity.149 This logic is further emphasized in how Aquinas characterizes God’s acts of knowledge and will as internal acts intrinsic to God’s perfection.150 As those acts intrinsic to his perfection, God’s acts of knowledge and will are peculiar movements and therefore only improperly motion: “For to understand is not a movement that is an act of something imperfect (actus imperfecti) passing from one to another, but it is an act of something perfect (actus perfecti), existing in the agent itself.”151 The absence of transitivity is here   IaIIae.3.4.   Ia.12.7.ad1. 146   Ia.26.2.corp; Ia.26.4,corp; Ia.6.1–2; Ia.14.3.ad1. 147   Ia.14.2.corp. 148   Ia.14.2.ad1; Ia.14.4. 149   Ia.14.1.ad1; Ia.14.2; Ia.19. 150   Ia.14.2.ad2. 151   Ia.14.2.ad2; Ia.19.1.ad3. On the distinction between the “act of something perfect” (actus perfecti) and “act of something imperfect” (actus imperfecti), see Bernard 144 145

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understood as the absence of imperfection, but not the absence of God’s perfect self-movement. Aquinas extends these reflections to God’s will and its relation to his goodness. Since we understand any act of will to consist in a response to an understood good as desirable, then in creatures all willing is consequent upon knowing something as good. Once something is recognized as good, this recognition of its desirability just is the will set in motion by the intellect. God knows and possesses his own goodness but is also aware of this knowledge and possession. God’s self-­knowledge is luminous; God knows himself, but he also knows that he knows himself.152 God is thus aware of his sufficiency in the good he possesses by possessing himself, for which reason God is blessed. It follows from this that God wills his own goodness and thereby loves and delights in himself: “In this respect will is said to be in God, as having always the good which is its object,” which “is not distinct from his essence.”153 Yet whereas this activity is sequential in creatures and thereby carries notes of transitivity and being set in motion, in God everything conforms to his aseity; the distinction between God knowing and willing his goodness is merely logical, and their ordering serves to render intelligible God’s blessedness and his particular freedom vis-à-vis other things. God wills himself through himself because his willing of his own goodness is identical with his being. The logic of aseity further demonstrates that God’s goodness alone suffices for his will as its sole necessary object.154 God’s love of and delight in his own goodness is an act of perfection intrinsic to God’s life and is wholly self-­referential in its essential intelligibility. That is, God is conceivable in wholly self-­referential terms of knowing and loving his own goodness and thereby being blessed in himself from and to all eternity. God’s will and therefore God himself is not ordered to anything other than his own goodness, which “can exist without other things.”155 And this possibility of existing without other things is part of what it means to conceive of and therefore acknowledge “God himself.” Here emerge the full implications of identifying theology’s material object with God in himself, understood with reference to his goodness. Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 110–16, 128–33. 152  Ia.15.2.ad2: “Now God not only knows many things through his essence, but also knows that he knows many things through his essence.” 153  Ia.19.1.ad2. 154  Ia.19.2.ad3. 155  Ia.19.3.ad2.

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From God’s reflexive activity of knowing and willing his own goodness, God is both conscious of his self-­sufficiency and therefore genuinely free because he exists and knows that he exists without any need for reality outwith his own eternal life. Through his internal act of knowing himself God possesses his sufficiency consciously, on account of which he loves and delights in himself. Aquinas gestures toward the significance of this blessed rest and enjoyment internal to God when he states how blessedness presupposes that whether one encounters good or ill, one is “master (domina) of one’s operations.”156 God’s willing of his own goodness as his necessary end therefore suggests that God’s agency is one characterized at every moment by his Lordship: God is the “blessed and only sovereign” (1 Tim 6:15). We may conclude our overview of God’s blessedness with two observations related to God’s lordship that will prove relevant to our consideration of the creative act in the following chapter; namely, God’s lordship over his acts speaks to his blessedness in his operations’ perfection and in their freedom. First, God’s blissful operations are effortless, firm, delightful, and unimpeded, for which reason God is perfectly at rest in himself and in his activity toward us.157 According to our understanding, God’s rest in himself follows as a proper consequence of his possession and enjoyment of his goodness.158 Since God effortlessly and firmly possesses his goodness in a simplicity and unity surpassing the aggregation that attends creaturely possession of the good, then God is above all at peace in himself and toward us.159 God does not arrive at a state of peace in his dealings with creatures because God’s rest in himself is part of what it means for him to be God. Second, God’s acts of will are blessed in that they are characterized by divine freedom with regard to their created objects. When discussing the nature of freedom, Aquinas delineates several forms of necessity that are and are not compatible with human freedom: (1) there is absolute necessity without which things cannot be the things they are; (2) necessity of finality when an end requires something for its attainment, as the end of living requires the means of food; and (3) necessity of coaction when one agent or force coerces another and negates its freedom of operation. Aquinas notes   Ia.26.1.corp.   SCG I.100; Eth. 7.13.1506. 158   IaIIae.2.6; IaIIae.3.4. This is similar to how those accidents proper to something (per se accidens) follow upon its essential principles; see Wippel, Metaphysical Thought, 269–71. 159   DDN 11.1.880; Ia.26.1.ad1. On the ratio pacis, see Wittman, “Not a God of Confusion,” 164–7. 156 157

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that ­necessity of coaction alone is incompatible with willing, whereas the other two are compatible.160 However, only the absolute necessity to will his own goodness and be himself applies to God. Nothing else can coerce God, and nothing apart from God is essential as means to God’s possession of his own goodness, the end. Since nothing apart from God is essential to the possession of his goodness, then there is no absolute necessity to will them.161 Though God wills his own goodness necessarily, he remains irreducibly free with respect to how he demonstrates his intrinsic joy and delight in his possession of his goodness. Indeed, God’s freedom extends to “specification” since he can either will things to be or not to be without loss to his intrinsically full goodness.162 With these implications of God’s self-­sufficiency understood as his blessedness, the acknowledgment of God himself strongly distinguishes God from creation and thereby excludes from our thoughts all idolatrous pretensions to sufficiency apart from God. Though God’s blessedness entails his perfection in himself and his freedom from any need, God’s is not the same as the pagan notion of divine beatitude that would render the gods or the unmoved mover indifferent to the affairs of mortals. Commenting on 1 Timothy 6:15, Aquinas notes that Scripture’s depiction of God as blessed is fitting “because the purpose of Christ’s coming is to lead us to blessedness.”163 God’s blessedness means that in all his perfection and freedom God authors our blessedness, and so his knowledge and will extend to realities beyond himself in sheer mercy.164 Aquinas therefore follows Augustine and argues that Christ’s mediation consists in opening a way for mortal creatures to partake of God’s immortal blessedness.165 All of this shows that while God’s blessedness is intelligible apart from his works in history, consideration of God’s blessedness in fact embraces that history and the eternity to which it beckons us. In this light divine beatitude is crucial to considering things “with reference to God” (sub ratione Dei), both for understanding God himself and all else relative to God as its principle and end.

 Ia.82.1.corp; DV 22.5.  Ia.19.3.corp. 162  Ia.19.10.ad2; Ia.19.3; Reginald A. Redlon, “St. Thomas and the Freedom of the Creative Act,” Franciscan Studies 20 (1960): 1–18. 163  1 Tim. 6.3.266; Ia.26.1.s.c. 164  Ia.14.5; Ia.19.2; Ia.25; Ia.26.3–4. 165  IIIa.26.1.ad2; Augustine, De civitate Dei 9.15. 160 161

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Conclusion From the foregoing we see that God’s blessedness entails his full perfection in himself and his freedom to be all that is. As the source and end of all that exists, God is blessed with an irreducible antecedence that is intelligible and conceivable apart from God’s creative activity. This entailment of divine blessedness will become clearer in the course of the next chapter, where we trace how God corresponds to his blessed life in himself in his external acts and the consequences of Aquinas’s construal for God’s relation to creation. Already, however, we find clues to this entailment in how God’s blessedness functions within Aquinas’s search for the acknowledgment of God. As the proximate conclusion to the argument begun in Ia.2, God’s blessedness serves to show how theology’s material object as God in himself enables Aquinas to acknowledge God on the basis of the knowledge of his ways without confusing God in himself with the formality of his external works. This chapter has aimed at demonstrating how the acknowledgment of God that Aquinas achieves through the insight into God’s goodness and blessedness results in a conception of God as intelligible and conceivable apart from his acts of creation and salvation. Theology’s material object is therefore God himself in the sense of God in himself apart from his works, a conclusion reinforced in the treatise on the Trinity that follows God’s blessedness. The blissful, self-­returning operations of God’s intellect and will correspond to truths that surpass the natural light of reason. In the light of revelation, we recognize the congruence in hindsight (a posteriori). As God’s internal operations are only those of knowing and willing, so, too, from the Father there is “no procession other than that of the Word and that of Love, inasmuch as God knows and loves his essence, truth and goodness.”166 Again, just as divine blessedness underscores the intellect’s possession of and the will’s rest in God’s goodness, so, too, the processions underscore the mutual presence of the known in the knower and the beloved in the lover in the names of the Word and Love, Son and Spirit. The divine processions therefore manifest but do not derive from the perfect fecundity of God’s blessedness.167 But the processions are complete in and of themselves and do not necessitate any further procession into creatures. Aquinas isolates   Ia.27.5.ad2; Ia.27.1.   Ia.27.5.ad3; DDN 1.3.57; Emmanuel Perrier, La fécondité en Dieu: La puissance notionelle dans la Trinité selon saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2009), 162–8, 223–4.

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this point for special attention, noting that the revelation of the Trinity helps secure once and for all the gratuity of creation: [K]nowledge of the divine persons was necessary . . . for the right idea of creation. The fact of saying that God made all things by his Word excludes the error of those who say that God produced things by necessity. When we say that in him there is a procession of Love, we show that God produced creatures not because he needed them, nor because of any other extrinsic reason, but on account of the love of his own goodness.168

The revelation of the Trinity therefore shows the blessed way of God’s creative act and thereby implicitly remarks upon that act’s freedom and contingency. What all of this suggests is that Aquinas’s treatment of the doctrine of God in the Summa theologiae is best read backwards to capture its true intent: from the ultimate truth of the Trinity descend the implied truths of God’s blessedness, and in turn of his knowledge, will, goodness, perfection, and simplicity.169 Just so that which is necessary for the full acknowledgment of God comes to us from the full knowledge of God’s ways in Christ. Acknowledging God in his blessed self-­sufficiency precludes any idolatrous collapse of creation into Creator and informs us of the end to which we are called and to which we must direct the thoughts and intentions of our hearts. Aquinas opens his inquiry into God’s being and activity by orienting his account formally as a causal analysis of God’s external works and how these are founded in God’s being. The process is informed by a biblical concern for the responsibility laid upon all rational creatures by virtue of God’s modestly revelatory activity in creation, which Aquinas derives from Romans 1. Problematic to any inquiry into God’s existence  Ia.32.2.ad3.  The inverse reading proposed here bears some similarity to Augustine’s exercise in deriving the divine perfections from one another in DT 15.5.7–6.9. The doctrine of the Trinity unifies, orders, and requires the material and formal treatment of divine actuality throughout the treatise on the divine essence – similar to how the higher causes the lower (Sent. II.3.3.2.corp). However, in this case the lower truths cannot function to provide “necessary reasons” for the doctrine of the Trinity. See here Emmanuel Durand, “Comment pratiquer la théologie trinitaire en pélerin? Béatitude et Trinité selon Richard de Saint-­Victor et Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 92.2 (2008): 209–23. On the function of divine blessedness within the overall argument, see further Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know? St. Thomas on the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 82 (2001): 260–71 (261); Kerr, After Aquinas, 192; Jean-­Marc Laporte, “Beatitude in the Structure of Aquinas’ Summa: Is Ia26 a Stray Question?,” Toronto Journal of Theology 18.1 (2002): 143–52; Sebastian Walshe, “Beata Trinitas: The Beatitude of God as Prelude to the Trinitarian Processions,” The Thomist 76 (2012): 189–209.

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is the moral situation of the knower, who is in danger of suppressing the truth in unrighteousness and impiety. Only the proper acknowledgment of God suffices to remove all idolatrous conceptions about God, and this acknowledgment requires knowledge of his ways achieved through causal analysis of God’s external works in nature, grace, and glory. As Aquinas’s argument proceeds, he gains an increasingly clearer insight into the character of God’s self-­sufficiency through his analysis of divine simplicity, perfection, and goodness. Through these substantial features, God’s responsibility for and distinction from creation are both formally justified in light of his being. The argument’s denouement in God’s goodness leads the novice to a deeper awareness of God’s creative activity and freedom, which is articulated when the modality of God’s intellect and will are understood relative to God’s goodness. Ultimately this leads to the doctrine of divine blessedness, the summary perfection of God most materially significant for the soteriological purposes of the Summa theologiae. The ascetical task of discerning God’s beatitude serves at once the soteriological ends of holy teaching and the confession of God as God. On account of God’s blessedness, the acknowledgment of God results in confessing God as distinct from and intelligible without his effects – thus the meaning of God himself. But this acknowledgment is also of the one who condescends to us and leads us into a participation of his blessed life through the missions of the Son and Spirit. The remaining questions for the following chapter are how God corresponds to himself in light of his blessedness and how this understanding of theology and economy bears upon God’s relation to the world.

3 Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation

The goal of Chapter  2 was to discern how Aquinas’s use of the distinction between theology’s formal and material objects is coordinated with his understanding of God’s self-­sufficiency. The formal orientation of Aquinas’s inquiry is to trace God’s external works to their ground in God’s being, where their causal efficacy is justified and demonstrated. This formal orientation in turn is characterized by a moral concern to acknowledge God in such a way that excludes idolatrous and prideful conceptions of God that confuse Creator and creatures. Taking his cues from Romans 1, Aquinas believes that this acknowledgment is achieved through knowledge of God’s ways, which is acquired scientifically and sapientially through causal analysis of the “things that have been made” (Rom 1:20). As the course of the argument reveals, the requisite acknowledgment of God is achieved only where God is understood materially as “God himself” in distinction from the formal understanding of God as “revealing himself.” Reflecting on the efficient, exemplary, and final causality of God’s works involves an ordered analysis of divine simplicity and perfection, which resolves in the notion of God’s goodness. When the effects of God’s external works are seen in light of God’s goodness, they are understood as incommensurate to God’s being. Aquinas presses this incommensurability into service when showing how divine goodness specifies the operations of God’s intellect and will, resulting in the perfection of God’s blessedness. In this summary perfection, theology’s material object is understood in its self-­returning material priority as God himself and thus as the one who is peacefully at rest in himself and sovereignly free from any necessity to create. The inquiry of the opening tract on God’s unity of essence thus concludes by confessing the intelligibility and conceivability of God prior to and apart from his revelatory external works. 74

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In conclusion, we noted that while God’s blessedness is conceivable and intelligible apart from the formality of God’s acts of creation and salvation, God’s goodness and blessedness nevertheless speak in the most relevant manner to God’s acts of creation, salvation, and eschatological consummation. Understanding these acts in light of God’s goodness and blessedness results in a particular understanding of those acts and of God’s relation to creation. Such matters are the concern of the present chapter, which aims to trace God’s self-­correspondence as the blessed God in his act of creation and the consequences of this account of self-­ correspondence for God’s relation to creation. God’s correspondence to himself is traced in an analysis of the creative act’s principle and end, the consequences of which result in the nonreciprocal or mixed (non ex aequo) relation between God and creation. The first section sets the stage with some comments on the relevance of divine self-­correspondence for the consideration of the creative act and the confession of God. The second section proceeds to analyze the reflexive circularity of God’s being and activity in light of his blessedness and focuses on the correspondence of God’s creative act to God’s being with respect to the inner-­divine operations and trinitarian processions. Aquinas secures God’s freedom from and for creation to the extent that he describes how God’s creative act corresponds to God’s blessed being at both essential and personal levels. This leads us in the third section to analyze the order of the creative act to God’s goodness, and thus the order of divine self-­correspondence. The dual consideration of creation’s principle and end is unified in holy teaching’s subject, which is God and all things in relation to God as their principle and end. This formality of theology’s subject, as well as the exit– return structure of the economy, conforms to God’s self-­correspondence as the blessed God in the creative act and bears important consequences for the radically asymmetrical relation between God and creation. Our final section therefore demonstrates how this asymmetrical relation follows from God’s self-­correspondence as the blessed God, who would be the same without this relation.

Creative Causality and the Question of God’s Self-Correspondence Creation is the inescapable backdrop to theology’s consideration of anything because it is the first of God’s external works, the “issuing of the whole of being from the universal cause, which is God.”1 For this reason  Ia.45.1.corp.

1

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creation out of nothing (ex nihilo) – creation without any presupposition apart from God’s loving activity – serves as the horizon against which theology considers its material object: God and creatures. Whatever we say about God we say as creatures, and whatever wisdom we possess about ourselves implies that we have a principle and end to whom we owe our being. Creation’s influence on Aquinas’s metaphysics and the intelligibility it lends to the articles of faith has led Josef Pieper to remark that it functions as the self-­evident “hidden key” to his thought.2 Something of this significance is evident in the argument we traced in the previous chapter, where the ontological indigence of creatures witnesses to God’s intrinsic plenitude that is the source of both his radical distinction from creatures and his relation to them. We also see this significance in creation’s placement within the Summa theologiae: “after the procession of the divine persons, it remains to consider the procession of creatures from God.”3 Consideration of creatures follows consideration of God the Trinity materially and formally. The material order intrinsic to theology’s object, God and creatures, accords priority to God himself before creation and creatures, and Aquinas simply repeats this order formally in his presentation of the doctrines. We have argued that consideration of God himself in his blessedness does not demand any further consideration logically but it does factually since the blessedness with which theology is concerned belongs to the self-­sufficient God who creates creatures for participation in his own eternal vision and enjoyment. It is precisely this God who is the principle and end of all things, and so consideration of the first of God’s external acts, and therein the horizon of all divine activity, proceeds by considering creation in light of God the blessed Trinity (sub ratione beatae Trinitatis). The significance of overlaying the formal and material order between the doctrines may be seen in how the same exigencies Aquinas draws from Romans 1 at the beginning of his inquiry into the blessed Trinity resurface at the outset of his doctrine of creation. The initial question on creation concerns the first cause of beings, consisting of four articles probing the applicability of efficient, material, exemplary, and final causality to God’s creative act. The very first article sets the tone for the whole question and asks if it is necessary that God causes everything. The question is not about creation’s contingency but about the necessity that  Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays, trans. John Murray and Daniel O’Connor (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999), 48. 3  Ia.44.prol. 2

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things’ existence owes to a cause – and this especially concerns efficient causality. Aquinas justifies his affirmative answer by citing Paul’s epistle to the Romans, similar to how he begins his inquiry into God’s existence: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Rom 11:36).4 Though he only cites the first half, in his commentary on the whole verse Aquinas picks up the thread of the proper acknowledgment of God we saw in his reading of Romans 1. He explains, Then when he says, To him be honor and glory, he shows God’s dignity, which consists in the two things previously mentioned. For from the fact that all things are from him and through him and in him, honor and reverence and subjection are owed him by every creature: If I am a father, where is my honor? (Mal 1:6). But from the fact that he has not received either counsel or gifts from anyone, glory is owed him; just as on the contrary it is said of man: if then you received it, why do you boast as though it were not a gift? (1 Cor 4:7). And because this is proper to God, it is said: I am the Lord; my glory I give to no other (Isa 42:8).5

Already we have seen that God’s causal responsibility for and distinction from creation are fully acknowledged in the confession of God’s blessedness and the procession of the Word and Love, and here we see some related thoughts touching again on the acknowledgment of God. Glory is due to the blessed God because “to be glorious signifies to be blessed.”6 Refusing to acknowledge God in his blessedness is also a refusal to glorify God, and results from the prideful boast that whatever we have – wisdom, blessings, faith, or even being  – is not a gift but had from ourselves.7 Such sinful boasting ascribes to humanity the aseity proper to God, and thereby mistakes the creature for the Creator. Hence, whatever metaphysical refinements attend our affirmation that things must necessarily have been caused, we must follow Paul’s advice: “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Cor 1:31). Aquinas’s doctrine of creation thus sustains his concern to acknowledge God and therefore glorify him so that we give God the honor, reverence, and worship due him on account of his gifts, the first of which is existence itself. The remaining articles in this initial question deny that God is a material cause of things since matter is created out of nothing and affirm that God is an exemplar and final cause of creation.8 Inquiry into the creative act therefore looks back to  Ia.44.1.s.c.  Rom. 11.5.950. 6  Ia.26.2.s.c. 7  1 Cor. 4.2.202. 8  Ia.44.2–4. 4 5

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the causal texture of divine activity traced in the opening to the doctrine of God in order to understand the creative act with respect to God (sub ratione Dei), all for the sake of confessing God as God. Our current task is to demonstrate how understanding the creative act with respect to God requires us to perceive how God corresponds to himself in the act of creating. The question of divine self-­correspondence concerns the extent to which theology may trace the continuity between God’s inner life and outer works, as well as the kinds of restrictions to this continuity it must register. How, in other words, does God’s being shape God’s activity or, conversely, how does God’s act inform us of God’s being? In light of Chapter 2, perceiving God’s self-­correspondence means understanding creation with respect to the blessed Trinity (sub ratione beatae Trinitatis). We touched upon the significance of the Trinity in the conclusion to the previous chapter only briefly, but here we will need to see its full consequences for God’s self-­correspondence and the confession of God as God. It is specifically in the blessed Trinity – rather than an abstract notion of divine beatitude  – that we find the basis of the correspondence in God’s being that we will trace in God’s act of creation. God’s correspondence to himself in his act of creation comes into view only when we see how this external act has its presupposition and basis in God’s inner life and vitality, with all its trinitarian specificity. Therefore, we must trace God’s self-­correspondence as the blessed Trinity through an analysis of the creative act in light of its principle and end, which the following two sections address, respectively. First we look at the principle of creation in God’s internal being and activity and find that creation corresponds to the essentially blessed form of God’s being, which is intelligible as a perfectly circular divine movement of the divine operations and processions. Second we turn to investigate the significance of God’s goodness for the order of God’s self-­correspondence in creation. As God’s creative act corresponds to his blessed being, he grants creation a participation in his own structured life by ordering creation to his intrinsic goodness. Once the creative act is understood synthetically in light of its principle and end in God’s life as the blessed Trinity, the acknowledgment and glorification of God are secured through the articulation of divine self-­correspondence. In this fashion, Aquinas’s inquiry into the doctrine of God retains its moral character to the extent that it offers a robust account of God’s self-­ correspondence conforming to the axiom that “act follows being” (agere sequitur esse).

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The Principle of Creation This and the following section are devoted to an analysis of creation’s principle and end, pursuing that on account of which creation exists and to which it is ordered. The origin and purpose of things are perennial questions of philosophical inquiry but inescapable to the Christian confession, “I believe in God the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” In our analysis of God’s goodness we have already seen that identifying God’s being as perfect and good is part of affirming creation’s essential goodness and God’s distinction from it. In moving now to consider the relevance of God’s being for creation from the perspective of divine self-­correspondence, we transpose these same considerations onto a broader analytic framework. A critical test of this framework’s viability is whether it functions to disclose creation’s principle and end, as well as God’s distinction from creation. That is, if God corresponds to himself in creating, then we should expect to discover within the pattern and order of divine self-­correspondence both creation’s principle and end as well as God’s qualitative distinction. What exactly this means and what it looks like will become clearer throughout the course of our discussion. Tracing God’s self-­correspondence in creation requires us first to analyze the principle of the creative act. Aquinas maintains that God creates by his knowledge and will, as well as his Word and Love; both divine operations and processions figure into God’s creative causality. However, before looking at each of the essential and personal dimensions of creation’s principle, we need to observe some basic features of God’s internal activity as it is proper to and characteristic of God’s essence apart from any activity with reference to an external term. Here we are concerned to discern the shape or form of God’s inner life, as it is knowable to pilgrims. Only where this is intelligible in some finite manner may the internal principle of creation itself be known as self-­consistent with God or otherwise. If we can see something of the movements proper to God’s inner life as such, then we will be positioned to discern whether those movements giving rise to creation are consistent movements of God. What might this shape be, and how may we discern it? For Aquinas, we perceive the shape of God’s inner life from the shape of God’s creative act because act discloses being. In this respect, he observes an irreducible order between the movements of God’s intellect and will, as he does between the procession of the Son from the Father and the procession of the Spirit from the Father and Son. This ordered

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movement has a characteristic form or shape proper to God’s life in himself, and which therefore is reflected in the movements of created beings as in a mirror. Aquinas explains the form of this ordered movement in cyclical terms: [B]oth in us and in God there is a certain circulation in the operations of the intellect and will, for the will returns to the principle of its understanding. Now in us the circle concludes in that which is external, the external good moving the intellect and the intellect moving the will by appetite and love tending towards the external good, but in God the circle closes in Himself (in se ipso). For God, by understanding Himself, conceives His Word which is the pattern (ratio) of all things understood by Him, inasmuch as He understands all things by understanding Himself, and from this Word He proceeds to love . . . And the circle being concluded (circulus conclusus est) nothing more can be added to it, so that a third procession in the divine nature is impossible, although there follows a further procession into an external nature.9

Aquinas discerns this cyclical movement in the ordering and reflexivity of God’s intellect and will, which correspond to the ordered processions of the Son and Spirit. The idea of God’s reflexive self-­movement supports the logic of aseity we traced in the previous chapter: “For a thing to ‘return to its own essence’ is simply for it to be self-subsistent.”10 The emphasis on divine aseity is evident when we compare God’s circular movement to the similar motions of created intellects in humans and angels. In humans self-­knowledge always involves the mediation of difference between the knowing subject and her act of knowing, through which she knows herself as a knower.11 One of the reasons for this is that the human intellect and will are always moved by an external good toward which they tend. As is evident in Aquinas’s reasoning, God requires no such mediating differentiation because there is no external good that can possibly move God. This recalls how God possesses his own goodness by an act of intellect that “returns to His own essence maximally,” and it follows that since  DP 9.9.corp; SCG II.46; SCG IV.26; Sent. I.14.2.2.corp; DC 15; Ia.14.2.ad1; DDN 4.11.450; DDN 4.12.460. Philipp Rosemann argues convincingly that this circular pattern is one of the central motifs of Aquinas’s thought: Omne agens agit sibi simile: A “Repetition” of Scholastic Metaphysics (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996), 253–78, 341–52; Philipp W. Rosemann, Omne ens est aliquid: Introduction à la lecture du ‘système’ philosophique de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain-­Paris: Éditions Peeters, 1996). 48–71, 116–39, 191–210. See further Oliver, God, Philosophy and Motion (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 95–101. 10  Ia.14.2.ad1. 11  Compare with Ia.87.1, Ia.88.2.ad3. 9

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God’s will is fixed upon the divine goodness apprehended by his intellect then God’s will returns to his intellect as its source.12 God’s will responds to his self-­possession in resting love, and so God is blessed and at rest. The circular motion in question therefore repeats the logic of divine aseity because its reflexivity is intrinsic to God’s blessedness. Furthermore, Aquinas emphasizes the same point by comparison to angelic creatures. Angels can know themselves through themselves similar to God, but their being is not identical to their act and so their intellect is not pure or complete in self-­knowledge, nor do they know all things through a reflexive act of knowing themselves.13 On the contrary, as pure act God’s concluded circle of movement is not internally differentiated into primary and secondary moments, nor is it completed by anything within or without God. Again, the metaphysics of pure act function to demonstrate the aseity of divine blessedness. And insofar as the processions of the Son and Spirit from the Father manifest the fecundity of God’s blessedness, then they also manifest how God’s circular movement is concluded in himself. Just as we saw in the conclusion to the previous chapter that the blessed Trinity entails God’s freedom to have possibly not created, so here Aquinas maintains that the closed circle of divine beatitude requires nothing more for its perfection or intelligibility. Nevertheless, a gratuitous procession into external nature does in fact follow from the intrinsically replete reflexivity of God’s blessedness. To ask about divine self-­correspondence in creation is thus to ask how this further procession corresponds to the cyclical perfection of God’s internal operations and processions in which God is blessed and at rest. For this correspondence to obtain, there must not be any competition between God’s blessedness and creation. On the contrary, Aquinas believes that blessedness accounts for how God creates and the consequent shape of that creation’s dynamism. Indeed, in both of his Summas the theme of God’s beatitude serves the dual function of concluding his treatment of God’s essence and prefacing his doctrine of creation.14 However, it is important that the treatise on the Trinity comes before the doctrine of creation in the pedagogical order intended by the Summa theologiae. For if God knows creation and wills it into existence freely and corresponds to himself therein, then the correspondence between his creative fecundity and blessedness is incomplete until we refer creation to the processions  Ia.14.2.ad1.  Ia.87.1.corp. 14  Granted the treatise on the Trinity intervenes between Ia.26 and Ia.44, the doctrine of the Trinity is still an account of who it is that is blessed. See also SCG I.100–2. 12 13

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of the Son and Spirit from the Father.15 God’s circular movement and the possession and enjoyment it implies reaches its full fruition in the doctrine of the Trinity; both essential and personal considerations are part of a continuous thought and must not be divorced from one another. That said, the consideration of God’s essential operations comes first, and so we will follow Aquinas’s order for the sake of showing more clearly the significance of the Trinity. Before turning to this material, we need to note how tracing God’s self-­correspondence in creation is incomplete until it concludes with an account of the creative act’s end and teleology. This flows straightforwardly from what we have just seen about the replete reflexivity of God’s internal being: if the blessed Trinity is complete and “closed” itself, then this means that if God’s acts correspond to his being, then God’s external act of creation must correspond in turn to this “closure” of God’s inner life. As we will see, creation only thus corresponds to God’s blessed being in himself once we see how its order is caught up in the very order of God’s life as God.

Divine Operations and Creation Aquinas articulates the divine operations of intellect and will within an overarching logic of divine aseity: God knows and wills himself through himself, on account of which these divine operations are strictly immanent and perfect. God’s knowledge and will are neither capacities in a primary state of actuality nor operations in a secondary act that presuppose a primary act. Rather God’s operations of intellect and will are pure act and hence devoid of any transition or sequence because they are identical with God’s being. God is at once his own intellect, his own knowledge, and his own object of knowledge, and likewise for his will. But just as God’s blessedness also accounts for how God authors our blessedness, the aseity of God’s intellect and will also accounts for how it is that God knows and wills things other than himself. In this subsection we analyze how Aquinas understands the divine operations as principles of creation. At this point our consideration of the interplay between simplicity and perfection becomes acutely relevant for demonstrating how God knows himself and other things in different modalities without any hints of transitivity. We saw in Chapter 2 that divine perfection enables the positive predication of goods to God such as intellect and will, while simplicity reminds us that these exist in God as indistinct from his being.  Ia.27.5.ad3, Ia.45.6.corp, Ia.32.1.corp.

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We are not thereby given any privileged access into the positive manner in which God’s intellect and will exist in God but are strictly reminded negatively that they do not exist in any manner within our comprehension. As we will see, Aquinas’s speculative grammar lends him resources to consider further the divine operations in relation to the creative act so as to account for God’s sovereign freedom he enjoys on account of his blessedness. When Aquinas considers the divine operations in relation to creation, the model of practical knowledge is one of his favorite analogies. Practical knowledge likens God’s intentional creative act to the analogy of an artisan with their art: “God’s knowledge stands to all created things as the artist’s to his products.”16 This practical model is particularly helpful in drawing out two aspects in which God’s intellect functions as the principle of the creative act. First, in every work of art the form in an artisan’s intellect is the principle of what they produce; the architect knows the house that they intend to construct, and this conception of their mind is that according to which they then construct the edifice. The case is similar with God, though in him there is no distinction between intellectual form and intellect since he knows all things by knowing himself – God is his own object of knowledge. God’s self-­knowledge is relevant for creatures because God knows himself insofar as he is imitable by creatures, for which reason Aquinas says there are “ideas” of all things God can or does create. Aquinas shares Aristotle’s critique of Platonic forms and so argues that these ideas are not external to God.17 Rather, God’s speculative knowledge of himself “conceives” (excogitat) the ideas of all things, suggesting an ineffably inventive act within the depths of God’s knowledge.18 Relevant here is Aquinas’s specification that the ideas are that which God knows, but divine wisdom is that by which God knows.19 One should keep the invocation of wisdom in mind because its biblical association with the second person of the Trinity (Prov 8:30) suggests that more needs to be said about divine ideas than the notion of intellect can provide on its own. Second, the usefulness of the analogy to practical knowledge also lies in how the will is required for the production of things: “an intelligible form does not indicate a principle of activity merely as it is in the knower, unless it is accompanied by an

 Ia.14.8.corp.  Ia.15.1.ad1–3. 18  DP 1.5.ad11. 19  Ia.15.2.ad2. 16 17

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inclination toward an effect; this is supplied by the will.”20 An architect may consider a house according to its constitutive features and thereby consider something producible speculatively and not practically, since the end in view is knowledge and not production. Furthermore, knowledge of something can cover contrary courses of action with respect to the object known, for which reason knowledge typically requires a decision about what to do.21 In intellectual natures possessing knowledge there must follow an inclination toward a particular end, supplied by the will, which has as its object some good – either the object known or something involving that object. All of this shows how knowledge alone does not induce action, and so consideration of creation’s principle involves a careful coordination of divine intellect and will. With these two features in view, it is imperative to note the asymmetry in the analogy with practical knowledge and how Aquinas exploits it. As pure act God’s life is not tensed into primary and secondary moments or aspects, so the sequential features of practical reason are inapplicable. God’s knowledge is not discursive, nor does God consider something as producible “before” his will inclines him to act. God does not have to deliberate and then choose a course of action, as if God had to weigh his options or as if God entertained even the remotest possibility of chance or caprice. Yet the sequential features of practical knowledge do point to something abiding and true. For creatures the object desired first moves the practical intellect, which cannot move unless the appetite determines it to a single course. The practical intellect directs the consequent movement but does not cause that movement independently of the will.22 Aquinas exploits these features of the practical knowledge analogy  Ia.14.8.corp.  Meta. IX.2.1792–3, IX.10.1883. 22  DA III.15.825; Ia.79.11.ad1–2; “Although the mind is a principle of action, nevertheless the mind simply considered in itself (or the speculative reason) does not move anything because it prescribes nothing about pursuit or flight, as was stated in De anima III; and hence it is not the speculative mind that is a principle of some action, but only the mind which is purposive, that is, ordered to some particular producible (operabile) thing as an end. This is the practical mind or reason, which indeed not only governs active operation (actio), which does not pass into external matter but remains in the agent – like desiring and becoming angry – but it also governs productive operation (factio), which does pass into external matter – like burning and cutting” (Eth. VI.2.1135). Two further aspects of asymmetry: whereas the artist considers the plan of the house in his mind and then executes this plan by imparting form to matter, God knows those things he creates through his own essence and does not merely impart form to anything preexistent but produces the whole of existence. Moreover, whereas “the desire of every artisan comes to rest in their work,” God “rests only in His goodness” (Heb. 4.1.204). 20 21

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solely to describe the causality of God’s knowledge, which, if it is to be a free exercise of causality, is only intelligible to us as an ordered union of knowledge and will. Starting from the actuality of created things, Aquinas reasons that God has created and since he wishes to protect God’s freedom to create, concludes that God’s knowledge is the cause of things only in conjunction with his will; this is God’s “knowledge of approbation.”23 The unity of intellect and will ultimately means that creation is an intentional work of wisdom, an insight that leads Aquinas ultimately to articulate creation’s teleology and freedom  – though our focus for the moment is on the latter. To see this we need to keep in mind that according to Aquinas’s analysis of human intentional action, freedom finds its root in reason, which first apprehends an end and then through a deliberative process renders an intentional judgment that precipitates action when joined to the will.24 This structure moves from the basic consideration of ends through means and ultimately to the decision for and execution of action. We have already seen that this sequential structure of the act is not the feature Aquinas intends to apply to God; rather, it furnishes the speculative resources to properly characterize God’s creative act. This is visible in Aquinas’s interpretation of Scripture: “God works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph 1:11). In his commentary on this passage, Aquinas says it points to the rationality of God’s purpose and works: Paul says that God works all things according to the “counsel” of his will and not “according to his will” alone.25 The first thing to notice about the importance of counsel is that God’s purposive ordering of all things is in accordance with the ordered unity of the divine intellect and will, the latter proceeding from the former rather than from itself or from some abstract power. At least here the priority of intellect over will seems to be an implication of Scripture and not, as some would worry, a mere deduction from an a priori philosophical anthropology. Second, the language of counsel concerns the divine operations “insofar as they are ordained to some end,” and while deliberation is inapplicable to God this language nevertheless signifies imperfectly that God’s will is “certain and  Ia.14.8.corp. By introducing God’s will in the middle of his account of God’s knowledge, Aquinas protects divine freedom from any necessity arising from knowledge as such, as if “practical knowledge” in God is something independent of God’s will that obligates its movements. Such is the concern of Scotus, Lectura I.39.5.43–4, in John Duns Scotus, Contingency and Freedom: Lectura I 39, trans. A. Vos Jaczn et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994), 104–9. 24  IaIIae.6–17. 25  Eph. 1.4.34. 23

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deliberate.”26 This points to the importance of God’s goodness for the operations of intellect and will, which we will see in more detail in our consideration of creation’s teleology. Already here we find hints that insofar as God’s intellect and will qua creative “return” to God’s goodness as their end, they correspond to God’s reflexive movement in himself apart from any reference to creatures. According to Aquinas, Scripture therefore testifies to God’s self-­correspondence in creating insofar as it testifies to the circular manner of the divine operations in all God’s works. However, equally as important is the implication Aquinas draws from Ephesians 1:11 for God’s self-­correspondence as the blessed God, because this verse also speaks to God’s blessed freedom. That which is willed from counsel is not willed from necessity, and so it is willed freely.27 In order to understand this, we need to recall several elements of our analysis in the previous chapter. The freedom of the creative act is a peculiar problem, given what Aquinas says about divine simplicity; if God is what God has, then God’s being is identical with his knowing and willing. Furthermore, if God is pure act, then it seems as if God just is his knowing and willing of creatures, which suggests that creation has at least an irreducible inevitability about it. Another way of stating this is that if God’s will is identical with his being, then it seems that we can only understand God’s will within the modalities indicated by divine simplicity, eternity, and so forth. So if God knows and wills things other than himself, then it seems to follow that he always has with the same necessity of his own life. Contemporary debates in the philosophy of religion suggest that similar concerns about “modal uniformity” attend debates surrounding the doctrine of divine simplicity.28 If God’s will is pure act, then all traces of contingency and possibility seem to evaporate before the unwavering necessity of actuality. Aquinas circumvents these apparent conclusions of his doctrine of God without sacrificing his commitment to the absolute priority of actuality over possibility by employing the resources of his speculative grammar. The aspect of the inquiry most relevant here especially concerns the divine will, which Aquinas considers in two logical moments. In the first moment Aquinas considers God’s will independently because he abstracts the thing signified (res significata) by “will” from our language’s requisite mode of signifying (modus significandi), which is incommensurate to God’s mode of being  IaIIæ.14.1.ad2; Eph. 1.4.34; Psalmo 32.9–10.  Ia.19.3.s.c. 28  For example, Thomas V. Morris, “On God and Mann: A View of Divine Simplicity,” Religious Studies 21 (1985): 299–318. 26 27

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(modus essendi). This is crucial to the coherence of Aquinas’s account, for if he did not take this step of abstracting the thing signified from the manner of its signification, then we might well suspect that simplicity’s negative function has suddenly become positive. That is, without isolating a positive moment in which perfections tell us something about God in himself apart from their conditioning by simplicity or immutability, then too easily it can seem as if the identity of God’s will with his being as pure act gives us positive knowledge about God’s mode of being. Only where we mistakenly attribute such a positive function to simplicity – a strictly negative doctrine – might we conclude that simplicity raises the problem of modal uniformity, for example.29 Whereas divine simplicity is a negative doctrine, the divine operations are positive perfections whose content (res) must tell us something independent of their modes of signification. Nevertheless, simplicity has an important function in Aquinas’s contemplative inquiry, for which reason this first moment is complemented by a second that treats God’s will inasmuch as features like divine simplicity and immutability condition it. In this second moment Aquinas studies God’s will in light of its simplicity, and so joins the thing signified together with its mode of signifying.30 Though this twofold approach is demanded and enabled by the complementary reciprocity between God’s simplicity and perfection, it remains temperate because it does not alleviate the strictures of our mode of understanding (modus intelligendi). We are still speaking about God’s will analogically and only noting that the analogy operates within a complementary interplay between simplicity and perfection. We are now positioned to see why that which is willed from counsel is not willed from necessity, and so why God’s creative act corresponds to  Recall that divine simplicity is a purely negative doctrine telling us what is not the case with God. However, when different theologians use the doctrine its apophaticism comes in varying degrees of intensity. For some the doctrine is more negative than for others and so forbids certain affirmations. For yet others, the doctrine is still strictly negative but allows for affirmations of the kind other proponents would not venture. This variance of simplicity’s apophatic intensity, as it were, is perhaps part of the reason why some modern theologians since at least the eighteenth century have treated the doctrine almost as a piece of cataphatic theology, which is something we will encounter when discussing Isaak Dorner in Chapter 6. This migration from negative to positive conceptions of simplicity occasions much misunderstanding. 30  On this point I am indebted to Rahim Acar, who argues that this feature of Aquinas’s doctrine of God distinguishes him from Avicenna, who only treats the divine operations as they are conditioned by simplicity, immutability, eternity, and the rest. See Acar, Talking about God and Talking about Creation: Avicenna’s and Thomas Aquinas’ Positions (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 119–26, 164–7. 29

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his blessed sovereignty. This is especially visible in how the two-­moment inquiry enables Aquinas to distinguish between two forms of necessity applying to God’s will. First there is absolute necessity, which states that things are necessary either (a) when the subject of a proposition includes its predicate (as in “humans are necessarily animals”) or (b) when the subject is part of the predicate’s meaning (as in “numbers must be odd or even”). Second there is hypothetical necessity, which follows the rule of noncontradiction and states that things are necessary in the limited sense that they cannot both be and be the opposite at the same time. Therefore, when we say “Socrates is sitting” we are not speaking about absolute necessity because sitting does not belong to the intelligibility of Socrates as such. Yet there is a hypothetical necessity involved, for while Socrates is sitting at t1 then he cannot be standing at t1. On the supposition that he is sitting, he cannot be the contrary.31 It is important to notice that Aquinas does not believe we must say anything more than this to account for the congruence between the pure actuality of God’s knowledge of approbation and God’s freedom. When we speak of God’s will, we employ the distinction between content and form (res and modus) to apply both kinds of necessity to God in different respects. Therefore, the only absolute necessity that befits God is God willing his own goodness because it is the only necessary object of his will. Nothing apart from God is commensurate to God, so “since God’s goodness is perfect and can exist without other things, and they add no fulfillment to Him, there is no absolute need for Him to will them. However, it is hypothetically necessary, for on the supposition that He does will a thing it cannot be unwilled, since His will cannot change.”32 The incommensurability between God’s goodness and creation that underwrites the absolute necessity of the former and the hypothetical necessity of the latter is central to God’s freedom to create or not.33 The incommensurability is such that even after having created God could cease to hold all things in being and reduce them to nothingness without loss to his perfectly  Ia.19.3.corp.  Ia.19.3.corp; DP 5.4.corp. 33  This formulation was contested by Norman Kretzmann, “A General Problem of Creation: Why Would God Create Anything at all?,” in Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology, ed. Scott MacDonald (New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), 208–28, but has recently been defended by John F. Wippel, “Thomas Aquinas on God’s Freedom to Create or Not,” in Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 218–39. See also Blankenhorn, “The Good as Self-­Diffusive in Thomas Aquinas”; O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius, 241–54. 31 32

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subsistent goodness in himself.34 Since creation is not a sufficient object of God’s will, then God’s will is not bound to will anything other than his goodness, for which reason creation is not absolutely necessary. The crucial move in the argument lies in the distinction drawn between absolute and hypothetical necessity, which relies on the complementary structure of Aquinas’s contemplative inquiry. The first moment considers the thing signified by God’s will, which is that God only wills his goodness with absolute necessity and so can exist without other things because they are not indispensable to the intelligibility of God. As blessed, God may well be without other things and is thinkable as such.35 However, the first moment is completed by a second which considers the mode of signifying God’s will, in which the hypothetical necessity of creation is intelligible because we consider God’s will together with entitative features like divine simplicity and immutability. Consequently, we confess that God necessarily wills creation only on the supposition that he does indeed will it.36 According to its content (res) God’s will necessarily wills himself and does not have to will other things, but according to its mode of signifying God necessarily wills both himself and creation, though in different respects. Theology does not rest content with either moment of this inquiry, and the strange truth deriving from the givenness of the actual remains suspended between the complementary affirmations that God’s simplicity and perfection support and require.  Ia.104.3.ad2. One should note the sed contra to this article, where Aquinas’s citation of Jeremiah 10:24 (“Correct me, O Lord, but in just measure; not in thy anger, lest thou bring me to nothing”) suggests that the cause of a creature’s annihilation would be God’s wrath against sin. All the same, Aquinas reasons that God does not annihilate things because this would impede the manifestation of his power (Ia.104.4.ad1) – a statement perhaps best read when we recall that God’s power is inseparable from his goodness, wisdom, justice, and mercy. 35  I agree with Rudi te Velde’s argument that for Aquinas, “God cannot be thought of independently from creation,” in te Velde, “God and the Language of Participation,” in Divine Transcendence and Immanence in the Work of Thomas Aquinas, ed. Harm Goris, Herwi Rikhof, and Henk Schoot (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 27. However, pace te Velde, I am suggesting that for Aquinas God can be conceived as independent of creation even while thought of in his relationship with creation. 36  Ia.19.2.ad1. Further, see Acar, Talking about God, 164–7. This same argumentation enables Aquinas to say that God’s knowledge of other things is necessary on the supposition of creation: “Since God’s power extends to things other than Himself because He is the first efficient cause of all being . . . it is therefore necessary that God know things other than Himself” (Ia.14.5.corp). Aquinas here anticipates hypothetical necessity; on the supposition that God’s power extends to other things, God knows this extension. However, Aquinas does maintain that logically prior to this extension God knows speculatively that to which his power can extend (Ia.14.16.ad1). 34

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From the foregoing it is clear that God is free to create or not on account of his goodness and the blessedness that consists in its possession and enjoyment. Aquinas’s argument for God’s freedom to create or not derives from a rich portrait of God’s fullness in himself, even though the means of its demonstration are culled from the speculative grammar instrumental to the acknowledgment of that fullness. In characterizing creation as only hypothetically necessary, Aquinas shows that in creating God corresponds to himself in the lordly freedom of his blessedness. Furthermore, Aquinas’s use of the analogy of practical knowledge shows how the union of God’s intellect and will is self-­returning in its intelligibility, and therefore corresponds to the cyclical movement of God’s blessedness apart from his knowledge of approbation. Both with respect to the movement of the divine operations as creative principle and with respect to the freedom of this operation, God corresponds to himself as the blessed God. Noticeable especially in Aquinas’s use of the practical knowledge analogy and his speculative grammar is the tempered nature of his inquiry. God’s intellect and will are identical with God’s being and so singular in their actuality, but since they are conceptually distinct from one another, they nevertheless admit of an order between them. This enables Aquinas to subvert the practical knowledge analogy to show that the creative act is deliberate without deliberation. Since God’s intellect and will are in pure act, the purpose of the analogy is not to suggest forwardly that God’s knowledge transitions from speculative to partial or even purely practical modes of knowing – as if distinct divine ideas changed on account of God’s disposal. Rather, Aquinas is attempting merely to demonstrate the rationality of believing that God “acts by way of intellect and will.”37 He aspires to nothing more nor less. In the same respect, the complementary moments of his speculative grammar do not function to give us access to the content of God’s will apart from our mode of understanding, but to disclose the rationality of God acting “by way of intellect and will.” The speculative, grammatical consideration of God’s will according to content and then according to mode of signifying therefore requires us to note how God acts both contingently and necessarily. However, even these notions fall short of depicting the manner of God’s will, “which transcends the order of necessity and contingency.”38 Aquinas therefore  Ia.19.4.ad2.  Commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, trans. Jean T. Oesterle (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1962), I.14.197.

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says what he must to account for the deliberate and free character of creation revealed in Scripture, but by temperance does not extend his analysis any further – a reserve we will witness when considering how he construes God’s relation to creation. Despite its metaphysical specificity at points, his analysis is relatively modest and prepares us for the doctrine of the Trinity.

Trinity and Creation Though visible to an extent in the divine operations of knowing and willing, God’s self-­correspondence in creating is insufficiently articulated until we consider creation in light of the Trinity. An account of the creative act must proceed to disclose the Creator and thus the Trinity, which is integral to how Aquinas thinks about creation and the whole economy.39 Everything from God’s freedom to create to the multiplicity and variety of creatures finds its full depth of explanation only in the Trinity.40 Our focus in this section is on how the trinitarian dimensions of the creative act reveal the correspondence between the divine processions and the procession of creatures from God. We considered this briefly in the conclusion to the previous chapter, where we suggested that the Trinity reveals the peculiar fecundity of God’s blessedness and thereby demonstrates most certainly that God is distinct from creation. In particular, the procession of the Son shows us that creation is not the product of natural necessity, and the procession of the Spirit proves that creation is not the response to an extrinsic good.41 This subsection considers each of these  See especially the work of Gilles Emery, “La Père et l’œuvre trinitaire de creation selon le Commentaire des Sentences de S. Thomas d’Aquin,” in Ordo sapientiae et amoris: Hommage au Professeur Jean-­Pierre Torrell OP à l’occasion de son 65e anniversaire, ed. Carlos-­Josaphat Pinto de Oliveira (Fribourg: Editions universitaires, 1993), 85–117; Gilles Emery, La Trinité créatrice: Trinité et creation dans les commentaries aux Sentences de Thomas d’Aquin et de ses précurseurs Albert le Grand et Bonaventure (Paris: Vrin, 1995), the salient points of which are summarized in Gilles Emery, “Trinity and Creation: The Trinitarian Principle of the Creation in the Commentaries of Albert the Great, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas on the Sentences,” in Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti: Sapientia Press, 2003), 33–70; Gilles Emery, “Trinity and Creation,” in The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, ed. Rik van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 58–76. See also Torrell, Spiritual Master, 53–79; John Baptist Ku, God the Father in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 310–12; Perrier, La fécondité en Dieu, 193–203. 40  Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Francesca Aran Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 173–4, 195–200, 214–18, 245–9, 338–59. 41  Ia.32.1.ad3. 39

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points by referring the creative act to the Trinity, arguing in particular that only where creation is understood as a trinitarian act is God’s self-­ correspondence secured. Namely, without knowledge of the Trinity the procession of creatures corresponds to nothing in God “as God.” Hence while the creative act has a foundation in God’s operations of knowing and willing, God only corresponds to himself in this act when its fruitful character as a procession is seen against the background of the divine processions. Before considering the function of the divine processions, we need to observe how Aquinas connects the personal and essential dimensions of the creative act. As we suggested in Chapter 2, the movement of Aquinas’s doctrine of God from the tract on the unity of essence to the one concerning the distinction of persons is part of one continuous thought. The distinction between the two tracts observes another distinction Aquinas draws between substantial and relative predication: “all that is in God is either absolute or relative.”42 Some things we say about God are absolute or common to the whole Trinity (“God is love”), whereas other things are proper or relative, concerning only one person (“God the Son is begotten”). Aquinas draws these two forms of predication together without confusing them in order to explain the creative act. To this end he employs a reduplicative grammar, the details of which are complex and need not detain us here.43 It suffices for us to observe that in his consideration of the creative act Aquinas employs both the essential and personal levels of theological discourse on the Trinity. He does this first by showing how the three divine persons possess the divine essence in a unique order. Creation involves the production of being (esse), and since God’s essence is his being, then creation as an effect bears a resemblance to its principle in God’s essence. This provides for the intelligibility of God creating through his essence, but Aquinas also observes that this essence is common to the Father, Son, and Spirit. As an act of the Trinity through their common essence, creation is indivisibly the work of the whole Trinity and not proper to any one divine person.44 However, the persons possess  Sent. I.26.2.1.s.c.  See Gilles Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in St. Thomas Aquinas?,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 521–63; reprinted in Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti: Sapientia Press, 2003), 165–208; Timothy L. Smith, Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian Theology: A Study in Theological Method (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2003), 48–159. 44  Ia.45.6.corp. On Aquinas’s use of the principle opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt, see Gilles Emery, “The Personal Mode of Trinitarian Action in St. Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 69 (2005): 31–77, reprinted in Trinity, Church, and the Human Person: 42 43

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this essence according to a certain order that transcends priority or hierarchy.45 Aquinas provides an illustration when speaking of the Trinity’s creative power (virtus): Hence to be the Creator is attributed to the Father as to one who does not have the creative power from another. And of the Son it is said that “through him all things were made” [John 1:3], inasmuch as He has the same power, but from another; for this preposition “through” usually denotes a mediate cause, or “a principle from a principle.” But to the Holy Spirit, who has the same power from both, is attributed that by His sway He governs and quickens what is created by the Father through the Son.46

The key here is to recognize that the divine essence is not a principle in abstraction from the distinction of persons but belongs to each divine person according to the order of their subsistence. Aquinas’s construal of divine persons as ordered, subsistent relations is the presupposition for their distinctive, ordered modes of agency; trinitarian agency is dependent upon personal distinction.47 Since for Aquinas act follows being (agere sequitur esse) in God no less than in creatures, then the divine persons’ relational modes of agency follow from their relational modes of being.48 This communicative order within the Trinity is the basis for the persons’ relationally distinct modes of agency as well as the doctrine of appropriation, for which reason his analysis of the common act of creating necessarily includes consideration of the Trinity.49 We are now positioned to see how Aquinas construes the trinitarian dimensions of the creative act. Within the distinct order in which God communicates being internally we find the trinitarian rationale for the creative act in which God communicates being externally. The comparison turns on the concept of procession, which involves a relationship of origin to a principle: “the divine persons, according to the nature (ratio)

Thomistic Essays (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2007), 115–53. 45  Ia.33.1.ad1; DP 10.1.ad9–10. 46  Ia.45.6.ad2. Just as the Son is “Word, that is, wisdom begotten, so we can call him nature, will, or power begotten, that is, received by generation, or, rather, receiving such things by generation” (DP 10.2.corp). Such is the pattern Aquinas follows in all such predications of trinitarian agency: the Father knows as speaking forth wisdom, the Son knows as spoken wisdom, and so forth (Ia.34.1.ad2; Augustine, DT 7.2.3). 47  Ia.29.4; Emery, Trinitarian Theology, 103–27. 48  DP 3.15.ad17. 49  Ia.39.7–8; Emery, Trinitarian Theology, 322–26.

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of their procession, have a causality concerning the creation of things.”50 Consideration of the procession of creatures follows the consideration of the divine processions, because the latter are the pattern and reason for the former. Aquinas draws the comparison by uniting the analogy with practical knowledge to the psychological model for the Trinity. He thus returns to the model of an artisan in describing creation’s trinitarian character: God is the cause of things through His mind and will, like an artist of works of art. An artist works through a word conceived in his intellect and through the love his will bears toward something. Thus God the Father wrought the creature through His Word, who is the Son, and through His Love, which is the Holy Spirit. And in this way the processions of the persons are the reason for the production of creatures, insofar as they include the essential attributes of knowledge and will.51

Transitioning from the practical knowledge analogy to the psychological model describes how the divine processions exercise an exemplary causality relative to the procession of creatures, “insofar as they include the essential attributes of knowledge and will.” The practical knowledge analogy is not left behind but set within its broader and more basic articulation in the doctrine of the Trinity. So, too, is the cyclical movement of the divine operations reflected in the divine processions. Again, in conformity to Aquinas’s tempered form of reasoning, the psychological model does not suggest that the Son and Spirit proceed from the divine intellect and will, respectively. Rather the analogy to the intellectual procession of an interior word and the volitional procession of love in rational creatures provides a means for disclosing the rationality of the procession of the Son and Spirit, after the analogy of the Word and Love.52 The psychological model in particular affords insight into God’s self-­correspondence in the creative act by providing a model for how the procession of creatures from God corresponds to a procession within God, namely, the

 Ia.45.6.corp; Ia.44.prol; “the processions of the divine persons are causes of creation” (Ia.45.6.ad1); “the processions of the persons are in some way the cause and ratio of creation” (Ia.45.7.ad3). See also Sent. I.14.1.1–2; DP 10.2.ad19. 51  Ia.45.6.corp; Sent. I.prol; Psalmo 32.8; Col. 1.4.37. 52  Aquinas reinforces that the psychological model functions to “show that the truth of faith cannot be overcome by reason” (SCG IV.10), for “the mind fails in representing the divine Trinity” (SCG IV.26). The importance of Aquinas’s reticence to take the model too literally is brought out in the comparison with Scotus by Russell L. Friedman, Medieval Trinitarian Thought from Aquinas to Ockham (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 75–93. 50

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processions of the Son and Spirit. Unpacking this with reference to both processions will help us to grasp the significance of this insight. First, God’s self-­correspondence is articulated in the procession of the Word from the Father as his likeness, by virtue of which creatures proceed from God with a certain likeness to him. Hence the import of likening the Word’s procession from the Father to the analogy of the artisan producing things by the art conceived in their mind: This is the way God is said to make all things in His wisdom, because the wisdom of God is related to His created works just as the art of the builder is to the house he has made. Now this form and wisdom is the Word; and thus in Him all things were created, as in an exemplar: He spoke and they were made (Gen 1), because He created all things to come into existence in His eternal Word.53

Thus the speaking in question has the deeper sense of the Father eternally speaking the Word, wisdom begotten, through whom all things were made.54 Particularly as wisdom is appropriated to the Son, then in the Father’s speaking of the Word we might also locate the conception of the divine ideas.55 Aquinas elaborates on the function of the Son’s procession: “For as a work of art manifests the art of the artisan, so the whole world is nothing else than a certain representation of the divine wisdom conceived within the mind of the Father.”56 For this reason creatures fittingly correspond to the Word, “as artifacts correspond to their art.”57 The Word thus fully expresses God since he is one with God, the perfect fruit of the Father’s self-­knowledge in whom all other things are expressed and caused in a secondary and derivative sense.58 The procession of the Word is therefore the archetype for the procession of creatures from God in a twofold sense. First, the cosmic “reception” of being from God that is creation constitutes a “remote likeness” to the Son’s eternal reception of the divine essence from the Father.59 Second, insofar as the Son “proceeds as Word” he proceeds as the perfect representation of the Father, for which  Col. 1.4.37.  Ia.34.1.ad3; Ia.34.3.corp; Col. 1.3.20; Col. 2.1.81. 55  DP 1.5.ad11; “The being of things flows out from the Word as from a primordial principle, and this outflow terminates in the existence of things in their proper natures” (Ia.58.6.corp); Ia.44.3.corp; Heb. 11.2.564–5. See further, Harm Goris, “Theology and Theory of the Word in Aquinas: Understanding Augustine by Innovating Aristotle,” in Aquinas the Augustinian, ed. Michael Dauphinais, Barry David, and Matthew Levering, (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007) 62–78. 56  Ioan. 1.5.136. 57  Heb. 11.2.564. 58  Ioan. 1.1.27; Ia.34.3.corp. 59  Ia.33.3.ad2. 53 54

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reason creatures proceed as bearing a likeness of God.60 The Son’s eternal generation is in this sense the exemplary reason and pattern of that act in which God speaks creatures into existence and therein grants them a participation in his own likeness. All of this shows how the Son’s procession from the Father secures God’s self-­correspondence in creating likenesses of himself through the procession of creatures. In both respects, God has a foundation in himself to which these features of his creative activity correspond. Second, God’s self-­correspondence is articulated in the procession of the Spirit as the motive force of Love, by virtue of which creatures proceed from God as loved by him. The analogy with the artisan involves not only the Word but also the inclination of the will toward the object known, such that the Word in which God knows himself and all creatures is complemented by the Love with which God loves himself and all creatures. The difference between “love” and “Love” tries to capture in the domain of the will’s activity what is expressed in the domain of the intellect by “speaking” and “Word spoken.” Hence, to the Son’s procession “by way of intellect” as the Word corresponds the Spirit’s procession “by way of will” as Love.61 The psychological model here discloses the rationality of the distinction between the processions of the Son and Spirit. There is a distinction even in the analogy of practical knowledge between the plan the artist knows and that plan’s motive force in the artist’s will, once the plan is seen as a good toward which the artist will direct her efforts. Aquinas explains that just as the understood object is in the one who understands, so, too, in a similar way is the “beloved object . . . in the one who loves” inasmuch as this object is genuinely loved.62 Yet the understood object resides in the mind as the intellect’s likeness or word of what it knows, whereas the understood object as a loved good resides in the will as a motive force: Loving comes about by the beloved object moving the lover, since the beloved object draws the lover to itself. Therefore, loving is completed in the attraction of the lover to the beloved object, not in the likeness of the beloved object in the one who loves, as understanding is completed in the likeness of the understood thing in the one who understands.63

 Ia.35.2.corp.  Ia.37.1.corp. 62  CTh I.45. 63  CTh I.46. 60 61

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Aquinas describes the presence of the beloved in the lover as the presence of a moving force, attraction, or inclination of the lover toward the beloved. Whereas the procession of the Son as Word says that God knows himself fruitfully, the procession of the Spirit as Love says that this knowledge is attended by God’s equally fruitful love of himself. The Son is like the fruit of God’s self-­knowledge, and so the Spirit is like the fruit of God’s love for what he knows in his self-­knowledge (his own goodness), which is a dynamic movement of God toward himself. Therefore, by designating the Spirit’s procession as Love, Aquinas articulates how the Spirit “proceeds as Love for the primal goodness whereby the Father loves Himself and every creature.”64 Two things should be noticed about this description before concluding. First, the psychological model speaks to the cyclical movement of the divine processions since the Spirit’s procession as Love follows and “returns” to the Word and Father, proceeding from them both.65 Second, the Spirit’s procession as Love discloses how the only necessary inclination of God’s will is that which arises on account of God’s love for his own goodness. The procession of Love does include a reference to creatures, “but secondarily” inasmuch as God’s love of his own goodness is the foundation of every gift God gives to the creature.66 Indeed the Spirit’s procession is also for this reason characterized as the first Gift and hence the archetype and “principle of all the gifts given to us by God” in the orders of nature, grace, and glory.67 That God the Spirit is Love and Gift means that God stands ready for the fellowship he creates and sustains with creatures by virtue of his immanent fruitfulness. Because the divine processions disclose the ultimate ground of God’s creative freedom, “it was necessary for us to know the divine persons . . . to have a correct view of the creation of things.”68 From the preceding analysis, we can see how God’s self-­correspondence in particular emphasizes why the divine persons disclose the correct view of creation. Only the procession of the Word and Love necessarily manifest God’s fecundity; as we noted in the last chapter when discussing blessedness, God’s  Ia.37.2.ad3; DP 9.9.ad13; Sent. I.14.1.1; CTh I.47–8. This is why “goodness is appropriated to the Holy Spirit, to whom belong the government that guides things to their proper end, and vivification, for life consists in an inner movement, and its source is the end and the good” (Ia.45.6.ad2); Ia.39.8.corp; SCG IV.20. On the appropriation of power to the Father, see Ku, God the Father, 310–12. 65  CTh I.49; Ia.37.2; Ia.36.4. 66  Ia.37.2.ad3. 67  Ioan. 5.3.753; Ia.38.2.corp; Augustine, DT 5.15.16. 68  Ia.32.1.ad3. 64

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fecundity does not lead to but is manifest in the divine processions.69 This manifestation of fecundity in God frees theology from any hint of creation being inevitable or completing God because the immanent fruit of God’s intellect and will in the procession of the Word and Love means that God’s internal activity is eternally complete with its own fruit. No further issue need attend God’s being-in-act: For by maintaining that God made everything through His Word we avoid the error of those who held that God’s nature compelled Him to create things. By affirming that there is in Him the procession of Love we show that He made creatures, not because He needed them nor because of any reason outside Himself, but from love of His own goodness.70

In the procession of the Word, we know that God’s nature does not compel him to create things because his self-­knowledge is already perfectly fruitful within God. In the procession of Love, we see that God’s love and enjoyment of his own goodness are already perfectly fruitful within God and so leave him free from and for creation. Since this “one perfect Word and one perfect Love . . . manifests His perfect fecundity,” then God’s ­creative external activity is free and corresponds to his blessed sovereignty. And yet God’s creative activity also corresponds to his immanent fecundity because God creates likenesses of himself in love, and so extends his goodness to other things in mercy. Only now may we start seeing how Aquinas thinks through what we have labeled God’s self-­correspondence. Within God’s eternal life, the procession of the Son from the Father and the spiration of the Spirit from the Father and Son as their mutual love point to the mutual indwelling of the three persons and thus to their circular movement.71 The eternal shape of God’s life as a cyclical movement discloses the correspondence between his act and being, both at the essential and personal levels. To the blessedness and rest of God in the simple act of his intellect and will corresponds his knowledge of approbation, which is the unity of intellect and will in God’s intentional creative action. More profoundly still, the divine processions that manifest this blessedness are the exemplary patterns and reasons for God’s creative activity taking the shape that it does. Just as the Father speaks the Word as his perfect representation, so the procession of the Word reveals the ultimate reason for creatures’ participation in the divine likeness. That this likeness is received in the  Ia.27.5.ad3.  Ia.32.1.ad3; cf. DDN 4.9.409. 71  DP 9.9.corp. 69 70

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creature as a benevolent gift finds its foundation and archetype in the procession of the Spirit as Love from the Father and Son. Beyond these levels of correspondence, the immanent fruitfulness of the Son and Spirit manifests God’s perfect fecundity intrinsic to his blessed possession and enjoyment of himself as the first truth and ultimate good. Because God is thus fruitful in himself, the fruitfulness of God’s creative activity is the superfluous overflow of God’s love, “which pours out and creates goodness in things.”72 Since this overflow matches the fruitfulness of God himself, then God corresponds to himself in generously creating reflections of his own perfection. The whole of God’s external working therefore finds a correspondence and root in God’s internal being and activity, springing forth from God’s blessed life not as the extension of a line but as the trace of a perfect circle. Within the consideration of God’s self-­correspondence as the principle of creation God is acknowledged and glorified as God because distinguished from creation as its Creator. However, God’s self-­ correspondence in creation is only complete from within a synoptic vision of creation’s principle and end because God’s cyclical movement has an intrinsic order that we must now consider.

The End of Creation Aquinas styles God’s creative act as an overflow and reflection of God’s cyclical blessedness as Father, Son, and Spirit, so as to imply that in all God’s external works the life of God in some way descends upon creatures in the orders of nature, grace, and ultimately glory. This cyclical pattern points to the self-­returning movement of God’s intellect and will, as well as the divine processions. Particularly in the processions of the Son and Spirit we see that God’s possession and enjoyment of his goodness is perfectly fruitful in himself, and yet proceeds externally in a free overflow. The exiting (exitus) of creation corresponds to the “exiting” of God in himself because creatures proceed as gifts bearing a likeness to God. Yet God’s cyclical movement also shows that God returns to himself eternally, the circle being concluded in himself. Hence, a full consideration of God’s self-­correspondence must trace how creation’s return (reditus) to God is part of God’s eternal “returning” in himself. That is, God’s creative act corresponds to God’s being insofar as its order is given by God’s ordered life in himself. Just as all things come from the Father through the Son and in the Spirit, so, too, do all things return by the Spirit through  Ia.20.2.corp.

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the Son to the Father. Only thus does God’s creative external movement fully correspond to the internal closure of God’s being and activity. In the previous chapter we saw that recognition of God’s goodness is essential to the proper acknowledgment of God in distinction from creation for two reasons: first it protects against the idolatrous identification of creatures’ ultimate end with our own projects of self-­realization or benefit, and second it secures the sense in which God is not subject to any end or eschatological consummation beyond himself. Intrinsic to the acknowledgment of God’s goodness is the final causality of his external works of creation, salvation, and consummation. Among the implications of Aquinas’s observations about God’s goodness and the nature of goodness in general is the principle of finality, which states that every agent acts for some end (omne agens agit propter finem). God is no exception to this principle because he is its rule: his goodness provides its foundation, being the ultimate thing all creatures desire and indeed the ultimate end of all God’s works.73 The procession of creatures from God in creation is not simply indeterminate procession (effusio in infinitum), but rather procession with a definite goal and order.74 This is another way of saying that creation is an intentional work of God’s wisdom and love rather than some aimless procession into the void. God begets creatures so that he might call them to himself gently and thereby establish their peace “through participation in the divine peace.”75 To do so, God gives creatures a telos.76 Aquinas’s discussion of the creative principle in God’s being anticipates the significance of this teleological ordering both to account for the inclination of God’s will and the way in which the procession of the Spirit discloses the freedom and beneficiary character of creation. Since the Spirit’s procession is intelligible as the pattern (ratio) of the procession of creatures by analogy to the fruitfulness of God’s willing of his own goodness, then God creates not out of any need for creatures or by the impulse of anything other than “love of His own goodness.”77 What follows unpacks this formulation and demonstrates its significance for divine self-correspondence. Principally we must give careful attention to the intentionality of the creative act and the specification of its end. Aquinas draws teleological distinctions for the sake of mapping an action’s meaning relative to  Ia.44.4.corp.  DDN 11.1.892. 75  DDN 11.1.892. 76  SCG I.44. 77  Ia.32.1.ad3. 73 74

Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 101 the natures of things and the purposes of the agent, all of which serves the cartography of intentionality.78 The commentary tradition would multiply these distinctions for the sake of more clearly specifying the intentionality of creation, offering two categories designating the interior ordination of an action (finis operis) and its agent’s purpose (finis operantis). Additionally, these two categories included subdivisions designating that “for which” (finis-cuius), “by which” (finis-quo), and “for whose benefit” (finis-cui) an act is undertaken.79 When used to analyze the creative act, these distinctions disclose the order within which the teleology of creation occurs. This section’s task is to examine how these distinctions concerning ends disclose the gratuitous and beneficiary character of creation insofar as the teleological determination of creation corresponds to the order of God’s life. God corresponds to himself in creation insofar as he specifies the order of his creative act with his own inner divine order, grounded in his possession and enjoyment of his own goodness. Consequently, the end of both God and creation is God’s goodness. Construing creation’s teleology in this manner protects both the acknowledgment of God in his blessedness and the beneficial character of creation that answers to his blessedness. Our consideration of God’s self-­correspondence in light of God’s ordered closure in himself provides the foundation for the peculiar relation God bears to creation we will consider in this chapter’s final section.

The Order of God’s Self-Correspondence Asking why or for what end God creates can be puzzling, since agents who act for ends usually do so because they seek to acquire the end in view. If God seeks to acquire something from creation, then this seems to compromise divine blessedness and therein creation’s beneficial character. This is too costly a price to pay if God’s creative act is to correspond to his blessed being and activity in himself. Clearly the question requires careful handling, and so in Aquinas’s first treatment of creation he asks whether it is fitting for God to act for an end. His answer harmonizes the Vulgate of Psalm 88:48, “Hast thou made all the children of men in  Consider how Aquinas employs these distinctions as they concern good and evil in IaIIæ.18.1–5. 79  For an elaboration of these subdivisions’ use and a defense of Aquinas’s view against certain manualist authors who suggested God’s extrinsic glory is his ultimate end in creation, see Philip J. Donnelly, “Saint Thomas and the Ultimate Purpose of Creation,” Theological Studies 2 (1941): 53–83. Our exposition is confined to the text of Aquinas without the refinements of his commentators. 78

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vain?” with Aristotle’s axiom that “nature does nothing in vain.” Hence, he says, God does act for an end because his works are not in vain, and those acts are vain which are not for some end.80 This leads Aquinas to draw an elementary distinction concerning the ways in which an agent acts for the sake of an end. Any agent acting for an end does so either on account of the “work’s end” (finis operis) or the “agent’s end” (finis operantis). Aquinas explains: The work’s end is that to which the work is arranged by the agent, and this is said to be the reason for the work (ratio operis). Now the agent’s end is that which the agent principally intends: hence the work’s end can be in another; but the agent’s end is always in himself. For example, in the case of a builder who gathers stones together to arrange them, the composition that constitutes the form of a house is the work’s end, but the benefit (utilitas) provided by the laborer is the end on the part of the agent (finis ex parte agentis).81

From this general analysis of agency, Aquinas culls three elements germane to the consideration of order in God’s creative act: the work’s end, the agent’s end, and the benefit of the work. Each of these distinctions deserves closer inspection, for each serve to characterize fully the creative act and disclose God’s self-correspondence. The application of these distinctions to God’s creative act is best understood if one remembers their context in the analysis of practical reasoning. Aquinas develops the previously noted distinctions concerning ends and others in his moral theology, where he elaborates on them and provides clear illustrations for how ends influence and characterize acts.82 This is because he believes “the meaning and nature of our acting (ratio operationum) derives from the end,” and so an act is not fully understood apart from the intent and means of its agent.83 This becomes clear when we see how Aquinas distinguishes the intrinsic ordination of an action from the purposes of its actor. The agent’s intention or purpose is “that for which” an action is ultimately done (finis operantis), which  Sent. II.1.2.1.s.c.; cf. IIaIIae.13.1–2; Aristotle, On the Heavens I.4.271a32–3 (LCL 338:30–1). Aquinas explains at greater length: “God makes nothing in vain, because, since He is a being that acts through understanding, He acts for an end. Likewise nature makes nothing in vain, because it acts as moved by God as by a first mover, just as an arrow is not moved in vain, inasmuch as it is shot by the bowman at some definite thing. What remains, therefore, is that nothing in nature is in vain” (DA I.8.91). 81  Sent. II.1.2.1.corp. 82  See especially IaIIae.1–17; Servais Pinckaers, “Le rôle de la fin dans l’action morale selon saint Thomas,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 45 (1961): 393–421. 83  IaIIae.14.5.ad1. 80

Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 103 is distinct from the intrinsic end of an action in itself (finis operis). The distinction between the end of the work and of the agent arises because among creatures the intrinsic ordination of an action need not always align with the agent’s purpose.84 On one level this reminds us that intentions often outpace actions: “there is an end of intention beyond the end of operation, as is clear in a house: for its form is the end that terminates the operation of the builder, but his intention does not terminate there but in a further end, which is a dwelling place.”85 Therefore, the form of the architect’s action (finis operis) exhausts itself in the existence of the house, whereas the form of the architect’s purpose (finis operantis) goes beyond the house’s mere existence to the finding of shelter. On an even deeper level, the distinction serves to analyze an action in terms of its specification and definition. For example, the end of the work of “giving money” specifies whether or not the act alleviates poverty or pays for commercial goods, because either end gives a distinct definition to the act itself that remains true of the action, regardless of the agent’s purposes. The end of the agent goes beyond this and further defines the act by virtue of the agent’s ultimate purpose. So whereas the work’s end could be the giving of alms, which we would evaluate as intrinsically good, we might evaluate the agent’s end as specious if the agent’s ultimate purpose were to keep up appearances by performing deeds in the sight of others (Matt 6:1).86 The distinction thus clearly bears upon the thorough analysis of everything from art and politics to the writing of theology books. Aquinas employs this distinction to articulate how the ordering of God’s creative act corresponds to the order of God’s being, and thus how God corresponds to himself as the blessed God in creating things as pure benefit to creatures. Stated briefly, Aquinas maintains that God’s end is his intrinsic goodness and that this is manifest in how the end of all creatures is likewise God’s goodness. Here he employs the diffusiveness of goodness to locate the work’s end and the agent’s end of God’s creative act in God’s goodness. Such is how Aquinas renders intelligible Scripture’s testimony to God’s final causality in creation: “The Lord made all things for himself” (Prov 16:4).87 Far from diminishing the gratuity of creation, the insight that God creates everything for himself actually procures it when viewed in light of God’s goodness. In fact, Aquinas elsewhere appeals to this verse to show the absolute gratuity of grace. Commenting on how  Meta. 12.12.2627–31.  DP 3.16.corp. 86  Matt. 6.1.561. 87  Ia.44.4.s.c.; Sent. II.1.2.2.s.c.; Heb. 2.2.127; Ioan. 1.2.73. 84 85

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God “predestined us . . . according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace” (Eph 1:5–6), Aquinas notes that this “specifies the final cause which is that we may praise and know the goodness of God . . . For the cause of divine predestination is simply the will of God, while the end is a knowledge of His goodness.”88 The end of predestination is the knowledge of God’s goodness on our part because God’s goodness is the end on God’s part: God’s will in no way has a cause but is the first cause of everything else . . . On the part of the one willing, the motive for the divine will is His own goodness which is the object of the divine will, moving it to act. Hence, the reason for everything that God wills is His own goodness: God has made everything for himself (Prov 16:4).89

God’s acts of creation and election order creatures to himself, and thus benefit them by drawing them to partake of his goodness. Aquinas argues along these same lines when making the case for the gratuity of God’s acts of nature. Thus he says that the end of creation is God himself, which serves as the end of the patient (finis patientis) and the end of the agent (finis agentis), though in different respects: [T]hat which the agent intends to impress is identical with that which the patient intends to receive. There are some things which are at once acting on and acted upon; these are agents which are imperfect, and to them it belongs that even in their acting they intend to acquire something. However there is no question of the first agent, who is purely active, acting for the sake of acquiring some end; He intends only to communicate His perfection, which is His goodness. Each and every creature intends to acquire its own perfection, which is a resemblance of the perfection and goodness of God.90

Tracing out the full scope of Aquinas’s argument requires us to examine both the ends of the patient and the agent of the creative act so that we can see how they differ. We may start with the end of the patient, the creature. The first thing to note is that, metaphysically, the identity of the ends of the agent and patient parallels the definition of motion as the actuality of an agent existing in the patient.91 Just as motion is here considered with reference to the agent and the patient, so, too, is Aquinas’s analysis of creation’s telos. God intends to communicate his goodness to the creature, which intends to receive this goodness as its formal perfection.  Eph. 1.1.11.  Eph. 1.1.12. 90  Ia.44.4.corp. 91  Phy. III.4.307; Phy. III.5.320; Meta. XI.9.2291, 2312–2313; IaIIae.26.2.corp; IaIIae.57.5.ad1. 88 89

Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 105 To understand what sense this could possibly make, we must recall our discussion in the previous chapter about created goodness being parsed into initial and ultimate stages corresponding to primary and secondary actuality. With regard to the creature (finis patientis), obviously no creature intends to receive the goodness that is coextensive with its initial perfection, or primary actuality. Creation does not wait for the creature’s consent. However, creatures do intend the reception of goodness that is their ultimate perfection, or secondary actuality. The ultimate no less than the initial stage is the reception of God’s goodness. Therefore, as the human reaches out to its ultimate perfection through its operations of knowing and willing, it actively participates in God’s communication of goodness, which itself draws the creature to God’s goodness in himself. This communication just is the diffusion of God’s goodness, which brings us to the act of creation on the side of the agent, God. When considering the creative act on the part of the agent (ex parte agentis), and therefore with reference to God, the distinction between the end of the work and of the agent becomes relevant: “Since the end of the work is always reduced to the end of the agent, even on the part of the agent [God] it is necessary to consider the end of his action, which is His goodness in Himself.”92 For God, the end of his creative intention (finis operantis) is his own goodness, which he wills with absolute necessity: God is unable not to will this (non posse non velle). Yet since God wills to diffuse his goodness, then the intrinsic ordination (finis operis) of God’s creative act itself is the creature’s attainment of the likeness of God’s blessedness.93 Clearly the creature’s attainment of God is an end of the creative act, but the work’s end must be reduced ultimately to the agent’s end. Therefore, the ultimate end of God’s will and the human creature alike is God himself and not the creature’s attainment of God in beatific vision and enjoyment.94 Aquinas is emphatic here: “The ultimate end is not communication of goodness, but rather the divine goodness itself, from love of which God wills to communicate it.”95 God’s goodness is “an end immeasurably exceeding created things” and “because God’s will is content with His own goodness it follows that He wills nothing  Sent. II.1.2.1.corp.  “Ex parte autem operis, finis intentus est pertingere in assimilationem divinae beatitudinis” (Sent. II.1.2.4.corp). Blessedness designates how rational creatures are ordered to goodness in their full perfection; though nonrational creatures do not attain to blessedness, they are nevertheless ordered to God’s goodness (Sent. II.1.2.2.ad4). 94  See also Sent. IV.49.1.1; Shields, “On Ultimate Ends,” 602–6. 95  DP 3.15.ad14. 92 93

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else except on that account, not that He wills nothing else.”96 Whatever God wills, he wills through his goodness, and so consequently all things are ordered to God’s goodness as their end: “He wills Himself as the end, and others as to that end, in that it befits the divine goodness that others should participate in it.”97 Reducing the end of the work of creation (finis operis) to the end of its agent (finis operantis) results in a peculiar construal of creation’s purposiveness: God wills the created universe for its own sake, although He wills its existence for His own sake: for these two are not incompatible with each other. For God wills creatures to exist for His goodness’s sake, namely that they may imitate and reflect it; which they do inasmuch as from it they derive their being, and subsist in their respective natures.98

In this respect, God’s qualitative distinction from creation as articulated through God’s goodness enables a noncompetitive account of creation’s teleology as a reflection of divine order. Through diffusion, God’s goodness is at once his own inner divine end and the cosmic telos establishing things as intrinsically purposeful reflections of his goodness. In short, if God’s will was directed to anything outwith himself, it would not bring rational creatures into the innermost depths of his blessedness. God must be for himself to be everything for us. Thus Aquinas demonstrates the unwavering humanism of God making everything “for himself” (Prov 16:4). The ordination of the creative act corresponds to the intrinsic order of God’s blessed possession and enjoyment of his own goodness since it involves the creature’s participation in God’s blessedness through a return (reditus) of conformity. Even in acting toward creation God is ordered to himself just as he is prior to and without his external works, so that the creative act is one of self-­correspondence all the way down. This construal of the creative act’s ordination thus secures in the first instance the acknowledgment of God in distinction from all subordinate, created goods – even the good that is the perfection of the rational creature in eschatological consummation. According to Aquinas, God is given the glory when one acknowledges and praises him as the Good from whom all things come and in whom alone all things find their ultimate rest.  Ia.25.5.corp; Ia.19.2.ad2; cf. Ia.19.5; Ia.19.1.ad3; Ia.65.2; Sent. II.1.1.5.ad12; Sent. II.1.2.2; SCG II.35; SCG III.17. 97  Ia.19.2.corp; IaIIae.1.8.corp. On the twofold order of things to one another and of the whole to God, see SCG I.78; Sent. II.1.2.3.corp; DDN 1.1-2.887-912 (cf. Augustine, De civitate Dei XIX.13). 98  DP 5.4.corp. 96

Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 107

God’s Self-­Correspondence as Benefit So far we have articulated the order of God’s self-­correspondence by considering the unity of the creative act’s ordination both as to the end of the work and of the agent (finis operis and finis operantis) in God’s goodness, but we now need to consider the self-­correspondence of the creative act according to its usefulness (utilitas). We saw earlier that an architect who builds a house has the form of the house as the end of their building activity (finis operis), but the “benefit (utilitas) provided by the laborer is the end on the part of the agent.”99 Consideration of creation’s benefit is essential to characterizing God’s self-­correspondence because it further articulates how creation’s telos is God’s goodness in himself and not anything God might stand to gain through creating. Indeed, the creative act corresponds to God’s blessedness precisely because it adds nothing to God: God creates “not in the sense that God needs the creature, as if He found in it the sufficiency of His blessedness, but in the sense that, ordering it to Himself, He finds sufficiency in Himself.”100 Implied here is an important sense in which creation is useless to God. Briefly exploring what this means will provide us further insight into why God creates for love of his own goodness and not for the communication of goodness. Aquinas follows Augustine and Lombard by employing the distinction between use (usus) and enjoyment (fruitio) within his moral theology and his account of intentional action. An agent uses anything when they apply it to operation, and so use follows from the determination to an end and the deliberative choice of a course of action to acquire that end.101 Enjoyment ensues upon acquiring the end in question, and so all use is for the sake of enjoying some end.102 Specifying the utility or benefit of creation enables Aquinas to underscore the unidirectional character of God’s generosity in creation, which is intelligible only insofar as God’s intrinsic goodness is the ultimate end for the sake of which God wills all other things. Within the horizons of creation’s teleology, Aquinas argues that many things may be used (and even enjoyed) but “rest is not utter and complete except in our ultimate end.”103 Since God’s goodness is the ultimate end to which all things are ordered, then we can only enjoy God

 Sent. II.1.2.1.corp.   Sent. II.15.3.2.corp; DP 4.2.ad5. 101   IaIIae.16.1.corp; IaIIae.15.3; IaIIae.14.2. 102   IaIIae.11.1.corp. 103   IaIIae.11.3.corp; IaIIae.11.4.ad2. 99

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and cannot use him to acquire some further end.104 Indeed, only those things that are adapted to an end are useful, “in fact their very usefulness (utilitas) is sometimes called use.”105 God cannot be so adapted to any end beyond himself, but neither does he adapt creation to an end he has yet to acquire. This means that the usefulness of creation is solely on the side of the creature because God does not create to acquire anything: God “alone is supremely generous, because He does not act for His own benefit (utilitas) but solely to give of His goodness.”106 Creation’s utility for the creature is the correlate of its uselessness to God, which follows from the fact that God creates not in order to possess his goodness but in order to communicate the goodness he already has. This insight culminates in a distinction between two ways in which an agent may act for an end, namely, either out of desire or love for the end. What distinguishes the two manners is that one only desires what is not possessed, whereas love applies additionally to what is possessed. Therefore, “it befits every creature to act for desire of the end, because the good of every creature is acquired from another and not possessed of themselves.”107 However, God “acts because of His goodness not as though He desires something He does not have, but because He desires to communicate what He does have: for He acts not from desire, but from love of the end.”108 In essence, Aquinas employs the logic of possession intrinsic to divine blessedness and notes that God creates as one who acts from a fullness possessed, and not as one who acts for a fullness desired. Since God possesses and enjoys his own goodness from all eternity in one simple act, then there cannot be in God more than one procession by way of word (the eternal generation of the Son) and one by way of love (the eternal spiration of the Holy Spirit). Thus the revelation of the Spirit’s procession by way of love shows “that God produced creatures not because He needed them, nor because of any other extrinsic reason, but on account of the love of His own goodness.”109 For one loves without desire only what is possessed, a truth especially confirmed and established in the revelation of the Trinity. Because God creates by  IaIIae.16.3.s.c.  IaIIae.16.3.corp. 106  Ia.44.4.ad1; Ia.20.2.ad3. A fuller consideration of creation’s utilitas would need to consider the finis cuius gratia, the finis quo, and finis cui of creation, which all serve to reinforce the intrinsic value of the created order and its pure gratuity. See DP 5.4.corp; IaIIae.16.3.corp; SCG III.18. 107  Sent. II.1.2.1.corp; Meta. 12.7.2529; Ia.20.1. 108  DP 3.15.ad14; Sent. II.1.2.1.corp; DDN 10.1.858. 109  Ia.32.1.ad3; Ia.41.6.corp. 104 105

Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 109 c­ ommunicating the goodness he already possesses and loves in abounding fruitfulness within himself, God in creation corresponds to himself as the blessed Trinity without creation. Aquinas secures God’s self-­correspondence “teleologically” and thereby characterizes all God’s external activity as the communication of a fullness already possessed, for which reason God’s act corresponds to his beatitude. In conclusion to this section we need to offset one potential objection to the portrait Aquinas provides here of God’s self-­correspondence. If God corresponds to himself as the blessed God in creation, then does he still do so in all his acts throughout salvation history? That is, does God correspond to himself in his acts of grace and mercy? Answering this objection provides us the opportunity to observe the significance of Aquinas’s construal of God’s self-­correspondence and particularly the priority it accords God’s goodness. This significance is nowhere more visible than in how Aquinas specifies God’s love, grace, and mercy as forms of God communicating goodness.110 Aquinas thus positions God’s goodness as more fundamental than love, grace, or mercy in some sense, because the latter derive from the former. Since Aquinas understands mercy as the “first root” of all God’s works, it suffices as an example of this method of derivation and its function in articulating God’s self-­correspondence even among the contingencies of sin and creatures’ miserable estate.111 Mercy is like the root of all God’s works when understood according to “its effect, but not as an affection of passion.”112 God is not moved by something outside himself out of sadness (tristitia), which is how we understand mercy in creatures. If this were the case, then in order to be intelligible God’s mercy would require some good or absence thereof in creatures to which he responded, as if God’s mercy were somehow due the creature. As revealed in Christ, however, God’s mercy is not owed to creatures: God is “rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us” (Eph 2:4), which suggests to Aquinas that mercy is even the “root of divine love” because God’s love causes goodness in creatures rather than responding to a goodness in them.113 If this is so, then mercy will need to correspond to God’s blessed life in himself apart from creation if God’s self-­correspondence obtains in his redemptive acts. One of Aquinas’s key moves is to define mercy as the communication of goodness insofar as it

  Ioan. 3.3.477; Ia.21.3.corp.   Ia.21.4.corp; Ia.25.3.ad3. 112   Ia.21.3.corp. 113   Eph. 2.2.86; Ia.20.2.corp. 110 111

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“expels defects.”114 Crucially, he also states that defects need not imply the privation of something that should be present but only the negation of some perfection: “if defect is understood negatively, in that sense every creature is defective in comparison with God; since it does not possess the excellence which is in God.”115 From the revelation of God’s mercy in Christ, Aquinas focuses narrowly on the fundamental aspect of God’s perfection expelling defects. The significance of this narrow clarification is to obviate any sense in which God could be merciful only if there was privation to overcome, so that God’s external activity is still rooted in mercy even without the contingencies of sin. God’s gift in Christ is still the broader articulation within which mercy is understood as the gifting of perfections to expel defects, but sin is deemed inessential to the intelligibility of divine mercy. Since the perfection God communicates may be one’s initial perfection or primary actuality, then God’s mercy is displayed even in the creation of things and thus without the presence of sin and privation.116 God is therefore merciful insofar as God communicates his perfection and perfects the creature in some measure by lavishing gifts upon creatures in nature, grace, and glory. When God acts mercifully by loving creatures and thereby perfecting them according to the communication of goodness, God still corresponds to himself in the freedom and liberality that is his own account of his eternal possession and enjoyment of his own goodness. All of this testifies to the unidirectional, beneficiary character of God’s activity as it issues from a fullness possessed and not one to be acquired. Through his account of creation’s end, Aquinas’s articulation of God’s self-­correspondence comes full circle. We should expect as much since the intelligibility of God’s blessedness is the movement of the cyclical reflexivity by which God possesses and enjoys his own goodness. Corresponding to the internal activity in which God is blessed, God’s knowledge of approbation is a self-­returning movement of God’s intellect to his essence and God’s will to his essence as apprehended by his intellect. Not only does this movement conform to God’s circular movement logically and ontologically prior to his creative activity, but it also conforms to the freedom of God’s blessed sovereignty as the one who possesses and enjoys his own goodness in conscious self-­sufficiency. The ultimate confirmation of God’s freedom and self-­correspondence is found in the revelation of the Trinity, to which God’s essential operations are  Ia.21.3.corp.  Ia.12.4.ad2; Ia.48.5.ad1; “. . . defectus non est nisi secundum aliquid quod in aliquo natum est esse” (Sent. I.26.2.2.corp). 116  Ia.21.4.ad4. 114 115

Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 111 parallel. Without the processions of the Son and Spirit, the procession of creatures corresponds to no procession in God. Hence, the fruitful issue of the Word and Love in God shows that God’s blessedness is ultimately manifest completely in God’s eternal life apart from and prior to creation so that the fruitful procession of creatures from God is an act of divine self-­correspondence. Within God’s cyclical reflexivity in the processions of the Son and Spirit from the unoriginate Father, we find the basis not only for creation’s exit from but also its return to God, where consideration of God’s self-­correspondence reaches its denouement and highest significance for the integrity of God and creatures in distinction from and relation to one another. God’s will is absolutely determined to his own goodness as its only sufficient and necessary end, and that God thus wills his goodness parallels the Spirit’s procession from the Father and Son as Love and Gift. Thus God’s cyclical reflexivity results in an inner divine order intelligible with reference to God’s goodness. Both Scripture and metaphysics lead to an account of God’s creative act likewise ordered to and enacted through God’s goodness. Consequently, creation’s order is located in God himself and not in creatures’ attainment of God, or even their blessedness resulting from that attainment, since no end is more ultimate than God’s goodness. The ordination of God’s creative act therefore corresponds to the order of God’s internal being and activity even prior to and apart from creation. Moreover, God’s creative act is entirely useless to God on account of the fact that he wills creation as one who possesses and enjoys his goodness with abiding fruitfulness within himself, disclosed in the nature of the Spirit’s procession as Love. God thus wills creation not out of desire but out of love for his own goodness, which grants creation its unquestionable gratuity. The acknowledgment of God is thus secured to the extent that God’s self-­correspondence is articulated: God is not confused with created being and motion protologically or eschatologically, nor is creation conceivable as a benefit to God as if he had need of the things he made. What are the implications of this account of divine self-­correspondence for God’s relation to creation?

The Relation of Creation So far we have argued that Aquinas endeavors to construe God’s self-­ correspondence in a manner that acknowledges and glorifies God as God. He does this by describing God’s internal being and activity as reflexively circular on account of his blessedness, God’s movement thereby understood as the self-­returning closure of his bliss. God nevertheless acts to

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create a reality distinct from himself in correspondence to his circular internal activity of knowing and willing, as well as the processions of the Word and Love. Therefore God’s actions produce and extend to a realm distinct from himself in a reflective manner, as God possesses and enjoys his own goodness and mercifully wills that creatures do the same. God thus corresponds to himself in both creation’s exit and return, ordering all things to himself as he is ordered to himself. From this account of self-­correspondence follows a peculiar account of God’s relation to creation – or more accurately, a peculiar account of how we understand God’s relation to creation, much like what Aquinas calls a “nonreal” or “rational” relation (relatio rationis). If this sounds slightly alarming at first, it only means we need to pay careful attention to what is and is not being said. The way Aquinas construes this relation highlights the asymmetrical, nonreciprocal character of the Creator–creature relationship and demonstrates the qualitative distinction of God from creation that results from his account of God’s self-­correspondence. God’s relation to creation thereby upholds the acknowledgment and glorification of God as God Aquinas pursues throughout his doctrine of God. In what follows, we consider first the general metaphysics of relations and Aquinas’s denial that God’s relation to creation is real before concluding with an analysis of how he discusses God’s relation to creation indirectly. The central importance of the category of relation emerges for Aquinas first in how he defines creation as a relation. Fundamental to Christian belief in creation is that it arises out of nothing and presupposes nothing but the activity of God. Creation is the instantaneous influx of being and therewith the conditions in which motion and activity are generally intelligible, so God’s creative act itself does not conform to the conditions it posits. Among other things, this means that the creative act is only circumspectly an act because it is devoid of motion: “properly speaking, creation does not in truth have the nature of a change, but only on the level of imagination, when we speak not properly but metaphorically.”117 Speaking of creation as if it were a change thus requires a measure of ascesis in order to isolate the intelligibility of the creative act. Deconstructing the standard associations of change as they apply to an act that presupposes nothing, Aquinas discards the unreliable features of action and passion from motion and uncovers the core truth that the creative act just is the relation between God and his effects. Thus his definition: “creation  DP 3.2.corp; Phy. 8.2.987–8; SCG II.17. On the instantaneous character of creation: DP 3.1.ad11; Ia.45.2.ad3; Ia.45.3.ad3.

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Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 113 itself implies neither an approach to being nor a change worked by the Creator, but only a beginning of being and a relation to the Creator, from whom it has being. And so creation is really nothing other than a certain relation to God with newness of being.”118 To consider creation as the relation between God and his effects is to consider creation considered actively and passively: “If it is taken actively, then it designates God’s action, which is His essence, with a relation to the creature, which is not a real relation but only a logical one. But if it is taken passively, since creation properly speaking is not a change . . . it cannot be said that it is something in the genus of passion but [rather it is something] in the genus of relation.”119 Here in brief is Aquinas’s teaching on the mixed character of the relation between God and creatures: creation in its active sense signifies God’s actuality with a relation to the creature he creates, and yet this relation is not something in God. In what follows we ignore creation’s passive sense, how it is a reality in the creature, and focus solely on the active sense and what it means for God’s distinction from creation.120

What God’s Relation to Creation Is Not In order to understand what Aquinas does with the category of relation, we need to review its place within the Aristotelian categories of being. The categories function to designate that on account of which we speak about things in certain ways, which recalls our discussion of medieval speculative grammar: our mode of signification follows from our mode of understanding things, which owes in part to those things’ modes of being.121 So when we say, “Thomas was a theologian in Paris,” there are modes of being in Thomas Aquinas corresponding to these predicates: “theologian” signifies his substance, “in Paris” signifies his whereabouts, and so forth. These features of Thomas (substance, whereabouts) are modes of his being and therefore affect how we understand and speak about him. Relation is one such category that designates something about the being of the subjects to which it is attributed, so before proceeding   DP 3.3.corp; Ia.45.3; Sent. II.1.1.2.ad4.   DP 3.3.corp; Ia.45.3.ad1. 120   For the passive sense of creation, see especially Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “Creation as a Relation in Saint Thomas Aquinas,” The Modern Schoolman 56 (1979): 107–33; Mark G. Henninger, Relations: Medieval Theories 1250–1325 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 13–39; Gilles Emery, “La relation de création,” Nova et Vetera (French Edition) 88.1 (2013): 9–43; James F. Anderson, “Creation as a Relation,” New Scholasticism 24 (1950): 263–83. 121   Meta. 5.9.890. 118 119

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we should familiarize ourselves with the main features of relations in order to understand how Aquinas does and does not use this category to analyze the creative act.122 Relations primarily refer things to one another, whether they do so on account of our intellectual acts or on account of extramental features of the things in question. Therefore in any relation there are four primary considerations: (a) the subject in which the relation inheres as an accident and which is thereby ordered to other things; (b) the foundation of the relation, which is its cause; (c) the term of the relation, which is that toward which the relation orders its subject; and (d) the definition or formality (ratio) of the relation, which is to be “purely relative (ad aliquid).”123 While any relation refers two things together, there are two main types of relation: real relations (relationes reales) and nonreal or rational relations (relationes rationis). Real relations have four requirements: (1) both terms of the relation must be real, (2) distinct from one another, (3) members of the same ontological order, and (4) there must be a foundation for the relation in each term. Where any one of these four requirements is missing, the relation between the two relata cannot be real and is instead rational. Such rational relations are further subdivided into two types, which we will address later when considering how creatures understand God’s relation to creation. For the moment we need to consider what God’s relation to creatures is not, and thus how it fails to satisfy the criteria for a real relation. We may dispense immediately with the first two criteria in light of our analysis thus far: both terms of this relation are (1) real and (2) distinct from one another. The last two criteria require further consideration, however, because through the notions of (3) order and (4) foundation it becomes clear that God’s relation to creation is not real. How Aquinas handles both notions in this respect owes to his construal of God’s self-correspondence.  Our exposition is limited and dependent upon fuller studies: A. Krempel, La doctrine de la relation chez Saint Thomas: Exposé historique et systématique (Paris: Vrin, 1952); Clifford G. Kossel, “Principles of St Thomas’ Distinction Between the Esse and Ratio of Relation: Part I,” The Modern Schoolman 24.1 (1946): 19–36; Clifford G. Kossel, “Principles of St Thomas’ Distinction Between the Esse and Ratio of Relation: Part II,” The Modern Schoolman 24.2 (1947): 93–107; Clifford G. Kossel, “St Thomas’s Theory of the Causes of Relation,” The Modern Schoolman 25.3 (1948): 151–72; Earl Muller, “Real Relations and the Divine: Issues in Thomas’s Understanding of God’s Relation to the World,” Theological Studies 56.4 (1995): 673– 95; Gilles Emery, “‘Ad aliquid’: La relation chez Thomas d’Aquin,” in Saint Thomas d’Aquin, ed. Theirry-­Dominique Humbrecht (Paris: Cerf, 2010), 113–35. 123  DP 2.5.corp. 122

Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 115 First, (3) order is inapplicable to God on account of his self-­ correspondence. To see why this is so, we need to step back and grasp the broader context of order. Part of Aquinas’s denial of a real relation of God to the world derives from convictions about theological cosmology in connection with the metaphysics of relations. Within the Western philosophical tradition, order belongs to a vision of the cosmos as invested with an intrinsic harmony or hierarchy between its various parts and the whole. Aquinas’s theological cosmology falls within this tradition; the perfection and goodness of the universe consist both in the absolute, inherent qualities given to creatures in their natures and to the order of the parts to one another and of the whole to God.124 Just as the various parts of an army are constituted by the whole’s order to its commander, so are the many components of the universe constituted by their order to God: “all creatures are ordered to God both as to their beginning and as to their end, since the order of the parts of the universe to one another results from the order of the whole universe to God.”125 The order of all things to God as their end follows from the end (finis operantis) of God’s creative act, which is God’s intrinsic goodness. God orders all things to his goodness because he creates from love of his own goodness; the ordination of God’s creative act corresponds to the order of God’s being in himself. By now it should be clear that the order of God’s self-­correspondence follows from the fact that God is ordered to himself in the reflexive circularity of divine bliss. Since God’s order is purely self-­referential and thus the principle and end of all created order, God orders all things to his goodness without any corresponding movement in which God has to order himself to all things, or anything else for that matter. God’s intellect is ordered to his essence and not to creatures, just as his will is ordered to his goodness and not to creatures.126 The ordering of things is given by virtue of God’s creative activity, and since God is not given by his own creative activity, then God is not part of any order he establishes. Therefore Aquinas denies that God and creatures are part of the same order: “God is outside   Sent. II.1.2.2.corp, Sent. II.1.2.2.ad4; Ia.11.3; Ia.47.3; Ia.65.2. Citing Augustine, Aquinas says that the unity of peace consists in the “tranquility of order,” which is established through the exemplary causality of God’s peace: DDN 11.1-2.891-912. For more extended treatments of order within Aquinas’s metaphysics, see Brian Coffey, “The Notion of Order according to St. Thomas Aquinas,” The Modern Schoolman 27.1 (1949): 1–18; de Finance, Être et agir, 132–3, 315–17; O’Rourke, PseudoDionysius, 260–74; Leo J. Elders, The Metaphysics of Being of St. Thomas Aquinas in a Historical Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 231–8. 125   DP 7.9.corp. 126   DP 7.10.ad5–6. 124

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the order of creatures, and all creatures are ordered to Him, but not vice-­versa”; “nor is being related to them part of His nature.”127 As the principle and end of creation in correspondence to his own self-­returning bliss, God is not ordered to things but they are ordered to him; and for the same reason the relation of God to creatures is not real, whereas the relation of creatures to God is. Accordingly, that God and creatures are not part of the same ontological order conforms to the pattern of divine self-­correspondence traced thus far. In addition to order, second, there cannot be a (4) foundation in God for a real relation because God is simple and therefore has no accidents. Any real relation must have an ontological foundation in the subject it relates, so that when we say, “Thomas is really related to Albert,” our mode of signifying corresponds to the subjects’ modes of being in some respect. This is precisely what Aquinas denies of God: there is no such ontological foundation in God’s mode of being to which our language can correspond because relations belong to subjects in which they inhere accidentally and God is not a composition of substance and accidents.128 While true, matters are somewhat more complex than this. Strictly speaking, relations are not substances but neither are they necessarily accidents because it is not essential to the nature (ratio) of relation qua relation to inhere in something and have an accidental existence in things. The characteristic of a relation is its mere formal aspect of relatedness, so if a relation exists in something it does so on account of something other than its relatedness.129 Among the categories, Aquinas says that relation has the “weakest being (debilissimum esse)” and for this reason must be founded on “more perfect” accidents as intermediaries between relation and substance. The only two accidents that can ground real relations are quantity or an active or passive power, “for on these two counts alone can we find in a thing something whereby we compare it with another.”130 In order to demonstrate that God has neither foundation in himself, we must briefly consider both quantity and active and passive power. Neither quantity nor an active or passive power makes it possible to attribute to God an accident founding a real relation to creation, chiefly because these sorts of foundations are only applicable to finite being. First, any two creatures may be related on account of some quantity. For  Ia.13.7.corp; Ia.28.1.ad3.  Accidents are inapplicable to God because they are further actualizations and determinations of substances: SCG I.23; Ia.3.6.corp; cf. Ia.77.6.corp. 129  DP 7.9.ad7. 130  DP 7.9.corp; Phys. 3.1.280. 127 128

Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 117 example, if Thomas is wider than Albert, then they are really related by virtue of their quantitative dimensions. This quantitative relation between these domical Dominicans depends upon comparing each person’s width: the relationship would be reversed if Albert achieved a greater circumference than Thomas and the relationship would be one of width-­parity if they were equal, but in all these cases the relation is real. It is patently obvious to Aquinas that such quantitative comparisons are inapplicable to God because the distinction between Creator and creature is qualitative, not quantitative. God is not a bowling ball on the cosmic billiard table, so there can be no quantitative comparison of creation to Creator – even if we heap qualifiers like infinite and perfect onto the latter. Second, any creature may also be related to another on account of action and passion. We see this in the relations between agents and patients or between causes and effects, which may mutually depend on one another similar to the example of width earlier. The relation of effect to cause is real because effects depend on their causes as that by which they are perfected. Conversely, the relation of cause to effect may be real when “the good or perfection of the mover or agent is to be found in the effect, patient, or thing moved.”131 The dependence of a cause on its effect is manifest in the relationship between parents and their biological children. In one sense the act of procreation is perfected in the production of a child, since procreation is the act of that which is imperfect (actus imperfecti) that consists in the production of an effect. To this extent the cause by which the relation of parents to child arises depends on the effect of their univocal agency. In another sense the parents may be moved to beget children out of a desire for children, who are a blessing from God (Ps 127:3). In this second instance the cause is moved by, ordered to, and therefore dependent on the good of the effect.132 The cause is really related to the effect whenever the cause depends on the effect for some good. However much we might be inclined to think of God’s relation to creation in such terms, Aquinas thinks that we do so only insofar as we forget God’s qualitative distinction from creation. He concludes, God does not work by an intermediary action to be regarded as issuing from God and terminating in the creature: but His action is His substance and is wholly

  DP 7.10.corp.   DP 7.10.corp.; Michael J. Dodds, “Ultimacy and Intimacy: Aquinas on the Relation between God and the World,” in Ordo Sapientiae et Amoris: Hommage au Professeur Jean-­Pierre Torrell, O.P., ed. Carlos-­Josephat Pinto de Oliveira (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1993), 223.

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outside the genus of created being whereby the creature is related to Him. Nor again does any good accrue to the Creator from the production of the creature . . . It is also evident that He is not moved to act, and that without any change in Himself He makes all changeable things. It follows then that there is no real relation in Him to creatures, although creatures are really related to Him, as effects to their cause.133

In other words, there is no accident in God grounding a real relation to creation because God’s creative act is not the kind of transitive action perfected in its effect, nor is creation a benefit to God that might move him as a good he desires to acquire.134 Since there is no ontological foundation in God to ground a real relation to creation, then God’s relation to creation is not real but creation’s relation to him is. Though the immediate metaphysical support for denying accidents in God comes from divine simplicity, the entailments of divine self-­ correspondence are not far from view. God acts to create by his immanent operations of intellect and will reflexively ordered to his own essence and goodness, on account of which creation proceeds from and yet returns  DP 7.10.corp.  See further DP 7.10ad1; IaIIae.57.5.ad1; SCG II.23.5; II.31.5; III.18.5. Whether Aquinas thinks of the creative act as an immanent or transitive act has occasioned some debate. Susan C. Selner-­Wright argues that creation is a strictly immanent act, in “Thomas Aquinas on the Acts of Creation and Procreation,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 3 (2003): 707–16. Gregory Doolan convincingly responds that Selner-­Wright is correct, but not correct enough because she ignores those places where Aquinas does speak about creation as a transitive act (e.g., DP 9.9.corp) when emphasizing how the “immanent” act of creation is productive of effects: “Aquinas on Creation: Transitive or Immanent Act?” (unpublished paper). Drawing on Karl Rahner’s analysis of activity in Geist in Welt (Munich: Kösel-­Verlag, 1957), 331–66, Leo Dümpelmann has argued somewhat more adventurously that the creative act is both immanent and transitive on account of the transcendental unity and distinction of God’s being with the ipsum esse creatum of the creature, emphasizing the creature’s existential participation in being. Leo Dümpelmann, Kreation als ontisch-­ ontologisches Verhältnis: Zur Metaphysik der Schöpfungstheologie des Thomas von Aquin (München: Verlag Karl Alber, 1969), 97–117. While Dümpelmann, like Doolan, is attentive to how Aquinas speaks of creation in both ways, he nevertheless says quite a bit more than Aquinas. He suggests that the act of the knower emanates into the known object and achieves a self-­realization in the object’s material medium, and that similarly God’s creative causality considered as an “emanation” is a mode of realization (Vollzugsweisen) that is wholly immanent to God and yet includes the otherness and perfection of the creature as interior to God (Kreation, 115–16). Whatever one makes of his interpretation of emanation here (cf. SCG IV.11; Meta. 11.9.2312–13), the problem is that Dümpelmann argues too much structural continuity between divine and creaturely activity. A more convincing interpretation of creation’s existential character, as well as Meta. 11.9.2312–13, may be found in de Finance, Être et agir, 254–62.

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Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 119 to God as perfecting creatures but not perfecting God; creation is benefit for the creature alone. Thus divine self-­correspondence rules out the metaphysical intelligibility of real relations to capture God’s relation to creation. At this point, one might well suspect that Aquinas’s metaphysics have led him down an infelicitous path. Is it not counterintuitive to say that God is not really related to creation? How does this not blatantly contradict Scripture’s testimony to God’s loving interaction with his creatures, revealed above all in the incarnation of the Word? Does this not compromise God’s radical nearness to his creatures? Such suspicions are only quieted with patient attention to what Aquinas says about God’s relation to creation when he likens our understanding of it to a rational relation.

God, Relations, and the Limits of Understanding To say that God does not have a real relation to creation is not the same as denying God’s loving attention to creatures. Rather, through the metaphysical analysis of relations Aquinas seeks to show that God’s relation to creation is simply unlike the relations creatures bear toward anything else within the horizon of created being. Aquinas’s analysis does not describe God’s relation to creation but rather destabilizes our sense of familiarity with this relation. We may see this by turning to Aquinas’s Disputed Questions on Power, question seven, article eleven, where he offers the most detailed of his mature statements on God’s relation to creation. Having denied that God’s relation to creation is real, Aquinas does not then turn to tell us what God’s relation to creation is. He instead discusses the varieties of rational relations that arise on account of our limited mode of understanding as creatures and likens how we perceive of God’s relation to creation to one of these varieties. From this overview alone, it is obvious that Aquinas’s inquiry is considerably tempered much like his analysis that God “acts by way of intellect and will.” Keeping these modest ambitions in view is essential to understanding what Aquinas does and does not say. Aquinas begins with a general definition of rational relations as consisting in the order of things understood (relatio rationis consistit in ordinem intellectuum), from which he proceeds to discuss two ways we order the things we understand.135 These two ways we order what we understand in turn result in two kinds of rational relation concerning objects of second   DP 7.11.corp; cf. Sent. I.26.2.1.

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and first intention, respectively.136 First, we relate that which we apprehend reflectively in second intentions when “our mind invents the order in question and attributes it to that about which we speak relatively.”137 Examples include when we attribute order between genus and species, between that which is in our mind and that which is in extra-­mental reality, or finally between different concepts of the intellect. This first manner of inventing the order of things by mental associations is similar to the later nominalist doctrine that relations as such are mental constructs without any reality in things.138 The second way in which we order things results from the way we directly understand objects of first intention as if they were really related to one another. This second manner differs from the first in that the relation is not an invented mental construct but an inescapable consequence of our mode of understanding and its creaturely limitations. This point is paramount to understanding Aquinas’s doctrine of creation as a relation, so it warrants close inspection. In this second type of rational relation, we attribute a relation to the object understood on account of the way in which we understand it. Aquinas explains, “This happens insofar as some things not mutually related are understood in relation to one another, although the mind does not understand them to be related, for in that case it would be in error.”139 That is, we inescapably understand the intended objects as if they were related even though we do not understand them as actually related. He provides four examples of how rational relations are consequent upon our mode of understanding, the first three of which involve us understanding the objects of our intention as if they satisfied one of the aforementioned requirements for real relations. So the intellect might relate objects of first intention by (1) attributing existence to things that do not exist, or (2) considering two things distinct that are in reality indistinct, or (3) considering something as relatable when in fact it is not (as happens when one of the objects under consideration is itself a relation).140 In these cases,  First intentions are conceptions of reality, whereas second intentions are conceptions of logic consequent upon the mind’s reflection on its own understanding. See Joseph Owens, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1963), 237–41. 137  DP 7.11.corp. 138  Emery, “La relation de création,” 21–2. 139  DP 7.11.corp. 140  More elaborately: (1) we might think of two things as being existent when in truth only one of the things exists or neither of them exist. So when we relate two things that are separated in time – one present and the other future (or both future) – and think of the two as being prior and posterior, then these bear only a rational relation 136

Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 121 rational relations inevitably result from our mode of understanding, even though the objects understood do not have the requisite modes of being to satisfy the criteria for a real relation one to another. In other words, in each of these cases our mode of understanding grasps the objects with an as-­if mode of being that is improperly attributed to them. Such is not the case with the rational relation of God to the world, however, for there is a fourth way rational relations follow from our mode of understanding. Turning to the final example of how rational relations may issue from our mode of understanding, Aquinas enlists the common example of the relation posited between the knower and the object known. The example is crucial not so much for grasping how God is related to one another because both things do not actually exist at the same time. Since the manner in which we consider at least one of these two things attributes to it an as-­ if existence, then the order drawn between the two is purely notional. We might be tempted to think this is a result of the temporal manner in which we understand the things in question, but Aquinas’s point is about the existence of the objects. Elsewhere he argues that there exists only a rational relation even between two things that will bear real relations to one another in the future as cause and effect, since these two things do not yet exist or are not yet in a relation of action and passion (Meta. 5.17.1025). (2) Rational relations also follow when we consider one object as if it were two and understand the “two things” in a relation to one another. Since the two things are not really distinct, they are not really related and the relation obtaining between them owes only to the way in which we are considering them. (3) Finally, we might also consider two things as capable of a relation (ordinabilia) to one another when in fact there is no relation between them and one of the things is a relation. Aquinas illustrates with the order between a subject and its accident, as when we say that a relation is accidental to the subject. Here we seem to be relating a subject and its accident, which in this case is a relation. Since relations have the ratio of “towards-­ness” (ad aliquid) and the esse of inhering in a substance, then to say that a relation must really relate to the substance in which it inheres is to require another relation somehow existing between the accidental relation and its supporting substance. The problem becomes evident: how can a relation (R) itself have a relation (RR) without requiring an infinite number of additional intermediate relations connecting R to RR? Here we find F. H. Bradley’s famous regress argument (though it predates Bradley): if a relation obtains between two terms (a and b) we must account for where the relation is located, and if it is really an accident then it must exist either in a or b or both. If the relation retains an accidental character and does not exist exclusively in either a or b, much less both at the same time, then it has to float in between them while still being connected to them, necessitating something else to relate the relation to the relata, and so on ad infinitum. Aquinas is clearly aware of the problem but thinks it may be obviated easily: “relations themselves are not related to something else by any further relation but by themselves because their very essence is relative. It is not the same with things whose essence is absolute, so that this does not lead to an indefinite process” (DP 7.9.ad2; Sent. II.1.1.2.ad5). All of this points to the absurdity of treating things that are not relatable as if they were, for which reason he concludes that such relations of relations are only in our mode of understanding (DP 7.11.corp).

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to creatures or o ­ therwise, but why we cannot describe God’s involvement with creation as a real relation on God’s side. Consider that actions such as seeing, knowing, and willing are immanent actions that remain within an agent and have no genuinely external term. There are external objects, of course, to which those actions respond but these objects are not the external terms of these acts. This state of affairs does not prevent us from thinking of those actions as if they were transitive, because this is how we think intuitively. Suppose we see someone with whom we are keen to acquaint ourselves. Upon seeing the person in question, we quite naturally see some relation existing between ourselves and the other party – minimally, this relation would entail considering the other person “knowable” because we have some knowledge of them, whether of their reputation, appearance, or something else. In considering this other person knowable, we are implicitly thinking and signifying them as in some relation to our own act of seeing or knowing.141 When thus perceived, the relation in question presupposes that we are thinking of our act of sight or cognition as a transitive act that reaches out to the other person as its external term. If knowing someone was a transitive action that extended from the agent to an external object, then in any act of knowing the known object actually would be the external terminus of the knower’s activity. However, sight and cognition are immanent activities and so we also know that our intuitions in this matter are not the whole story. What this means is that when we know the other person we are imputing to that person a relation to our own act of knowing because we are thinking of an immanent act as if it were transitive.142 In truth, however, the other person is thereby related to us in nothing more than a purely logical sense; objects of knowledge are the measure of that knowledge, and so do not depend on it. Due to how our mind orders objects of first intention, we necessarily think of our immanent acts of knowing as if they were transitive acts extending from our intellect into external matter. Our mode of understanding thus precipitates the rational relation. Aquinas likens this example to how we think about God: “In like manner our mind attributes to God certain relative terms, inasmuch as

 DP 7.11.corp.  “But to see and to understand and actions of this kind . . . remain in the things acting and do not pass over into those which are acted upon. Hence what is visible or what is knowable is not acted upon by being known or seen. And on this account these are not referred to other things but others to them” (Meta. 5.17.1027; cf. DV 21.1.corp).

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Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 123 it considers God as the term of the creature’s relation to Him: wherefore such relations are purely logical.”143 What does this mean? As the appeal to our mode of understanding at the beginning of the article suggests, Aquinas’s concern throughout this discussion is with the creaturely character of human knowledge of God. On account of our mode of understanding, we say things about God that fall short of the whole truth (even if they are wholly true). The crucial move in the argument comes at the very beginning of the article when Aquinas says that rational relations can themselves be the product of our mode of understanding, which is very different from saying that our intellect discovers rational relations between things. When he likens God’s relation to creation to rational relations, Aquinas is not saying positively what God’s relation is like but simply gesturing toward its mysteriousness. We as creatures are related to God our Creator and we necessarily think of him as reciprocally related to us in turn, just as we do with anything we know. But the theologian recognizes that this is a product of our minds, because God’s relation to us is far more intimate and wonderful than the category of relation is equipped to disclose. God relates to us in sheer benevolence and beneficence by corresponding to himself as the blessed God and giving us himself by simply being himself. Such a relation is far removed from the species of relations we know all too well among ourselves, for which reason God’s relation to creation cannot be comprehended with the conceptuality of even rational relations. Hence, Aquinas limits the explanatory reach of rational relations to our mode of understanding and ultimately renders both real and rational relations inadequate to describe the irreducibly mysterious actuality of God’s relation to creation. We saw the same thing in our consideration of the divine will, where Aquinas employs his speculative grammar as a reminder that God’s pure actuality escapes the limitations of our understanding and speech. Just as the consideration of divine act and being requires the interplay of negative and positive theology within a speculative grammar, so, too, does the characterization of God’s relation to creation. God is not related to creation by virtue of something accruing to him, but neither is he related to creatures as one created quantity to another. Aquinas’s characterization of God’s relation to creation is oblique: we glimpse something of its mystery only as we become aware of the inadequacy of our finite modes of understanding. The way we understand God’s relation to creation is likened to a rational relation because   DP 7.11.corp; cf. DP 7.11.ad1; Ia.13.7.ad4; SCG II.13.

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it does not belong to God’s nature to be related to creatures, nor is his relation to creatures something inhering in his essence. The distinction of God from creation transcends all distinctions of being and likewise his relation to creation transcends all modes of being, categorical relations included. Since our mode of understanding can only encounter God’s unique actuality within the confines of the modes of being familiar to and owned by us, our mode of signifying can only speak to God’s relation to the world in terms of rational relations because they speak best to the asymmetry and disproportion of God’s relation to creation. God measures our knowledge and speech about him, and so he does not depend on us “since he infinitely surpasses all that is measured by Him.”144 The relationship between God and creatures is therefore mixed: real in creatures, but not real in God. When speaking more plainly, Aquinas articulates this insight with the logic of aseity: “The relation existing between God and creature is not in God really. However, it is in God according to our understanding; similarly, it can be in Him according to His own understanding, that is, insofar as He understands the relation things have to His essence. Thus, these relations exist in God as known by Him.”145 This is the closest Aquinas comes to offering anything like a positive account of God’s relation to creation, but significantly it conforms to the pattern of God’s self-­correspondence we have traced throughout this chapter. God knows through his essence the relations all things bear to him because God’s intellect is not distinct from his being: “He supremely returns to His own essence, and knows Himself.”146 Here we see the full flowering of God’s reflexive circularity coming to bear on the aseity that textures God’s relations with creation. Because God knows and wills all things through knowing and willing himself reflexively, God is not really related to creation as something that mediates his knowledge or beckons his will. The problem with such construals is not that they draw God too closely to his creation, but that they presuppose too much distance.147 To maintain a real relation of God to the world would encroach on the transcendence of God by presupposing too finite a view of God’s immanence, but neither do rational relations capture the truth of God’s involvement  DP 7.7.ad1.  DV 3.2.ad8. 146  Ia.14.2.ad2. 147  Thus Rosemann: “La réalisation de l’essence divine; sa reditio, coïncide avec ces opérations; c’est la raison pour laquelle Dieu n'a pas à se rapporter à la création, comme s’il y avait une distance entre Lui et son miroir créé.” Omne ens est aliquid, 139. 144 145

Aquinas on the Creative Act and God’s Relation to Creation 125 with creatures. Just as God is uniquely distinct, so, too, does he uniquely relate. God relates to creation by sharing his relation to himself in the processions of the Son and Spirit from the Father, and therefore unlike anything we know.

Conclusion Aquinas’s inquiry into the doctrine of God marshals his full metaphysical and theological intelligence in the service of a contemplative mission to bring his thoughts captive to Christ, and thereby acknowledge God as God. The psalmist declares, “Ascribe to the lord the glory of his name; worship the lord in holy array” (Ps 29:2).148 Commenting on this verse, Aquinas says, God is our end and there is nothing we may add to Him, and therefore we should glorify Him so that everything we do is for His glory  . . . Likewise, God is our principle and so we owe Him honor: if I am Lord, where is my honor? (Mal 1) . . . He is glorious in Himself, but His name should be glorious in us, which means that it is glorious in our knowledge (notitia nostra). And so that He is glorious and celebrated in us, we should give Him honor.149

Confessing God as the end and principle of all things in light of his triune beatitude is the diametrical opposite of the Gentiles, who “did not see fit to acknowledge God (non probaverunt Deum habere in notitia)” (Rom 1:28). Such confession leads Aquinas to reckon with creation in light of the acknowledgment of God, and so in light of God’s blessedness as God himself. Understanding the creative act with respect to the blessed Trinity (sub ratione beatae Trinitatis) means understanding creation in light of its correspondence to God’s inner life, and therefore tracing the correspondence of God’s act to God’s being. Anchoring his analysis firmly with reference to God’s reflexive knowledge and enjoyment of God’s own being, Aquinas sustains the acknowledgment of God in distinction from creation by reinforcing God’s freedom and self-­sufficiency. God creates by a self-­returning knowledge of his being as imitable by creatures to which his will is joined in approving love of his own being as the supreme good that results in a merciful overflow, which is the influx of created being.   The Vulgate: “Afferte Domino gloriam et honorem, afferte Domino gloriam nomini eius” (Ps 28:2). 149   Psalmo 28.3. 148

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The function of Aquinas’s speculative grammar enables him to affirm the singularity of God’s volitional act to create while also recognizing its absolute non-­necessity. God’s freedom to create or not is further reinforced when the creative act is seen in light of its correspondence to the divine processions, for here holy teaching finds the only fruitfulness possible within God in the processions of the Son and Spirit. Consequently, creatures proceed from God both freely and with a likeness to their Creator because God proceeds in himself by way of Word and Love, Image and Gift. The full intelligibility of God’s self-­correspondence in creation comes into view when creation’s ordination is understood in correspondence to the inner divine order of God’s reflexive circularity as the blessed Trinity. Just as God proceeds within himself from himself, so, too, does he proceed to himself – the exiting of creatures corresponds to the exiting of God in himself, but so, too, does creation’s return correspond to an inner divine returning. Thus understood, creation is only intelligible as pure, merciful benefit to the creature and not in any way the filling of a primordial lack in God. Furthermore, God is intelligible and conceivable as possibly being all there is because everything he is for us he is already in himself antecedent to and without his act to create. All of these descriptions result in the nonmutual relation of creation, which at once secures the acknowledgment of God in his qualitative distinction from all things and the particular glory due him on account of his radical immanence within and care for creatures. This account of divine self-­correspondence enables the acknowledgment of God within the particular exigencies Aquinas identifies in his reading of Romans, and it conforms to the axiom that act follows being. This construal of God’s self-­correspondence is not above questioning, for does such an apophatic approach to God’s relation to creation suffice as the proper response to God’s revelation? Does the unity of God with humanity in Jesus Christ not demand something else for adequate confession? Indeed, the critical questions we will now see posed to this construal in Part II are largely along such lines: Does God’s self-­correspondence conform to generally applicable metaphysical axioms, and does a different understanding of this self-­correspondence follow from an equally different understanding of the moral strictures surrounding theological reason?

Part II GOD’S BEING IN ACT ACCORDING TO KARL BARTH

4 Barth on God’s Being in Act

The purpose of this book’s second part is, like the first, to explore a distinctive theological conception of how God may be confessed as God. As with Part I, our pursuit of this conception will involve exploring an equally distinctive account of God’s relation to creation that is grounded in his eternal perfection, discernible through the notion of divine self-­ correspondence. Here our inquiry turns to Karl Barth’s doctrine of God and how it grounds an account of God’s distinction from and relation to the world that operates within a different conceptual domain and coordination of theology and economy. Despite some striking similarities between the two theologians, Barth’s account of God’s activity and being offers in many respects an acute alternative to the conception we find in Aquinas even though he pursues something very similar. And yet, if its alternative is acute, this is not accidentally related to the stark differences in theological genre one encounters when turning from the Summa theologiae to the Church Dogmatics. One of the immediate consequences that must be noted is that, while our material interests are the same, the form of the present inquiry differs from the first part because it is shaped by the texts under consideration. Aquinas’s conceptual rigor, interest in clarification, and systematic consistency do not apply straightforwardly to Barth, who is adamant that we cannot linger over any statement in dogmatics lest it illegitimately “become the final word or the guiding principle.”1 A survey of his doctrine of God must therefore capture something of its whole movement to capture his own thinking. But any survey can only capture part of his thinking. The spiraling, restless movement 1

 II/1:407.

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of the Church Dogmatics means that any one picture fails to capture its arguments’ pilgrimage. As Katherine Sonderegger warns us about Barth, “The drama is drawn in master strokes and no critic can encompass them or domesticate them.”2 And by Barth’s own admission, there are “complexities  – even contradictions! – in the Church Dogmatics.”3 Alongside Barth’s labyrinthine prolixity which resists restatement, these factors mean that the interpreter often can only point to patterns, tendencies, or elements with a requisite warning that none of this captures everything the man has to say. That said, Part II traces how Barth construes the relationship between God’s self-­correspondence and relation to the world primarily in isolated moments of Church Dogmatics II (§§28–33), though with occasional glances forward to volume IV. The conclusions, if not the evidence, of our interpretation admit of brief summary: Barth seeks to confess God as “God is” primarily in terms of God’s electing self-­determination to be for humanity in Christ, which is understood as an internal act carrying dispositive entailments for God’s being and precipitating what is functionally a real relation of God to the world. Already in this brief summary, the suspecting reader is reminded of how few subjects occasion as much controversy among Barth’s interpreters as his construal of the doctrines of God and election. In distinction from many contributions to that debate, the present analysis focuses on the conceptuality of divine self-­ determination in light of Barth’s critical reconstruction of the traditional doctrine of God, which he undertook in constant conversation with the traditions of Protestant scholasticism as he sought to work away from Neo-­Protestant liberalism. Our analysis will therefore attend to matters of conceptual clarification and definition in relation to issues surrounding the interaction of divine being and activity, including matters such as teleology and divine internal operations. The present chapter investigates Barth’s construal of divine being and activity by identifying the relationship between theology’s formal orientation and material subject matter, primarily attending to Church Dogmatics II/1 §28. This involves, first, identifying aspects of Barth’s formal approach to divine actuality that he develops in his study of Anselm and carries into the Church Dogmatics. Through this formal orientation, Barth restricts theological inquiry to tracing the correspondence between God’s being and his external acts by only interpreting them in light of  Katherine Sonderegger, “On Style in Karl Barth,” Scottish Journal of Theology 45.1 (1992): 65. 3  John D. Godsey, ed., Karl Barth’s Table Talk (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963), 12. 2

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one another. On the whole, this results in an account that understands God strictly in terms of his relation to the world. Yet Barth distances himself from certain such construals in the nineteenth century for the sake of confessing God’s objective perfection in himself as the ground of his external works. Second, then, we will show how this formal orientation is itself reflective of the material subject matter of theology, understood as God in his self-­determination. Barth has a robust account of God’s perfection that he means to liberate from general conceptual and metaphysical strictures for the sake of employing it in ways that most transparently map onto God’s self-­demonstration in Christ. To this end, he distances his doctrine of God from certain traditional and modern teleological constraints in order to affirm that God orders himself in accordance with his self-­determination. Consequently, Barth’s particular integration of theology’s formality and object points to how his doctrine of God in II/1 is poised for a positive, irreducible correlation with the doctrine of election in II/2. The final chapter of Part II will uncover the material ground of this correlation and its significance for God’s self-­correspondence and relation to the world. Before proceeding, it is perhaps worthwhile to try and offset some foreseeable objections to the approach taken here. What follows is an interpretation that understands the deconstruction and redefinition of concepts as windows into some of the motivations and concerns animating Barth’s thought. Such an investment in especially “metaphysical” concepts and their argumentative apparatus might be thought to impose an inappropriate concern on Barth’s otherwise strictly ethical, exegetical, or narrative genres of theological exposition. Now Barth’s interests are never in conceptual clarification per se, as if conceptual clarity and order were sufficient for the theological task or were particularly illuminating exercises as such. He is wary of potential excesses here, like the kind of overinvestment in the explanatory power of concepts that takes conceptual clarification as the starting point for further logical deduction. But concepts nevertheless possess an indispensable descriptive function, even if they are always provisional and in service to the more pressing task of declaring the good news of God’s self-­revelation in Jesus Christ.4 Thus Barth always situates conceptual clarification within a larger, often exegetically and ethically interested argument to which such clarifications are subordinate. To an extent, we follow these movements as much as

4

 II/1:276. On Barth’s approach to philosophy, see Kenneth Oakes, Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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possible  – especially in this chapter  – without sacrificing the opportunity to focus on the conceptual analysis as a window into the pressures that attend Barth’s critical interaction with received notions. If such an interpretation of Barth misses something of his dialectical thought patterns, it also affords the unique opportunity to scrutinize the tensions that arise for theological understanding when situated within those patterns. Furthermore, in the texts under consideration, Barth’s discussions are highly conceptual. That said, will analysis of concepts such as self-­determination, being, and activity hew closely enough to Barth’s own thought patterns to prevent distortion? Yes, if we recognize at the outset the provisional, strictly descriptive character of concepts in Barth’s thought. Especially in the later volumes of the Church Dogmatics, Barth “proceeds by narrative and conceptually descriptive statement rather than by argument or by way of an explanatory theory undergirding the description’s real or logical possibility.”5 Fundamentally, God moves, and we must follow this movement lest we find ourselves following something else altogether.6 Theology therefore consists in grateful retrospection upon God’s acts, seeing these acts as reiterations of God’s being freely inclining toward us. To this extent, even metaphysical concepts like essence and activity have a significant role to play in depicting God as he gives himself to be known in Scripture, while yet failing to comprehend or control God.7 Particularly relative to the scholastic and modern traditions, Barth critically examines and redeploys traditional categories for the purpose of describing not simply the identity of Jesus Christ, but the whole divine activity and movement in which this identity is central, undoubtedly, but also intelligible. In different ways, then, both narrative or intratextual and postmetaphysical approaches to Barth’s theology can prove constraining insofar as they prevent us from grasping the complexity and subtlety of Barth’s theological interests. Certainly, Barth is keen to focus on Scripture’s testimony to Christ and avoid untoward speculation, but this does not prevent him from interest in and conceptual description of the antecedent grounds and causes of Christ’s identity and solidarity with humanity. Barth’s interest in exegesis is an extension of his interest in the risen Christ’s self-­testimony through his Spirit, an interest that  Hans Frei, Types of Christian Theology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 161.  II/1:674. 7  According to Paul Dafydd Jones, “Barth shows little reticence when it comes to tendering strong claims about God’s being as such.” The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 63. 5 6

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avoids the untheological speculation of historicism only as it acknowledges the depths of Christ’s history with us in his own eternal history with the Father and Spirit.8 As the course of our analysis will demonstrate, Barth’s thought on vexing issues related to divine activity and being is best grasped in all its complexity when we locate him within broader traditions, his engagement with which is especially accessible through his relevant conceptual analyses.

The Theological Approach to Divine Actuality Questions matter almost as much as answers for Barth. Some answers (like 42) are useless without the right questions, and so we must coordinate the right statements with the right form of inquiry. Throughout the Church Dogmatics Barth pauses characteristically before the questions he poses to his material, exorcising them of disordered motives and assumptions. Given this scrupulous attention devoted to framing questions theologically, it stands to reason that any interpretation of Barth’s doctrine of God needs to let him set the table first. Only on this basis will our analysis follow Barth’s thoughts after him and not impose too much foreign interest on the argument. Yet how exactly does Barth set the table, and how does this frame his doctrine of God? Answers to these questions are visible at the beginning of his doctrine of God, where the task is explicitly stated as one of first hearing God and then on this basis learning to say “God” in the right sense.9 Barth’s lengthy treatment of the problem of the knowledge of God is an attempt at extracting the presuppositions behind the Church’s confession of God and Christ. Here he rejects two questions as representative of false starting points. First, theology starts from the given fact that in his Word, “God is actually known and will be known again.”10 Hence, the question is inappropriate as to whether God is known in the church, or at least it is inappropriate where ventured on any grounds other than the fact that in revelation God questions our knowledge. Second, equally as inappropriate is the question about the possibility of the knowledge of God in view of the fact that God is known. In a statement that reflects perhaps his most predominant pattern of reasoning, Barth says that where “the actuality exists there is also the corresponding possibility. The question cannot then be posed   I/1:420–1.   II/1:3. 10  II/1:4/2.      8      9

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in the abstract but only concretely; not a priori but only a posteriori.”11 Therefore, the “only legitimate and meaningful questions” in this respect are: “how far is God known? and how far is God knowable?”12 This initial foray into the knowledge of God reveals two formal features of theological inquiry that one encounters throughout the Church Dogmatics. Respectively, these consist in the noetic prioritization of actuality over possibility and the corresponding a posteriori articulation of possibility in light of actuality and not versa. These two formal features reveal a preference for questions that ask “how far?” rather than “did God really say?” We therefore need to address the reasons for this preference and the meaning of asking how far something is true. As Barth notes in these same opening pages, he culls the concrete, a posteriori nature of his inquiry from his landmark study of Anselm, with consequences for how we should understand the corresponding prioritization of actuality over possibility. His readers should “keep that text in mind” and allow it to color their understanding of his procedure.13 Following this advice, our analysis will turn first to Barth’s book on Anselm to discover some key convictions he employs throughout his doctrine of God. Here we will discover the unique importance Barth attaches to necessity, which is a formal orientation of his procedure throughout the Church Dogmatics and especially its central material related to divine  being and act. Through this orientation toward the necessity of God’s being and act, Barth argues that God in his self-­revelation is that than which nothing greater may be thought (id quod maius cogitare nequit).14 However God reveals himself, “it is not for man to try to turn the page. He can and must read only that which is set before him, only that which he has to read.”15 Theology therefore is bound to its object in a manner that circumscribes its freedom and elicits its obedience before God’s revelation. Correspondingly, the questions theology poses must reflect this binding and submission to its object. After these initial points of orientation, we will then proceed to the primary text that is the focus of this chapter’s analysis, §28 of the Church Dogmatics, in which Barth treats of God’s being-in-activity. In the opening subsection (§28.1), we see how Barth fuses the formal orientation of dogmatic inquiry articulated in the Anselm book with his reflections on God’s being and activity.  II/1:5.  II/1:5/3. 13  II/1:4. 14  II/1:305. 15  IV/1:491. 11 12

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This is evident in theology’s binding to the actuality of God, “the totality of its happening not only in its inner inter-­relationship and movement but also in its unity.”16 From here we will turn to consider the material object of the doctrine of God, which moves from the form of divine actuality to its material content through a dialectic that traces the movement of God’s self-­revelation as his loving in freedom (§28.2–3). How Barth construes these elements of God’s actuality is intelligible only in light of the formal orientation of his procedure because he effectively sees theology’s formal orientation and material object as coterminous. This tight integration of theology’s formality and object anticipates the irreducible correlation between God and his self-­determination in the doctrine of election, which is the subject of Chapter 6. Ultimately this integration has consequences for the ordering of theology and economy, and for God’s relation to creation.

Necessity and Decision: The Formal Orientation of Theological Understanding Anselm and the Necessity of the Objects of Faith Privileging the methodological convictions about the correlation between divine act and being articulated in the Anselm book is an interpretative decision, but it is one with some warrant in the opening pages of Church Dogmatics II/1. According to Barth, his study of Anselm was formative for his theology generally: “in this book on Anselm I am working with a vital key, if not the key, to an understanding of that whole process of thought that has impressed upon me more and more in my Church Dogmatics as the only one proper to theology.”17 It might be objected all the same that analysis of Barth’s thought is compromised where any one thought-­form (Denkform) predominates, because “from the human point of view the position which in a system is occupied by the fundamental principle of interpretation can only remain basically open in Church dogmatics, like the opening in the centre of a wheel.”18 Indeed, one of the most influential approaches to interpreting Barth advocates attention to a variety of thought-­forms, or “motifs,” rather than architectonic formal  IV/2:779.  Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides quaerens intellectum. Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of His Theological Scheme, trans. Ian W. Robertson (London: SCM Press, 1960), 11. 18  I/2:867. 16 17

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or material principles.19 None of this is denied necessarily if we evaluate Barth’s thought from within one pattern he announces as particularly salient in the doctrine of God. We are only reminded that our analysis does not pronounce on all the particulars of Barth’s doctrine of God, much less his whole thought. Our analysis traces but a single thread in a complex tapestry that is not always as consistent in methodological details as it is with the bigger picture. Without entering into an account of  Barth’s “whole process of thought,” we will nevertheless focus on one of the central insights of the Anselm book that stays with him. Furthermore, our focus on this insight is solely for the purposes of demonstrating its significance for Barth’s inquiry into God’s activity and being.20 The insight in question concerns how faith transitions to an understanding of its articles as it apprehends their necessity. This necessity comes to us in the form of the aforementioned preference for questions asking how far any particular claim is true. But why are such questions important? And what does it mean to ask how far something is true? In Fides quaerens intellectum, Barth prefaces his careful analysis of the so-­ called ontological proof for God’s existence with an overview  of Anselm’s general theological scheme. Only when we first understand what it means to prove theologically for Anselm will we understand the infamous proof in question. Here in this first part Barth makes a number of observations that are important to keep in view. For our purposes, we need to note two of these observations, the second of which will take us into the heart of the matter. First, the nature of faith itself prompts its movement to understanding, and therefore the knowledge and understanding

 George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5–6. 20  This narrow focus thus leaves aside disputed questions about the role of Fides quaerens intellectum in the development of Barth’s theology, as well as about the faithfulness of Barth’s interpretation of Anselm. On such matters, one must consult Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), 136–55; Gordon Watson, “Karl Barth and St. Anselm’s Theological Programme,” Scottish Journal of Theology 30.1 (1977): 31–45; Gordon Watson, The Trinity and Creation in Karl Barth (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2008), 21–39; Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 412–49; Michael Beintker, ‘. . . alles Andere als ein Parergon: Fides quaerens intellectum’, in Karl Barth in Deutschland (1921–1935), eds. Michael Beintker, Christian Link, and Michael Trowitzsch (Zürich: TVZ, 2005), 99–120; and especially now Martin Westerholm, The Ordering of the Christian Mind: Karl Barth and Theological Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 139–223. 19

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of God presupposes faith.21 Since the desire for understanding is immanent to faith itself, theology is grounded in faith and located within its movement to understanding and not elsewhere.22 Whatever questions theology poses to its material may not move beyond this location and must respect the grace of God’s revelation as the limit of its inquiry. Only thus will theology be humble and dependent on God in prayer. On this basis Barth proceeds to note a number of conditions that characterize theological inquiry, which help it to stay within its proper bounds. Here he introduces the “how far” question we saw earlier. Second, therefore, as a positive science based upon faith, theology does not question the Christian faith but asks rather “to what extent (inwiefern) is reality as the Christian believes it to be?”23 That is, theology is neither faithful nor scientific when it makes itself the basis of the theologian’s acceptance of the church’s faith or of that faith’s acceptability. Understanding does not stand somewhere independent of faith, from which it may adjudicate the truth of faith’s claims. Rather, theology’s responsibility is to submit itself humbly and obediently to what is the actuality or “factuality” of Christian truth and to consider this factuality as a decisive aspect of the truth’s “inner necessity.”24 “Anyone who wants to ask more questions at this limit can only be a fool.”25 Hence, Barth identifies the question of truth’s extent or range with its necessity, but what is meant by this necessity and how exactly does it function?26 In one of the more winding and terse sections of his book, Barth analyzes an apparent interchangeability between rationality and necessity  Anselm, 21 (16, 18). Barth gives several reasons for this from Anselm’s texts. Since the knowledge of God is situated within the will’s orientation toward God, then growth in knowledge and love of God is part of the creature’s conformity to God. For this reason, faith in and knowledge of God has an irreducibly ethical character, dependent at every moment on the grace of God. Consequently, faith’s movement to understanding must be situated within grace and not glory: understanding leads us to the limits of faith but not beyond faith itself because knowledge awaits the eschatological vision of God for its fulfillment (Anselm, 18–21). 22  Anselm, 21–6. 23  Anselm, 27. 24  Anselm, 28. Throughout Church Dogmatics §25, Barth emphasizes such themes: theology proceeds on the basis and under the guidance of grace at every point, responding to God’s self-­demonstration in Christ, and so it is always a matter of the “obedience of faith” (Rom 1:5; 16:26). 25  Anselm, 28. 26  Especially as it concerns the meaning of the “extent” question and how Barth deploys necessity, I am heavily indebted to Westerholm, Ordering of the Christian Mind, 196–205. 21

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in Anselm’s texts. The details of this account need not detain us; it will suffice to note the consequence of this parallel between rationality and necessity. Most basically the purpose of this analysis is to demonstrate how reason becomes rational and free within the bounds of faith and revelation. Theological reason becomes genuinely rational inasmuch as it submits itself to reality as God wills and knows it. In this submission and obedience, reason becomes genuinely free within the limitations God sets for it, in which it truly knows “as a real ox knows its master or a true ass its master’s stall.”27 Within this genuine freedom, reason encounters God’s revelation in his Word as an absolutely binding force, whose contents are thus so determinative for the knower that they find it inconceivable that the objects of faith might be otherwise than they are. Faith’s understanding (intellectus fidei) therefore seeks to apprehend the object of faith as unable not to be, or at least unable to be other than it is, by virtue of the fact that God so determines it in his free grace. Hence Barth concludes that the starting point of faith’s understanding is in “that which is” understood precisely as “that which must necessarily be,” and not in “that which can be.”28 The argument thus advocates the priority of actuality over possibility as the point of departure for theological reasoning, but actuality understood with the force of necessity, “the sheer impossibility of its denial.”29 Specifically, Barth begins by noting that since rationality is somewhat synonymous with necessity, it may be defined as “conformity to law.”30 As the course of the argument reveals, law is the point from which Barth correlates God’s determination of both the object of faith and our u ­ nderstanding of that object’s determination. This introduces some specifications about the noetic and ontic division of rationality and necessity alike, which we may summarize in two moments. In the first moment, God confers upon an object of faith its ontic rationality and necessity by bringing it into being – God creates the world out of nothing, the Son assumes human flesh, and so forth.31 Consequently, an object’s necessity is the impossibility of its existing otherwise than it does, and  Anselm, 169; cf. II/1:53–62.  Anselm, 52. 29  Anselm, 102. 30  Anselm, 49. 31  Resistant to what he believes are overly positivist notes, McCormack is right to note that Barth’s view of the ontic rationality and necessity of certain objects should not be understood in terms of a decision that has been made, though I would add that it should not be so understood exclusively (Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 431–4). In light of how Barth coordinates “decision” with God’s eternality, we might say the 27 28

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its rationality is its conformity to God’s determination of it in his mind and will. In the second moment, God decides about the noetic rationality and necessity of an object of faith insofar as, through revelation, he conforms our knowledge of these objects to the law of their being in his own mind and will – in light of God’s will, the thought of the world’s or the Christ’s nonexistence is ruled out of court for us. In a sense, when we know things as God determines them in his knowledge and will, we know them rationally and therefore we know them as necessary.32 Only when we apprehend the objects of faith as necessary by grasping their grounding in God’s determination of them does faith move from merely assenting to their factuality to understanding their conformity to law. Notably, both the ontic and noetic moments depend upon the decision of God. Therefore, human understanding is not a creative and norming but rather a receptive and normed activity – normed above all by God’s knowledge and willing of the objects of our knowledge.33 When we grasp the basis of the objects of faith in God’s knowledge and will, we grasp them as irreducibly necessary for us, and we must consequently submit ourselves obediently to this necessity.34 Thus far we have seen how necessity orients theology’s attention firmly on God in his actuality, as he has presented himself to us in his self-­ revelation. Before moving on to the doctrine of God, we need to see how Barth argues for the necessity of God’s self-­revelation without making creation and revelation necessary for God. Barth guards against such conclusions by texturing the notion of necessity with two rules: respectively, all the necessity belonging to God’s being in his self-­revelation derives from God’s will, but this necessity is not thereby capricious because all acts of God’s will are acts of God’s faithfulness to himself.35 The first rule is therefore the derivation of all necessity from God’s will. As we

objects of faith acquire their ontic and noetic rationality in light of the fact that God has decided upon, is deciding upon, and will decide upon them (II/1:593, 621–4). 32  “Intelligere means to see into the noetic rationality and therefore into the noetic necessity of the statements that are revealed, on the basis that they possess ontic rationality and necessity as revealed statements, prior to all intelligere, to all ‘proof’ and therefore not based on proof” (Anselm, 144). 33  Anselm, 46–7, 51. This means that knowledge is directed, yet not purely passive (I/1:198–201). 34  “Bene intelligere means: finally to realize that it is not possible to think beyond God, not possible to think as a spectator of oneself or of God, that all thinking about God has to begin with thinking to God” (Anselm, 169; cf. I/1:205–8). 35  See Westerholm, Ordering of the Christian Mind, 201–3; von Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 144–6.

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see already in Barth’s discussion of Anselm, not even ontic necessity is a “final word” since it depends on God’s will.36 God is not subject to any necessity, properly speaking; there is only the “unchangeability of God’s honour” standing as a kind of “improper” necessity in all his acts.37 The necessity of the objects of faith is “posited and determined thus and not otherwise in God’s freedom.”38 Theological reasoning does not stop short of or move beyond the necessity of God’s exercised will, which means that theology must seek necessary reasons for its objects grounded in God’s will and may not be content “merely to uncover formal analogies (convenientiae)” or fittingness arguments based on anything more “absolute” than God’s will.39 The second rule protects this grounding in God’s will from some variety of what Barth ultimately calls “nominalism,” because in every act God remains the one he is in complete faithfulness to himself. In all his acts, God distinguishes His action from all caprice and contingency . . . He does what is in the highest sense the right, namely, that in which He Himself is righteous – that which is due Him as God, which is worthy of Him as God . . . He reveals Himself as the one He is, as the one who is bound in Himself, the one who is true to Himself.40

God’s self-­consistency excludes from his activity all caprice, for which reason the necessity issuing from his will is universally binding (and in this sense not contingent). It follows that God is the principle of all necessity and not in any way constrained by a necessity that stands over him.41 Through his reading of Anselm, Barth characterizes the necessity that enters theological understanding as a matter of recognizing the  Anselm, 51 n.1.  Anselm, 51 n.1; cf. Anselm, Cur Deus homo II.5, in Major Works, 319. 38  I/2:32, 135. This might imply that the necessity God attaches to the objects of faith is a “hypothetical necessity,” but it is worth noting that Barth never specifies it this way. 39  Anselm, 62. Barth singles out Aquinas for arguing that the incarnation was merely fitting and not necessary since “absolutely, it might just as well have been otherwise.” This argument appeals illegitimately to “absolute speaking,” which “can never be the subject-­matter of theology . . . because we take our stand not above but beneath the reality of revelation, and assign necessity to it and not to our grounds, not even to our grounds in trinitarian theology” (I/2:35; cf. STh IIIa.3.8). At times Barth seems to employ a kind of fittingness argument, grounded in God’s righteousness and wisdom (II/1:376–80, 426–7), particularly through the language of that which is worthy (würdig) of or appropriate (angemessen) to God (cf. I/2:184; II/2:22; III/1:49–54). However, he does not elaborate on this form of reasoning and seems to regard it as insufficient. 40  II/1:384/432, rev. Interestingly, Barth disagrees with Anselm sharply about the nature of God’s self-­consistency (IV/1:486–7). 41  II/1:306–7. 36 37

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faithfulness of God’s activity to his being in God’s decision. God regards his will in its loving exercise toward us as necessary and worthy of himself, and when we acknowledge this movement as such, we speak on the basis of a subsequent understanding grounded in reflection on grace and not nature. We may therefore speak only that which we have heard, and therein honor “the necessity of His actual manifest will, His ordained power (potentia ordinata).”42 What is de facto is as such de jure for theological reasoning faithful to the Word of God. Within this conviction about necessity and the two rules that texture it, we may already see a tendency to construe the object of theology as the covenant between God and man. We gain greater purchase on this tendency by identifying how Barth grounds necessity formally in God’s being-in-act through the notion of decision, which leads us to its ultimate material ground in God’s electing self-determination.43

Act, Being, and the Necessity of God’s Decision We turn now to see how Barth delimits and specifies the inquiry into God’s being and activity at the beginning of Chapter  6 of the Church Dogmatics, entitled the “actuality (Wirklichkeit) of God,” the opening section-­paragraph of which (§28) will occupy us for the remainder of this chapter. After reviewing the material in §28.1, we will have concluded our overview of how Barth formally orients theological understanding and proceed to an analysis of its material object in §28.2–3. Obviously this material is part of one whole for Barth, so treating §28.1 already begins the analysis of the object of theology. Because Barth roots theology’s method in its matter, the decision taken here to isolate §28.1 from the analysis of theology’s object is merely heuristic.  I/2:37.  Already this is visible in II/1 §26: In view of God’s actuality in his Word, we must discern also its corresponding possibility, “the genesis of its facticity” (II/1:64/69, rev). To this end, “we must first go back to the decision which is prior to all our questions about the knowledge and knowability of God . . . made from eternity and in eternity by the fact that God is who He is” (II/1:67). This decision is the grace of God’s “good-­ pleasure” (cf. Eph 1:5). That is, it is found wholly and bindingly in Jesus Christ, on whom the “good-­pleasure” of God rests (II/1:112). Barth summarizes: “God’s being and essence are not exhausted in the encroachment in which He is God among us and for us . . . But whatever else He may be, God is wholly and utterly the good-­pleasure of His grace and mercy. At any rate, He is wholly and utterly in His revelation, in Jesus Christ. And therefore it is not only justifiable but necessary for us to understand His whole being and essence as summarized and ordered in His good-­pleasure. In this way and not otherwise He has turned towards us . . . we have no way which bypasses the grace and mercy of the divine good-­pleasure” (II/1:75/81, rev).

42 43

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Thus far we have seen how the necessity of the objects of faith orients our understanding of God’s actuality as “that beyond which nothing greater may be conceived.” Barth explains that “greater” in this formulation includes God’s external as much as internal relations, actions, and conduct.44 Hence when Barth speaks about the actuality of God, he is able to capture in one broad stroke the factuality and objectivity of God, while also holding together that which traditional concepts in the doctrine of God such as essence seem to divorce: God’s being and God’s act.45 This point is crucial for our exposition of Barth’s doctrine of God, for it amounts to an affirmation that God in his self-revelation (and not simply God “as such”) is that beyond which nothing greater may be conceived. In the terms of our overarching concerns, to confess God as God is to confess God’s actuality, and thus to confess “God is.” The chapter on God’s actuality and indeed the whole Church Dogmatics is one long German thought on the statement that God is. This statement in particular is the “subject of all other statements” in dogmatics, “the basis and content of all the rest.”46 Moreover, it is a statement with ontological implications; theology content with mere description of God’s activity fails to disclose “the fact that it is, and how far (inwiefern) it is, the action and the working of God.”47 Again the extent question surfaces, which seeks to grasp the necessity attendant to God’s acts both because he wills them and because they are acts consistent with his being. Naturally, therefore, inquiry into divine actuality involves consideration of God’s being because theology must apprehend God’s correspondence to himself.48 Only through apprehension of God’s self-­correspondence, in other words, will we confess God as God is. Barth’s procedure in his doctrine of God is consequently one of reading into divine actuality and discerning therein both God’s being and his act in its whole inner and outer range. The necessity of attending to the actual means that God’s being is only known in and through his acts,  “Here ‘great’ suggests . . . quite generally the large mass of all the qualities of the object described and therefore as much its ‘greatness’ in relation to time and space as the ‘greatness’ of its mental attributes or of its power, or of its inner and outward value or ultimately the type of its particular existence” (Anselm, 74); “In this event of His self-­ demonstration God is He quo maius cogitari nequit” (II/1:305); cf. IV/2:779. 45  II/1:262; Karl Barth, “Fate and Idea in Theology,” in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth: Essays and Comments, ed. H. Martin Rumscheidt (Allison Park: Pickwick, 1986), 36. 46  II/1:257; cf. II/1:3. 47  II/1:259/290. 48  I/1:428; II/1:258–9; see Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming, 35–6, 120–1. 44

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and chiefly his act of self-­revelation. God’s being may only be understood in the “sphere of His action and working as it is revealed to us in his Word . . . It is, therefore, right that in the development and explanation of the statement that God is we have always to keep exclusively to His works (as they come to pass, or become visible as such in the act of revelation).”49 Thought is bound to God’s act of self-­revelation, “we move necessarily in the circle of its event.”50 Barth here carefully correlates the understanding of God’s being with his act and vice versa. This results in a pattern of thought confined to understanding God’s acts only in light of his being and God’s being only in light of his acts, here understood specifically as God’s external works. One consequence of this strict correlation of God’s being with his act and vice  versa is that it becomes methodologically impossible to think God apart from his relation to the world. This point has important implications for how Barth narrows his inquiry because, as we will see, it leads him to trace the correspondence of God’s external works with God’s being understood under the formality of God’s decision. Functionally, such is an account that traces the correspondence between God’s external acts and those internal acts with a terminus outside God’s immanent life. From within this formality, God is unthinkable apart from his relation to creation. We will return to this momentarily, but at this point it is worth observing how the impossibility of thinking God apart from his relation to the world signals a formal similarity between Barth and Albrecht Ritschl, despite significant material differences. Ritschl advocates a systematic account of Christian doctrine that occupies the standpoint of the Christian community as it is conditioned by God’s effectual agency (Wirkung) in grace.51 The object of theological inquiry is therefore correlated between the community’s faith and God’s salvific agency in justification and reconciliation.52 This is why “one knows the nature of God or Christ only in their worth for us.”53 Ritschl thus maintains that theology admits only  those religious conceptions that express some relation between God and the world, or what ensues upon that relation: the community’s  II/1:260.  II/1:262. 51  Albrecht Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung [CLRV], vol. 3, Die positiv Entwickelung die Lehre, 3rd ed. (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1888), §1, 5; Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine [CDJR], eds. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1900), 5. 52  Ritschl, CLRV, §1, 3 (cf. §§5–6); CDJR, 3. 53  Ritschl, CLRV, §29, 201; CDJR, 212. 49 50

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relation to the world. Among the chief concepts that express these relations is love, because love is both what characterizes the unique form of moral fellowship Jesus established (the Kingdom of God) and also what characterizes the will of God as it is known in redemption. Theology is thus concerned with both redemption and the kingdom of God as they are revealed in Christ, for the “revelation of God directs itself not only to the purpose of redemption, but also to the final end of God’s kingdom.”54 Already we can see how important a “teleological” understanding of Christianity is for Ritschl, to which we will return later when analyzing §28.2. For the moment we must grasp how theology’s standpoint and task for Ritschl require that we understand God strictly as loving will, for this is the only way he gives himself to be known in revelation; we do not know “what” God would be “before his self-­determination to love.”55 The parallel to Barth is striking insofar as this is an account that deems insufficient any speech about God that does not incorporate creatures’ correspondence to divine action. Two features in particular distinguish Barth from Ritschl at this point, however. Unpacking each of these distinguishing marks will suffice to summarize the remaining material in §28.1 relevant to our purposes. First, unlike Ritschl, Barth tries to understand God’s external works as external works of God and therefore as those which have a strong backward reference to an antecedent objectivity.56 Consideration of God’s external works in light of their ground in God’s being is at least formally the conviction that animates Barth’s development of the doctrine of the Trinity, to which he alludes at various points throughout §28.1.57 Whereas the Latin tradition especially modeled the intelligibility of its doctrine of the Trinity after the immanent activities of the mind and will, Barth develops his account with primary reference to God’s transitive activity: “We arrive at the doctrine of the Trinity by no other  Ritschl, CLRV, §2, 14; CDJR, 14.  Ritschl, CLRV, §34, 268; CDJR, 282. It is easy to misread Ritschl as if he denies straightforwardly the ontological ground of God’s works, thereby collapsing God into his acts ad extra. It is more accurate to say that Ritschl’s interests lie exclusively in God pro nobis, making an account of God in se irrelevant and dangerous. The obvious objection, which Barth levels, is that such an exclusive interest seems inevitably to collapse God into his external works. 56  Karl Barth, Gespräche 1964–1968, ed. Eberhard Busch (Zürich: TVZ, 1996), 286–7. 57  For example, in the event of revelation God is “subject, predicate and object; the revealer, the act of revelation, the revealed; Father, Son and Holy Spirit” (II/1:263). See further in particular Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming, 13–53; Wilfried Härle, Sein und Gnade: die Ontologie in Karl Barths kirchlicher Dogmatik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975), 13–46. 54 55

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way than that of an analysis of the concept of revelation.”58 In the biblical account of this concept, it becomes clear that “God reveals Himself as the Lord,” God remains free and sovereign at every moment of his movement toward humanity in revelation.59 Analysis of this movement reveals that it is a differentiated unity: God is the free Lord as the revealer who initiates this movement, as the revelation whose life is its substance, and as revelation’s imparted presence. Revelation is a differentiated unity because of its ontological basis in God’s triune life. Hence, to say “God reveals Himself as the Lord” is to say the Father reveals himself through Jesus Christ and by the Spirit, and he thus reveals himself because “antecedently and in Himself” God is Father, Son, and Spirit.60 Only because God is objectively the differentiated unity of the three modes of being internal to his perfect life is there a “repetition” of this unity in his external acts – the former is the basis of the latter.61 Barth’s stress on divine objectivity leads him to characterize God’s acts only in light of his being. Our knowledge of God’s acts might prove to be lofty thoughts about ourselves unless we understand them as acts of God. This means that the works through which we know and understand God are not necessary for God; God is God without his external works, but he is not another than who he is in these works. Thus, God is not “swallowed up” by his relation and conduct toward us.62 God remains transcendent and self-­sufficient even in his acts, which as divine cannot be synthesized with the general events and determinations of history.63 Because we understand God’s being only as it is revealed in his act, we cannot understand God otherwise than with the conceptuality of act, event, and occurrence. Therefore, God’s being is his life, livingness characterized by its actuosity (actuositas).64 However, we learn what these concepts mean from the specific place where God has revealed himself and not from general metaphysical inquiry. That God is pure act is intelligible only in light of God’s qualitative uniqueness and hence we must say that God is pure and singular act (actus purus et singularis).65 This means we may only acknowledge, and not metaphysically analyze, God’s  I/1:312, 475–6.  I/1:307–10. 60  I/1:392, 414–16, 466–7. 61  I/1:299. 62  II/1:260; I/1:140. 63  II/1:264; I/1, §5.3. 64  II/1:263. 65  II/1:264, 442. 58 59

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being as event, act, and life. God is not subject to historical processes or some realm of becoming because God remains the Lord in all his acts, and grasping this is part of what it means to confess that God is. This brings us to the second and final observation, namely, that Barth differs from Ritschl in how he seeks to understand God only in light of his relation to the world. Whereas Ritschl traces the relation between divine activity and the Christian community’s faith, Barth traces the correspondence between God’s external works and his being.66 Hence he specifies his strong affirmations of divine transcendence and aseity with a decisive restriction: whereas God transcends his activity, we cannot. So while we necessarily understand God’s being to consist in an event, it is not an abstract event that we apprehend: “not any event, not events in general, but the event of His action, in which we have a share in God’s revelation.”67 Again from a different angle, the singularity (singularitas) of God’s actuality means that God’s uniqueness is found in the particularity of God’s self-­revelation in Christ. The stress on divine aseity and transcendence therefore serves to restrict theological inquiry to understanding God in light of his relation to the world. For this reason, Barth proceeds to characterize the aseity and transcendence of divine actuality primarily in terms of the concrete, particular freedom of God’s event, act, and life.68 To this end, he invokes the notion of God’s personality: “The particularity of the divine event, act and life is the particularity of the being of a person.”69 God’s being is “being in person . . . the I who knows Himself, who wills Himself, who posits (setzt) and distinguishes Himself, and in this very act of His perfection of power is wholly self-sufficient.”70 This does not imply an interest in the concept of God’s personality as such: “In this formula we are simply interpreting the triune being of God as Father

 II/1:270–1. Westerholm explores further similarities and differences between Ritschl and Barth in this respect in Ordering of the Christian Mind, 156–64. 67  II/1:263. 68  II/1:264–5. 69  II/1:267/300. 70  II/1:268/300, rev. Barth’s use of setzen captures the sense of a supremely active self-­ assertion. Without overstating the point, we may observe that this sense likely owes something to Fichte: “The self’s own positing of itself is . . . its own pure activity. The self posits itself, and by virtue of this mere self-­assertion it exists; and conversely, the self exists and posits its own existence by virtue of merely existing.” J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge §1, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 97. Barth differs from Fichte in many respects, not least of which is that God’s self-­positing is a self-­moved activity dependent on nothing but God. 66

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and Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit proceeding from both.”71 Barth’s interest is in how the notion distinguishes our understanding of God’s being from all forms of pantheism and deism, and especially from the implicit identification of divine and creaturely movement in nineteenth-­ century Protestant liberalism.72 Contrary to such false conceptions, the particularity of God’s free being-in-act consists in the fact that God is self-­moved, which leads to the characterization of God’s being as “decision.”73 This characterization is what lends a formal determination to the notion of God’s being that begins to piece together the elements we have identified thus far. Before concluding with a look at the aforementioned formal determination, we should note how Barth’s polemical interests and the corresponding concepts he employs for these interests might have more than mere formal significance. It is because of these interests that he turns to the notions of divine personality, self-­movement, and decision. However, in his doctrine of the Trinity Barth accounts for the correspondence between God’s activity and being through careful attention to the “event which constitutes the divine being,” the divine processions, and the “necessary, inner-­divine relation between Father and Spirit as between Father and Son.”74 Corresponding to revelation’s differentiated unity as an event is the eternal event of the divine life in its differentiated unity. The Father is the source of the Trinity who “posits” the Son and Spirit; the processions of the Son and Spirit are not “self-­grounded and self-­reposing,” but presuppose this originating “intradivine relation or movement.”75 The Son is begotten of the Father in an eternal “becoming” that is perfect as an act yet perpetual in its enactment (in opere perfectus, in operatione perpetuus), and which just is his relation of origin and

 II/1:268. Elsewhere, Barth associates setzen with the divine processions (I/1:370/391, 416/437, 432/454, 433/456, 483-84/507–8), echoing Isaak Dorner’s talk of “God’s eternal self-­positing (Selbstsetzung)” in System der christlichen Glaubenslehre [SCG], vol. 1, Grundlegung oder Apologetik (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1879), §15.5, 190; Isaak A. Dorner System of Christian Doctrine [SCD], vol. 1, trans. Alfred Cave and J. S. Banks (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1888), 204. 72  II/1:269–70. “If God ‘in and over the world’ is only the more potent form of the movement which we know well enough as our own, then we cannot see to what extent (inwiefern) beyond this He must be self-­moved, to what extent there must be a particular idea of God” (II/1:270/303, rev). 73  II/1:268, 271. 74  IV/1:129; Karl Barth, Erklärung des Johannesevangeliums, ed. Walther Fürst (Zürich: TVZ, 1999), 249. 75  I/1:393–4. 71

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dependence relative to the Father.76 Likewise, the Spirit is the common act of love, impartation, and gifting between the Father and Son: “the act in which the Father is the Father of the Son . . . and the Son is the Son of the Father.”77 The Spirit thus proceeds from the Father and the Son in an internal act of God (actionem Dei ad intra) that reflects upon God within his essence and constitutes an inner divine relation through the sharing of that essence.78 Because of the eternal intradivine movement of the processions, it is no surprise that “with regard to the being of God, the word ‘event’ or ‘act’ is final, and cannot be surpassed.”79 What is striking about all this is how the account of divine being and act in the doctrine of the Trinity trades in explicitly doctrinal concepts, whereas this is largely absent in the related material in §28.1. While Barth has not retracted that material and alludes to it occasionally, it is nevertheless true that he chooses not to enlist the trinitarian processions to explain what he has to say about act, event, and decision, opting instead to rely on concepts like personality, nature, and spirit, whose natural habitat is the nineteenth century. It is this curious absence that fuels the impression, perhaps not entirely without warrant, that Barth has granted God’s personality too much prominence, as if a monolithic Subject were more basic than the relations of the Father, Son, and Spirit.80 Whatever one makes of the impression, it is worth asking whether the material would be better served with explicit appeal to the mutual acts of the Father, Son, and Spirit (opera Dei personalia), as well as their common acts of knowledge and love (opera Dei essentialia).81 Barth will bring together the personality concepts and trinitarian material, as we will see. Yet the prominence at this point of the personal over trinitarian notions signals his indebtedness to the nineteenth century in how concepts like personality reinforce theology’s restriction to apprehending God only as he is related to the world.  I/1:427, 430, 363; Johannes Andreas Quenstedt, Theologia didactico-polemica (Wittenburg, 1685), I.9.1, thesis 28, 330. 77  I/1:470/493. 78  I/1:469, 474, quoting the Synopsis purioris theologiae/Synopsis of a Purer Theology: Latin Text and English Translation, vol. 1, Disputations 1–23, ed. Dolf te Velde et al (Leiden: Brill, 2014), disputation 9.10. 79  II/1:263. 80  On which, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Die Subjectivität Gottes und die Trinitätslehre. Ein Beitrag zur Beziehen zwischen Karl Barth und der Philosophie Hegels,” in Grundfragen systematischer Theologie. Gesammelte Aufsätze, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), 96–111. 81  So, too, Brian Asbill, The Freedom of God for Us: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Divine Aseity (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 178–9. One is struck in this regard by the relative neglect of biblical exegesis throughout §28.1. 76

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This restriction ­consequently colors how Barth disposes the inner trinitarian material, which will become visible in how he coordinates God’s “essence” (Wesen) with his self-­determination. For the moment, we may conclude by looking at how construing God as self-­moving, self-­positing personality lends a formal determination to the correspondence theology seeks to apprehend between God’s activity and being. As §28.1 draws to a close, theology’s confinement to knowing God’s being only in and through his works is necessary because it is materially grounded in the fact that God is understood strictly in terms of God’s “act and decision.” “That God’s being is event, the event of God’s act, must (if, when we speak of it, we turn our eyes solely on His revelation) mean that it is His own conscious, willed and accomplished decision (Entscheidung).”82 When the notion of decision emerges, so does the formal orientation of the theological inquiry into divine being and act. Barth explains, Every statement of what God is, and explanation how God is, must always state and explain what and how He is in His act and decision. There is no moment in God’s essence (Wesen) which is over and above this act and decision. There is no going back behind this act and decision, behind the livingness of God. There is only the apprehension of His livingness in virtue of the fact that we are apprehended by Him in His revelation.83

The proper dogmatic inquiry into the doctrine of God is therefore one that grasps the necessity of God’s being-in-act in light of his decision and not otherwise. “In God all potentiality is included in His actuality and therefore all freedom in His decision.”84 The significance of decision (Entscheidung) at this point is primarily to orient theology’s consideration of God’s essence (Wesen) formally. That is to say, we may understand the correspondence between God’s being and act only under the formality of the decision God has taken to be God in the way he has and not otherwise. While left without much by way of material content at this stage, the concept of decision opens the logical space for Barth to position a well-­ordered account of the doctrine of God as one that moves between considering how God’s activity corresponds with his being as understood primarily in light of God’s self-­determination – a positioning that will acquire more texture and depth in Barth’s doctrine of election. This is the argument we must substantiate throughout the course of our  II/1:271/304, rev; I/1:156–62.  II/1:272/305, rev. 84  I/1:157. 82 83

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analysis. The burden of the remainder of this chapter is to follow Barth’s development of God’s “act and decision” in §28.2–3, where he specifies these notions with God’s love and freedom, respectively. This analysis will demonstrate more concretely how the formal orientation of Barth’s inquiry shapes the dialectic between love and freedom, preparing for a positive correlation between the doctrine of God and election that makes them inseparable from one another.

Loving in Freedom: The Material Object of Theological Understanding For Barth, the unique manner of theological understanding is that it seeks to affirm the necessity of God’s self-­revelation only on the basis that it has taken place, and to see in this necessity the fact that God freely reveals himself in a manner that confirms rather than constitutes his being. Equipped with the insight that we cannot understand God’s essence in any other light than that provided by God’s “act and decision,” Barth proceeds from this account of the divine essence’s “form” to a description of its contents.85 Beginning with the triune God’s self-­revelation in Jesus Christ, Barth notes that we here encounter God’s act and decision specifically as his loving in freedom. Subsequently, love and freedom are the subjects of extended conceptual deconstruction throughout §28.2–3. The specification of divine actuality in terms of God’s loving in freedom also serves to specify the material object of the doctrine of God in light of its formal orientation. This specification of divine actuality provides the structural framework for the consideration of the divine perfections in the remainder of Church Dogmatics Chapter 6. It is noteworthy, therefore, that two features appear in the account of God’s loving and freedom that continue to orient the doctrine of God toward the doctrine of election: God’s self-­determination to be for humanity in Christ. Respectively, it is the burden of what follows to uncover these two features. First, in §28.2 Barth critically articulates the concept of God’s love in opposition to teleological constraints he discerns in both Aquinas and Ritschl, thereby introducing an orientation of theology toward economy that does not sacrifice God’s perfection. Second, in §28.3 Barth sets forth an account of God’s freedom as his capacity to condition himself in relation to another. This emphasis supports the fact that God constitutes himself the limit of theological inquiry by virtue of his self-­revelation, but it  II/1:283/318.

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also contributes to the increasing importance of God’s self-­determination we will encounter, especially in the doctrine of election. Both of these features precipitate an emphasis on God’s freedom to orient himself teleologically toward his decisive self-­demonstration in Jesus Christ. Such an emphasis leads Barth to depend on God’s self-­determination in his account of the perfections of God’s loving in particular and shows how the doctrines of God and election are positively correlated. All of these streams steadily merge in the notion of God’s self-­determination and the Creator–creature relation it undergirds. We must therefore conclude our investigation into Barth’s theological approach to divine actuality with an analysis of its objective specification as God’s loving in freedom. As we will see, Barth’s account of God’s loving in freedom includes an irreducible reference to God’s antecedent perfection and his relation to creatures in grace. This contributes to a portrait of theology’s object as God’s self-­determined fellowship with the creature, consequently rendering the doctrine of God responsible to account for the correspondence between God’s activity and his being, not as such, but as the self-­determining God.

God’s Loving Having identified God’s being with his act, Barth now proceeds to show that this act “is in no sense act in general but the concrete, specific action of His love.”86 As with the concept of God’s being-in-act, so, too, with the concepts of love and freedom: we learn what these are only in the act of God’s self-­revelation in Christ. Barth begins here by defusing the “tempting definition” of God as love from 1 John 4:8, “God is love.” The only way to understand this, Barth argues, is as the “basis of a definition” that follows how the Evangelist describes the love in question throughout the remainder of the passage: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:9– 10). The one who abides in this love is “whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God” (1 Jn 4:15). Barth comments: “The love of God, or God as love, is therefore interpreted in 1 Jn 4 as the completed act of divine loving in sending Jesus Christ.”87 What we see in Jesus Christ is that God freely and without any obligation or requirement condescends to us and creates fellowship between himself and us in his love.  II/1:299.  II/1:275.

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On this basis, Barth isolates the concept of love in §28.2 with a positive statement: “God is He who in His revelation seeks and creates fellowship with us, and who (because His revelation is also His self-­revelation) does this in Himself and in His eternal essence.”88 Note carefully: both in his revelation and in his eternal essence, God is the one who creates fellowship with us. The formal orientation of understanding God’s essence only in terms of the decision he has taken to be God for us remains present in the analysis of God’s love. That we are to understand God’s decision in terms of election also begins to emerge on the same page: “If it is legitimate and necessary to bring together the direction (Richtung) and meaning of this act in order to understand it, and therefore to understand God Himself, then we must now say: He wills to be ours, and He wills that we should be His.”89 Here are the rudiments of the concept of election, and the mutual determination of God and humanity that it encompasses, which we will explore in Chapter  6. And just so, it also encompasses the covenant formula: “I will take you for my people, and I will be your God” (Ex 6:7). The subtle consolidation of love’s meaning and direction comports with the manner of understanding we have traced thus far, and it is key to Barth’s exposition of God’s loving. Whatever we understand of this concept will be only in light of the fact that God “posits Himself in this relation to us. He does not will to be Himself in any other way than He is in this relation. His life, that is, His life in Himself, which is originally and properly the one and only life, urges (drängt) towards this unity with our life.”90 However, this urging or tendency of God’s life toward us is also free and self-­moved, not imposed (aufgedrängtes) upon God.91 And as free, it is still an act self-­consistent with God’s being because what he seeks and creates between himself and us is what God already is in himself: perfect fellowship as Father, Son, and Spirit.92 All the same, the

 II/1:274/307.  II/1:274/307, rev. 90  II/1:274/308, rev. Similarly, Dorner remarks that God’s holy self-­love includes an internal Tendenz to communicate itself to others (SCG, vol. 1, §31b, 427). Barth’s notion, like Dorner’s, might be read as a species of the Protestant scholastic notion of the decree’s tendentia or the propensitas of God’s love (II/1:370). 91  II/1:301/338. 92  II/1:275. Barth is clearer elsewhere: “In this triunity of His essence God loves both as and before He loves us; both as and before He calls us to love . . . It is on this ground that He loves us” (IV/2:757; I/2:377). Yet consistent with his affirmation that there is no moment in God’s essence prior to his “act and decision” to be for us (II/1:272), God being love “before” election is strictly correlated with God’s love as the “ground” of election (IV/2:751–83). 88 89

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direction or ordering of this antecedent fellowship within God may only be read in light of the decision taken for its overflow toward creatures. Qualifying the positive statement this way serves initially to orient the analysis of God’s love, or more precisely, God in the act of his loving. Notably, it is consistent with what we have traced thus far: the narrowing of theological inquiry to tracing the correspondence between God’s act and his self-­determination. The majority of Barth’s material decisions in §28.2 then consists in four clarifications of the concept of love as applied to God that articulate the goodness, ground, purpose, and blessedness of God’s loving.93 These clarifications demonstrate that “the concept of God’s love surpasses and oversteps the common concept of love that we ourselves can produce and presuppose.”94 Analysis of these clarifying statements will demonstrate that Barth consciously and polemically equates the scholastic concept of divine goodness with God’s loving. Among other things, this enables Barth to free himself from general teleological constraints and therefore to establish a teleological direction to his doctrine of God that he believes best conforms to revelation and preserves God’s perfection. We begin by looking at Barth’s first and third clarifications of the concept of love since these address love’s relationship to goodness and teleology, respectively. The first clarification is that “God’s loving is concerned with a seeking and creation of fellowship for its own sake.”95 That is, the movement of God’s love toward another in seeking and creating fellowship is not directed toward, or for the sake of, some good extrinsic to that movement and the fellowship it establishes. Barth’s overriding concern in this clarification is that God’s loving is indistinct from his goodness, which requires a focused criticism of the traditional scholastic definition of love and the account of God’s goodness it presupposes. For Reformed scholasticism, God’s goodness is the fount of love in the order of nature, along with other attributes that designate forms of communicated goodness, such as grace and mercy.96 In such accounts, God is the supreme good (summum bonum) essentially, and his love consists in his willing goodness to another.97 Barth believes the problem with such an account is that  II/1:276–84.  II/1:281. 95  II/1:276/310. 96  Amandus Polanus, Syntagma theologiae Christianae (Hanoviae, 1615), II.xx; Francis Turretin, Insitutio theologicae elencticae (New York: Robert Carter, 1847; ET: Phillipsburg: P&R, 1992), III.xx. 97  Polanus, Syntagma, II.xxii; Turretin, Institutio, III.xx.iv–v. 93 94

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it trades on the assumption of a supreme good behind or separate from God’s loving, which depends on “the concept of a pure unmoved being.”98 God is not first “the good (das Gute)” and then the one who loves, but rather “God is the one who loves, and as such [is] the good and epitome of all goods.”99 Barth’s concern is that unless we define God’s goodness as the fellowship he seeks and creates, antecedently in himself and consequently with us, then we might conceive of God’s goodness as something perhaps behind or beyond the fellowship in which he gives himself to us in Christ. Any divine goodness that is above or more ultimate than God’s love to us in Christ could relativize the centrality of Christ, suggesting that there may be a greater good beyond Christ. But since in Christ God gives us nothing less than himself, then “there is no greater good which has still to be communicated to us through His fellowship with us.”100 Consequently, in God’s self-­revelation his love admits of no separation of God’s goodness from its communication. We either find God’s goodness in this communication as such, in Jesus Christ, or we find it nowhere at all: God’s “innermost self is His self-­communication, and loving the world, He gives it a share in His completeness.”101 We learn a great deal about this initial clarification in how Barth locates his view critically vis-à-vis the tradition. Barth notes that in Scripture God’s love is defined with reference to its decisive movement in Christ so that it requires a correspondingly particular definition. God’s love itself is the love of Jesus Christ, from which we are consequently inseparable by anything in all of creation (Rom 8:35–9).102 This is precisely where the traditional definition of love as willing good to another fails, however, because it remains a general definition equally applicable to God and creatures. Aquinas and Gottfried Thomasius both serve as examples of this generalist approach, and Barth’s own view acquires greater texture through his criticisms of each. First, Aquinas employs this definition of love to affirm that love occurs where “the lover is placed outside himself and transported into the beloved, inasmuch as he wills good to the  II/1:277.  II/1:276/310, rev. Hermann Cremer expresses a similar view in a book Barth claimed was an influence on his account of the divine perfections: “Only in love is life a good both for the one who lives it and for those for whom it is lived. Love is thus the highest of goods and the highest good. For only that is good which is good for us and good for life . . . Love is the Good.” Hermann Cremer, The Christian Doctrine of the Divine Attributes, ed. Helmut Burkhardt, trans. Robert B. Price (Eugene: Pickwick, 2016), 10. 100  II/1:276. 101  II/1:277. 102  II/1:276–7.      98      99

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beloved and by his providence cares for them as for himself.”103 Barth objects to what he sees as Aquinas’s prioritization of the good as something that may be defined prior to the transportation of the lover into the beloved. Rather, Barth believes a more biblical definition would be: “the lover wills good to the beloved and by his providence cares for them as for himself, inasmuch as he is placed outside himself and transported into the beloved.”104 Barth’s definition prioritizes the movement of the will over the supposedly static goodness it communicates; hence, goodness is not something prior to its communication by God’s will. God’s will is good only as it is directed toward another, “therefore because and as He loves, His will is good will.”105 What is so striking about Barth’s reversal in definition is that Aquinas defines love the way he does in part for teleological reasons. For Aquinas, we may recall, the nature (ratio) of goodness is its desirability and so he applies it to God by virtue of God’s final causality. Divine goodness therefore specifies the ultimate end of all things, including God’s will. The consequence of this move is that God’s own goodness in himself is the end of all God’s economic activity such that nothing outside God can be the telos of the divine life because nothing is greater than God’s intrinsic goodness. At least for Aquinas, this need not result in a relativization of Christ both because God’s goodness is inseparable from its communication, and because the whole economy of its communication is fulfilled in the creature’s return through Christ to God’s intrinsic goodness in the Father. Yet while God’s goodness and its communication are inseparable, they are distinct for the sake of specifying the inner divine order of God’s love to God himself and not a notion of bare communication. Left alone, after all, the Dionysian idea that goodness is self-­diffusive might seem to render creation necessary or inevitable. Not so when we prioritize goodness’s finality over its diffusion or communication: “The ultimate end is not communication of goodness, but rather the divine goodness itself, from love of which God wills to communicate it.”106 By critically denying any such distinction, Barth subtly gestures toward a notion of God’s love   Ia.20.2.ad2. Strangely, Barth’s criticism of Aquinas here is largely ignored. The only express treatment I have found misses the heart of Barth’s concern because it fails to focus on Barth’s first clarification of love and seeks primarily to defend Aquinas: Louis Roy, “A Note on Barth and Aquinas,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66.1 (1992): 89–92. 104   “Amans sic vult amato bonum et operatur per suam providentiam sicut et sibi, inquantum, fit extra se in amatum translatus” (II/1:277). 105   II/1:277. 106   DP 3.15.ad14. 103

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that specifies its ordering by virtue of its communication (and not vice versa). Granted, Barth’s account of love and his critique of its traditional coordination with a supreme good is not metaphysically specific, and his use of goodness tends to be more ethically oriented. All the same, his criticism of the traditional view leaves him free to specify love’s teleology differently than Aquinas and the scholastic tradition. Before moving on to what Barth has to say about love and teleology, it is important to note how he maintains God’s antecedent perfection with this critical definition of love. This is visible in his response to Thomasius’s defense of the traditional “patristic and scholastic definition.” In the context of this defense, Thomasius mentions that “the new theologians” replace God’s goodness with God’s love to no gain since the traditional concept of goodness includes the fact that it is self-­communicative (bonum est communicativum sui). Hence, when one replaces goodness with love, one already presupposes that love has within itself a “positively good content” that it communicates. Moreover, Thomasius is concerned that a definition of God’s love which does not distinguish the goodness it communicates from its communication might result in  the collapse of God into his external communication. These comments come right after several pages of scholastic definitions of God as the highest and self-­sufficient good (summum bonum and αὐτοάγαθον), culminating in the insight that, for the tradition, the specification of God’s will by his own intrinsic goodness is what excludes God from any external need. The implication is presumably that without any notion of goodness preceding its communication, the efficient causality of goodness as self-­ communicative is left perilously adrift such that a “volitalization of God” is not decisively excluded.107 Barth believes all this is mistaken because the “positively good content” of God’s life “consists in the fact that it is the self-­communicating life as such.” God does not lose himself in seeking and creating fellowship with us because this self-­communicating is already his own triune life.108 Because God’s triune love in himself is the basis of his external self-­communication, God may give himself without giving himself away. Using the tradition’s language, we could say that Barth locates the nature of divine goodness not in its desirability, but in its communication. He does this by effectively refusing any distinction  Gottfried Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk: Darstellung der evangelisch-­ lutherischen Dogmatik vom Mittelpunkte der Christologie aus, vol. 1, Die Voraussetzungen der Christologie und die Person des Mittlers (Erlangen: Verlag von Theodor Blasing, 1856), 42–3. 108  II/1:277. 107

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between divine goodness and its communication, for which reason he stresses that God’s loving is his self-­communicating. The movement of God’s love just is the supreme good, so we need look only to Christ to find all of God’s goodness.109 Yet what does this say about love’s teleology, and so the teleology of God’s being-in-act? Answers to these questions begin to emerge in Barth’s third clarifying statement: “God’s loving is its own purpose (Selbstzweck).”110 Barth sees this in passages of Scripture where God’s unprompted love is that behind which we are given no other reason why God acts as Israel’s savior (Deut 7:8; Jer 31:8; Isa 63:9).111 Barth’s criticisms of Aquinas and Thomasius already point to a polemic against traditional construals of love that prioritize any aspect of divine goodness (like its finality) over its communication, or diffusion, and which thereby distinguish the good from love. It is clear that Barth supposes such conceptual specifications render the good something static rather than dynamic and active, which alone can serve as the adequate ground for the act of God’s loving in Christ. However, when Barth attempts a teleological clarification of love, his sights are on Ritschl rather than Aquinas. We have already seen that Ritschl’s doctrine of God reaches its apex in the love of God, which fixes theological inquiry solely on God’s will as it directs itself to redemption as its “end” (Zweck) and the kingdom of God as its “final end” (Endzweck).112 Theology’s starting point is in the community’s reflection on its salvation as justification and reconciliation, and so for Ritschl the doctrine of God is viable inasmuch as it supports this understanding of   Interpreters of Barth’s ethics are better positioned to recognize the significance of this reformulation: “The good is not merely an eternal, transcendent good. It is a good that has also been actualized in human existence in Jesus Christ and thus fulfilled by him. It is in Jesus Christ who obeys the command of God by being the elect one in all that he is and does that the good is actualized . . . Moral theology for [Barth] has to do not with a good which human beings find in themselves but with the relation of human beings to a good that has already been accomplished in Jesus Christ.” Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 6–7. Hence it is that the telos of God’s gracious love (what specifies creatures’ reditus) is fellowship with his covenant partners in the kingdom of God (IV/1:109–13; III/2:168; III/3:431–2). See also John Webster’s comments on the “givenness” of the good in Barth’s theological ethics and its attention to ontological concerns, in Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 214–23. 110   II/1:279/313, rev. 111   II/1:279. 112   Ritschl, CLRV, §2, 14; CDJR, 14. Zweck corresponds to telos, meaning either purpose or end (as in Kant’s Reich der Zwecke). I have translated it mainly as “purpose” merely for the sake of consistency and transparency. 109

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salvation and its corresponding ethical vision in the kingdom of God. Love is the primary conceptual means toward articulating a viable doctrine of God, in which God’s “worth for us” is never eclipsed. An exclusively soteriological doctrine of God results, providing the foundation for the teleological conception of Christianity that finds in the kingdom of God the common end of both God and humanity. We need to see here how this teleological understanding is grounded in the doctrine of God’s love and how Barth seeks to avoid what he considers the infelicitous consequences of Ritschl’s imbalanced focus on the benefits of Christ. Ritschl’s account of God’s love depends on a definition that lays out four criteria: love (a) has another person as its object, (b) is constant in its aim, and (c) aims at the achievement of the other person’s own end or purpose (Selbstzweck). Crucially, these conditions are only met when (d) the “lover’s will assimilates the self-­purpose of the other into its own personal self-­purpose. That is, love constantly strives to cultivate and appropriate the distinctive self-­purpose of the other person, evaluating this task as a necessary task of its own self-­purpose’s determination.”113 Applied to God, this definition of love leads to a correlation between God’s personal end and the final end of the world, the kingdom of God, understood as “the affiliation of men for mutual and communal action proceeding from love.”114 To the extent that God cultivates and appropriates this final end as his own, God is love, and his love is perfected through love-­ prompted human action, which completes the revelation of God (1 John 4:12).115 Barth believes this “bourgeois” definition of love fails both as an account of God’s love for us and of our love for God, not to mention as exegesis of 1 John. First, it is difficult to see how our personal purposes or ends could constitute in part our love for God in any but a dangerous sense, much less how we could cultivate God’s self-­purpose or help God to achieve it. But more importantly, second, subsuming God underneath this general definition of love and the teleology that accompanies it does “such violence to the idea of divine love as almost to destroy it.”116 If God is arrested by this general definition of love and its “inflexibility of  Ritschl, CLRV, §34, 264; CDJR, 277–8. For an impressive analysis of the background, contours, and significance of teleology for Ritschl’s thought, as well as its tensions, see Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as a Science in Nineteenth-­Century Germany: From F.C. Baur to Ernst Treoltsch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 180–7, 211–49, 256–9. 114  Ritschl, CLRV, §36, 275–6, 278–9; CDJR, 290, 293–4. 115  Ritschl, CLRV, §36, 276; CDJR, 291. 116  I/2:377. 113

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purpose,” then he cannot be love except insofar as he functions as the transcendental ground of a kingdom of ends. And if God’s love is indistinguishable from the universally binding moral laws of the kingdom, then it is difficult to see the need for God. Barth’s fundamental concern with Ritschl’s view, then, is that its account of teleology makes God’s love unintelligible before and without the actualization of God’s purposes with respect to the creature.117 Barth’s clarification that God’s love is its own purpose is more than a counterstroke, however much his criticism of Ritschl tells us about his own view. Since God is who he is apart from and without his works, then the same holds true for God’s love. God’s loving is its own purpose/end, or self-­purpose, and he is this for all eternity apart from any purposes he achieves toward us. “God loves, and the purpose (Zweck) of His being is to do this. As He loves, He also fulfills His purpose, in accordance with which all His intentions (Absichten) regarding a being distinct from His own can be actualized only as purposes of His love. God loves, and to do so He does not need any being distinct from His own as the object of His love.”118 It is true that God has purposes in the world – he wills his own glory and our salvation, and it is also true that he loves in achieving these purposes. However: “God loves because He loves; because this act is His being, His essence and His nature. He loves without and before realising these purposes . . . Even in realising them, He loves because He loves.”119 These statements differentiate Barth from Ritschl in the stark manner we would expect. Here is a clear account of God’s eternal, antecedent perfection that is complete apart from and without God’s external activity. What Barth does not offer is much clarification regarding a necessary inner divine ordination of love, precisely where we might expect it to come. In his first clarifying statement, when Barth refuses the distinction between love and goodness, he functionally redefines the traditional characteristic of goodness as its communication and not its desirability, which enables him to identify God’s goodness with God’s act of loving. In this light, his clarifying statement about the teleology of love amounts to an affirmation that the communication of goodness is divinely purposeful in itself and needs no higher motive or end, nor is any historical purpose necessary to the conception of God’s love. The former clarification frees Barth from scholasticism’s teleological specification of God’s love by   II/1:280.   IV/2:755/857, rev. 119   II/1:279. 117 118

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God’s own intrinsic goodness, whereas the latter clarification frees Barth from Ritschl’s teleological specification of God’s love by the kingdom of God, or some progressive vision of history as the moral unification of humankind. Through Barth’s conceptual clarification of God’s love, he subtly distances himself from any general teleological constraints, whether they derive from medieval scholasticism or German idealism. As we will see, Christ is the only telos with which Barth will have us reckon. Barth is seeking an account of God’s eternal life in which God is antecedently perfect, yet in this perfection capable of ordering himself and so teleologically determining himself toward another concretely in Christ. Such an account will provide a solid basis for the notion of God’s self-­determination. We will encounter the full implications of this in Chapter  6, but such an account is ultimately what enables Barth to affirm that God’s electing love is “quite unmotivated; or rather, it is its own motive,” or that all God’s activity internally and externally has fellowship with his covenant partners as its telos.120 Such a telos is what we would expect, given the orientation of theological inquiry Barth articulates up to this point. If we may understand God’s love only in terms of God positing himself in relation to us, then we understand God’s love in terms of how it freely urges toward unity with us. Barth’s second and fourth clarifications of divine love reinforce these inclinations and lead into the account of God’s freedom. The second and fourth clarifying statements belong together because they emphasize God’s aseity, which occupies Barth in his account of God’s freedom. Respectively, these clarifications state that God’s loving is its own ground and that it constitutes God’s blessedness. First, alongside the fact that God’s love is the good it communicates and that it is its own purpose, God loves without regard for “an existing aptitude or worthiness on the part of the beloved.”121 Why else does Christ call the sick rather than the righteous to repentance (Lk 5:31), or die for us “while we were yet sinners” (Rom 5:8)? Barth takes the opportunity to again criticize the scholastic thesis that love consists in willing good to another; rather, “[i]t is as beloved that the loved of God becomes lovable.”122 His point is that God’s love is grounded wholly in itself, and so has no external cause in the creature that might prompt it. This is an extension of Barth’s affirmation that God is self-­moved, so for the sake of our purposes, we  IV/2:766; IV/1:7–8.  II/1:278/312. 122  II/1:278. 120 121

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may proceed without further comment. The final clarification of God’s love not only begins the transition to God’s freedom but also begins to show the significance of distancing the doctrine of God from general teleological considerations. Since God’s loving is his own being, then it is necessary, but “for this very reason it is also free from any need in regard to its object.”123 The point of this final clarification is to articulate the concrete blessedness of God’s loving: God loves in himself and toward us in such a way that he is self-­sufficient, but disposes or specifies this self-­ sufficiency in a free “overflow” of his eternal love toward us.124 Barth’s overflow language is thematic, and we will explore it along with its logical presuppositions in Chapter 6. Anticipating that discussion for a moment, it suffices here to note that the way Barth employs the notion of God’s love overflowing invokes the notions of decision and self-­determination. Thus, “[i]n the fact that He determines to love such another, His love overflows.”125 God’s blessedness consists in his loving, and this is why he has no need of anything other than himself even in his loving, even in the fact that he “finds no satisfaction in His self-­satisfaction” and so turns to us in a free “overflow of the perfection of His essence.”126 Two things must be observed from the preceding analysis before moving forward. First, God’s triune loving constitutes his antecedent perfection so that it is its own ground and is free from any need or augmentation from us. God’s loving is not grounded partly in God and partly in something else, but wholly in God because it is his antecedent, eternal perfection, and blessedness. Second, God’s loving is not ordered to anything other than itself so that it finds in itself its own purpose or end. Combined, these two observations form another part of the ontological backdrop to God’s self-­determination in Christ. In his account of God’s loving, Barth begins the process of articulating an account of God’s perfect life over which God remains Lord, which means that the nature of God’s perfection is such that God may determine himself in relation to another as an expression of his perfection. According to Barth, the traditional scholastic conception of God’s love not only flirts with training our eyes behind or beyond Christ, but it locks God’s life up in a static and   II/1:280/314, rev. Here is where Barth locates the doctrine of God’s blessedness. He cites Polanus only to correct him along the same lines he has in his account of love visà-vis goodness: “Beatitudo in actu consistit . . . But God’s act is His loving” (II/1:283; cf. Polanus, Syntagma II.17). 124   II/1:280–1. 125   II/1:280. 126   II/1:283/318, rev. 123

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unmoving conception of being. The older account thus makes it impossible that God might order his perfect life toward something other than himself. Conversely, while Ritschl’s notion of God’s love accounts for how God can order himself to something else, his account is inadequate precisely because he cannot affirm that God is love antecedently to “God’s self-­ determination as love” (Selbstbestimmung Gottes als Liebe).127 Ritschl’s influential account thus makes it difficult to affirm that God does not lose his perfection or acquire it in ordering himself to something else. Properly understood in light of God’s self-­revelation in Christ, God’s love is part of the possibility and perfection of his self-­determination, though this possibility and perfection will require further specification in the account of God’s freedom. Our analysis has demonstrated that as Barth clarifies the concept of God’s loving, he frees the notion of God’s antecedent perfection and the notion of God’s self-­determination from constraints that hinder our acknowledgment of God’s Lordship in his self-­revelation. God’s loving is therefore capable of “positing its own basis and purpose.”128 Barth’s theological inquiry into divine actuality has not abandoned its formal orientation toward its object: God’s loving is still being interpreted strictly in light of the decision God has made for its overflow toward us. But as the conceptual deconstruction of §28.2 shows, understanding God’s loving in light of this decision requires that love have a strong backward reference to its ontological ground in God’s inner life and a correspondingly strong forward reference to the economic term of its overflow. Only when God’s loving in his self-­revelation has this forward and backward reference do we apprehend the necessity of God’s loving as an act self-­consistent with his being.

God’s Freedom Having concluded his analysis of God’s loving with a specification of its freedom from any need with respect to its object, Barth segues into an analysis of this freedom in §28.3. With God’s freedom we are tasked with articulating how God’s “act is in a unique way His act, His love is in a unique way His love. He is in a unique way who He is.”129 Glimpsing God’s freedom is to view God’s life and love with “reference to their uniqueness,” and so it raises the question of “the depth in which

 Ritschl, CLRV, §34, 269; CDJR, 284.  II/1:300. 129  II/1:297/335, rev. 127 128

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He lives and loves and has His being.”130 The freedom under consideration is therefore the freedom of God’s living and loving, which we only find in the light of God’s decision to be God in the way he has in fact decided. We do not ask about God’s freedom, which Barth identifies with his aseity, by looking at what God is (quid sit) apart from who God is (qui sit). Theology has no interest with just “any idea of the divine” but only with God’s self-revelation.131 To approach God’s freedom responsibly, we “must enquire about the determinacy (Bestimmtheit) of God’s essence, which makes it necessary on our part to study just this objectivity.”132 In other words, what are the qualitative defining characteristics of God’s  essence that make it necessary for us to study the freedom of God’s external movement and only this freedom as genuinely divine? Barth’s question reaffirms his commitment to correlating God’s essence with his external acts, even as it concerns divine aseity. Once again, the Anselmian form of inquiry to which Barth adheres shapes this determinacy and the necessity to study it: We need only stand on the ground which we took up from the beginning – the question of the actuality of God in His revelation, in which He is faithful to Himself, and in which we are therefore also confronted by His essence in itself.133

Theology’s formal orientation toward its object means that we understand God’s freedom only as he moves toward us, but we see the truth of God’s freedom in himself precisely in his freedom for us. At the very outset, then, Barth seeks to elaborate on the manner of God’s act in his loving that he sought to procure in the previous section. Like love, freedom will have a backward reference to its antecedent ground and a corresponding forward reference to its economic term. The account of God’s freedom thus complements that of God’s loving to underwrite the possibility and perfection of God positing himself in relation to creation. Just as the ordering of God’s antecedent loving in himself is only intelligible in light of the decision taken for its overflow, so, too, the freedom of God’s antecedent life is only read in light of its external movement. This initial orientation serves to weight the analysis of God’s free­ dom, much the same as with God’s loving, toward the narrowing of   II/1:298.   II/1:299. 132   II/1:298/335, rev. Barth identifies this Bestimmtheit with God’s self-­determination (II/2:7/6, 89/96). 133   II/1:300/337, rev. The lessons Barth learned from Anselm figure prominently in this section (II/1:305, 308). 130 131

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theological inquiry to mapping God’s self-­correspondence qua the electing God. The brief trajectory of §28.3 consists first in defining God’s freedom in its negative (freedom from) and positive (freedom for) dimensions, and then second in articulating this freedom as God’s absoluteness in himself and toward us.134 Already visible from the overall momentum of §28 thus far, throughout Barth’s specifications about freedom as aseity and absoluteness, he is concerned to underwrite an understanding of freedom as “the sovereign grace wherein God chooses to commit Himself to man.”135 Inasmuch as this strikes at the heart of Barth’s understanding of God’s freedom, the primary concern of our analysis is to show how it supports the teleological concerns raised in §28.2. With this in view, we will be positioned to see how the formal orientation of theological inquiry is slowly identified with its object such that the correspondence theology traces between God’s act and being is primarily the correspondence between God’s external works and his self-determination. Theological inquiry into divine freedom starts with the actuality of its enactment, and therefore with Christology. When God’s self-­revelation serves as the tutor of God’s freedom, theology is concerned not with abstract freedom but with the “freedom of His incarnation in Jesus Christ.”136 Characteristic of this freedom is God’s distinction from his creation in his relation to it. In terms of Christ’s ontology, this means there is no confusion or mingling of the divine and human natures in Christ, though they are genuinely united in Christ. And in terms of Christ’s ministry, this means that he exercises God’s royal freedom from all the world’s orders and powers in his freedom for the world.137 Thus we see in Christ a negative and positive aspect of God’s freedom in its exercise toward us. Barth spells out these aspects with a more focused statement that will serve our analysis of both aspects. Alluding to his doctrine of the Trinity,  For a general analysis of this material, see Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 121–7. On the significance of God’s freedom for human freedom, which constantly occupies Barth’s attention, see John Webster, “Freedom in Limitation: Human Freedom and False Necessity in Barth,” in Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 99–123; Jesse Couenhoven, “Karl Barth’s Conception(s) of Human and Divine Freedom(s),” in Commanding Grace: Studies in Karl Barth’s Ethics, ed. Daniel L. Migliore (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 239–55. 135  Karl Barth, “The Gift of Freedom: The Foundation of Evangelical Ethics,” in The Humanity of God, trans. Thomas Weiser and John Newton Thomas (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 69. 136  II/1:304. 137  IV/2:171–3. 134

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Barth states that God’s freedom just is the mode of his Lordship, and this mode “is absolutely God’s own, in no way forced upon Him from outside and conditioned by no higher necessity than that of His own choosing and deciding, willing and doing.”138 Note here that the manner of God’s being-in-act is neither a cause nor a law imposed upon him from without or within, but rather something God freely decides. What we need to observe, then, is that negatively God’s freedom consists in his freedom from limitation or determination by anything apart from his decision, and that positively his freedom consists in self-­determination. We may access the relevant dimensions of God’s freedom by developing two statements summarizing God’s freedom in its negative and positive aspects, respectively.139 First, both externally and internally God is free in that his life is not subject to any limitation, restriction, or necessity. This is the negative aspect of God’s freedom: his freedom from any conditioning or limitation by anything other than his own decision. In the first place this means that no external cause or law necessitates the particular enactment of God’s freedom, nor may any such circumstances (like the causal nexus of history) condition that enactment.140 In this respect, the negative dimension of God’s freedom loosely parallels what the tradition calls God’s freedom from coaction (libertas a coactione). Creatures may not limit or condition God’s activity because his relation to them is not one of “mutual limitation and necessity”; the Creator–creature relation is asymmetrical.141 Hence, neither creatures’ being nor act limit God, neither the relative contingency of the creature’s free decisions nor “its relative necessity in the continuity and limitation of its existence as it obeys the law of its being (Gesetzmäßigkeit),” as if God became an object to himself in the necessities intrinsic to created being.142 It is impossible to synthesize God

  II/1:301/338–9, rev; II/2:101.   There is little to say about Barth’s exegesis here because, as in §28.1, he is rather light on exegetical attention in §28.3 aside from two small occasions addressing statements depicting God as the Lord (II/1:301–2) and statements confirming that God is absolute in himself before he is absolute toward us (II/1:317). 140   I/1:156–7. 141   II/1:562, 580–2. 142   II/1:562/633. This (slightly nominalist) use of Gesetzmäßigkeit might allude polemically to certain speculative idealist conceptions of determinism: Georg W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace, Together with the Zusätze in Boumann’s Text (1854), trans. A. V. Miller, rev. by Michael J. Inwood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), §422, 151. 138 139

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with some larger ontic or noetic whole because God is not in a genus and therefore uncircumscribed by general notions of infinitude or being.143 Barth is quick to add, however, that God’s negative freedom from the creature threatens to be the mere apotheosis of our own limitations unless we are “taught first, by the decision made in His factual existence, that God is free in Himself.”144 We cannot grasp the genuine divinity of God’s freedom toward us unless we understand it as an act of faithfulness to himself, and therefore something which is true antecedently of God. We therefore must ask “to what extent (inwiefern)” God is free and discover that the negative dimension of divine freedom is binding for us and requires our acknowledgment because it corresponds to who and what God is in himself.145 God is “free from all origination, conditioning or determination from without” because primarily he is free from any need of origination or acquisition of his being in himself, because he “already has His own being and is Himself.”146 That God does not need to constitute or cause himself means that he is not limited or conditioned by the threat of non being. In God’s eternal actuality as the Trinity, “His non-­being or His being other than He is is ontologically and noetically excluded . . . an impossibility which has no possibility as its background.”147 In other words, God does not become God in the processions of the Son and Spirit, as if he eternally transitions from a state of indeterminacy to determinacy, or potency to act. Beyond this, God’s negative freedom in himself means that his freedom has no “internal law . . . so that there can be nothing divine which must first be its motive or norm, or which it needs as a motive or rule.”148 This comports with what we saw in Barth’s criticism of the traditional distinction between divine goodness and love; God’s loving is not constrained by anything higher than itself, even if only rationally higher. Thus, God loves in freedom when he has no higher motive than his self-­communication as such. Barth notes, however, that freedom is more than “absence of limits, restrictions, or conditions”; this is only the improper aspect of God’s freedom because it is fundamentally contrastive with respect to either the creature or non being.149 The negative dimension of God’s freedom  II/1:310–12.  II/1:308/346, rev. 145  II/1:308/347. 146  II/1:306/344. 147  II/1:307. 148  II/1:560–1, 307. 149  II/1:301. 143 144

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is indispensable to understand and describe God’s life in himself and toward us, but “we shall be able to do so legitimately only when we do so against the background of our realization that God’s freedom is precisely the peculiar positivity, not only of His external action, but also of His own inner essence.”150 Second and most properly, then, both internally and externally God is free with regard to his freedom, free to establish fellowship with us and there enact his faithfulness. This is God’s positive freedom: to condition himself in accordance with his own decision because he is grounded in and through himself, self-­determined, and self-moved.151 Both negative and positive aspects of freedom are indispensable to a proper understanding and explanation of God’s freedom as his self-­determination, but in defining the concept we “must not in any circumstances” emphasize the “negative aspect.”152 That God is free in his self-­determination means that he is free from external conditioning, but more decisively still God is free to begin with himself and condition himself as he pleases. Here we note two aspects that serve to define God’s positive freedom, the first of which is that the God “who begins in this way with Himself in his revelation is He who begins with Himself from eternity, and therefore the One who properly and necessarily exists.”153 God’s freedom to “begin with Himself” therefore has a reference to God’s activity internally and externally. In revelation, God begins with himself because he is the Lord at every moment: revealer, revelation, and revealed-­ness. Revelation merely repeats what is true of God antecedently in God’s positing of himself from eternity to eternity: God begins with himself in the sense that he has aseity, life from himself. This freedom to exist from himself is not an abstract “power of being,” but rather, it is the freedom of the Trinity, in which God “willed and determined Himself to be the Father and the Son in the unity of the Spirit.”154 The freedom in which God posits himself as Father, Son, and Spirit is his freedom to be himself and therefore a freedom without which God would not be God. He wills himself to be what he is, the Father, Son, and Spirit, but he is not the Father, Son, and Spirit because he so wills to be.155

  II/1:303/340, rev.   II/1:301. 152   II/1:302. 153   II/1:305/343. 154   Barth, “The Gift of Freedom,” 71. 155   I/1:433–4. 150 151

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Additionally, however, God is free to begin with himself in such a way that he binds himself to another reality. Barth explains, According to the biblical testimony, God has the prerogative to be free without being limited by His freedom from external conditioning, free also with regard to His freedom, free not to surrender Himself to it, but to use it to give Himself to this communion and to enact His faithfulness in it, in this way being actually free, free in Himself. God must not only be unconditioned but, in the unconditioned-­ ness in which He sets up this fellowship, He can and will also be conditioned . . . This ability, proved and demonstrated in His action, is His freedom.156

The manner in which God lives his life with us is therefore “conditioned by no higher necessity than that of His own choosing and deciding, willing and doing,” but note: his freedom means that he is conditioned by the necessity of his decision.157 This is why “God’s freedom is essentially not freedom from, but freedom to and for . . . God is free for man, free to coexist with man and, as the Lord of the covenant, to participate in this history.”158 Nor does God relinquish his positive freedom in conditioning himself by virtue of his decision: “in this His freedom, in which He spontaneously binds Himself in a certain way to the world, He remains unbound from the point of view of the world and its specific determinations.”159 Irreducibly in all his internal and external activity, God grounds himself, begins with himself, moves himself, and only in this way is he free to differentiate his activity and presence as he pleases. From the foregoing, it becomes clear that the most decisive meaning of God’s freedom is his capacity to enact his life however he pleases. Embedded within this notion, however, is an element anticipating fuller development in the doctrine of the divine perfections and election. Namely, God enacts his life in accordance with his decision both externally and internally. God’s freedom to do with himself as he pleases is positive in the precise sense that he may condition himself, which easily recalls the associated concept of God’s love overflowing toward us. Just as the overflow language referred us to the notions of decision and self-­determination, so, too, with the positive, proper meaning of God’s freedom, which is essentially freedom for self-­determination – self-­determination in that it is self-­moved and self-­grounded, but self-­determination in that it entails a positive conditioning and binding of God’s being. This element therefore  II/1:303/341, rev.  II/1:301. 158  Barth, “The Gift of Freedom,” 72. 159  II/1:314. 156 157

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points to an ontological significance beyond the mere affirmation that God’s freedom is his freedom for fellowship with another. We will return to this element as it bears upon the significance of God’s decision and self-­determination in Chapter  6. To conclude this section, we need to isolate how freedom contributes to the specification of theology’s object in light of its formal orientation. When §28.3 is viewed together with §28.1–2, God’s freedom means that the necessity of the particular act of God’s loving is wholly the necessity of God’s decision to be God in the way he has in fact decided to be. This means the definition of freedom can only be an interpretation of the fellowship God seeks and establishes in Christ. God’s freedom is his freedom to love, and he loves in a particular way: “Because this is the case, we must say expressly in conclusion that the freedom of God is the freedom existing and enacted in His Son Jesus Christ.”160 The inquiry of §28 ends where it began, with God’s self-­demonstration in Jesus Christ. Barth’s differentiation between God’s negative and positive freedom serves to interpret God’s self-­revelation as something unnecessitated by anything other than God’s sovereign decision to be God in this way. The discussion of God’s aseity and freedom, internal as much as external, is therefore aimed at depicting the history of God’s fellowship with humanity, and not at providing logical and metaphysical grounds for God’s freedom to be God in any other way than he actually is. As such, Barth has no interest in an account of God’s freedom that specifies how God might not decide for the external overflow of his loving; any such doctrine of God’s freedom treats God’s self-­revelation as something other than the one thing greater than which nothing may be thought (id quod maius cogitare nequit), which is strictly forbidden. Hence, God’s decision to be Jesus Christ means that God may be considered only in this light, and therefore only in his relation to the world that he grounds and posits. This restricted consideration is visible in the general movement of the argument. At the beginning of §28 Barth limited the consideration of God’s being-in-act generally to the “act and decision” of God’s self-­positing personality. Theology is then poised to understand the necessity of God’s activity to the extent that it sees those acts as self-­ consistent with his being, provided that God’s being is understood strictly under the formality of God’s decision. Barth then proceeds to specify God’s act as his loving, so that the activity most proper to God is his self-­communication, understood apart from any teleological constraints   II/1:321/361, rev.

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imposed by general definitions of love or the good. Finally, Barth specifies God’s decision as his freedom to love in an overflow of himself. Freedom answers the teleological question posed in the consideration of God’s loving: God conditions himself precisely because he decides freely for his loving to exist and enact itself in Christ. Theology’s Christological concentration is the mirror of God’s decision to be the one who loves in this way. The doctrine of God is not grounded materially in Christology, but molded to reinforce the prevenient gratuity and certainty of the divine loyalty evident in God’s movement toward us in Christ. Theological inquiry thereby need only look to Christ for the basis and criterion of its understanding of God’s essence. The manner in which love and freedom are located firmly with reference to Christology grounds theology’s formal orientation materially in the doctrine of God and primes the canvas for the correlation of the doctrines of God and election that we will follow throughout the remainder of our analysis.

Conclusion: Theology and Economy We may conclude this chapter by reviewing the steps taken thus far and seeing how they contribute to an overall tendency in the doctrine of God that we will observe moving forward. Through his study of Anselm, Barth develops a commitment to a particular formal orientation of theological inquiry that prioritizes actuality over possibility noetically and seeks to understand the actual by grasping its inner necessity. Theology becomes rational to the extent that it grasps the objects of faith, like divine activity, in light of their necessity  – the impossibility that they might exist otherwise than they do – which issues from God’s determination of them in his mind and will. In other words, God’s decision about any particular object is the ultimate ground of its rational intelligibility even when the object in question is God himself. Applied to the doctrine of God, this results in theology’s binding to God’s actuality, which Barth understands as the whole complexus of his internal and external relations and activity. These active relations are God’s enacted, demonstrated existence (Existenzbeweis).161 All of this flows from a concern that theology consist in the “obedience of faith” (Rom 1:5) that clings to God’s Word in the gospel of Jesus Christ, that it be wholly circumscribed by the grace of God, and that its confession of God be shaped accordingly.162 Hence,  II/1:305/343.  II/1:37.

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God in his self-­ revelation constitutes the limit of theological inquiry because there is nothing greater or more absolute than the movement of God’s free love. Yet God is not thereby bound by any internal or external necessity because all necessity derives from God’s own conscious, willed, and accomplished decision. The apparent nominalism of this arrangement is immediately checked, however, when Barth specifies that grasping something’s necessity is also a matter of grasping its consistency with God himself. Because the movement of God’s will is a self-­revelation, then the “faithfulness which He evinces and proves in His freedom with regard to His creation is His own faithfulness.”163 Apprehension of the faithfulness of God’s activity to his being occurs as we ask how far any given account of God’s activity defines God rather than us. These are the animating convictions of Barth’s inquiry into divine actuality, and thus his pursuit of the obedient confession of God as God is. With the Anselmian procedure in view, we then turned to an analysis of God’s being as the one who loves in freedom in Church Dogmatics §28. Operating with the conviction that theology begins with God’s actuality and seeks to apprehend the necessity of this actuality in light of the correspondence between God’s activity and his being, Barth restricts theological inquiry to understanding God’s being strictly in light of his external activity and vice versa. As the account unfolds, theological inquiry operates within the ambit of God’s act and decision, which makes God unthinkable apart from his self-­posited relation to the world. While this procedure signals Barth’s indebtedness to theologies like Ritschl’s, the manner of its execution sacrifices neither a strong account of God’s objectivity nor God’s antecedent perfection. All the same, it does begin to restrict our understanding of the correspondence between God’s act and his being strictly within the formality of God’s act and decision, which Barth develops through an account of God’s loving and freedom. Both of these notions are understood to the extent that they elucidate the correspondence between God’s self-­revelation in Christ and God’s essence (Wesen). As Barth interprets God’s loving, he distinguishes his view from scholastic and modern attempts to define God’s love with reference to a motivating or specifying cause or end, such as the supreme good. Thus Barth frees himself from general considerations that might prevent him from identifying the “concrete form” of God’s love with the movement of Christ’s history in which he obeys God and fulfills the covenant, “builds His community, calling men to Himself, gathering them in it, giving them   II/1:318/358.

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a part in its faith and mission, sanctifying them, and therefore treating them as His own, as members of His body.”164 In this event, the perfection of God’s love is its overflow to us. We must not seek for a higher motive, purpose, or end, than God’s love in Christ, even if we attempt to locate that purpose in God’s inner life. If we did that, on Barth’s reckoning, we would only betray a commitment to a general conception of God’s unmoved being as more basic and absolute than Jesus Christ. Whatever God’s love means, it must enable us to say that God communicates himself to another as an intrinsically purposeful act without any higher end or greater good. Especially through his critical interaction with figures like Aquinas and Ritschl, Barth seeks to affirm God’s capacity to determine his own intrinsic order, in some sense, because this is what revelation demands. In Christ, the concrete form of love is the “teleological power of grace” in which God “wills Himself as our Lord and therefore as our supreme good (summum bonum), or rather as the one and perfect good of our existence.”165 The definition of God’s loving therefore includes within itself an irreducible double reference to God’s antecedent perfection as its ground and the grace of his self-­communication in Christ as its goal. Barth underwrites these concerns in his discussion of the depth of God’s love in its freedom. Most properly, God’s freedom extends to the way he chooses to live his life, with consequences for God’s internal being and activity as much as his external activity. This harmonizes with Barth’s attempt to free the notion of God’s loving self-­communication from abstract teleological constraints, which would compromise God’s perfection in giving himself to another. God’s freedom is therefore the divine depth in which God’s loving does not lose itself in God’s self-­communication to a telos located in his external works. The origin of this self-­communication is God’s self-­determination, an activity which will acquire greater definition in the doctrine of election. Taken together, God’s loving in freedom is the basis of the possibility and perfection of God’s self-­determination to be the God of the covenant. Like the definition of God’s loving, the definition of God’s freedom therefore includes an irreducible reference to God’s self-­demonstration in Christ as that than which nothing greater may be thought. As our analysis has shown, the formal orientation of theological understanding considers God’s being and activity strictly in light of the relation he establishes to the world. This orientation is an ingredient in  IV/2:779.  II/2:567; IV/2:777.

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Barth’s specification of divine actuality in terms of God’s loving in freedom, which has an irreducible reference to God’s presence and activity in Christ as the locus of his relation to creation. God’s loving in freedom is what we have termed the material object of theological understanding. So intertwined is the manner of Barth’s approach with its subject matter that it is difficult to discern which comes first: the inquiry’s material object or formal orientation. Leaving aside this (by no means unimportant) question, it will be helpful to parse our findings before moving forward. We may do so profitably by translating Barth’s procedure into a scholastic idiom. Certainly this risks overstatement, but the risk is worthwhile if only for the sake of delineating the contours of Barth’s thought more clearly. Barth considers the material object of the doctrine of God as God’s actuality, which includes the fellowship between God and creatures. Per Aquinas’s influential definition of theology’s subject matter, theology treats of its objects with respect to God (sub ratione Dei), either because its object is God himself or other things insofar as they are ordered to God as their principle and end.166 Motivating Aquinas’s account of theology’s subject matter in part is the kind of teleological interest oriented to God’s intrinsic goodness that Barth resists. Because the ultimate end of the theologian is the possession and enjoyment of God’s goodness in the beatific vision, then theology is ordered to God’s intrinsic goodness as its end. Hence, theology’s ultimate subject matter is God himself. This does not abrogate the fact that theology considers God formally in terms of divine revelation; it rather results from God’s revelation of his own intrinsic goodness as the end of all things.167 Our analysis has shown that the formality under which (objectum formale) Barth considers God, theology’s material object, is neither simply God himself nor divine revelation. For a variety of reasons that need not detain us, Barth instead prefers to subvert the whole distinction between God himself and God’s revelation – such is the force of “self-revelation.”168 God’s self-­revelation “is Jesus Christ as the positive relation which has now been once [and] for all effected between God and man: God’s gracious lordship over men.”169 Consequently, for Barth, “with respect to God” (sub ratione Dei) is equivalent to saying “with respect to the Revealer”   Ia.1.7.corp.   Ia.1.1.corp. 168   I/1:298. Tellingly, Barth comments elsewhere: “We cannot . . . attribute to this whole distinction between God in Himself and God in His relation to the world an essential, but only a heuristic, significance” (II/1:346). 169   I/2:871. 166 167

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(sub ratione Revelatoris) or, in his own words, “with respect to the Word of God” (sub ratione Verbi Dei).170 The “one Word of God . . . is one in the purest act of its actualisation by God, which is identical with the purest act of the existence of the Trinity.” And this truth is recognized when dogmatics renounces the “attempt to usurp a kind of transcendent vantage point in the existence of God Himself.”171 Since Barth derives the definition of God as the one who loves in freedom from God’s self-­ revelation in Christ, then the formal consideration of God with respect to the Word of God coheres with material convictions about what it means to confess God as God is. Without hesitation, Barth wants to be able to say that God is the actuality of his self-­moved decision to be Immanuel because that alone is what the Word of God gives us to acknowledge. Of course, the accent here must fall on God, and so his actuality includes everything we have seen about his loving in freedom. In this light, the overall thrust of Barth’s account tends toward a consideration of theology’s object as “God-in-self-determination for the covenant and all things in relation to this God as their beginning and end.”172 The chief insight we should draw from this is that the formal orientation of theological inquiry is more or less identical with its material object, namely, God in his self-­determination. The consequence, or rather proof, of this identification is that the greater proportion of Barth’s procedure traces the correspondence between God’s external works and his self-­determination than the correspondence between God’s activity and being as such – indeed, because being as such is an illegitimate abstraction for Barth. God is in himself “what He is as God in His revelation,” and we only abstract from this when we disobediently turn our eyes away from the only order of knowledge prescribed “by the Jesus Christ attested to us by the prophets and apostles.”173 This means that to some unspecified extent being follows act (esse sequitur operari) and not vice versa. Thus refusing any abstraction from the order of knowing to the order of being, Barth construes the moral determination of theological  I/2:866.  I/2:877. 172  On account of the Menschlichkeit Gottes, theology “must occupy itself neither with God in Himself nor with man in Himself but with the man-­encountering God and the God-­encountering man and with their dialogue and history, in which their communion takes place and comes to its fulfillment.” Karl Barth, “The Humanity of God,” in The Humanity of God, 55. Additionally, see IV/1:3–5; IV/2:3–10; Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, trans. Foley Grover (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), 202. 173  II/1:83–4. 170 171

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inquiry as consisting in the grateful “acknowledgment of the revelation of God.”174 The acknowledgment of God therefore consists in the obedient refusal to speak of God’s being apart from the concreteness of God’s self-­revelation in Christ, which also leads to a different understanding of God’s self-­correspondence. Barth’s operative understanding of actuality thus tends toward the whole of God’s internal and external activity, with a decided emphasis on the priority of the former as the ground of its movement to the latter. Divine actuality is therefore primarily understood as God’s self-­determination and its enactment in time, all understood as a confession of God’s actuality as the “actuality of Jesus Christ.”175 The remaining questions for us are how Barth’s coordination of theology and economy achieves a theologically material foundation in the doctrine of election understood as God’s self-­determination, and the consequences for God’s relation to the world attending Barth’s account of God’s self-­ correspondence. How Barth understands correspondence itself is relevant to how he thinks through these matters. So before addressing these questions, we need first to understand how Barth construes correspondence in light of his concerns with nominalism raised implicitly in his account of God’s freedom and the operative construal of divine simplicity that attends this correspondence.

  II/1:217.   I/2:44/49, rev.

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5 God’s Self-­Correspondence and Barth’s Critique of Nominalism

Barth approaches the question of how to confess God as God through a reflection on what it means to obediently confess in faith that God is. Faith makes this confession as it apprehends God’s actuality in grace, and thus in the face of Christ, acknowledging the inner necessity of the actual in God’s decision to be God in the way shown to us in God’s self-­revelation. In the previous chapter we traced this approach by showing how the formal orientation of theological inquiry into the doctrine of God is coincident with that doctrine’s material object: God as he relates to the creature through an act of self-­determination. This coincidence anticipates a positive correlation of the doctrines of God and election, where the notion of God’s decision or self-­determination is materially grounded. We suggested in conclusion that this positive correlation leads to a tendency in Barth’s doctrine of God to trace the correspondence between God’s activity and his self-­determination with greater success than the correspondence between God’s activity and his being as presupposed to that self-­determination. All we mean by this is that Barth’s doctrine of God leans proportionately toward an irreducible albeit asymmetrical correlation with the doctrine of election. It is not that Barth has abandoned consideration of God’s being; closer to the truth is that Barth’s procedure considers God’s being and self-­ determination coterminous. We will proceed in the following chapter to substantiate these claims in more detail, but that discussion will be unintelligible without first attending to Barth’s discussion of the challenges and tasks of the doctrine of the divine perfections (§29). Here we must grasp briefly the particular kind of correspondence Barth traces between God’s essence and perfections, which is opposed to all forms of 176

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what he calls “nominalism.”1 The question of correspondence concerns the type of similarity that obtains between God’s internal being and his external acts, offering some topographical detail to exactly what Barth does with analogy and dialectic. This is a question of considerable weight for Barth, especially as it helps him to navigate away from problems he detects in the various traditions of nominalism he identifies. It also helps us grasp the way Barth deploys divine simplicity to reinforce his commitment to confessing God as God is in Jesus Christ. Our analysis here focuses first on what Barth says about correspondence in §29 in the form of two material convictions about analogy and dialectic, respectively. Specifically, we need to see how Barth construes analogy as the correspondence of form and content, introducing an understanding of analogy more isomorphic than might be expected, and how Barth employs dialectic in the doctrine of the divine perfections primarily as a means of charting the course for an inquiry attuned to the material priority of love over freedom. With this in view, we will turn to examine how Barth supports these convictions with his account of divine simplicity articulated in §31 and how this doctrine focuses theological inquiry on the name of Jesus Christ as it seeks to confess God as God. The doctrine of the divine perfections treads the path Barth cleared in the preliminary description of God’s being as the one who loves in freedom. Barth’s point of departure in the divine perfections is God’s livingness, the same as it was in the being of God. Starting with God’s livingness, Barth derives two material convictions about the doctrine of the divine perfections relating to analogy and dialectic, respectively.2 First, as God lives out his perfection in the history of Israel and Christ, he is identical with a fullness of distinct perfections; consequently, theology must reckon with the extent of the truth of this identity between God’s being and his attributes, the Lord and his glory. Therefore the special task of the doctrine of the divine perfections concerns the ­correspondence  As will become clear, Barth’s definition of nominalism is chiefly a descriptive, heuristic device. What nominalism is and who might be fairly described with that label are debatable. At a minimum, much more than what Barth means by the term must be granted; see Calvin G. Normore, “The Tradition of Mediaeval Nominalism,” in Studies in Medieval Philosophy, ed. John F. Wippel (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 201–17 and the many essays collected in William J. Courtenay, Ockham and Ockhamism: Studies in the Dissemination and Impact of His Thought. Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, vol. 99 (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 2  For a reliable commentary on §29, see Robert Price, Letters of the Divine Word: The Perfections of God in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 33–48. 1

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of the Lord with his glory and vice versa, the precise nature of which will serve as a critical measure of Barth’s success in tracing God’s self-­ correspondence relative to his own intentions. Second, “because God lives His perfect essence the knowledge of His perfections is also a way . . . we must tread.”3 God’s economic movement itself corresponds with some transparency to a movement in himself, which locates the inquiry proper to the doctrine of God’s perfections within the dialectical movement of God’s loving in freedom. This means there is a material order of dogmatic inquiry that identifies the order of knowing with the order of being’s actuality, which again paves the way for the positive correlation of the doctrines of God and election. Consideration of these points – the precise notion of correspondence Barth seeks, the material priority of love over freedom, and divine simplicity’s Christological form and content – will suffice to introduce us to the relevant aspects of our inquiry, which we will extend in Chapter 6.

Correspondence as Analogy and Dialectic Analogy as Correspondence of Form and Content The first question Barth addresses concerns the correspondence of God’s manifold perfections or attributes with his being, a point Barth articulates with the notions of glory and lordship. God’s glory bookends Barth’s discussion of the divine perfections; the connection of glory with God’s Lordship provides the point of entry for the consideration of the unity and multiplicity of the divine perfections, and the account concludes with the description of God’s glory. The perennial heresies of modalism and subordinationism serve as negative criteria to uphold the dual affirmation that God the Lord is identical with the glory of his manifold perfections and those perfections are identical with the Lord. Chiefly, this is what it means for the doctrine of the divine attributes to be “trinitarian.”4 Just as we must not so emphasize God’s unity that we fall into the error of modalism, so, too, we must not so emphasize God’s lordship that we consider his glory mere economic appearance, something which we may safely bypass in the interest of finding something more absolute behind his self-­revelation. Similarly, just as the conciliar doctrine of the Trinity 3 4

 II/1:322/362, rev.  II/1:326–7. See also Jan Štefan, “Gottes Vollkommenheiten nach KD II/1,” in Karl Barth im europäischen Zeitgeschehen (1935–1950), eds. Michael Beintker, Christian Link, and Michael Trowitzsch (Zürich: TVZ, 2010), 91–2.

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does not privilege the distinction of the Father and Son at the expense of their unity, neither does a well-­ordered theology of the divine perfections subordinate God’s glory to his Lordship. If God is “the same” in eternity as he reveals himself in history, then God exists in his perfections in himself just as much as toward us.5 Dogmatics is thus tasked with specifying what it means for God to correspond to himself in his manifold perfections. How are these perfections not mere appearance but genuinely proper to God’s life as such? Barth’s inquiry into the precise nature of this correspondence again asks “to what extent” theology is capable, permitted, and required to speak of “a multiplicity of perfections” in God and then to speak of them in their “particularity and distinctness.”6 As the “extent” form of the question would suggest, theology’s answer can only note the necessity of God’s perfections existing this way and not otherwise. What do we say about the form of this necessity, and therefore the form of the correspondence between God’s activity and being? Barth believes theology may consistently privilege the priority it grants to Christology for its knowledge of God if it avoids all hints of what he calls nominalism. In its immediate context, nominalism is a shorthand designation for any attempt that privileges God’s unity as “proper” to God and his multiplicity as “improper.” Two species of nominalism are singled out in particular that we must avoid. First, there is the “strict nominalistic thesis” Barth associates with Eunomius, William of Occam, and Gabriel Biel: names predicated of God represent “purely subjective ideas and descriptions (conceptus, nomina) to which there is no corresponding reality in God.”7 This thesis so privileges a notion of absolute simplicity that all predication is “improper” (improprie) and fails to trace any correspondence between God’s act and being. Second is the more influential, semi-­ nominalism Barth attributes to the Thomist and Protestant orthodox traditions: names predicated of God correspond to a foundation in God, but their multiplicity is a result of God’s condescension to creatures who cannot apprehend the unity of his simple essence.8 God’s attributes differ conceptually (rationaliter) but not really (realiter). According to Barth, by affirming the existence of God’s attributes apart from our knowledge of those attributes, this tradition only apparently transcended nominalism. The problem is that they could affirm that God’s attributes exist in God,  II/1:323–4.  II/1:327/368, rev. 7  II/1:327. 8  For example, Turretin, Institutio III.v.ii–xvi. 5 6

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but only as a unity and not as a multiplicity. Noting the improvement of this thesis over strict nominalism, Barth nevertheless maintains that it fails to trace the correspondence between God’s act and being because our predication is again improper. It is therefore a “cloven-­hoof . . . owing to the dazzling effect of the Platonic-­Aristotelian idea of being.”9 The root of this Faustian failure is “that the idea of God was not determined by the doctrine of the Trinity,” which means that God is not the same in history as he is in himself.10 Barth’s appeal to the Trinity provides a window into the specific notion of correspondence he seeks. When developing the doctrine of the Trinity as an expansion of the statement “God reveals himself as Lord,” Barth notes that the “distinction between form and content (Form und Inhalt) cannot be applied to the biblical concept of revelation.”11 The form of God’s self-­revelation  – revealer, revelation, and revealedness  – says the world about the content of revelation – Father, Son, and Spirit. This content is intrinsic to its form, for which reason both modalism and subordinationism are equally disastrous.12 Mutatis mutandis, God’s self-­revelation admits no distinction between the form and content of the divine perfections because those perfections tell us the world about what and who God is. Barth returns to the question of form and content in his account of God’s glory, which serves as the stirring conclusion to the doctrine of the divine perfections.13 In that discussion, the question of the “shape and form” (Gestalt und Form) of God’s being and activity acquires aesthetic dimensions we need not address for our purposes.14 All we need to recognize is that God’s form and content are indistinguishable because they just are the “concrete form” of God’s life as the Father, Son, and Spirit.15 Only in this objective triune form do we find the specific unity of identity and nonidentity, movement and peace, multiplicity and

 II/1:334.  II/1:329. 11  I/1:306/323, 299, 301. 12  I/1:381–3. 13  II/1:657–64. Glory also lays the foundation for the “form” of reconciliation in Christ’s prophetic work, which is identical with the “content” of Christ’s life as Light (IV/3:47– 8, 105–7). 14  II/1:649/732. The connection of beauty to “form” remains an underdeveloped aspect of Barth’s thought in the literature, but see William T. Barnett, “Actualism and Beauty: Karl Barth’s Insistence on the Auch in His Account of Divine Beauty,” Scottish Journal of Theology 66.3 (2013): 299–318; Philip Stoltzfus, Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Western Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2006), 107–66. 15  II/1:657. 9

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simplicity, and order and succession with which God adorns himself.16 Consequently, this objective form and content are repeated in God’s glorious overflow in history. Again, Barth recognizes that we would not know this form of God’s being, and therefore its content, apart from Christ. In Christ we see that God is “not imprisoned or bound to be merely one. He is identical with Himself, and yet free to be another as well; simple and yet manifold; at peace with Himself, and yet also alive.”17 In this way the unity of form and content is inclusive of God’s economic activity, for the form of God’s external works is natural to him as a reflection of his proper form as God. All of this helps illuminate why Barth’s account of the correspondence of the Lord with his glory follows the “German theologians of the 19th century,” who repudiated the nominalist theses.18 Several of these theologians acknowledged that God’s perfections must reveal his objective essence in itself, doubling down on the tradition’s express identification of God’s attributes with his being while leaving behind its particular metaphysics of being. Among others, Barth invokes Isaak Dorner: “If God will not or cannot grant us knowledge of his being in himself, but only of his being in the world, he thus reveals in the world, since not himself, then necessarily something other than himself.”19 Barth reinforces this insight by recalling the axiom he employed in his account of God’s loving in freedom: every what (quid sit) question is only a repetition of the who (quis sit) question; “his quidditas must be identical to his ­haecceitas.”20 In  II/1: 660. While Barth treads his own path, one may see a plausible likeness to Duns Scotus’s distinctio formalis in this respect, because the differentiation between the perfections is itself wedded to trinitarian theology. 17  II/1:663. 18  II/1:330. 19  Dorner, SCG, §15.5, 191; SCD, 204. 20  Katherine Sonderegger, “Divine Justice and Justification,” Zeitschrift für dialektisch Theologie, Supplement Series 6 (2014): 164–76 (175), recognizes acutely how the dialectical hedging of theological language in §29 drops in the discussions of the perfections in §§30–1, giving way to a “startlingly direct” and undialectical form of predication (165). Sonderegger discusses more delicately this tendency toward an “univocal equivocity” in “Barth and the Divine Perfections,” Scottish Journal of Theology 67.4 (2014): 450–63. These reflections are insightful in light of Barth’s critique of semi-­nominalism and its eventual correlation with the historical form of Christology in IV/1–3, where the divine basis and content of our knowledge of and speech about God is inextricable from its historical form. For Barth, knowledge and speech become analogical through the activity of the risen Christ in his Spirit as God enfolds our words (along with our whole life-­act) into his own self-­revealing activity, and thereby grants our speech a participation in the historical form of his own correspondence to himself (IV/3:211–20; II/1:227– 9). Additionally, see Bruce McCormack, “‘The Limits of the Knowledge of God’: 16

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no sense, then, may we confine God’s perfections to his relation with the world, thus separating the form of God’s glory from its content and vice versa. Both the form and content of the perfections must be grounded objectively: “whether it is a form of love in which God is free, or a form of freedom in which God loves, it is none other than God Himself, His one, simple, distinctive essence.”21 Despite this accent on identity, we must consider God in himself and God in relation to us as “distinguishable forms (Gestalten)” of his one self-­same life, even if the distinction is only heuristic.22 The “distinguishable forms” in question represent the two poles which theological inquiry considers necessary for its understanding of God’s actuality: the antecedent basis and the economic term of God’s free love. Insofar as that which grounds is distinct from that which is grounded, Barth draws a distinction between internal and external form. Otherwise, however, Barth will seek to draw as close a correspondence between the two poles as possible without confusing them. In this way Barth strongly correlates the form and content of the divine perfections, and therein God’s act and being, internally and externally without collapsing God’s antecedent perfection into his economic works: “God does nothing which in his way he does not have and is not in himself.”23 Thus Barth’s resistance to all forms of nominalism results in a correlation of the divine perfections’ form and content internally and externally. One consequence of this move is that God’s self-­correspondence becomes somewhat isomorphic in comparison to Aquinas and the Protestant scholastic tradition. One encounters this tendency particularly in Barth’s Theses on the Theological Epistemology of Karl Barth,” in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 167–80; Michael Beintker, “Analogy,” in The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth, ed. Richard Burnett (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013), 3–6. For some of the historical background, see Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (London: T&T Clark, 2010). 21  II/1:322/362, rev. 22  II/1:346/389. Barth will make largely the same point with the related term Form: God’s secondary objectivity is distinct from his primary objectivity, “not by a lesser degree of truth, but by its particular form suitable for us, the creature” (II/1:16/16). The “form and content” of God’s secondary objectivity thus answer to a distinct form and content in God’s primary objectivity (cf. II/1:9–31). While there is a discernable tendency in I/1 to confine Gestalt to economic form (I/1:315–21), there is no rigid function peculiar to Gestalt or Form operative in II/1 – indeed, Gestalt clearly refers to immanent and economic form (II/1:357–8/401–2). Moreover, precisely what Barth means by any term must be discerned by its particular function in the occasion of its use. 23  II/1:467/526, rev. In this respect, Barth’s concern with the semi-­nominalist construal of certain predicates as improprie extends to the scholastics’ invocation of our modus intelligendi and significandi; pace Steven Duby’s otherwise fine analysis in Divine Simplicity: A Dogmatic Account (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 181–3.

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unwavering resolve to avoid rendering any element of God’s activity “improper” to God’s being, a point we will take up in the next chapter when considering his description of God’s internal activity. Again, we are only highlighting tendencies. Barth has much to say about the dialectical unity of God’s loving in freedom, which prompts our knowledge as much as our ignorance.24 The correspondence of God’s being with his activity is a dialectical kind of “similarity in dissimilarity or dissimilarity in similarity.”25 Nevertheless, however unsettled by Barth’s dialectic, there is a drift toward a nondialectical emphasis on similarity over dissimilarity, especially in the richly descriptive tracts of the doctrine of reconciliation. An example of this drift is Barth’s account of the Son’s obedience, which also serves to demonstrate how Barth extends his anti-­nominalist account of God’s self-­correspondence to certain elements of Christ’s history. In the opening subsection of his first main Christological section-­ paragraph (§59.1), Barth makes three basic moves: first he establishes that the mystery of the Son’s deity encompasses two moments, then proceeds to describe God’s self-­correspondence in the second and external moment of the Son’s self-­humiliation, and concludes with the affirmation that the first and internal moment of the Son’s obedience accounts for this self-­correspondence because obedience is proper to God as God.26 Here again the movement from actuality to corresponding possibility secures the intelligibility of divine self-­correspondence. He explains this in terms of God’s inner and outer life: From the point of view of the obedience of Jesus Christ as such, fulfilled in that astonishing form, it is a matter of the mystery of the inner being of God as the being of the Son in relation to the Father. From the point of view of that form, of the character of that obedience as an obedience of suffering, of the self-­humiliation of Jesus Christ, of the way of the Son into the far country, it is a matter of the mystery of His deity in His work ad extra, in His presence in the world.27

In his self-­humiliation, Christ takes on an alien form (Fremdgestalt) without becoming alienated from himself.28 God has the ability, willingness, and readiness to exist not only in his form as God but also in the form of a servant (Phil 2:7). In a way, then, Barth’s emphasis on the unity of form and content is a commentary on the Christ-­hymn of Philippians.  II/1:341–9. On these matters, see Asbill, Freedom of God for Us, 113–33.  Barth, Gespräche 1964–1968, 91. 26  IV/1:157–79, 179–92, 192–210. 27  IV/1:177/194. 28  IV/1:180/196. 24 25

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God’s love and freedom, and all the essential perfections to which they speak, are included in the fact that God “can become worldly, making His own both its form, the servant form, and also its cause; and all without giving up His own form, the divine form, and His own glory, but adopting the form and cause of man in the most perfect communion with His own, accepting solidarity with the world.”29 But this rests on the fact that the Son’s obedience “is (in re) the first and inner moment of the mystery of the deity of Christ” because it corresponds to God’s eternal life as the Trinity.30 In this final segment of the argument it becomes clear that “form” is serving double-­duty: on the one hand it refers to the servant-­form (Knechtsgestalt) that veils and conceals the Son’s God-­form (Gottesgestalt), whereas on the other hand it refers to the correspondence of form and content between Son’s being and activity externally and internally. The absence in this section of “form and content” language should not distract us from the presence of the form of reasoning about divine self-­correspondence this language helps describe. This is especially visible in how Barth singles out subordinationism and modalism as the trinitarian heresies that must be avoided if we are to grasp the propriety of the Son’s obedience, that is, the form and content of the Son’s mission.31 Notably, this is exactly what Barth does when emphasizing the inseparability of form and content in his doctrines of revelation and the divine perfections, on the basis of God’s Lordship.32 The problem with subordinationism is that it bids us to accept a priori what God can and cannot be and do, such that all speech about the Son’s obedience is “improper” (uneigentliche).33 Barth comments: “It is really difficult to see how and how far (inwiefern) the many can be made righteous (Rom 5:19) by the obedience of a being improperly God or of a supremely qualified creature, or what value and right there can be for wanting to bring every thought captive to the obedience (2 Cor 10:5) of such a being.”34 Likewise, the flaw in modalism is to render the Father’s command and the Son’s obedience as mere “worldly figures, forms, or appearances of true Godhead,” which suggests that in the economy God is only improperly himself.35 The Son’s obedience is no mere appearance (Erscheinungsform),  IV/1:187.  IV/1:192/210. 31  IV/1:196–7. 32  I/1:305–26, 381–3; II/1:323–7. 33  IV/1:195/213 34  IV/1:196/214, rev. 35  Ibid. 29 30

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but rather is proper to him as the eternal Son of the eternal Father. There is a genuine “divine obedience” that takes place in God himself from all eternity. When the Son humbles himself, “He does not do it without any correspondence to, but as the wonderfully consistent final continuation of, the history in which He is God.”36 God’s self-­correspondence in both form and content at this point shows how God may be for us what he is in himself  – both one who rules in majesty and one who obeys in humility: It is the free grace of the atonement that He now not only reflects His inner being as God as He did in creation, that He not only represents it in a likeness as He did in the relationship of Creator and creature, but that He allows it to become external as such . . . He does not change in giving Himself. He simply activates and reveals Himself externally, in the world. He is now also in and for the world what He is in and for Himself.37

Only because this is so is God’s self-­revelation binding, disclosing to us necessities that could not be otherwise.38 We can now see how the form-­ content structure of divine self-­ correspondence applies equally to the divine perfections and to Barth’s Christology, since God’s self-­correspondence encompasses elements of Christ’s history.39 Indeed, this suggests that at least from this perspective the “historicizing” of Barth’s doctrine of God is not nearly as drastic as the concept might sound. Barth simply strives to avoid all hints of nominalism and so affirms that even the formal character of history (Geschichte) corresponds to the “history” of God’s inner being, the “occurrence” (Geschehens) of the triune life.40 “God is historical even in Himself.”41 Barth’s extension of this practice into his Christology supports his resolute focus on the historical dimensions of Christ’s being and activity. But most relevant to our concerns is that the example of the Son’s obedience shows how the notion of correspondence operative in Barth’s theology enables him to say considerably isomorphic things about the inner recesses of God’s eternal life in comparison to what we

 IV/1:203/223, rev.  IV/1:204/223, rev. 38  IV/1:194–5. 39  For further reflections on how the form-­content structure of correspondence bears on Christology, see Tyler R. Wittman, “Facticity and Faithfulness: Divine Simplicity in Barth’s Christology,” Pro Ecclesia 26.4 (2017): 415–34. 40  E.g., I/1:172, 393–4; II/2:175, 184; IV/2:31, 344–8; IV/3:483–4. 41  IV/1:112/122. 36 37

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find typically in the “semi-­nominalism” of the Thomist and Protestant scholastic traditions.

Dialectic and the Movement of God’s Self-Correspondence The other question Barth addresses in §29 concerns the “derivation and distribution” of the divine perfections, which is entailed by asking “to what extent do these many individual and various perfections of God exist?”42 Leading yet again with the “extent” question, Barth is concerned to uncover the necessity of speaking “properly” about the various divine perfections. In other words, speaking properly on the basis of revelation will involve concerns about the derivation and order of the divine perfections as much as their multiplicity and unity because the correspondence theology seeks to acknowledge between God’s being and activity admits no separation between form and content.43 Barth’s first task therefore is to establish the derivation of the divine perfections. Focused on God’s  self-­revelation, theology is required to ask about the “contours” of God’s essence according to his loving in freedom.44 In this vein, Barth resonates with the trajectory in the scholastic tradition that distinguishes divine attributes into categories of transitive and immanent, relative and absolute, moral and metaphysical, quiescent and operative, or communicable and incommunicable. These pairings speak to both the quiddity and haecceity of God, but are nevertheless inadequate because such distinctions are too sharp and thereby betray nominalist allegiances.45 Rather, theology obedient to revelation simply speaks of the perfections both of God’s loving and his freedom, without isolating one from the other. Thus Barth will treat two series of perfections, one with an emphasis on God’s loving in freedom and another with an emphasis on God’s freedom to love. Both series, however, concern God in himself just as much as God for us. Barth’s second task is to establish the order or sequence of the divine perfections, which he notes is “not a matter of indifference.”46 The order  II/1:335.  This concern for taxis is trinitarian: “what is repeated and revealed in the whole divine essence as such, and in each divine perfection in particular, is the relationship and form of being of the Father and the Son in the unity of the Spirit, to the extent that these three are distinct in God but no less one in God, without pre-­eminence or subordination but not without succession and order” (II/1:660/745, rev; I/1:314). 44  II/1:336. 45  II/1:339–49. 46  II/1:348. 42 43

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of the divine perfections, as much as their derivation, must correspond to God’s self-­revelation as the one who loves in freedom. As concerns the sequence of the divine attributes, Barth notes a decisive inadequacy in the trajectory of the tradition with which he aligns himself. Whereas the Protestant scholastics, for example, treat God’s “incommunicable” attributes before his “communicable” attributes, Barth believes this corresponds neither to the order of knowing nor to the order of being. In God’s self-­revelation, God’s unveiling is the “first and the last, the origin and the end of the ways of God.”47 So, too, in his revelation in the gospel, God encounters us as the one who loves and only then do we recognize him as the one who withdraws in holy freedom. It is not that God is more his loving than he is his freedom; however, “He is it differently; He is it namely in this relationship of the second with the first. Hence He is it in this sequence.”48 While Barth affirms the reciprocity of love and freedom in their derivation, there is nevertheless an irreducible order within this reciprocity, which signifies “the movement of life in which God is God, corresponding exactly to how He reveals Himself as God. And in our apprehension and exposition of God’s perfections we must adhere to this order and sequence.”49 It therefore becomes visible that dialectic in  this context serves mainly to designate the normative movement of God’s being that theology must follow, and to which our knowledge of God must correspond. The sequence of our knowledge of God’s perfections moves in correspondence to the movement of the life to which those perfections belong, resulting in the material priority of love over freedom. When Barth hints at how this decision about material priority in particular most distances his doctrine of God from the tradition, he already shows some awareness of how his doctrine occupies new territory, the borders of which will be drawn by his doctrine of election.50 This serves as a preliminary confirmation of our thesis that Barth will find it easier to trace the correspondence of God’s activity with his self-­determination, rather than with his being as such. Demonstration of this thesis awaits us in the next chapter, where we must analyse the meaning of God’s self-­ determination in election and the significance of its Christological shape  II/1:349.  II/1:349/393, rev. 49  II/1:350/394, rev. 50  “It is clear that the older scholastic doctrine, to whose basic thoughts we formally adhere, will be given a greatly changed appearance . . . especially by . . . the reversal in the order of the two categories. But it is surely the appearance corresponding to the compulsion of the subject” (II/1:350). 47 48

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for God’s self-­correspondence. Here we will begin to see more clearly the consequences of specifying divine self-­correspondence in terms of its form and content and the material prioritization of love over freedom, not only for the kinds of things theology can say responsibly about God’s being and activity but also for the character of God’s relation to creation.

The Simplicity of God’s Self-­Correspondence in Christ Before turning to Barth’s analysis of God’s self-­determination and election, we need to see how the preceding convictions about analogy and dialectic are correlated with his doctrine of divine simplicity. Judgments about simplicity undergird what theologians have to say concerning how theological language functions as they acknowledge the unity of God’s perfections with God’s being. Barth’s account is unique in the way he renders God’s unity a strictly revealed doctrine with a Christological form and content, and how this reinforces his concern to confess God in the concreteness of God’s self-­determination to be for us in Christ – and not otherwise. Simplicity comes up for discussion in §29 naturally as Barth wrestles with coordinating the unity and multiplicity of God’s perfections relative to the nominalist and semi-­nominalist traditions. What we have seen thus far is a meditation on an enigmatic phrase Barth finds in Augustine, who mentions God’s “simple multiplicity or multiple simplicity.”51 However, he reserves extended treatment of the doctrine until taking up the divine perfections of God’s freedom in §31. There Barth opens his discussion with the perfection of God’s unity, and by unpacking it we will begin to see the convergences of his anti-­nominalist construal of divine self-­correspondence and the necessity of God’s decision to freely love the world in Christ, as well as the importance this has for how he navigates the confession of God as God. Following his material prioritization of love over freedom, Barth discusses the perfections of God’s loving (§30) before the perfections of God’s freedom (§31). When he treats the perfections of God’s freedom, he begins with unity and recapitulates the love-­freedom dialectic in reverse: he considers divine unity through the lens of freedom and then concludes by viewing it in terms of love.52 However, this reversal is chiefly formal because the material order between the two remains and becomes  Augustine, De trinitate 6.4.6; II/1:323, 329.  Respectively, II/1:445–50, 450–61.

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a­ pparent when Barth grounds divine simplicity itself in the activity of God’s love. The structure of the discussion loosely anticipates this conclusion. God’s perfect unity includes two elements: God’s uniqueness (singularitas, Einzigkeit) and simplicity (simplicitas, Einfachheit). As Barth treats freedom before love, so, too, he treats uniqueness before simplicity, but ultimately he grounds uniqueness in simplicity, thus reinforcing the material priority of love over freedom. The characteristic feature of Barth’s discussion of God’s unity is his insistence on the doctrine’s particularity: “If we understand it rightly, we can express all that God is by saying that God is One.”53 This is a big “if,” but it is one Barth endeavors to vindicate through appeal to trinitarian and Christological teaching. The early struggle to understand God’s simplicity was the struggle to understand the doctrine of the Trinity and Christology: the Church clarified its doctrine of simplicity as it clarified the unity of persons in God and the unity of natures in Christ, and it clarified its doctrine of the Trinity and Christology as it clarified its doctrine of simplicity.54 Barth states his point with a clarity and directness that is easily overlooked: “Properly considered, the two things are one. The unity of the triune God and of the Son of God with man in Jesus Christ is itself the simplicity of God.”55 In due course, we will see the extent to which Barth means what he says here. For the moment we need only observe how he contrasts his construal of the doctrine’s provenance with how later scholastic theology “lost itself” in abstractly logical, metaphysical, and mathematical reflections on the “most simple being” (ens simplicissimum).56 The problem is that these features “are put at the head, and not, as we are trying to do here, in their proper turn.”57 The result: the nominalist “colourlessness and lack of form which undoubtedly characterize this section of the older Protestant dogmatics and constitute its weakness.”58 Barth’s concern for form is again in play. When read in this light and what he takes  II/1:442.  Alluding to Chalcedon, Barth mentions the “undivided but unconfused unity” of Christ’s two natures (II/1:446/502). 55  II/1:446. Somewhat similar, though not as pregnant with meaning: “God’s Word does not allow us to yield to the demonism of the concept of the unconditioned. It opposes to monotheism the offense that God in his revelation, as the one God, is triune, and to pantheism the folly that in his simplicity he becomes man in Christ and calls us his children by the Spirit.” Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 431–2. 56  II/1:457, 447. 57  II/1:447. 58  Ibid. 53 54

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to be the trinitarian and Christological provenance of divine simplicity, his critique concerns the material order of dogmatics. Simplicity must be an a posteriori acknowledgment in the light of the doctrines of the Trinity and Christ, which for Barth must not be separated. Only by holding fast to the proper material ordering will we develop the doctrine on “a more distinctly biblical and therefore Christian basis.”59 Nevertheless, we must retain the recognition of God’s simplicity defended by Protestant orthodox dogmatics, for simplicity “is the basis of His uniqueness, the explanation of the diversity and unity of His perfections and finally the criterion for understanding His relation to the creature.”60 Whatever we say about simplicity will have significant consequences for the obedient confession of God in his self-­revelation and the kind of relation between God and the world that elicits this confession. We begin to glimpse how Barth conceives of this distinctly biblical and Christian basis, and thus of the doctrine’s particularity, when we look at another of Barth’s chief concerns: the ethical dimension of our knowledge of God. Morally indeterminate and “neutral” conceptions of God’s unity, which Barth believes are the product of traditional formulations, are ipso facto susceptible to and perhaps even symptomatic of idolatry. He therefore refuses to separate what we know from how we know it. Where the concept of God’s unity is articulated through abstract metaphysical reflections, it threatens to become nothing more than a human construction. Genuine knowledge of God’s unity only results from “the encounter between man and God, brought about by God.”61 In this encounter, God’s covenant partner recognizes God’s promise and obeys God’s command; “it is in this indebtedness and responsibility that it is knowledge of the One who is both unique and simple.”62 This encounter, and therefore genuine knowledge of God’s uniqueness and simplicity, occurs above all in God’s love and how he elects himself to reveal and the human to hear. It is not the idea of election that interests Barth, but election’s actuality as God chooses his covenant partners and summons them to obedience. Election “is a choice, but it is a choice as an event! It is in this event as such that the love of God reveals itself and acts with the incomparability to which the only appropriate response is the confession of God’s uniqueness.”63 And so, too, God’s simplicity is known through  Ibid.  Ibid. 61  II/1:450/507. 62  II/1:450. 63  II/1:451/507. 59 60

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the encounter with God’s electing love: “In Scripture the utterly simple is ‘simply’ God himself in the factuality (Tatsächlichkeit), the superior force, the persistence, the obviousness  – or even simpler: the facticity (Faktizität), in which he is present as God and deals as God with the creature, with men.”64 Knowledge of God’s unity is a morally involved response to God’s love, and so God’s unity is a revealed doctrine. The necessity of this encounter with God’s love delivers a word of judgment on false religion and idolatry, which is visible both in the accounts of uniqueness and simplicity. Barth takes up uniqueness first and expounds it in terms of freedom and loving. First, God’s uniqueness as a perfection of his freedom means that “God alone is God. He is the only one of His kind.”65 Barth surveys a number of passages in the Old Testament (Deut 4:32–40; Isa 44:6–9; 2 Kgs 19:16–19) that link the revelation of God’s uniqueness together with Israel’s calling to obey and worship Yahweh exclusively.66 From the form and content of these statements, we must conclude that God’s unity is something the fallen creature only seeks in vain. God’s unity is not “an – ism or system, which is capable of turning into its opposite. On the contrary, He is the divine actuality itself in its uniqueness.”67 That is to say, God is unique, but uniqueness is not God. False notions of uniqueness betray themselves through their reversibility with God, as in pagan religion and so-­called monotheism. Monotheism is an arbitrary construct especially when it provides a supposed point of commonality between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Barth believes fundamentally that what really makes the divine unique in such accounts is tied to the occasional religious need of the human subject, who divinizes some objective reality as “the unique” to fulfil their desire for self-­transcendence.68 Inevitably this results in a conflict of the supposedly divine and the human subject over who or what is really unique. For instance, at the supposed height of its purity, Jewish monotheism influenced Israel to reject their Messiah and crucify him, thus failing to understand the fulfillment of their whole history. Before Christ’s cross, we must deny that God’s uniqueness is an object of natural knowledge. This means, second, that we understand the freedom of God’s uniqueness in light of God’s freedom to love. We know the extent of God’s uniqueness only by grace, and thus by faith in the Word of God.  II/1:457/514–15, rev.  II/1:442. 66  II/1:451–3. 67  II/1:452/509, rev. 68  II/1:448–9. 64 65

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The confession “there is only one God” might mean something true or false; only the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit may reveal the truth of this statement.69 It is crucial that we attend to “the uniqueness of the divine Word and work as it occurred in Jesus Christ.”70 Only this self-­testimony of this God in this Mediator, Jesus Christ, approaches the genuine meaning of God’s uniqueness. The repeated use of “this” (diese) in Barth’s concluding comments on God’s uniqueness serves to emphasize its haecceity, highlighting the prominence of God’s self-­revelation in Christ for our knowledge of God’s unity.71 Barth proceeds to base God’s uniqueness “on His simplicity,” for it is as simple that God cannot tolerate other gods alongside him “without self-contradiction.”72 As with uniqueness, Barth describes God’s simplicity both in light of freedom and love. Most basically in terms of God’s freedom, divine simplicity means that “in all that He is and does, He is wholly and undividedly Himself.”73 Thus far, Barth’s description is close to scholastic accounts, which he credits for describing God “as the absolutely simple.” However, they failed to understand that this only applies to “God Himself in His self-interpretation.”74 God’s simplicity is grasped in its true extent and character only in the encounter with God’s electing love in Jesus Christ. On this account, God’s demonstration of his simplicity refutes all general theisms and the false simplicities they harbor. For instance, both pantheism and panentheism are false because God is never “composed out of what is distinct from Himself,” nor is he “divided or divisible” from his own being and act. Alongside this relative significance is its absolute significance: God is “outside every genus  . . . without the least possibility of either internal or external composition.”75 Once more Barth’s concerns are most tangibly ethical. Correspondingly, only idolatrous forms of simplicity are reversible with God because the predicate itself is rendered absolute and severed from its subject: a “concept of a whole which is indivisible or an indivisible which is whole, can certainly  II/1:453–4.  II/1:455–6. 71  John Webster captures this motivation well: “Weaving together the notions of uniqueness (singularitas) and simplicity (simplicitas), Barth presents the unity of God in terms of God’s sheer self-­positing Istigkeit, God’s irreducible thisness.” Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, 41. This point is reinforced with Barth’s use of singularitas to qualify actus purus (II/1:264). 72  II/1:445/501. 73  Ibid. 74  II/1:457. 75  II/1:447. 69 70

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be an object and a very natural object of human divining and construction.”76 The reason why is that humanity in all its complexity easily venerates simplicity as something to which it should aspire. There is little reason, however, to believe that this object of veneration has anything to do with God, and this for two reasons. First, if we follow this line of thought consistently, we will conceive of the simple as that which only “exists for itself, in abstraction from all that is complex.”77 But this notion is false because it is unrelated to the world and leaves the world autonomous; it is ultimately a simplicity that secularizes rather than sanctifies. Second, we might shrink away from these consequences and instead “understand the simple as the unconditioned (Unbedingte).”78 However, while this understanding creates space for a related, conditioned, and complex world, it also involves “the simple” too much with its opposite: “we have to admit that this relationship, and therefore the existence of this world, and therefore its complexity, are all essential to the simple, that it would not be the unconditioned without the correlated totality of the conditioned (korrelate Totalität des Bedingten).”79 In other words, general notions of unconditioned and conditioned are always understood in a reciprocally determinative relation. On these terms God could not be “the unconditioned” without the conditioned world as a negative backdrop against which God’s simplicity comes into view.80 Barth concludes, “God is certainly simple and the divine deliverance is certainly deliverance from complexity. But the absolutised idea of simplicity itself belongs to the complexity from which man must be delivered.”81 Absolutized notions of simplicity compromise the humanism of God’s actuality, and just so offend the confession of God as God in the face of Christ alone.

 II/1:449.  Ibid. 78  II/1:449/506. 79  Ibid. 80  See also III/3:139. Barth opposes Unbedingte as an understanding of God’s simplicity because it is insufficiently transparent to God’s enacted freedom in Christ. Again, the material priority of love over freedom in the doctrine of the divine perfections performs a critical service to remind us that the true internal and external indivisibility of God is that which includes God’s enacted freedom, which is his Bedingtheit in Jesus Christ (II/2:101/108; II/1:301–3). Hence, Barth believes that one introduces God into a fated, correlated totality with the world once the concept of simplicity is defined negatively as mere “unconditionedness,” since it is true that in his eternal election of grace God conditions himself to be the covenant God revealed in Jesus Christ. In part, Barth’s concern is to uphold God’s grace. We will amplify these points in the following chapter. 81  II/1:450. 76 77

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It should come as no surprise, then, that deliverance from false forms of simplicity is possible again only in the light of Christ and his cross. The unity of the prophetic and apostolic witness speaks to the unity of God himself, for everywhere we have to do with the God who is trustworthy and faithful. Scripture presents us with an analytical judgment when it describes God as “faithful” or “true” (Deut 7:9; 32:4; 1 Jn 1:9). These statements just mean that God is himself self-­identical and therefore consistently and unwaveringly truthful. Barth understands himself here to provide for the doctrine of divine simplicity what he promised at the outset of his inquiry: “a more distinctly biblical and therefore Christian basis than it had in the early Church, the Middle Ages and Protestant orthodoxy.”82 God’s simplicity just is his self-­fidelity, which is not something abstract but dynamic, concrete, and enacted: “God’s simplicity reveals itself and consists in this: that He always confirms Himself anew in His speech and action, He always confesses and attests to His identity anew.”83 How does God do this? God does it through the repetition and fulfillment of His promise . . . the unity of His promise and His command, of the Gospel and the Law  . . . the unity of the election and calling of the sinful people Israel and of the Church of Jews and Gentiles . . . the unity of grace and holiness, mercy and righteousness, patience and wisdom, in the total work of His love.84

Yet God testifies to this unity in one place alone, “in the name of Jesus Christ.”85 For the true God is also the “true and faithful witness” (Rev 3:14; 1:5; 19:11). And when Paul calls upon the “true God” as his witness that his word is faithful and true, he appeals to the content of his preaching: “the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you . . . was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him” (2 Cor 1:19–20). Barth concludes, All the lines we mentioned, promise and fulfillment, Gospel and Law, Israel and the Church, the love and freedom of God, are not separate, but meet and unite in Christ. The Yea and Amen of the whole prophetic-­apostolic message of all Scripture is, in fact, in Him: for in Him is the Yea and Amen of the one God Himself. For this very reason God’s faithfulness and truthfulness are to be regarded and understood as the real meaning and basis of His simplicity. And for this very reason the meaning and basis of its knowledge is faith, in which  II/1:447.  II/1:460/518, rev. 84  II/1:460/518. 85  Ibid. 82 83

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man for his part ascribes to God’s faithfulness and truth the honor due to it, acknowledging its legitimate right, and to that extent himself (πιστεύειν) becoming faithful and true, and to that extent simple. Faith is trust placed in the divine faithfulness.86

The ontic ground of God’s simplicity is God’s faithfulness demonstrated in Christ, and the noetic ground is that same faithfulness as it creates recognition and honor for itself, the obedience of faith.87 We may conclude this chapter with two observations from the foregoing. First, by grounding simplicity in faithfulness Barth subtly but surely distances himself from the tradition he seeks to recover. Whereas a traditional scholastic doctrine would understand God’s simplicity as the ground for God’s faithfulness because logically act follows being, Barth asserts the opposite: God’s faithfulness is the ground and meaning of his simplicity. Act is just being, and vice versa. Simplicity is, to be sure, also what the orthodox dogmatics had in mind, but Barth believes they should have been clearer about God’s faithfulness and trustworthiness as its genuine basis and meaning. Barth means what he says, for he essays a material correction to the tradition he inherits and recovers. Only when God’s faithfulness has been revealed may we apply the standard logical, mathematical, and metaphysical entailments of simplicity properly and so understand their genuine function. To wit, the irreducible indivisibility to which divine simplicity’s metaphysical intelligibility gestures is that of God’s enacted perfection, as Barth would understand it, and therefore to the whole of God’s being and activity as it reaches us in the economy: “His uniqueness and simplicity . . . is grounded in Himself and posited, maintained, and executed by Himself.”88 Simplicity means that God corresponds to his own haecceity or facticity. The ground and execution of God’s simplicity are therefore an indivisible whole.89 Thus Barth can say God is “trustworthy in His essence, in the innermost ground of His being as God.”90 But since God’s being is in act, God’s essence in movement, then “the deeper essence and ground” of simplicity is the love in which God’s freedom is manifest.91 God’s simplicity is therefore his  II/1:460/518, rev.  See in this connection IV/2:116–54. 88  II/1:491. 89  Cf. III/3:138. 90  II/1:459/516, rev. 91  II/1:457. Such statements lead Stephen Pickard to worry that Barth illegitimately posits two “grounds” for God’s simplicity: one in God’s Lordship and the other in God’s loving. Stephen Pickard, “Barth on Divine Simplicity: Some Implications for Life in a Complex World,” in Karl Barth: A Future for Postmodern Theology?, ed. Geoff 86 87

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unique ­freedom and indivisibility manifest in his enacted perfection and not something that subsists apart from that enactment, nor something knowable in any other form or with any other content. Second, Barth understands God’s simplicity as a strictly revealed doctrine, due in part to the moral demands of our knowledge of God and in part to the doctrine’s Christological provenance. We only know God’s simplicity in God’s self-­demonstration, so it is to be sought only in the prayer that God would make us faithful through his faithfulness: “Faith is straightforwardness corresponding to the divine truthfulness.”92 As such, simplicity is “the climax of the attitude required and necessary in the Church.”93 The church’s simplicity toward Christ (2 Cor 11:2f) is “the basic knowledge in which, without glancing aside to the right hand or the left, they are content with Christ because all things are given them in Him.”94 In this respect, simplicity offers a unique perspective on Barth’s Christological focus that ties our reflections in this chapter together. In a key section-­paragraph of Church Dogmatics I/2, Barth discusses “God’s freedom for man” demonstrated in God’s self-­revelation in Jesus Christ and seeks to show that intrinsic to this freedom is the incarnation’s necessity. Barth explicitly invokes Anselm’s method of faith seeking understanding, then asks “how far the actuality of Jesus Christ is God’s revelation.”95 In order to perceive God’s self-­revelation, we must adhere to the “order of being in Holy Scripture” and so “first we have to put the question of fact, and then the question of understanding.”96 The question of understanding is, we will recall, a matter of understanding how possibility is enclosed within the actuality of Christ, and then grasping all of this as “divine necessity.”97 When discussing the actuality of Christ, Barth explicitly connects it to God’s perfection of unity as he will describe it in Church Dogmatics II/1. Scripture points us to Christ as the actuality of God’s revelation, and thereby “points to an actuality that is utterly simple, as simple as anything else in the world, as simple as only God is.”98 This actuality is also as utterly “once-for-all (einmalige) as God is Thompson and Christiaan Mostert (Adelaide: Australian Theological Forum, 2000), 220–1. However, if my reading is correct, then Barth has really only grounded God’s simplicity in the whole of its enactment. 92  II/1:460. 93  Ibid. 94  III/2:303. 95  I/2:44/49, rev; cf. I/2:8. 96  I/2:7/9, rev. 97  I/2:8/9. 98  I/2:10/11.

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once-for-all.”99 In short, the fullness of God’s self-­revelation in Christ is the fullness of God’s simplicity and uniqueness. And to this extent, the unity of God’s actuality in Christ proves that the incarnation “was needed in order that God might become manifest to us, that He might be free for us.”100 Two notable consequences follow from this strongly Christological description of God’s unity – especially in its aspect of simplicity. First, it forbids any dissolution of Christ himself into any element of the church’s confession. Simplicity functions here to prioritize Christ himself over the complexities of experience, faith, preaching, tradition, and theology. Text and commentary are strictly distinguished and unconfused: “The christological dogma, like that of the Trinity, is obviously not the text but the commentary on the text.”101 The text in question is the utterly perspicacious reality of Christ himself, who remains Lord over the church and her theology and thus has “the final word.”102 Confession of God as God is in Christ thus combats the idolatrous temptation to domesticate the gospel for ideological ends, confusing the Creator with his creation. Second, the simplicity of this “fact” means there is nothing more absolute with which theology must deal than that which encounters it in Christ alone.103 There is no more absolute simplicity that relativizes the simple actuality of Jesus Christ, nor is there any higher necessity: “we honour the actual will of God visible in the event of His revelation, as the source and inner concept of all necessity.”104 The simplicity of Christ’s actuality in this sense is not merely relative, but it is also absolute in its binding authority and intensity. This means the prioritization of Christology for dogmatics, as opposed to the doctrine of God: “by definition christological thinking forms the unconditional basis for all other theological thinking.”105 All of this gives some weight to Barth’s statement that unity “of the Son of God with man in Jesus Christ is itself the simplicity of God.”106 God is simple in his self-­determination to be with us in Christ, and of any other simplicity we need not confess and may not speak. What Barth finds in Christ  – God’s enacted simplicity  – is evidence of God’s eternally free decision to love the world, a loving freedom that   II/1:12/13.   I/2:43. 101   I/2:13. 102   I/2:24; cf. I/2:8; IV/2:118, 121–2. 103   I/2:35. 104   I/2:37. 105   IV/3:175. 106   II/1:446.     99

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grounds the only necessity relevant for the confession of God as God is. Consequently, the anti-­nominalist kind of divine self-­correspondence he seeks to trace out in §29, with its attendant Christological form and content developed in §31, is a natural outworking of his emphasis on God’s freedom to love set forth in §28. As such, the simplicity of God’s self-­determination forbids any confession of God as God apart from the name of Jesus Christ, in whom the covenant between God and humanity finds its temporal and eternal unity, and God’s self-­determination finds its correspondence in both form and content. How this is so, and the consequences it has for God’s relation to the world, are questions to which we may now turn.

6 Barth on the Electing God’s Relation to Creation

Our aim in Chapter 4 was to uncover the formal orientation and material object of Barth’s doctrine of God, which are ultimately coincident with one another in that theology seeks to understand God in the only way he exists, namely, in self-­determination. God’s actuality is that of his self-­determination to be God for us in Christ, and so theological inquiry attempts to understand this actuality by grasping its inner necessity. Theology perceives the necessity of any object of faith  – the impossibility of its existing otherwise than the way it is – by understanding its determination by God’s mind and will, even when this object of faith is God himself. As it applies to the doctrine of God, then, theology grasps the necessity of divine actuality by grasping God’s self-­determination, his “own conscious, willed and accomplished decision.”1 Through an analysis of God’s loving in freedom, we saw that Barth consciously distances his account of God’s eternal perfection from the general metaphysical and teleological constraints ingredient to the scholastic and Ritschlian notions of divine love. With his account of God’s freedom, Barth specified that God is free to order his being dispositively in relation to another and thereby condition himself in his love’s free overflow. Loosely speaking, Barth thereby laid the ground for an account of God’s perfection that retained part of the “absoluteness” of the scholastic tradition and the “personality” of the Ritschlian tradition.2 God is freely self-­determined 1 2

 II/1:271/304, rev.  Thus echoing to an extent his former professor, Theodor Häring, in The Christian Faith: A System of Dogmatics, trans. John Dickie and George Ferries (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913), vol. 1, 346: “The only one who, humanly speaking, could make Himself the end of His existence refuses to do so . . . the divineness of God’s own nature

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in relation to another, but the thought of God apart from this self-­ determination is impossible: God in his self-­revelation is that than which nothing greater may be thought (id quod maius cogitare nequit). Hence, within the limits of the Anselmian method we are tracing, Barth’s account tends on proportion to identify theology’s formal orientation and material object. In conclusion, we suggested that this identification anticipates the positive correlation of the doctrine of God with the doctrine of election, the “sum of the gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best” (id quod maius dicere aut audire nequit).3 Naturally, such emphases on God’s freedom and decision raise concerns about possible hints of nominalism in God’s self-­correspondence. In Chapter 5 we specified that the correspondence Barth seeks to establish between God’s being and activity is resolutely anti-­nominalist, encompassing both the form and content of God’s perfection in the whole of its movement from eternity to time. Further, the contours of God’s simplicity in its determination and enactment focus theology’s attention on the name of Jesus Christ, behind whom there is nothing more simple or absolute for our confession of God as God is. But what are the consequences of this anti-­nominalism and Christological description of God’s simplicity for the character of God’s relation to the world? As we will see, Barth’s account of God’s self-­correspondence bears upon his positive correlation of the doctrines of God and election insofar as it is wedded to an account of Christ’s irreducible presence in God’s eternal life, giving it a Christological form and content. All of this is part of Barth’s tendency to trace the correspondence between God’s activity and his self-­determination with greater interest than the correspondence between God’s activity and his being “as such”  – as if there were any such thing. The root cause of this is that Barth considers God’s being and self-­determination coterminous and irreducible one to the other; theology may not concern itself with any other necessity than that of God’s self-­determination. To appreciate this, we need to ask how exactly Barth correlates God’s essence with his self-­determination and how his doctrine of election intensifies his account of God’s self-­correspondence. What are the ontological entailments of self-­determination for God’s being? And what are the theological consequences of the election of grace for God’s

is found in loving.” In other words, Häring protects God’s perfect distinction from the world by characterizing God’s love with his aseity and vice versa, a reciprocity for which Barth lauds Häring (II/1:344). 3  II/2:3.

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self-­correspondence? Finally, what does this say about God’s relation to creation? The aim of the present chapter is to answer these questions by tracing the notion of God’s self-­determination and self-­correspondence through his doctrines of God and election and then to demonstrate their ontological significance for the type of relation God bears to creation. The argument proceeds in two parts, the first of which concerns Barth’s account of the beginning of all God’s ways and works in his electing self-­determination. Here our focus will be on the ontological significance of God’s self-­determination for God’s being, which is especially visible in Barth’s conceptual clarification of self-­determination against the background of Protestant scholastic discussions of God’s immanent activity and the decree. Barth’s clarifications about God’s internal activity ground the positive meaning he assigns to self-­determination as a dispositive act of self-­qualification. Second, we will analyse how this notion of divine internal activity plays into the doctrine of election, where Barth gives a decisively Christological shape to the correspondence between God’s internal and external activity. The overall result is that Barth solidifies the tendency announced in his doctrine of God’s being-in-act and perfections to trace the correspondence of God’s acts to his self-­determination rather than to his nature as such. In conclusion we will explore the relation between God and the world that results from the preceding account of God’s eternal life. The positive notion of divine self-­determination and the restriction to tracing divine self-­correspondence within its bounds results in an account of God’s real relation to creation. This is demonstrated by looking at how Barth’s view presupposes something analogous to certain late-­medieval nominalist accounts of real relations that sought to uphold God’s qualitative distinction from creation. What emerges is a portrait of God’s relation to history that formally conforms to the logical strictures of the aforementioned accounts of real relations. Such is the consequence of Barth’s increasing consistency in binding theological thought and speech to the object of faith understood in light of its necessity, or “conformity to law” – that is, its conformity to God’s self-­ determination. Barth’s theology therefore inclines toward an account that specifies God’s own teleology in his self-­determination, resulting in a real relation to history without sacrificing God’s antecedent perfection. These features of Barth’s thought distinguish him both from the scholastic tradition that preceded him and the Ritschlian tradition in which he was trained, while yet retaining vestiges of their influence. Therefore this chapter will set the stage for our concluding reflections on the ordering

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of theology and economy, how God’s relation to the world is intelligible only against the background of teaching on God’s eternal perfection, and how such teaching enables a genuinely theological acknowledgment of God as God in distinction from and relation to creatures.

The Decree’s Necessity and the Question of God’s Self-Correspondence At the beginning of all God’s ways and works stands his election of himself to be God for humanity and of humanity to be his covenant partner. Everything else that dogmatics says about God’s works derives from this first decision such that election is analogous in its distribution throughout Barth’s thought to the role the doctrine of creation plays for Aquinas. Indeed, in many respects it functions similarly as the hidden element in the Church Dogmatics, giving shape to everything else even where it is not explicitly invoked. If theology is an extended analysis of the statement that “God is,” then election is the “necessary complement to the doctrine of God in the narrower sense” because it tells us that God is the God of the covenant.4 A complete description of God is one that makes him “known as the one who in virtue of his innermost essence, willing, and being does not stand outside all relations, but stands in a definite relation to another externally (ad extra).”5 Behind this decision theology may not seek God. And if this decision is God’s self-­determination for fellowship with his covenant partner in Christ, then Christ’s humanity has “theological necessity” as the “first and final basis in the root of all Christian knowledge and thinking.”6 This careful correlation of the doctrines of God and election is precisely what we have argued is anticipated in Barth’s doctrine of God “in the narrower sense.” Locating the doctrine of election within the doctrine of God enables Barth to provide a material basis for his conviction that theological understanding consists in apprehending the necessity of the objects of faith, which in this case means  II/2:11/10, rev. “Therefore, this primal relation (Urbeziehung) belongs to the doctrine of God itself. The doctrine of God would be incomplete without the extension necessitated by this primal relation, without the inclusion of the decision which precedes and characterizes and gives rise to all God’s work ad extra” (II/2:52/55, rev). See also Barth’s comments on the dogmatic location of the doctrine of election in II/2:76–93. 5  II/2:6/4, rev. Throughout these opening pages, Barth speaks of how theology, if it is obedient, is bound to the determinate relation (bestimmten Beziehung) – or more intimately, the determinate relationship (bestimmten Verhältnis), God’s determinate conduct (bestimmten Verhalten) – in which God is known as God or not known at all. 6  IV/2:34–5. 4

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understanding it as impossible that the one who loves in freedom might not be Jesus Christ. Election is thus the doctrine in which Barth specifies the teleology God posits for himself, making good on the possibilities opened in the critical reconstruction of God’s perfection as his loving in freedom. Central to this eternal beginning designated by election is the internal act of God’s self-determination. Our task in the next two sections of this chapter is to explore conceptually how Barth construes the ontological significance of self-­ determination for God’s being, which will require us to explore the intelligibility of self-­determination as an immanent act identical with the decree, and the decree’s function in God’s self-­correspondence. Especially in this notion of election as an internal or immanent act we find some conceptual clarity regarding how Barth construes the dispositive significance of self-­determination for God’s being. It is standard in Reformed scholastic thought to preface a discussion of the decree with consideration of divine operations, including the personal works (opera Dei personalia) and essential works (opera essentialia), the distinction between internal and external acts, their complex taxonomy, and their relation to divine simplicity and immutability. It is precisely these issues Barth engages and seeks to reform that prove most illuminating for self-­determination’s ontological character. Moreover, his concerns here are never far removed from the doctrine of election and divine self-correspondence. We may therefore approach this constellation of issues through two criticisms Barth levels against the traditional doctrine of the decree in Reformed theology. Both criticisms have a twofold reference first to God’s self-­correspondence in revelation and second to the binding nature of this self-­correspondence (the necessity of God’s revelation). In each of Barth’s responses, he further specifies the character of self-­determination ontologically and its consequences for God’s self-­correspondence. The first criticism relates to how the Protestant scholastics conceive of the decree as an act of God, which Barth wants to understand as a genuine activity that carries a correspondingly genuine necessity for theological inquiry. Laudably, the scholastics describe the decree as an internal act of God’s will that is identical with his essence, which orders the relation between God and the creature.7 Barth observes that at this point they capture an insight into a special turning, movement, and decision in God, but they compromise this immediately with their doctrines of simplicity and 7

 II/1:519–20, citing Johannes Wollebius, Compendium theologiae Christianae (London: T. Longman, 1709), I.iii.

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immutability. Suddenly all notes of movement in God’s will are deemed “improper,” such as when they treat God’s antecedent will (voluntas antecedens), or will of good-­pleasure (voluntas beneplaciti), as genuine and proper, but treat his consequent will (voluntas consequens), or will of the sign (voluntas signi), as improper.8 The net effect of treating the latter, relative elements of God’s will as improper is to blunt the binding force of revelation. Unless what we encounter in history is God’s antecedent as much as consequent will, we cannot be sure “we have to do with God Himself and not with an appearance.”9 In this way, Barth faults the Reformed scholastic tradition with failing to give an adequate account of the decree’s binding necessity for obedient theological understanding. This involves Barth in a sustained renovation of the traditional doctrine of God that ensures the decree’s form as an activity and movement is as “proper” to God internally as it is externally, thus resisting what he believes are the nominalist notes of immobility in the Reformed accounts. The concept of self-­determination that results is one in which God can qualify himself in something like a transcendent, self-­moved, dispositive act. As a strictly historical analysis, Barth’s concerns with the scholastic distinctions in God’s will are inflated.10 However, readings of Barth focused on such historiographical matters risk devolving into a form of what we might call “irreverent exposition” (expositio irreverentialis). That Barth revered and sought to understand the Protestant scholastics is beyond doubt, but he did not do so as a mere historian.11 Throughout our analysis, we ignore questions of Barth’s qualities as a historian to focus solely on what his perceived problems with the Protestant scholastic tradition say about his own thoughts.  II/1:520; II/2:79.  II/1:593. This is also the substance of Barth’s critique of the “mythological” picture of the pactum salutis, in which apparently different subjects with distinct wills make an agreement: “The result was an uncertainty which necessarily relativized the unconditional validity of the covenant of grace, making it doubtful whether in the revelation of this covenant we really had to do with the one will of the one God. If in God there are . . . different subjects, who are indeed united in this matter, but had first of all to come to an agreement, how can the will of God seen in the history of the covenant of grace be known to be binding and unequivocal, the first and final Word of God?” (IV/1:65). 10  See especially Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725 [PRRD], 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 3:456–73. 11  See Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer, Karl Barth and Post-­Reformation Orthodoxy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015). Relevant in this connection is Barth’s view of church history as a theological task: John Webster, Barth’s Earlier Theology: Four Studies (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 91–117. 8 9

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The second criticism relates to how the Protestant scholastics conceive of the decree abstractly as a general account of how God’s essence relates to the world operating from equally general notions of teleology and providence.12 Such notions of deity in general owe more to metaphysical than Christological pressures, according to Barth. This again sacrifices both the correspondence between God in himself and in his works toward us and the binding necessity of this correspondence. Against identifying the deepest reality of the decree in an inaccessible “good-­pleasure” hidden within God’s eternal life – the “absolute decree” (decretum absolutum) – Barth identifies both God’s good-­pleasure and the decree concretely with Jesus Christ so that election avoids all hints of nominalism and carries a correspondingly genuine necessity for theological inquiry. The decree is therefore the “concrete decree (decretum concretum) of the election of Jesus Christ,” election thereby conforming to the “concrete form” God gives his love in Christ.13 Jesus Christ is the decree, decision, and good-­ pleasure of God such that we find included in him “everything else that God also wills and is also the content of His decree, but in such a way that this is subordinate to that first, as determined by and adjusted to it.”14 This is part of Barth’s concern with the Reformed doctrine of the covenant of redemption (pactum salutis), which is a “purely innertrinitarian decision” that cannot serve as the basis of the covenant of grace because of the “absence of the one who must be present as the second partner at the institution of the covenant to make it a real covenant, that is, man.”15 Barth therefore renovates both the doctrine of the decree and the theologoumenon of the covenant of redemption such that election has an irreducibly Christological form and content. In Jesus we see God’s eternal will, “not only what the will of God is, but also what it was and what it will be.”16 Jesus Christ is therefore both the electing God and the elected man, eternally present in God’s life as “the absolute decision . . . made in respect of all things, and not least ourselves,” for which reason only the concrete decree of Christ’s election is “necessary, inescapable, claiming and controlling us wholly and utterly.”17 Interpreted thus, God’s  II/1:520.  II/2:169/173, rev; IV/2:779. 14  II/1:521/586, rev. 15  IV/1:66. Barth appreciates how the pactum salutis depicts God’s “eternal Testament, which is executed between the Father and the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit” as “a happening,” to which its historical fulfillment corresponds (Gespräche 1964–1968, 78). 16  II/2:156. 17  II/2:160. 12 13

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self-­determination involves an irreducible Christological element, with decisive consequences for the character of God’s self-­correspondence. What results is an emphasis on the correspondence of God’s external acts with his self-­determination over their correspondence with his nature as such, which reinforces Barth’s commitment to allowing nothing more absolute than God’s self-­demonstration in Christ to establish the directionality of God’s self-­correspondence. With these criticisms in view, each of the following two subsections will approach the analysis of God’s self-­determination through the substance of Barth’s respective responses to these perceived shortcomings. In the first section we will explore the decree’s form and content as an act, turning, and movement, and in the second we will explore the decree’s form and content as concretely bound to the man Jesus Christ. Through each of these responses, we will encounter a clearer portrait of God’s eternal perfection as it grounds God’s relation to creation, which we will consider in the conclusion.

The Decree’s Form and Content as God’s Internal Activity We may begin by turning to Barth’s first criticism of the Reformed doctrine of the decree, which concerns its character as an immanent activity. As we suggested already, Barth’s critical engagement with Protestant scholastic notions of God’s internal activity is an especially illuminating window into the ontological dynamics of divine self-­determination. In this section we need to grasp how Barth critically interprets the notion of the decree as an internal act, which is “properly” described as an action, movement, turning, and decision in God’s life. What does it mean to predicate “turning” and “decision” to God properly? And what does this presuppose about the nature of God’s eternal perfection? In this respect divine internal activity relates to and brings together several themes we have already encountered. Barth states explicitly that election is an internal act with reference to God’s external works (opera Dei ad extra interna), or an outgoing internal act.18 This specific kind of internal act is identical with predestination or election and indicates the “transition . . . from God’s being in and for Himself to his being as Lord of creation.”19 In this transition, God’s inner perfection “overflows” into his history with creatures, declaring the decision in which God is who he is. Here we find  II/2:79.  II/2:175/192.

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a clear distinction between God’s inner being and his external works, centered on the internal, transitional act that designates the dynamic transition from one to the other. Furthermore, this transitional act internal to God’s life accounts for the overflow of God’s perfection, a thematic notion we encountered in his account of God’s loving. When discussing the nature of this transitional act, Barth has some critical things to say about how this internal work with an external term (opus internum ad extra) sits uncomfortably next to the traditional scholastic understandings of divine simplicity and immutability. Barth’s alternatives to these traditional understandings are part of his reinterpretation of divine internal activity, so we will need to look to his doctrine of God’s constancy to uncover the conditions under which God’s internal activity is properly turning, decision, and movement in God. With these considerations in view, we will be prepared to see the positive significance of divine self-­ determination, illustrated through Barth’s characteristic use of overflow language.

Immanent Activity and the Decree in Protestant Scholasticism It will be helpful at this point to sketch an overview of Reformed scholastic accounts of God’s immanent activity before turning to Barth’s critical appreciation of them. Accounts of God’s activity and the distinctions therein often constitute a distinct locus in Reformed scholastic theologies, typically located directly after the formal doctrine of God and immediately prefacing or at least part of topics included in the decree.20 Questions addressed in this locus pertain to what characterizes the difference between internal and external acts, distinctions in kinds of internal acts, the nature of unity and distinctions in external acts, and the principles and ends of God’s acts. The most basic distinction is that between immanent (ἐμμένοντα) and transitive (μεταβαίνοντα) activity: immanent acts “are those that remain in the agent and which do not extend outside the agent, as to perceive in the senses, or understanding and willing in the mind,” whereas transient actions extend beyond the agent; the former are the perfection of the agent (actus perfecti), and the latter are the perfection of the thing made (actus imperfecti).21 As it concerns divine immanent activity, there are further distinctions between personal and essential acts. The internal personal acts (opera personalia) are either  Polanus, Syntagma IV.i–iv; Turretin, Institutio IV.i–ii; Wollebius, Compendium I.iii. Additionally, see Muller, PRRD 4:257–74. 21  Polanus, Syntagma IV.iv, 237; Turretin, Institutio V.i.xii. 20

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the nondeliberative, natural acts of relation like begetting and spirating (opera relationis), or are actions of one person on another according to an existing relation between them (opera simpliciter personalia).22 Personal internal works therefore either ground or presuppose a relation between two divine persons. These internal works have no reference to an external term, nor are they productive as such of anything outside God’s inner life, for which reason they are designated intrinsically immanent works (opera immanentia per se). Hence, God’s intrinsically immanent activity includes the reflexive knowledge, love, and enjoyment of the Trinity, which is infinite, eternal, unchanging, and wholly complete in the inner-­ trinitarian relations. In distinction from these purely self-­referential acts, the internal essential works (opera essentialia) have the common divine essence as their principle rather than the essence’s mode of existence in one person on account of a distinct personal property. These essential acts refer to “acts immanent and intrinsic in God, but connoting a respect and relation to something outside of God.”23 Such internal acts are those that ground and precede further external works. Hence, not every internal act is strictly an immanent act, and not every external act is simply external: the decree is an internal act that pours forth into external activity (opera immanentia donec exeunt).24 Yet what does it mean to speak of an internal act within God that opens up into an external act, of God’s outgoing internal acts? And how do these acts, particularly the decrees, relate to divine simplicity and immutability? Answering such questions prompts the Reformed to explain what kind of existence the decree has in God’s essence with all the attendant issues raised by God’s simple, pure actuality. Among the relevant issues the Reformed face is the task of clarifying the freedom of the decree, given that whatever is in God is God. Indeed, the decree’s contingency is heightened in the Reformed scholastic ramifications of God’s freedom in terms of spontaneity and indifference. God’s freedom of spontaneity (libertas spontaneitatis) specifies that God is free to will what he chooses without compulsion, whereas his freedom of indifference (libertas indifferentiae) accounts for the fact that God so wills things that he could have positively not willed them.25 And as the decree’s ­contingency  Polanus, Syntagma IV.ii, 236; Turretin, Institutio III.xxiii.xiv–xv; III.xxix.  Turretin, Institutio IV.i.iv. 24  Wollebius, Compendium I.iii, 19; Polanus, Syntagma IV.vi, 240. 25  Turretin, Institutio III.xiv.iii–vii. The libertas indifferentiae has a very limited significance, however. Turretin is clear that God’s indifference does not mean that God is free or neutral with respect to opposites, as if he could will both good and evil (Institutio 22 23

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is heightened, so, too, is the importance of demonstrating that its existence introduces no change in God’s essence. Therefore, one finds discussion of the decree within the doctrines of simplicity and immutability, and vice versa. To this end, authors employ a variety of logical tools to demonstrate how the decree exists in God without introducing change and how it is identical with the divine essence on account of God’s simplicity – to varying degrees of success. We need only grasp a representative example of how Reformed scholastics negotiated these issues to see the difficulties to which Barth addressed his own doctrines of simplicity and immutability. For our purposes we may consider Francis Turretin’s account of the decree as broadly representative of the Reformed scholastic tradition as a whole. Here we find an attempt to hold together the decree’s necessity and contingency in different respects alongside God’s simplicity and immutability, particularly through the use of scholastic logical and rhetorical tools. Turretin opens his doctrine of God by noting that we conceive of God’s attributes as distinct from his essence only because we understand things by way of composition, whereas God’s simplicity and the manner of any attribute’s existence in God exceed our capacities. Cognitive apprehension of the attributes therefore involves the logical tool of abstraction, in which we isolate the attributes intelligibly from their identity with God’s essence and one another.26 He employs similar logical analyses when considering the decree’s compatibility with God’s simplicity, immutability, and freedom. On account of divine simplicity and immutability, the decrees exist in God essentially as identical with his essence and not accidentally as superadded qualities.27 Thus the decree is God’s essence relatively “conceived after the manner (ad modum) X.iii.v). Nor is God free with respect to the exercise of his justice in the sense of indifference, but only in the sense of spontaneity (Institutio III.xix.v). On the complicated history of this idea, see in particular Olivier Boulnois, “Libertas indifferentiae: Figures de la liberté d’indifférence au Moyen Age,” in Mots médiévaux offerts à Ruedi Imbach, ed. A. Atucha, et al. (Porto, Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 405–18. On its incorporation by Reformed theology: Willem J. van Asselt, J. Martin Bac, and Roelf T. te Velde, eds., Reformed Thought on Freedom: The Concept of Free Choice in Early Modern Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010), and the response by Richard Muller, Divine Will and Human Choice: Freedom, Contingency, and Necessity in Early Modern Reformed Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2017). 26  Turretin, Institutio III.v.i–iv. 27  Turretin, Institutio IV.i.vi–vii. Note, however, that the decree is only “metonymically” identical with God’s will, because the two differ inasmuch as God’s will is related to the decree as principle to effect. Polanus, Syntagma IV.vi, 242; cf. Turretin, Institutio IV.ii. vii, III.vii.xii.

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of a vital act determining itself to the production of this or that thing outside of itself.”28 Yet this identity of the decree with God’s essence in our manner of understanding does not detract from God’s freedom. To demonstrate the decree’s contingency and freedom, Turretin considers it in two distinct logical phases. First, the decree is considered directly as it is in fact (in actu exercito) and thus with reference to its external terms. When so considered, we see that God is free “to decree this or that thing” because there is no necessity that God’s decree terminate on any particular object. Alternatively, when considered indirectly with reference to its principle in abstraction from its terms (in actu signato) the decree is not free: “because to decree anything depends upon the internal constitution of God by which he understands and wills. It is free as to the reference (σχέσιν) and external relation, but not as to the absolute existence internally.”29 Consequently, the decree is intrinsically necessary only in the sense that its principle  – God’s knowing and willing  – is eternally and necessarily in act, but the decree remains extrinsically free in relation to its terms (ex parte rei). This necessary existence of the decree on the part of the principle (ex parte principii) secures its compatibility with God’s simplicity and immutability, because the only variable element in the decree is its tendency (tendentia) or external relation, “which modifies but does not compound.”30 If not quite as ingrained systematically within an overarching sapiential inquiry, these logical tools nevertheless resemble Aquinas’s complementary use of God’s simplicity and perfection, as well as his attendant speculative grammar. What is important for us to recognize is that for Turretin, the decree’s identity with God’s essence is located primarily in our mode of understanding (modus intelligendi). So, too, are the manifold distinctions Turretin and several other Reformed scholastics draw with respect to God’s will and the decree: the distinction between the will of the decree and will of the precept (voluntas decreti and praecepti), the will of God’s good-­pleasure and of the sign (beneplaciti and signi), or God’s hidden and revealed will (arcana and revelata). All of these distinctions arise on account of “our manner of conception,” whereas in God they are one.31

 Turretin, Institutio IV.i.vii.  Turretin, Institutio IV.i.xiii; III.vii.xi. 30  Turretin, Institutio IV.i.xvi. 31  Turretin, Institutio III.xv.i; Wollebius, Compendium I.i, 12. Polanus says the distinction between God’s absolute and conditional will “non distinguit ipsam in se voluntatem Dei, sed significationem nominis voluntatis Dei.” Polanus, Syntagma, II.xix, 161. Further: Muller, PRRD 3:456–73. 28 29

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Already we can see in outline some of the positions Barth finds objectionable in his first criticism of the Reformed doctrine of the decree. Two observations will suffice to draw this out. First, Turretin distinguishes the identity of the decree with God’s essence according to an absolute/ relative pairing: absolutely, the decree is God’s essence considered “after the manner of a principle (ad modum principii),” but only relatively and when considered “after the manner of a relation (ad modum relationis)” is the decree’s tendency identical with God’s essence.32 He explains: “no action proceeding from a free will can be God absolutely and in itself, but still can well be called God considered relatively, as a vital act determining itself spontaneously.”33 The net result of this distinction between absolute and relative is, like the corresponding classification of the divine attributes, to make the “absolute” proper and the “relative” improper. We see this in how Turretin restricts all the notes of genuine motion or change in the decree, which is an internal act, to the extrinsic relation God has to the objects of his decree.34 Furthermore, distinct aspects of the decrees differ in their necessity and freedom. On Barth’s reckoning, all of this bifurcation amounts to a dangerous semi-­nominalism that compromises the decree’s form as an activity and turning from corresponding to God internally as much as externally. Making the decree’s tendency something only relatively identical with God’s essence involves a relapse into a static view of God, even if the portrait sketched of Turretin struggles to match that description. As such, bifurcating certain elements of the decree along an absolute/relative axis has the consequence of blunting the sense in which God reveals his own being in his act of decreeing. Barth will want to say something more robust about how even the decree’s tendency and its dynamic notes of movement reveal God absolutely as much as relatively, for there can be no substantive bifurcation here. This same issue is what leads Barth to resist collapsing all the manifold distinctions in God’s will into one simple act. If we cannot affirm a genuine turning and movement in God’s will, witnessed in his dynamic covenant history with Israel, then the relative terms of the distinctions pertaining to the divine will  – God’s will of the sign, of the precept, as well as God’s revealed, conditional, or consequent will  – do not reveal God’s being in himself with the same force as the absolute terms.35 Again, Barth’s concern with  Turretin, Institutio IV.i.xiii–xvii; III.vii.xiv–xv.  Turretin, Institutio IV.i.xv. 34  Turretin, Institutio IV.i.xiii–xvi; III.vii.xiii. 35  Though see Turretin, Institutio IV.ii.ix. Barth’s concerns here must be understood through the lens of his full-­orbed convictions regarding semi-­nominalism we traced in the previous chapter; otherwise, his complaints can seem obscure. 32 33

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this semi-­nominalism is that it blunts the binding force of revelation. So what does he have to say in response?

Immanent Activity, Divine Constancy, and Self-Determination Notably, Barth’s criticism of the Protestant scholastic accounts of God’s immanent activity comes at the end of his analysis of God’s immutability, which he characterizes as God’s “constancy” (Beständigkeit). With this notion Barth seeks to distance himself from what he perceives to be overly metaphysical considerations of God’s immutability, which predominantly define the subject by the predicate rather than vice versa. Where this is done, the sense of movement we gather from God’s external acts is incapable of corresponding to the movement of God’s inner being in both form and content. The result is to lose sight of God’s livingness we find in Scripture such that God is deemed “immobile.”36 The truth is stranger for Barth, because while God is incapable of real diminution or addition, degeneration or rejuvenation of what and who God is as the one who loves in freedom, he is nevertheless free to remain himself in the self-­moved changes that characterize his living relation to history. In his constancy, God remains faithful to himself and is never in danger of losing himself: in his relation to the times and places that he approaches, God is “the one who – as master and in His own way – partakes of their alteration (Wechsel), so that there is something corresponding to that alteration in His own essence. His constancy consists in the fact that He is always the same in every change.”37 God therefore has a “holy mutability” that is contrasted not with immutability tout court but with the unholy mutability of human creatures. This means that God has a “real history” with creatures that involves a “real participation in the existence and essence of the creature moved by Him” – all without detriment to God’s qualitative distinction from creation and his undiminished self-­ sufficiency.38 This enables Barth to affirm a genuinely self-­moved movement of God in history, in which he responds to prayer, relents of his anger, and most demonstratively becomes one with the creature in Christ. These are the remarks that preface his reconsideration of the ontology of the decree relative to God’s being and act.

 II/1:492.  II/1:496/557. 38  II/1:502, 501; cf. Dorner, SCD I, §32, 464. 36 37

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Drawing his account of God’s constancy to a close, Barth states that what is revealed in Christ is the constancy of the one who has bound himself to creation in grace: “God has determined Himself to be this God and no other, to be the love which is active and effective precisely here and in this way in Jesus Christ.”39 And just as Barth does with his account of the freedom of God’s love, he turns to an analysis of the freedom of God’s constancy revealed in Jesus Christ. There is no compulsion that God’s constancy take this specific form, but God nevertheless binds himself to the creature in this form. Explaining this involves elucidating two correlative insights. First, “what did and does happen to and for creation in Jesus Christ must be understood as God’s free decision (Entschluß).”40 In this divine self-­movement we are concerned with a “turning and decision that takes place in the essence of God Himself.”41 Yet this turning can only represent God’s gracious condescension to us, which is free from any necessity higher than God’s good-­pleasure. Complementing this free decision is “that what did and does happen in Jesus Christ must be understood as a necessary resolution (Beschluß) of God.”42 This means that we cannot seek God except where and how he has given himself to be found, which involves his freedom becoming a genuine necessity: “God has raised this His free decision (Entschluß) to a resolution (Beschluß), and has executed it as such . . . we are therefore bound to it and cannot ignore it or live without it  . . . His freedom establishes our necessity.”43 Barth here gestures toward the binding character of revelation that he finds missing in traditional Reformed accounts of the decree. The decree is necessary for us because it is a movement of God’s freedom in which God elevates his own free decision to a necessity, one which we cannot escape because it corresponds to a necessity God has given himself freely and internally. For this reason, when we encounter God’s “resolution,” we find a genuine necessity that corresponds to a real, irrevocable turning and movement in God’s essence itself.44 But just what does Barth mean  II/1:518/582, rev.  II/1:518/583. 41  II/1:518/583, rev. 42  Ibid.; II/2:20/20; IV/1:194–95. 43  II/1:518/583, rev. 44  Sang Eun Lee, Karl Barth und Isaak August Dorner: eine Untersuchung zu Barths Rezeption der Theologie Dorners (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014), 193–5, argues Dorner’s influence to the extent that Barth pairs Entschluß and Beschluß with freedom and necessity, locating both in the a posteriori act of love by which God turns to us, similar inversely to how Dorner correlates both in his a priori “metaphysics of love.” See here Isaak Dorner, Divine Immutability: A Critical Reconsideration, trans. 39 40

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by this real turning and movement of freedom that issues forth necessity even for God’s own being? Robert R. Williams and Claude T. Welch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 166–80; Dorner, SCD §31b.III. In this same vein, we should note the parallels between Barth’s use of these terms and Hegel’s description of the free will’s concretization in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991) §§6–13. Without getting into the details or context of his remarks, it suffices for us to note how Hegel illustrates the transition of the will from a first moment of indeterminacy to a second of determinacy with the terms Entschluß and Beschluß. Entschließen originally meant “to open/unclose” and beschließen “to close.” Hegel plays with the etymological differences and suggests that these words illustrate the character of freedom as both self-­opening and self-­closing: the free subject has an initial moment of pure indeterminacy and universality (openness) that must be overcome by a second moment of determination that closes itself off to possibilities (Philosophy of Right §6). But these two moments only leave us with absolute finitude because both “indeterminate” and “determinate” mutually limit one another. Instead, Hegel offers a third moment that integrates and reconciles the first two: properly understood, the “will is the unity of both these moments” in such a way that the “I” is self-­consistent in all its determinations (Philosophy of Right §7). The reason is pictured in the true character of freedom’s infinite self-­opening (sich entschließen), “which indicates that the indeterminacy of the will itself, as something neutral yet infinitely fruitful, the original seed of all existence, contains its determinations and ends within itself, and merely brings them forth from within” (Philosophy of Right §12). Thus: “Freedom is to will something determinate, yet to be with oneself in this determinacy and to return once more to the universal” – chief examples of which include love and friendship (Philosophy of Right §7). See further, Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 125–30; Franck Fischbach, L’être et l’acte. Enquête sur les fondements de l’ontologie moderne de l’agir (Paris: Vrin, 2002), 74–5; Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Barth himself expressed a fondness for Hegel’s patterns of thought, though his exposure to the philosopher was likely indirect for the most part. See Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1975), 387; Michael Welker, “Barth und Hegel: zur Erkenntnis eines methodisches Verfahrens bei Barth,” Evangelishe Theologie 43 (1983): 307–28. The purpose of making this parallel is purely illustrative: formally Barth’s use of this terminology similarly testifies to a necessity God gives himself in freedom that does not forfeit that freedom but flows from it as its self-­consistent expression. Perhaps this is why Barth says cryptically that “the will of God is free even in His necessity to will Himself, and necessary even in His freedom to will everything else, so that the non posse non velle is determined by His will and the posse non velle is rejected by His will” (II/1:591). God’s deciding is at once an act of negating and choosing, a sovereign positing of necessity and freedom in the unity of both. Here at any rate, these words speak to the freedom of God’s love in binding himself, which perhaps finds its eternal form in the mutual love of the Father and Son by the Spirit: “here and there, before and after, above and below . . . are already, in their original and proper form, quite apart from us and before the world was, the contrasts in God’s own being and life – contrasts which are eternally fruitful, which as such are never sublated (aufgehobenen) even though not ossified in abstract separation, but which subsist always in a mutual relation of self-­opening and self-­closure (sich öffnenden . . . schließenden)” (IV/2:343/383, rev).

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At this point Barth revisits the notion of the decree’s character as an internal act, part of which we have already encountered in his first criticism of the traditional Reformed doctrine. For his construal of God’s constancy Barth acknowledges his indebtedness to Dorner’s critical reconstruction of divine immutability, and this acknowledgment might well be extended to his critique of the Protestant scholastic concept of God’s internal activity.45 In the course of his reconstruction of divine immutability Dorner also has to modify the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity, Barth’s appreciation of which we already saw in his preference for the “German theologians of the 19th Century” in response to the semi-­nominalism of the tradition.46 As it concerns us, Dorner accuses adherents of the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity of an inconsistency when they functionally conceive of God’s inner being as including two moments, one of a primary act (actus primus) and another of a secondary act (actus secundus).47 He maintains that, though scholastic theologians affirm God’s simplicity and pure actuality, they find it necessary to contradict this and suppose that there is at least some transition or interval between God’s reflexive acts of knowing and willing himself and of his knowing and willing himself as the ground of an actual creation. “Thus,” he writes, “in one and the same divine thought whereby God thinks himself in his all-­sufficiency, freedom, and blessedness and at the same time as Creator of the world, there are contained two essentially different thoughts, which indeed may go together in one, but not in one and the same simple thought.”48 On Dorner’s reading, only such a distinction between two moments in God’s actuality – between moments of primary and secondary act – prevents the traditional affirmation that God knows himself and all things in one eternal, simple act from resulting in pantheism. Therefore, God’s inner livingness and vitality must accommodate the movement and transition presupposed in this distinction between two moments, and this requires a corresponding reinterpretation of divine  II/1:493. On Dorner’s doctrine of immutability, see especially Robert Williams, “Introduction,” in Divine Immutability, 1–37; Robert F. Brown, “Schelling and Dorner on Divine Immutability,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53.2 (1985): 237–49. 46  II/1:330. See the discussion in Chapter 5, 178–86. 47  Dorner, Divine Immutability, 141–2 (101, 186). Interpreters of Scotus have identified a similar distinction in his thought: Michael Sylwanowicz, Contingent Causality and the Foundation of Duns Scotus’ Metaphysics (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 73–5; on Scotus’s application of this distinction to opera personalia, see Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 223–9. 48  Dorner, Divine Immutability, 142. 45

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simplicity and immutability that allows for transitivity within God’s perfect inner life. Barth is largely sympathetic to Dorner’s concerns, but he parses the differentiation of moments in God’s life differently. Nowhere does he suggest that God’s inner life should be construed in terms of a distinction between primary and secondary act, but he does offer something analogous when he encourages a “before” and “after” in God’s life (prius et posterius). This is what it means to affirm that God’s being is genuinely in act and therefore self-­moved in his livingness.49 Barth explains when discussing the so-­called absolute/relative distinctions in God’s will: “All these distinctions speak of a movement, a multiplicity of acts in God’s own life. They speak of a real divine ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ a real ‘before’ and ‘after,’ a real ‘thus’ and ‘otherwise.’”50 In such remarks, we see that Barth wants to construe God’s inner activity without explaining it away as improper (improprie).51 He can even state the point forthrightly: “To say that God moves in certain directions is not a mere figure of speech.”52 Consistent with his larger concerns about semi-­nominalism, Barth seeks to draw a tight correspondence between the form of God’s activity externally and internally, and to protect against a general metaphysics interfering with this correspondence. Therefore, the internal acts of God must be understood properly, that is, as designating a real movement, turning, and decision in God. Only by virtue of such a genuine internal act of free love does God posit himself in relation to the creature and really turn himself toward another, conditioning and changing himself in lordly freedom. Thus far we have seen how Barth reconstructs the doctrine of immutability to accommodate a more robust anti-­nominalist construal of God’s inner movement and activity. This is the ontological backdrop to Barth’s account of the decree, and in conclusion we need to grasp its significance for God’s self-­determination. We may approach this significance by exploring Barth’s positive understanding of God’s self-­ determination and what it says about his operative doctrines of simplicity and constancy. First, then, what exactly does it mean to grant self-­determination a “­positive” sense, and how does this differ from negative senses of the concept? Typically whether a given construal affirms a positive or negative significance will depend upon the kinds of functions assigned to divine simplicity. The positive way that God’s internal activity maps  II/1:493, 519.  II/1:592/668; IV/2:343. 51  II/1:520. 52  II/1:593. 49 50

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closely to the form of his external activity suggests that Barth operates with a doctrine of simplicity that allows for us to say something positive, however parsimoniously, about the manner in which God’s life does exist in himself. This leads to a somewhat more isomorphic account of God’s self-­correspondence than what we find in Aquinas and most Protestant scholastics. This positive meaning of simplicity helps us see that the concept of self-­determination as such is not the point where Barth diverges with the scholastic tradition. The notion has a wide currency in scholastic thought, even if it acquires different shades of meaning in different authors. What characterizes Barth in distinction from the authors we have considered is the kind of positive significance he assigns self-­ determination. For example, Aquinas gives self-­determination a strictly negative significance, similar to how divine simplicity only tells us how God does not exist. Recall that statements such as “God is his own goodness” say nothing positive about the manner of God’s identity with his goodness, but only inform us negatively that God is not other than his goodness and vice versa. Thus to say that God is self-­determined is merely to say that God is not determined by another, but it tells us nothing positive about God giving himself a particular determinacy.53 This means that when God wills to create, he does so by ordering all things to himself as their final end. Barth’s conception of God’s self-­moved internal act, on the contrary, suggests that God disposes his own inner perfection. When God wills to elect and create a people for himself, he orders himself as well as his covenant partner.54 God, writes Barth, does not will to be understood otherwise than in this concrete livingness, in this determinacy of His will, which is as such also a determinacy of His essence . . . God is not abstractly Father, Son and Holy Spirit  . . . but rather in determinate relation and resolution: in virtue of the love and freedom in which in the bosom of His triune essence He has disposed (verfügt) Himself from and to all eternity.55

Barth affirms this without sacrificing God’s aseity or falling headlong into voluntarism or nominalism because in self-­determination it is less that God decides “what” or “who” he is, or his own “character,” as much as how he will be what and who he is.56 God therefore always  Ia.19.3.ad5; IIIa.1.1.ad1.  II/1:301; II/2:6–7, 50–2, 100–1; IV/2:31, 84–6. 55  II/2:79/85, rev. 56  Examples of these stronger statements may be found in, inter alia, Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 140; Robert W. Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2002), 70; Jones, The Humanity of Christ, 69; 53 54

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remains distinct from creation and not dependent upon it; neither does he fundamentally change himself in his self-­determination. God always begins with himself and remains Lord over his self-­movement. All the same, self-­determination designates a dispositive act of self-­qualification in which God decides upon the concrete properties of his identity in his decision to be Immanuel. An example of this self-­dispositive character of God’s perfection is visible in the attendant grammar of Barth’s “overflow” language. In Chapter 4 we suggested this language is thematic, and indeed in several places where Barth uses this metaphor, there is a consistent grammatical pattern present that logically presupposes a considerable proportion between God and creation. We first observed this language in Barth’s account of the blessedness of God’s loving: God has no need of us, yet God “finds no satisfaction in His self-­satisfaction” and therefore “turns to us in the overflow of the perfection of His essence and therefore of His loving, and shares with us, in and with His love, its blessedness.”57 While it is tempting to see the reference to God’s dissatisfaction with his own self-­satisfaction as rhetorical, since similar statements may be found in classical authors, this would be overly hasty. Barth employs this very manner of speaking repeatedly in connection with the movement of God’s perfection toward creation.58 Moreover, this theme is central to the crowning perfection of the doctrine of God: “God’s glory is the indwelling Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 113. 57  II/1:283/318, rev; “It implies so to speak an overflow (Überfluß) of His essence that He turns to us. We must certainly regard this overflow as itself corresponding to His essence, belonging to His essence” (II/1:273/307, rev). The Platonic character of this language is not lost on interpreters: Edwin Christian van Driel, Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for a Supralapsarian Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 72–4; Jones, Humanity of Christ, 74–6. 58  Other examples: “[T]his overflowing is conditioned by the fact that although it could satisfy itself, it has no satisfaction in this self-­satisfaction, but as love for another it can and will be more than that which could satisfy itself” (II/1:280/315); “According to His Word and work, God was not satisfied merely with His pure, divine form of existence. His inner glory overflowed outwards” (III/1:68; IV/1:212); “If He loves the world and us, this is a free overflowing of the love in which He is and is God and with which He is not content, although He might be, since neither the world nor ourselves are indispensable to His love and therefore to His being” (IV/2:755/857). Nor is this way of speaking about divine self-­sufficiency new to Barth: “It has to be something more and new and not self-­evident, but a miracle, if He, God, from all eternity is also not content with His own blessedness, if from all eternity He is love.” The Göttingen Dogmatics, 425; cf. The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation, trans. J. L. M. Hare and Ian Henderson (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), 38.

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joy of His divine being which as such shines out from Him, which overflows in its richness, which in its own superabundance does not suffice for itself but communicates itself.”59 This overflow is the movement of God’s self-­glorification, the “transitive unfolding (Transeuntwerden) of His immanent joyfulness.”60 And as might be expected, this external overflow is connected with God’s self-­determination, internal activity, and election: “God determines Himself not to be satisfied in Himself, though He could satisfy Himself. He determines Himself for that overflowing, that movement, that condescension.”61 What are we to make of this? Not too much, but not too little. Barth still affirms that “God knows perfect beatitude in Himself.”62 What is at stake is not therefore whether God is blessed, but how God is blessed in himself. Grammatically, the statement that God could remain satisfied with himself but does not so remain invests a strong realism into the notion of God’s turning or movement toward us. What this suggests is that God knows beatitude in himself, where the “self” in question is inescapably the one who relates to us and not otherwise because this is how God lives his life.63 Such a reading coheres with the way Barth describes God as capable of qualifying or disposing his perfection in relation to something other than himself. God’s perfection possesses a sort of plasticity before God, which Barth describes with the metaphor of overflowing. When he does so, he articulates God’s perfection with the kind of grammatical strictures that typically attend  II/1:647/730, rev.  II/1:648/730, rev; III/1:15. 61  II/2:10/9, rev. Further: “In the fact that He determines to love such another, His love overflows” (II/1:280); in God’s “decree . . . an opus Dei internum ad extra . . . He is no longer alone by Himself, He does not rest content with Himself, He will not restrict Himself to the wealth of His perfections and His own inner life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit” (IV/1:66/70). The theme crops up throughout the doctrine of election: God “might well have been satisfied with the inner glory of His triune being, His freedom, and His love. The fact that He is not satisfied, but that His inner glory overflows and becomes external, the fact that He wills the creation, and the man Jesus as the first-­born of all creation, is grace, sovereign goodness, a condescension inconceivably tender” (II/2:121/130, rev); “He could have remained satisfied with Himself . . . But He did not do so” (II/2:166); “In this primal decision God did not remain satisfied with His own being in Himself. He reached out to something beyond, willing something more than His own being . . . this decision can mean only an overflowing of His glory” (II/2:168). 62  IV/2:346. 63  In this respect Barth again differs from Aquinas: “A being – which might have the highest predicates otherwise – that was quiescent and indifferent in itself, except that there existed a relation between it and the creation corresponding to its rest and indifference, would not be the God present and revealed in man – in this man Jesus. The God of man – of this man – is as such (and it lies within His being that He is to be thus constituted!) wholly resolved, energetic, and active in a definite direction” (III/2:68/79, rev). 59 60

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description of objects in mutually real relations, that is, relations in which both terms are modifiable or in some way proportionate to one another. As we will see later, these grammatical strictures themselves cohere with how Barth understands the God–creation relation. The attendant grammar of this overflow language therefore illustrates the portrait of God’s self-­dispositive perfection that we have traced thus far, and how this ­particular quality enables Barth to interpret God’s internal activity as corresponding in form and content to his external act of condescension in Christ. God’s external movement toward us corresponds to an internal movement toward us: this is God’s internal act that pours forth into external works (opera ad extra interna). In its form and content as an activity, God’s self-­determination for covenant fellowship thus tells of a genuine internal turning, binding, and self-­qualification that reinforces the necessity of God’s self-revelation.64 However, this correspondence still requires a Christological reference for its intelligibility. As we saw in the previous chapter, the name of Christ is the criterion for the correspondence in both form and content theology seeks to trace as it confesses God as God is. Only in the eternal presence of the man Jesus within God do we find the form and content of God’s internal act corresponding to its external form and content as a “history, encounter and decision between God and man.”65 We must now take up this Christological element as it bears upon the second of Barth’s critiques of the Reformed doctrine of the decree.

The Decree’s Form and Content as Christ’s Election In the previous section we traced Barth’s response to his first criticism of the Reformed scholastic account of the decree. Against what he discerns as semi-­nominalist concessions to a static notion of being, Barth revises the traditional doctrine of immutability in order to procure the correspondence of the decree’s form and content as an activity, thus revealing 64 65

 IV/2:35.  II/2:175/192. Barth states that if Jesus had been identified with God’s actio interna, the doctrine of the decree “would at once have acquired a Christian content and could have formed a solid basis for the doctrine of the opera Dei’ (II/1:522). For an example of how Barth employs this insight in the opera Dei ad extra, see his Christological interpretation of the Trinity’s indivisible works in IV/2:128–31, 335–9. That said, apart from the existence of the human covenant partner and therefore this interna actio, already history, encounter, and decision as such exist in the fellowship of the Trinity (IV/2:342–4). But alone this is not history, encounter, and decision between God and humanity.

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the genuine movement, turning, and binding that take place in God’s inner life. Barth’s second criticism involves how the traditional account leaves the decree abstract both with respect to its content and its teleology, which are bound up with one another. When older authors identify the decree with the eternal providence of God, Barth believes they flatten the decree and make its contents irrelevant for its definition and destination.66 As an example, Barth singles out Aquinas’s definition of God’s providence as the eternal pattern (ratio) of the order of all things existing in God.67 The problem is that such a pattern seems to require a relation to the creature apart from God’s self-­determination. Instead, the pattern of the order of all things only belongs to God’s being, as it is “radically identical with the election of grace in Jesus Christ.”68 When defining God’s decision, plan, or good-­pleasure in his decree, “it is impossible to abstract from the content of this event in the interests of a general conception of the relation of God to the world.”69 One side of his concern with the traditional doctrine of the decree is therefore its directionality or teleology, which must be normed by its content and therefore by Jesus Christ.70 However, as we saw earlier, the significance of identifying the decree with Christ also pertains to the anti-­nominalist correspondence of the decree to God’s being in himself. Without the eternal presence of Christ in God’s self-­determination, the covenant of redemption (pactum salutis) could be a “purely intertrinitarian” event that leaves God’s human covenant partner absent and therefore nominalizes the form of God’s covenant with humanity in time. Only by identifying the covenant of redemption with Christ from all eternity may we “give an unequivocal or binding answer to the question of the form (Gestalt) of the eternal divine decree as the beginning of all things.”71 Again we see Barth’s anti-­nominalist convictions about the correspondence between God internally and externally, here heightened with respect to the human element of God’s self-­ correspondence. The obverse side of Barth’s concern with the traditional doctrine of the decree therefore concerns the correspondence of both its content and form with God’s inner being. Both sides of this concern are resolved in election’s Christological form and content. Hence, when we  II/1:520.  Ia.22. 68  III/3:5–6. 69  II/1:521. 70  I am using “teleology” quite loosely in what follows, without connotations of a perfecting causality. 71  IV/1:66/70. 66 67

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see how Barth construes Christ’s eternal presence in God’s life in his doctrine of election, we will at once grasp Barth’s highest realization of God’s self-­correspondence and God’s self-­determined teleology. The task of this section is to offer a reading of God’s self-­correspondence as the electing God, which involves first demonstrating how Barth seeks to invest the decree with a necessarily Christological form and content within God’s inner life. Second, we will proceed to show how circumscribing divine self-­correspondence within the formality of God’s immanent acts ordered to an external term (opera immanentia donec exeunt) helps to alleviate lingering elements of nominalism in Barth’s doctrine of God. As Barth distances himself from these nominalist vestiges, he also specifies God’s teleology concretely in Christ’s history. The internal act in which God disposes his perfection teleologically finds it terminus and external correspondence in the covenant fellowship God establishes and perfects with creatures in Christ. The final section of this chapter will argue that this construal of God’s self-­correspondence entails that God bears a real relation to creation.

The Decree’s Christological Objectivity Our first task is to glimpse how Barth impresses a Christological form and content on the decree so as to secure the correspondence of God’s covenant activity with his inner life. At this point it serves us to recall our analysis of Church Dogmatics §28 where we argued that Barth binds theological thought to understanding God as he relates to creation and not otherwise, for God’s self-­revelation is that than which we are not permitted to think of anything greater. Through the analysis of love and freedom we demonstrated that God’s loving includes within itself a reference both to its logically antecedent ground and its logically subsequent term; God’s loving is poised between an internal and external term and may not be understood apart from the active relation these terms describe. The function of God’s freedom is to specify the living depths of God’s sovereignty even with respect to his own perfection; God is free to dispose his perfection as he pleases. In our analysis of §29, we argued that the kind of correspondence Barth seeks to establish is that of the form and content of God’s internal life and external works. Moreover, God’s enacted simplicity means that this form and content find their criterion in the name of Jesus Christ. Theology obediently avoids all nominalist evasions of revelation only by tracing this correspondence in form and content, thereby demonstrating the necessity of God’s self-­revelation in Christ for

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theological thought. We cannot look to another form or content but must know only the crucified and risen Christ. The way Barth employs this pattern sacrifices neither God’s antecedent perfection nor the full reality of this perfection’s identification with us in and through Christ. This same pattern of theological reasoning and its anti-­nominalist convictions are operative throughout Barth’s doctrine of election. In God’s actual love and freedom he is the electing God, so any genuinely Christian proposition will “necessarily reflect both in form and content this divine electing.”72 Most relevant to our inquiry, this pattern of reasoning plays a considerable role in the knowledge of election and in the kind of correspondence Barth seeks to establish between God’s electing activity in history and God’s own being in himself. As it concerns the knowledge of the electing God, Barth stridently adheres to an inductive form of inquiry: looking “only upon and to the name of Jesus Christ” do we know “who God is, and what the meaning and purpose of His election is, and the extent to which (inwiefern) God is the electing God.”73 Christ forms the basis of our knowledge of the doctrine of election, for here alone is the thought of God’s gracious electing always necessary and compulsory. Therefore, Christ must have some fundamental place within God’s self-­correspondence as the electing God. And, consistent with the unity of form and content articulated in §29, this means that Christ will find a place in both antecedent and subsequent poles of God’s actuality. Knowledge of election is only obedient and confident when it submits itself to the secret of God’s good-­pleasure in taking “the character and form (Gestalt) and content (Inhalt) displayed to us in God’s revelation.”74 This flows straightforwardly from Barth’s anti-­nominalist convictions: Scripture speaks to Christ as the one who elects (John 13:18; 15:16–19), and so “in their strictest and most proper sense” these statements correspond to God’s being in himself.75 Alongside other texts that imply Christ is the elected of God (Eph 1:4), Barth concludes that Christ is eternally the subject and object of election.76 Barth situates this account within a firm trinitarian framework, articulated in terms reminiscent of  II/2:77.  II/2:54/58, rev; II/2:4, 59, 89–92. 74  II/2:157/170. 75  II/2:106. For more on Barth’s exegesis in this respect, see Mary Kathleen Cunningham, What Is Theological Exegesis? Interpretation and Use of Scripture in Barth’s Doctrine of Election (Valley Forge: Trinity Press, 1995), 19–49; van Driel, Incarnation Anyway, 67–72. 76  II/2:102–3. 72 73

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the covenant of redemption: the Father chooses to establish the covenant by giving his Son to be one with humanity, the Son chooses to obey this gracious decision and to offer himself up for humanity, and the Spirit resolves to affirm the unity of the Father and Son in this covenant. But, as Barth pleads in his infamous excursus on the Johannine prologue, precisely what we mean by Son or Logos may not be abstracted from the name of Jesus Christ.77 Barth draws this conclusion from the presence of “this one was” or “this was he” (οὗτος ἦν) in both John 1:2 and 1:15, namely, that the Word is the “same” as Jesus.78 On this basis he says that Colossians will speak of the Son’s creative agency concretely as Jesus Christ, the head of the Church, rather than as the Logos (Col 1:17). It is not an abstract Logos that we must keep in view in the doctrine of election, but the concrete Logos that is Jesus Christ because only in him does the fullness of the Godhead dwell bodily (Col 1:19; 2:9), and only his name is given to us as that by which we may be saved (Acts 4:12).79 Barth’s argument that the self-­posited teleology of the Logos is his identity as Jesus Christ, and therefore that Christ is the electing God from all eternity, is most obviously the strangest relative to the tradition. It has also occasioned the most controversy about whether and to what extent Barth intends or warrants any substantive ontological revisions to his doctrine of the Trinity with this formulation.80  II/2:95–9. In the terms of our inquiry: for Barth, the λόγος ἄσαρκος is the Word of God in abstracto, the “content of a necessary and important concept in trinitarian doctrine when we have to understand the revelation and dealings of God in the light of their free basis in the inner being and essence of God” (IV/1:52). But since this “free basis” is that of his love, then we must understand the Word or Son, together with the Father and Spirit, “not in abstracto . . . but rather in determinate relation and resolution: in virtue of the love and freedom in which in the bosom of His triune essence He has disposed Himself from and to all eternity” (II/2:79/85, rev). In other words, we can no more abstract the Word from his content and form as Jesus Christ than we can understand God apart from his relation to creation: “Jesus Christ is the content and form of the first and eternal Word of God . . . the content and form of the eternal divine counsel exactly as it is fulfilled and revealed in time” (IV/1:53–4). From all eternity, then, the Word is the “very God and very man He will become in time” (IV/1:66). The Son’s self-­posited teleology is the union of his divine essence with humanity, determining and giving himself this form irrevocably (IV/2:86–8). This means the λόγος ἄσαρκος is always becoming the λόγος ἔνσαρκος (either as the Word incarnandus before creation or as the God-­man who actively unites his divinity with his humanity in history), so any abstract appeal to the former apart from this concrete determination fails to obediently grasp God’s willed necessity. See further Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming, 83–9. 78  II/2:98. 79  II/2:98–9. 80  This debate is sufficiently represented, but not exhausted, by the essays collected in Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology, ed. Michael T. Dempsey (Grand 77

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Fortunately these much-­debated questions about the Trinity and election are not directly relevant to our concerns, but a few comments are in order about why before proceeding. Our purpose in the current analysis is strictly to understand the significance of Barth’s affirmation that Christ is the electing God and elected man for the anti-­nominalist manner of God’s self-­correspondence he seeks to establish. In the previous chapter we identified Barth’s concern to trace the form and content of God’s self-­ correspondence in the divine perfections, and here we are arguing this same concern (among others) is part of what animates his account of Christ as the subject and object of election. Such matters are not directly addressed in the disputes about Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity, which are most basically concerned with the logical or ontological priority of God’s triunity or self-­determination. Such questions are relevant to the kind of analysis undertaken here, but only tangentially. Irrespective of whether the Trinity or self-­determination has logical priority, the question still remains whether or not the internal and external poles of God’s beingin-act correspond to one another in both form and content. Our present argument is that the concern for God’s self-­correspondence in election according to both form and content is more to the heart of Barth’s moral and theological concerns than questions about what kind of ontology he instantiates. If true, this means that questions such as the logical or ontological priorities of Barth’s “actualism” are downstream from his more pressing concern to trace God’s self-­correspondence. Since an indirect implication of our argument is that so far these debates have not tackled the question of divine self-­correspondence sufficiently, our analysis tries to approach one of the core issues in a different light. This overlooked concern for the form and content of God’s self-­ correspondence in election is one of several issues motivating Barth’s departure from and corrective to the traditional Reformed doctrine of election.81 Here we have seen that it arrives in the form of a question Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011); van Driel, Incarnation Anyway, 83–105; Bruce L. McCormack, “The Doctrine of the Trinity after Barth: An Attempt to Reconstruct Barth’s Doctrine in Light of His Later Christology,” in Trinitarian Theology after Barth, ed. Myk Habets and Phillip Tolliday (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke & Co, 2012), 87–118; Kevin W. Hector, “Immutability, Necessity and Triunity: Towards a Resolution of the Trinity and Election Controversy,” Scottish Journal of Theology 65.1 (2012): 64–81; George Hunsinger, Reading Barth with Charity: A Hermeneutical Proposal (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015). 81  For other issues surrounding his doctrine of election, see Hans Theodor Goebel, Vom freien Wählen Gottes und des Menschen: Interpretationsübungen zur “Analogie” nach Karl Barths Lehre von der Erwählung und Bedenken ihrer Folgen für die Kirchliche Dogmatik (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990); Matthias Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher

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about the presence of God’s human covenant partner at the beginning of this covenant in God’s eternal decree. Another way of stating this is that the primary objectivity in which God knows himself as the electing God needs Christ for its intelligibility if this knowledge is the basis of the secondary objectivity in which God gives himself to be known as the electing God.82 In this sense, we may speak of a primary and secondary Christological objectivity where objectivity encompasses both form and content. Already we have suggested that without an internal Christological form and content, the decree would fail to correspond in both form and content to the human element of God’s external covenant fellowship. Hence, without a primary Christological objectivity, the decree’s secondary Christological objectivity fails to correspond to God’s being. This problem lies underneath the surface of some concluding comments to Barth’s positive account of Christ’s election: Because it is identical with the election of Jesus Christ, the eternal will of God is a divine activity in the form of the history, encounter and decision between God and man . . . If we are correct in saying this, we must say that the name and person of Jesus Christ was in the beginning with God. The will of God was His self-­ giving on behalf of man in the concrete form (konkreten Gestalt) of the union of His own Son or Word with the man Jesus of Nazareth. And as such this beginning is life, the life of a history, encounter and decision.83

As we see here, Christ’s eternal presence in God’s self-­determination provides for the internal, theanthropic form and content of the fellowship established by election that corresponds to this fellowship in the decree’s execution. God’s self-­ determination includes humanity as it includes Christ, and so God’s eternal will is a history, encounter, and decision on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-­Theological Comparison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); David Gibson, Reading the Decree: Exegesis, Election and Christology in Calvin and Barth (London: T&T Clark, 2009); Shao Kai Tseng, Karl Barth’s Infralapsarian Theology: Origins and Development 1920–1953 (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2016). 82  See here Barth’s discussion of God’s objectivity in §25.1. 83  II/2:175–6/192. Again: Christ is “the concrete and manifest form (Gestalt) of the divine decision – the decision of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – in favor of the covenant to be established between Him and us” (II/2:105/113); the older doctrine of predestination “did not acknowledge [God] as they saw Him in His work, or with the determinacy and form (Gestalt) of His temporal action” (II/2:149/162, rev); “If we would do proper justice to the interests of predestination . . . we cannot do better than hold to the fact that its content (Inhalt) is God’s eternal will in the concrete form (Form) of this particular history” (II/2:194/214). These and similar statements vindicate Sonderegger’s claim that Barth’s theology “is not simply Christocentric, it is Christomorphic, conformed to the shape of Revelation” (“On Style,” 79).

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between God and humanity. Barth argues the point exegetically from the first chapter of Ephesians, noting two movements from general statements about the blessings of God’s decree to concrete statements about its Christological form and content. Paul says generally that God “blessed (εὐλογήσας) us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Eph 1:3), and then moves quickly to the particular: “he chose us in him before the foundation of the world . . . he predestined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will” (Eph 1:4–5). Later in the same sentence, there is again a movement from the general “good-­pleasure” (εὐδοκίαν) to unite things in Christ (Eph 1:9–10) to the particulars: “in him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose (πρόθεσιν) of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph 1:11). Barth comments: “From these passages . . . we gather that the concrete form (Gestalt) of the divine blessing (εὐλογία), and of the good-­pleasure (εὐδοκία) of the eternal purpose (πρόθεσις) is in fact that predestination (προορίζειν) which will be made known by the existence of the Church (Eph 3:10), so assuredly did God ‘purpose his eternal plan (πρόθεσις) in Jesus Christ our Lord.’”84 He concludes, in all these passages “the reference is to the beginning of all God’s external ways and works . . . under the name of Jesus Christ, whose person is that of the executor within the universe and time of the primal decision of divine grace, the person itself being obviously the content of this decision.”85 Jesus Christ is the form and content of God’s self-­ determination, and so this determination is already in eternity a history of encounter and decision between God and humanity. This is precisely what Barth believes the older tradition failed to secure with its abstract doctrine of the decree. Only Christ’s presence at the eternal beginning of all things, as both the form and content of the decree, prevents the covenant of redemption from being a “purely intertrinitarian” event that would nominalize the theanthropic form and content of the decree’s execution in history. Confirmation of this concern may be seen in how the question of the form and content of God’s eternal will crescendos in the final stages of Barth’s exposition of Christ’s election in Church Dogmatics II/2 §33. Two points especially stand out in this material, which are relevant for demonstrating the significance of specifying the decree’s form and content with  II/2:102. Barth makes the same point later from Eph 1:4 in connection to the οὗτος of Jn 1:2 (II/2:110). 85  II/2:103. 84

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Christ. Respectively, Barth identifies Christ with the form and content of election first by placing Christ at the beginning of God’s eternal act of election, and second by specifying that Christ crucified and risen is the eternally elected man. With these affirmations Barth establishes a basis for resolving a difficulty present in his treatment of the divine perfections, which we will examine momentarily. First, Barth resists the tradition’s hermeneutical principle that sought to find something more than Christ in the Word of God. When the older tradition read of the decree, “there suddenly seemed to open up before them the vista of heights and depths beyond and behind the Word which calls and justifies and sanctifies us.”86 Instead, Barth maintains that we restrict our knowledge of election to the name of Jesus Christ and seek no other Word or decree beyond or behind his name. Barth applies this insight thoroughly to election’s eternal character such that at no logical point does God’s electing activity take place except in and through Christ. Just what it means to say that election takes place “in” or “through” Christ in pretemporal eternity depends on how one interprets the relation between Trinity and election. Irrespective of one’s view on this matter, it nevertheless remains true minimally that Christ is present in God’s act of self-­determination, lending it both form and content.87 If Jesus is really the one who was, is, and is to come (Rev 1:8), then he must be eternally present at the beginning of all things before time as the form and content of the decree just as much as he is and will be so for all eternity.88 The net effect of this argument is to invest the internal activity of the decree with a necessarily Christological objectivity so that as we know ectypally the electing God in Christ, so, too, God knows himself archetypally as the electing God in Christ.89  II/2:151.  On the various senses in which Christ could be interpreted as the electing God, see van Driel, Incarnation Anyway, 101–3. 88  II/2:153; IV/3:44–5, 293–316. Here Barth is gesturing toward his account of eternity’s threefold form as pretemporal, supratemporal, and posttemporal, on which see George Hunsinger, “Mysterium Trinitatis: Karl Barth’s Conception of Eternity,” in Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 186– 209; Daniel Griswold, Triune Eternality: God’s Relationship to Time in the Theology of Karl Barth (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). There is no pretemporal eternity conceivable without Christ (II/1:621–3; II/2:104–5, 116–17, 152–4). 89  This suggests how in Christ we are “ready” to know God as the electing God: “the only begotten Son of God and therefore God Himself, who is knowable to Himself from eternity to eternity, has come in our flesh, has taken our flesh, has become the bearer of our flesh, and does not exist as God’s Son from eternity to eternity except in our flesh. Our flesh is therefore present when He knows God as the Son the Father, when God knows Himself. In our flesh God knows Himself” (II/1:151). 86 87

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Second, Barth specifies the particular form and content of this primary Christological objectivity in the decree in terms of that to which Christ is elected. In revelation we see that Christ is elected to suffering, death, resurrection, and exaltation. This is the Christ present at the beginning of all things within God as the electing and elected God-­man. And when this is grasped, so, too, is election’s actional character because Christ’s presence in God’s eternal life means an active pact and history between God and man, involving God’s humiliation and humanity’s exaltation. Predestination is not only something that took place in pretemporal eternity, but it takes place again and again as history. Election is a “determinate, concrete (gestaltete), completed action” whose determinacy does not contradict God’s being but just is that being in self-­determination, God’s life lived as his decision accomplished in eternity and therefore “anew in every second of our time.”90 These affirmations about the decree’s Christological objectivity will become significant momentarily, because with them Barth identifies God as the subject and object of election in a way that includes humanity from the very beginning in the triune God’s spontaneous, outgoing internal act (opus internum ad extra). In this way God’s covenant fellowship with humanity is not secretly and properly a covenant with himself alone. Barth thus overcomes the regnant nominalism that he believes consigns the traditional forms of the doctrine of election to inquiries separated from Christ. We may bring this section to a close by returning to where it began. At the end of our analysis of §28 we suggested that Barth’s identification of theology’s material object and formal orientation would work itself out in a tendency to trace the correspondence between God’s external works and his self-­determination with greater success than the correspondence between God’s activity and being. This much we see in Barth’s doctrine of election. The notion of Christ as the electing God and elected man helps Barth to articulate how God’s covenant history with humanity corresponds to his self-­determination in and through Christ. The decree’s secondary Christological objectivity corresponds to its primary Christological objectivity, and thereby theology is bound to the concrete decree (decretum concretum) revealed in Christ for its knowledge of God and election. Therefore, the notion of self-­correspondence operative here in Church Dogmatics II/2 is one that moves between the poles of God’s external works and his outgoing immanent works (opera immanentia donec exeunt) – not between God’s external activity and God’s essence  II/2:187/206, rev; II/1:271; Gespräche 1964–1968, 79–80.

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per se. We will see later how this feature of Barth’s thought is not without its own internal problems, but first we need to recognize how it helps to alleviate an oft-­misunderstood difficulty in his doctrine of the divine perfections. The way it helps solve problems already present in Barth’s doctrine of God in Church Dogmatics II/1 shows that this kind of divine self-­correspondence is truest to his construal of the manner of theological understanding operative at this point in his magnum opus, thus representing the consistent outworking of his identification of theology’s material object and formal orientation.

The Teleology of God’s Self-Correspondence Specifying the primary Christological objectivity of the decree, Barth demonstrates how the secondary Christological objectivity of God’s external acts corresponds to his self-­determination. Yet this is not all Barth achieves in his reinterpretation of the decree’s internal objectivity. Our second task in this section is to demonstrate how Barth also establishes a basis for ridding his doctrine of God of lingering nominalist elements while leaning into an identification of the decree’s teleology with God’s self-­posited external movement. We can see this most easily in how the Christological objectivity of the decree specifies concretely how God’s outgoing internal act is an act of grace and mercy. In his gracious election God determines himself as the one who eternally moves toward humanity in unmerited favor and takes up our cause by exalting humanity in his only Son. Election’s primary Christological objectivity therefore speaks to the perfections of God’s grace and mercy, specifying their internal form and content. Significantly, this is the very thing Barth struggles to achieve in his explicit treatment of these divine perfections in §30.1–2. Hence, what follows is a brief analysis of the divine perfections of grace and mercy that aims to demonstrate how Barth’s doctrine of God anticipates for its fulfillment the account of divine self-­correspondence we have traced in this chapter. The importance of the decree’s primary Christological objectivity for certain of the divine perfections demonstrates sharply Barth’s coordination of theology and economy, with consequences for the relation between God and creation explored in the final section of this chapter. Our analysis of grace and mercy will also make passing reference to the paired perfections of holiness and righteousness so as to limit the inevitable distortion of the movements of Barth’s own thought, but we leave out much of importance to a full consideration of this locus. Prescinding from

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a comprehensive analysis of this material, what follows isolates individual moments of the inquiry where Barth specifies the internal form and content of these perfections. At these moments Barth struggles to specify the internal pole of God’s self-­correspondence without recourse to what is functionally the semi-­nominalism he insists theology must avoid. Admittedly, this tendency is pronounced in §30 because it concerns God’s loving, which emphasizes God’s “personality,” whereas the perfections of God’s freedom in §31 emphasize God’s “absoluteness.” However, on its own the fact that Barth feels it necessary to affirm the correspondence of grace and mercy to God internally apart from creatures tells us a great deal about his procedure as well as the kinds of things he feels compelled to say on its basis. As we shall see, the unsettled specification of these affirmations goes well beyond the unsettled, unsystematic nature of his dogmatics as whole. Indeed the perfections of grace and mercy most transparently illustrate the inclination of Barth’s doctrine of God toward tracing the correspondence between God’s external works and God’s outgoing internal act, rather than between God’s external works and his being “as such” or the inner-­trinitarian personal acts (opera personalia). The importance of this inclination becomes visible in a particular difficulty it creates in God’s self-­correspondence and how Barth attempts a solution with his account of God’s teleology and relation to creation. Barth’s account of God’s grace is one of the shortest, strangest, and most revealing sections in the whole of the Church Dogmatics, but it exemplifies sharply the tendency that occupies us. It also merits close attention, given the central importance of grace’s movement toward us in Christ for Barth’s theology. If Barth succeeds here, then much of what he says about several other perfections is vindicated in advance. The form and content of grace denote “the manner in which God, in His essential being, turns towards us,” which “takes place in the form of a stooping, a condescension.”91 In this respect, grace primarily signifies negatively that God’s turning does not answer to anything in the recipient but rests solely on God’s favor and inclination toward this other to whom he condescends. Specifically, grace “presupposes” the existence of the recipient’s unworthiness and opposition to God, which his grace overcomes triumphantly.92 This is the grace which must correspond to God’s life because it is identical in all its distinctiveness with God’s loving: grace is the “inner

 II/1:354/398, rev.  II/1:355.

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being and self-­conduct of God Himself.”93 However, Barth asks, what sense does it make to say that turning, condescension, and overcoming of resistance is true of God’s being in itself? This an acute problem, given everything Barth says in §29 about the strict and moderate forms of nominalism he seeks to avoid. Barth answers that God’s grace within God (ad intra) is the source which is “not yet a special turning, not yet condescension, not yet an overcoming of opposition . . . from there and there alone can it become the form we know it to be: turning, condescension, overcoming.”94 More pointedly still: “The form in which grace exists in God Himself and is actual as God is in point of fact hidden from us and incomprehensible.”95 The difficulty Barth encounters in specifying the form of God’s grace in himself flows naturally from the commitments of Barth’s procedure we have analyzed to this point. The presence of the difficulty is not surprising, but Barth’s proffered solution is because it shares so much with the tradition he criticizes. The identification of God’s grace with his essence is a typical feature of several Reformed scholastic doctrines.96 However, the Reformed scholastics do not attempt to specify an analogous form of grace within God’s essence without grounding it in something more basic from which it derives, such as God’s goodness.97 Among other reasons, this protects the affirmation of identifying God’s essence with his grace from requiring the relation of superior to inferior that grace designates by definition; this relation, like grace, is intelligible as the relative movement of God’s goodness. Barth rejects this method in his definition of God’s loving and his resistance to the semi-­nominalism that privileges goodness over love, but he nevertheless employs an equivalent procedure: however grace exists in God, it is the source from which the form of grace with which we are familiar derives. Functionally, this is semi-­nominalism because Barth fails to specify the internal basis of grace that makes it distinct from love as such.98 Most tellingly, when the definition of grace is  II/1:353/397, rev.  II/1:358/402, rev. 95  II/1:357/401. 96  Polanus, Syntagma II.xxi; Turretin, Institutio III.xx.ix. 97  “In the order of nature, God’s goodness is prior to grace, love, mercy, patience, and gentleness because grace (along with all the others) is derived from the goodness of the divine nature.” Polanus, Syntagma II.xx, 163. See also Turretin, Institutio III.xx.xi. 98  So too Price, Letters, 57–9. Otherwise, acute interpreters seem prone to underestimating Barth’s concerns with semi-­nominalism at this point. Colin Gunton tries to rescue Barth’s apparent failure by stating that he merely intends to support God’s ability to be gracious without self-­contradiction: Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God 93 94

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stripped of turning, condescension, and overcoming, we are left with the definition of God’s loving.99 What are we to make of this antinomy between Barth’s theological manner of inquiry and his failure to specify an internal basis of God’s self-­ correspondence as the gracious God? Rather than seeing this moment as an abject failure, it is best read as part of the tension that is only resolved when Barth positively correlates his doctrines of God and election. This is the correlation we have examined thus far in this chapter, seeing how it results in a pattern of divine self-­correspondence that seeks to identify the harmony between God’s external works and outgoing internal act. Within these terms, Barth is able to specify that the “determination of the will of God is eminently grace to the extent that with respect to this other, God’s creation, God’s first thought and decree consists” in election.100 This divine self-­ determination consequently provides an antecedent, internal basis for the form of grace proper to God’s external activity. In Jesus Christ, God’s divine essence in the Son is “concretely determined” in the concrete form (Gestalt) of grace: God is . . . not only gracious, but He exercises grace, and He does this by becoming the Son of Man as the Son of God, and therefore in the strictest, total union of in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 200. Hunsinger similarly suggests that grace, and the Son’s obedience, should simply be “extraordinary determinations” of God’s love and freedom: Reading Barth with Charity, 118. However, neither proposed solution clearly distinguishes grace ad intra from love, which amounts to the semi-­nominalism Barth clearly wishes to avoid. Even where Barth appropriates grace and mercy to certain trinitarian relations (IV/1:129, 158, 304, 356; IV/2:357–9), he goes no further than establishing a semi-­nominalist basis unless we are to believe that the Father’s relation to the Son (for example) is one that involves turning, condescension, and overcoming of opposition. Explaining this away by appealing to “analogy” is insufficient, because correspondence sacrifices neither form nor content; pace John L. Drury, The Resurrected God: Karl Barth’s Trinitarian Theology of Easter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 50–2. Unless grace has a perceptibly distinct internal form and content, its ratio is identical to love. 99   Cf. II/1:353, 276–8. 100   II/2:121/130. On the same page: “this content of predestination is already grace” (II/2:121/130). Elsewhere: the Son’s Kindschaft – not his Sohnschaft – is “eminently grace” (II/1:122/130); “In virtue of this self-­determination of His, God is from the very first the gracious God. For this self-­determination is identical with the decree of His movement towards man” (II/2:91–2); God’s being “as the God of man is His grace” (IV/1:42); Jesus “is the content and form of the divine thought of grace, will of grace and decree of grace in relation to the created world, before the created world was” (IV/1:50/53); “the forma Dei consists (besteht) precisely in the grace in which God Himself assumes and makes His own the forma servi” (IV/1:188/205, rev); “Grace is the election and act of God . . . it is a matter of God’s unmerited good-­pleasure” (IV/3:81–2).

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His nature with ours. This does not take place at the expense but in the power of His divine nature. It is, however, a determination which He gives it. It acquires in man its telos. Turned towards and oriented to human nature, it acquires precisely this form.101

Here the form of grace in the Christological doctrine of the communication of grace (communicatio gratiarum) is grounded in nothing more absolute than God’s turning toward the creature, which is his self-­determination. Barth also notes that the trinitarian act of the resurrection is “God’s act of grace in nothing less than an exemplary form (exemplarischer Gestalt), inasmuch as here indeed the Son of God as such was operative only as a recipient, the Father alone the one acting, and God the Holy Spirit alone the one mediating His acting and revealing.”102 In both cases the form (Gestalt) of grace is identical with its exercise in the hypostatic union or the resurrection, but the notion of an antecedent form of God’s grace within God’s being goes no further than the eminently gracious form and manner of God’s self-determination.103 What we see from these later texts is that Barth’s difficulty with specifying the internal form of God’s grace is alleviated in those places where he discusses its basis in terms of God’s self-­determination. Within these terms, grace has a clear internal form and content in the decree’s primary Christological objectivity. Only thus does Barth’s procedure result in an account of God’s self-­correspondence that avoids semi-­nominalism, but it also results in an account of God’s self-­correspondence as the electing God and not as God per se. Indeed, Barth seems to consider the latter an untoward abstraction from the name of Christ. The determination of God to be Immanuel is grace in an eminent manner because grace just is God’s being-in-decision in this way. Like any divine perfection, grace does not stand on its own but is intelligible conceptually only in light of the constant movement of theological inquiry between the perfections in which God reveals his unity in multiplicity. Thus Barth quickly moves to discuss God’s holiness as that which “singles out, blesses, helps and restores” and as such is separate, confronting us with awe and obligation.104 If grace speaks to the  IV/2:87/95, rev.  IV/1:356/393, rev. 103  IV/1:66; IV/2:33–46. Härle also recognizes that election is Barth’s sole recourse to account for how there could be a distinctive basis of God’s grace ad intra corresponding to its external “form.” Härle. Sein und Gnade, 41, n.157. Jones recognizes as well that what Barth has in mind with self-­determination being “eminently grace” bears upon the form and content of what I am calling God’s primary Christological objectivity. Jones, Humanity of Christ, 89. 104  II/1:361. 101 102

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forgiveness of sins, holiness tells about the judgment on sin inseparable from this forgiveness, and so both “characterize and distinguish [God’s] love and therefore Himself in His action in the covenant, as the Lord of the covenant between Himself and His creature.”105 When Barth specifies how this holiness corresponds to God’s inner life, he notes there is no opposition in God but there is “more”: There is the purity, indeed He is Himself the purity, which as such contradicts and will resist everything which is unlike itself, yet which does not evade this opposing factor, but, because it is the purity of the life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, eternally reacts against it, resisting and judging it in its encounter with it, but in so doing receiving and adopting it, and thus entering into the fellowship with it which redeems it.106

We must observe two elements of this specification, the first of which is successful: God is the purity of his self-­asserting will in establishing and perfecting fellowship with another, a self-­asserting purity which inevitably overcomes what is impure.107 However, the second element requires God’s self-­determination in election for its intelligibility, for how else does God’s internal holiness within his own life “not evade” or “eternally react” against an opposing factor unless we are speaking of the holiness of God’s electing love, his gracious self-­determination? The tension we see in Barth’s account of God’s grace is therefore still present in his account of God’s holiness, but it is relaxed to an extent by his partial distinction of God’s internal holiness from love. Nevertheless, the full intelligibility of the form and content of holiness as the divine self-­assertion that resists and withstands the creature’s impurity requires God’s decree of election. This same tension is visible in the next pair of divine perfections: God’s mercy and righteousness. Barth’s account of God’s mercy is a continued expansion on the concept of grace and is less shy about acknowledging its dependence on God’s self-­determination. God’s mercy is his free inclination to turn to creatures in their need, to espouse their cause and alleviate the distress and misery they encounter in their opposition to his grace. Mercy is therefore God’s “involvement in the misery of another, which lies in His essence and constitutes His being and action  . . . it is His will to commit Himself to the eradication of this misery.”108 Mercy positively complements grace in this respect. In his innermost essence   II/1:360.   II/1:368. 107   II/1:377. 108   II/1:369/415, trans. 105 106

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and moved on account of his good-­pleasure alone, God is “open, ready, inclined (propensus) to compassion with another’s suffering and therefore to assistance.”109 However, the element of creaturely need and suffering seems intrinsic to the propensity Barth here describes. Aware of how difficult it is to understand mercy as proper to God’s essence apart from the creature’s plight, Barth simply asserts that it must be so in light of God’s self-­revelation in Christ. He then concludes, God is as merciful in Himself as He is merciful in His action. The concept of grace itself refers back from God’s conduct and action to God’s being, heart, and mind, and thus to Himself. All misunderstanding in regard to the concept of grace, as if it were not eternal in God Himself, becomes quite impossible if now we have understood it as merciful grace. For then it is understood, not simply as God’s turning towards us, but as His free, strong compassion. Looking backwards, therefore, it is seen, not only as an appearance, but as the constitution (Beschaffenheit) of the heart and thus the essence of God.110

Even more explicitly than he did with God’s grace, Barth here roots the internal basis of mercy in God’s self-­moved determination to alleviate the creature’s need. Mercy thus corresponds to God’s essence in himself insofar as his essence is understood in its determinacy by virtue of God’s outgoing internal act and not otherwise. Only when this insight is wedded to Barth’s specification that Christ is eternally elected to suffering and resurrection does mercy acquire a distinctive internal form and content that distinguishes it from love. This is further testimony that the formal and material object of Barth’s theological inquiry favors an account of God’s correspondence to his self-­determination, rather than to his essence apart from his self-determination.111

 II/1:370.  II/1:375/421, rev. Again a parallel to Hegel proves illuminating. For Hegel, Beschaffenheit is an inner state or set of properties/qualities susceptible to determination from within a subject’s relations ad extra. Thus he remarks that something is “constituted” as it is “caught up in external influences and in external relationships. This external connection on which the constitution depends, and the being determined through an other, appear as something accidental. But it is the quality of the something to be given over to this externality and to have a constitution.” Georg W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 96. See also Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2006), 349–54. Barth might mean something similar, albeit with the very important proviso that God is self-­moved and thus self-­determined in relation to the objects of his love and not subject to determination by them. 111  See also II/2:156; IV/2:353–9. 109 110

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Barth continues to emphasize God’s mercy in terms of his self-­ determination in the counterbalancing perfection of God’s righteousness. Wary of any separation between the divine perfections, Barth is concerned to demonstrate that righteousness and mercy stand in a “relationship of mutual penetration and consummation.”112 God’s mercy is compatible with his righteousness, for in establishing merciful fellowship with the creature, God “also wills, does, and asserts what corresponds to His own dignity.”113 What accords (decens) with his love is what accords with his dignity, for which reason God’s self-­fidelity is just: the inner-­divine rectitude of the trinitarian relations’ ordered, free loving is as such the rule of all justice.114 This is how God reveals himself in the covenant, as “One who is bound in Himself, the One who is true to Himself.”115 Since God’s righteousness is eternally active in his own trinitarian rectitude, God would affirm his dignity even without his faithfulness to the creature. In this respect, God’s justice clearly corresponds to God in himself, and to the extent that God’s mercy is predicated upon the fact that merciful acts are worthy of God’s intrinsic rectitude, mercy at least acquires a semi-­ nominalist basis.116 But Barth’s resistance to all forms of nominalism leads him away from rooting mercy in righteousness, because this might suggest that mercy was not as absolute as justice. Notably, however, the solution he offers only reinforces the difficulty he has in establishing the identity of God’s grace and mercy with God’s essence apart from his self-­ determination. For while the unity of mercy with righteousness is inseparable, Barth affirms that the converse does not hold: God was under no obligation “to clothe His righteousness in mercy.” When we acknowledge that God did so, we “magnify only the decision made in God’s good-­ pleasure” and the necessity of this decision alone.117 Especially through the election-­ related language of “decision” and “good-­ pleasure,” this suggests a somewhat voluntarist portrait of the internal form of the unity of righteousness, mercy, and grace. Nevertheless, Barth’s consistent appeal here and elsewhere to their internal unity in terms of God’s eternal

  II/1:376.   II/1:377/424, rev. 114   IV/1:529–32, 560–8. 115   II/1:384/432, rev; IV/1:532. 116   II/1:387, 380. 117   II/1:402/452; IV/1:563. It may be that God’s love (and not a “principle” or any creature) compels God to give his righteousness this merciful garment, to decide for its form in this way, but this still leaves us with a semi-­nominalist portrait of mercy as indistinct from love ad intra. 112 113

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decision and good-­pleasure comports with his tendency to explicate the correspondence of God’s external works to his outgoing internal act. What we have seen in the perfections of grace and mercy and the paired notions of holiness and righteousness is sufficient to demonstrate the presence of a tension running through the doctrine of God to the doctrine of election, rooted in the identification of theology’s material object and formal orientation with God’s self-determination.118 When Barth emerges from his doctrine of God into his doctrine of election, he specifies concretely the Christological form and content of the decree both internally and externally. Barth thereby demonstrates how God corresponds to himself in his covenant fellowship with humanity without any hint of nominalizing either the genuine turning in which God condescends to the creature or the intrinsic humanity of this fellowship. We have explicated both of these elements in terms of two critiques Barth levels against the traditional Reformed doctrine of the decree. First, Barth thinks the Reformed vitiate their insight into God’s livingness when they qualify their affirmations about God’s internal activity with their doctrines of simplicity and immutability. Instead Barth affirms that God’s external activity corresponds in both form and content to the internal activity in which God lives his life, an outgoing internal act. But this form and content seem inescapably Christological, which brought us to Barth’s second critique, namely, the traditional conception of the covenant of redemption nominalizes the human covenant partner and calls into question the covenant’s humanism. Barth redresses this felt deficiency by interpreting the covenant of redemption in terms of what we have called a primary Christological objectivity such that God’s intratrinitarian covenant itself includes humanity because Christ is present as the one in and through whom God is the electing God. Only thus does God correspond to himself in election. Barth’s commitment in §28.1 to tracing the correspondence of God’s external works with his essence in light of the necessity of God’s decision flowers in his doctrine of election to tracing the correspondence between God’s external works and his outgoing internal act. God’s essence is thereby understood strictly in terms of its self-­determined character, and thus in terms of God’s outgoing immanent operations. While this enables Barth to specify the internal form and content of certain divine perfections like grace and mercy, it is also not without its own intrinsic problems. We may access briefly this difficulty by considering self-­determination in light  II/2:4–8.

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of its absoluteness and Barth’s proffered solution in light of its teleology. Absolutely considered, God’s act of self-­determination is a nonessential feature of God’s eternal life. While Barth believes “absolute speaking can never be the subject-­matter of theology,” he does occasionally gesture toward such considerations.119 Consider as an example Barth’s invocation of the distinction between acts of nature and acts of will. Explaining the character of the Son’s eternal generation from the Father, Barth discusses the distinction between generation as an act of nature (ἔργον φύσεως) that God must will and creation as an act of will (ἔργον θελήσεως) that God is able not to will. Effectively, Barth appreciates the scholastic thesis that God’s acts of nature are free in the sense of spontaneity but not indifference, whereas God’s acts of will are free in both respects.120 Implicit in Barth’s hypothetical claim that if God had not created “God would not on that account be any the less God” is a claim about the absolute consistency of God’s self-­determination with his own being logically prior to this self-determination.121 For example, if God is equally grace and mercy apart from his self-­determination and thus his primary Christological objectivity, then theology must be able to demonstrate that God’s perfection as grace or mercy does not require his outgoing immanent operations for its intelligibility. Stated otherwise, God’s internal act of self-­determination must itself be an act self-­consistent with God’s essence and perfections. Otherwise, self-­determination seems to contribute   I/2:35.   I/1:434. At times like this Barth seems to affirm something like the libertas indifferentiae (see also II/1:567), but one has to balance these affirmations with the claim quoted earlier (see note 44) that God determines both the non posse non velle and posse non velle alike (II/1:591). Barth here complicates the traditional function of the libertas indifferentiae as it would typically ground the radical contingency of God’s opera essentialia; Barth seems content to say simply that creation is not necessary in the same sense as God is necessary – without any metaphysical specification of necessity or contingency. It is more accurate in this regard to interpret Barth as retaining a thin account of the libertas contrarietatis and contradictionis: God is free to create these objects or others and free to reject certain objects and affirm others – but what God’s freedom might have done beyond that is not a freedom with which we have to do, bound as we are to God’s self-­determination (III/1:51). Barth affirms clearly a libertas spontaneitatis (II/2:25, 106). 121   I/1:434. This raises the issue of Barth’s “hypothetical counterfactual” claims that God would be the same without his acts of self-­determination and creation. Many interpreters have recognized that such appeals are not material in the sense that they affirm God could actually have had a positive will not to create, but rather they are merely formal in that they serve only to reinforce the gratuity of God’s acts: Busch, Great Passion, 124; Jones, Humanity of Christ, 73–4; Asbill, Freedom of God for Us, 185–91. 119 120

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essentially to God’s perfection. As it stands within the terms of his resistance to all forms of nominalism Barth can only affirm rather than demonstrate such self-­consistency, insofar as God’s self-­determination provides the internal ground of God’s self-­correspondence in certain divine perfections and in God’s covenant history with Israel, Christ, and his church. This issue is moot where Barth forbids absolute reasoning about God’s inner life, but it is alive all the same where Barth appeals to counterfactual claims about God’s perfection. Again we must stress that we are only tracing a tendency in the texts under consideration. We do well to remember that the tendencies of a theologian and the tendencies of his or her theology are often two different things; no one is perfectly and consistently self-­aware. The intrinsic ordination (finis operis) of a theology and the intention (finis operantis) of its theologian may be distinct. Moreover, Barth is able to account for God’s self-­correspondence without appealing to the decree or semi-­nominalism in several divine perfections. The critical question is what kind of self-­correspondence can be applied consistently to all the divine perfections in accordance with Barth’s stated objectives we uncovered in our analysis of §29. At this point, we need to digress for a moment and face an objection that could be brought against this reading, one which Barth registers on his own behalf. In the opening volume of the Church Dogmatics Barth contests any reading that would understand his views to account inadequately for “God in Himself.”122 This is not in question. Rather have we suggested that, within the predominant thought form he employs in the doctrine of God and which he developed through his reading of Anselm, alongside his concern to avoid semi-­nominalism, he is unable to say consistently what at least part of him wants to say about God in himself. Yet Barth has something to say about this, too! Logical consistency is perhaps an unfair criterion with which to judge Barth’s success or failure in this regard, chiefly because it is one for which he professes little affinity. Speaking about the “impossible possibilities” of sin and evil in God’s good creation, Barth says that some things must remain mysterious in keeping with the subject matter (Sache) about which Scripture speaks: “In order to keep true to the subject matter, dogmatics has here, as in other places, to be logically inconsequent.”123 It is not an isolated thought. In Barth’s  I/1:170–4.  Karl Barth, Credo (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 36 rev. from Credo: Die Hauptprobleme der Dogmatik, dargestellt im Anschluss an das Apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis (München: TVZ, 1935), 36.

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estimation, theology goes awry where faithfulness to an abstract standard of logical consistency leads us to conclude such apparently untoward things as that God “willed and created these possibilities.” Barth has a method, or methods as it may be, but he is perhaps not so given to logical consistency that one particular method could be the Ariadne’s thread of his thought. If this is so, then it does not mean necessarily that investigating the consistency or otherwise of certain concerns is fruitless. This restriction only reminds us again that in tracing one of Barth’s concerns and analyzing its ability to sustain central judgments he wishes to make, we are but tracing one of his many concerns. In the end, we may succeed only in showing both the promise and limitations of this one concern, rather than of Barth’s thought tout court. However, if a particular methodological commitment flows from one of Barth’s chief concerns, then its logical consistency in particular is germane to how theology in the present best appropriates these concerns as its own. We have endeavored to listen carefully to Barth for the sake of contemporary appropriation, which we will take up in the following chapter. In this respect, we follow another of Barth’s methodological commitments, namely, that the voices of the church’s history are living voices in the communion of saints. Relative to his stated objectives, then, Barth’s account of theological reasoning and its construal of theology and economy inclines him toward providing an account of God’s self-­correspondence as the electing God with greater consistency than God’s self-­correspondence as God per se. At least, this is the case if he is to avoid successfully all forms of nominalism. When we examine self-­determination teleologically, Barth seems content to lean in on this tendency and simply articulate the full implications of his doctrine of God as the electing God, who disposes his perfection to be for us in Christ. This is most visible in the doctrine of reconciliation as Barth works through his mature Christology, which he opens with a strong teleological affirmation: The whole being and life of God is an activity, both in eternity and in worldly time, both in Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and in His relation to humanity and every creature. But what God does in Himself and as the Creator and governor of humanity is all aimed at the single, particular act in which it has its center and meaning . . . As one with others this act is at the same time the telos of all divine acts: the eternal activity, in which He is God in Himself and in the history of His acts in the world created by Him.124   IV/1:7–8/6, rev. Barth describes this act’s teleology just as he describes the teleology of God’s love, namely, as a “divine self-­purpose (Selbstzweck)” (IV/1:212/233).

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The eternal activity of God internally as well as externally is all ordered to one telos, which is God’s covenant fellowship with humanity in Jesus Christ. Here we find a strong affirmation of the irreducibility accorded God’s outgoing internal act of self-­determination and its historical fulfillment for theological reasoning. The union of humanity and divinity in the person of Christ, and within his history the twofold movement of God’s condescension and humanity’s exaltation, is the enactment and specification of God’s determinate love and just so his teleology.125 Per his account of God’s loving in §28.2 Barth resists any sense that God’s goodness or something more anterior and absolute than God’s self-­ communicating love is a necessary end (finis) of God’s life. He does this precisely to maintain God’s freedom to specify his own teleology in a dispositive act of Lordship, which God does in and as he is “external” in his Son Jesus Christ.126 The force of this reinterpretation of divine goodness is, as we have seen repeatedly, that God specifies the internal (terminus a quo) and external terms (terminus ad quem) of his perfection. Theology must strictly move within the ambit here circumscribed if it is to be obedient to God’s self-­ demonstration in Christ, which Barth’s correlation of the doctrines of God and election imbues with supreme necessity. God’s simplicity is the enacted actuality of his self-­revelation, so this actuality is irreducible for us. God’s self-­posited teleology in his eternal election of grace disperses the last appearance of contingency, externality, incidentality and dispensability which can so easily seem to surround the historical aspect of the Christ-­ event in its narrower sense . . . The concept of the true humanity of Jesus Christ is therefore primarily and finally basic  – an absolutely necessary concept  – in exactly the same and not a lesser sense than that of His true deity.127

What takes place in Christ occurs “in the freedom of God, but in the inner necessity of the freedom of God.”128 God’s electing grace gives “this

 IV/1:36.  II/1:667. 127  IV/2:35/37. Note: absolutely, not hypothetically necessary. This suggests that Barth perhaps finds the traditional distinction between absolute and hypothetical necessity too rigid to depict the radical freedom of God to determine necessity: we are not free to apprehend any necessity more absolute than God’s self-­determination (II/1:307). Hence, it is accurate to say, “Barth hat die Erwählungslehre als einen notwendigen konstitutiven Teil der christlichen Gotteslehre . . . konzipiert und lociert.” Goebel, Vom freien Wählen Gottes und des Menschen, 28. 128  IV/1:195. 125 126

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telos and form to His divine essence for the sake of man.”129 Because what takes place in Christ “is a necessary happening,” it has unconditional validity and scope and binding force. This is why it commands the reverence due to it as the heart of the Christian message . . . We do not need to look beyond Jesus Christ . . . We only need to hear the word of His historical existence and we shall hear the Word of God and look into the basis and essence of God and man and all things.130

By so stressing the self-­ posited teleology of God’s perfection, Barth forestalls any attempt to think beyond the factual necessity of God’s self-­demonstration, enacted with all the irreducibility of God’s simplicity in Christ. Practically, this renders the question of the consistency of God’s self-­determination with his nature or essence as such irrelevant for a theological inquiry whose task is delimited to tracing God’s self-­correspondence strictly within the terms of God’s self-­determination. Thus the tendency intrinsic to Barth’s construal of divine being and activity; how does it bear on the understanding of God’s relation to the world?

Conclusion: God’s Relation to Creation Thus far we have traced how Barth conceives of the relation between God’s being and activity by looking at how his coordination of theology and economy results in an account of divine self-­correspondence that operates most consistently within the borders of God’s self-­determination to be for us in and through Christ. Especially in light of what Barth believes are the proper limits of theological inquiry, the only correspondence consistently binding for theology is what obtains between God’s external works and his outgoing internal act. This account of self-­correspondence is the only one that enables Barth to articulate fundamental aspects of the doctrines of God and election without resorting to semi-­nominalism. And while there are doubtlessly many other factors playing into Barth’s increasing historicism, as he works out his mature Christology he leans in on God’s self-­posited teleology in such a way that is even more consistent with the basic commitments concerning God’s being-in-act that we have traced. When his account of God’s self-­correspondence is viewed synoptically across the texts we have examined, it becomes clear that Barth easily demonstrates God’s self-­consistency with respect to his self-­ determination but shows little interest in demonstrating the extent to   IV/2:88.   IV/1:48/51.

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which God is self-­consistent with respect to his perfection apart from his self-­determination. Certainly, Barth affirms this self-­consistency, but in our analysis of the perfections of grace and mercy we have suggested he nevertheless fails to demonstrate it without reverting to semi-­nominalism. This is not as such a failure because Barth does not thereby sacrifice a robust account of God’s perfection, but he rather strictly delimits the kinds of questions theology should pose at this point. The character of God’s perfection must be determined at every moment by God’s self-­revelation and not general or absolute inquiries irrespective of their provenance, whether doctrinal or metaphysical. This delimitation is consistent with the moral circumscription of theological inquiry as Barth understands it, and so his reticence to address the lacuna between God’s nature per se and his self-­determination might be read as a form of intellectual temperance. Summarily we can say that Barth retains an account of God’s antecedent perfection in ways reminiscent of the Protestant scholastic tradition, but correlates this with the economy in ways evocative of the Ritschlian school. Obedience in theology requires us to say something robust about divine antecedence, but only relatively and never absolutely. As we have already seen in the positive meaning given to self-­determination, Barth’s account of God’s pure actuality has important consequences for the character of God’s relation to creation. A further, brief reflection on this character will serve to conclude our analysis of Barth. Drawing together the various threads we have traced thus far, we need to see here how Barth attributes to God what is functionally a real relation (relatio realis) to creation that upholds God’s qualitative distinction from creation. This is but an approximation; Barth nowhere explicitly states that God has a real or a nonreal relation to creation in any technical sense, likely because he is uninterested in or ignorant of the traditional concepts and might not appreciate their descriptive utility. Neither should we expect such metaphysical specificity from Barth. Notwithstanding, these concepts retain sufficient descriptive value if we allow Barth the requisite freedom from their traditional metaphysical associations. That Barth’s account is equivalent to a mutually real relation will be demonstrated by examining formal parallels between Barth’s account of God’s self-­posited relation to creation and certain kinds of real relations in late medieval nominalism that are appropriated by some Reformed scholastic theologians. What we find is a commitment to a qualitative distinction between God and the world that nevertheless presupposes God’s freedom to establish some proportion between the two without this ever becoming a fixed state of affairs. Such a relation is

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a consistent result of Barth’s peculiar Anselmian form of inquiry, and so demonstrates the consequences of his coordination of theology and economy. We may keep our analysis brief here since it simply seeks to articulate the implicit consequences of Barth’s accounts of God’s loving in freedom, self-­determination, and self-­correspondence as the electing God. First we must consider the tradition of real relations in late-­medieval nominalism that maintains God’s qualitative distinction from creation and see how this is appropriated in some Reformed theologies of the seventeenth century. Without arguing for any direct dependence or influence, this tradition is formally parallel to the operative assumptions in Barth’s correlation of the doctrines of God and election. Francis Turretin and Johan-­Heinrich Alsted suffice as examples of this appropriation. In the opening question to his doctrine of creation, Turretin draws the standard distinction between active and passive senses of creation before drawing a less standard conclusion. Actively creation is the “transitive act of God by which he confers being upon created things,” whereas passively creation is the term of this transitive act in the creature by which it transitions from “nonexistence to existence.”131 The distinction between active and passive describes the two terms of the relation of creation, which Turretin maintains is a real relation: “Thus arises the relation existing between God and his creatures, which although adding nothing new to God (and indicating only an extrinsic habitude to the creature) is yet properly called real, both because it stands between real extremes and because the reason of founding it on both sides occurs on the part of the thing (even no one thinking).”132 When addressing the same issue Aquinas concludes that since God’s active power is not an accident and all real relations require an accidental foundation, then God’s relation to the creature is not real. Here we can detect a metaphysical difference between Aquinas and Turretin. For Aquinas, a real relation between two entities requires four elements: (a) both terms of the relation are real, (b) both terms are distinct from one another, (c) each term has a foundation for the relation in question, and (d) each term belongs to the same ontological order. Turretin departs from Aquinas by following a later medieval tradition that negotiates the final requirement, maintaining that the first three suffice to establish a mutually real relation. The Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez describes this tradition of real relations in his Metaphysical Disputations (Disputationes Metaphysicae),   Turretin, Institutio V.i.xi.   Ibid.

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which many Protestant scholastic theologians consulted in the seventeenth century.133 Suárez observes how certain nominalist theologians maintain that a real relation adds nothing to its related terms, either the subject or the term of the subject’s relation. A real relation obtains either when denominated “from the concomitance of the extremes” or when it is something absolute itself connected to a related term (relatum) when and where that term exists “on account of some link or some connection found between them.” Such a real relation may arrive without any intrinsic or real addition to either of its terms, “and without composition, and consequently also without any dependence upon some extrinsic thing but, at most, in a certain mode of denomination.”134 Since these are the only things that could introduce “imperfection,” then there can be a mutually real relation between God and creatures without attributing imperfection to God. Here God’s active power functions as the basis for attributing a real relation to creation upon the actuality of the creature’s existence. The difference between these nominalists and Aquinas is that they appear to negotiate away the fourth requirement for a real relation, namely, that both terms belong to the same ontological order. Suárez admits calmly that this difference is not “a question of great importance, but almost about the way we speak.”135 Since these theologians impute no imperfection to God, then their views are not heterodox. Turretin’s position canvassed earlier is very similar to the one Suárez describes in the nominalist tradition, and indeed other Reformed scholastics articulate more or less the same position. Consider Alsted’s distinction between a relation of a thing (relatio rei) and a nonreal relation (relatio rationis). He says the relation of a thing is a “relation between  Francisco Suárez, Disputationes Metaphysicae [DM], in Opera Omnia, vol. 26 (Paris: L. Vivès; reprinted: Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1965), disp. 47; quotations are drawn from On Real Relation (Disputatio Metaphysica XLVII), trans. John P. Doyle (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006). On Suárez’s views, see Jorge Secada, “Suárez on the Ontology of Relations,” in Interpreting Suárez: Critical Essays, ed. Daniel Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 62–88; Sydney Penner, “Suárez on the Reduction of Categorical Relations,” Philosophers’ Imprint 13.2 (2013): 1–24. 134  Suárez, DM 47.15.16. The nominalists mentioned are Occam, Gabriel Biel, Durandus of Saint-­Pourçain, Gregory Rimini, and Marsilius of Ingham. However, the view of relations in question begins at least with Henry of Harclay: Henninger, Relations, 98–118. Interestingly, Suárez cites Anselm – as does Harclay – as precedent for speculation about the possibility of accidents “improperly so called” accruing to God without effecting any real change in God. See here Anselm, Monologion §25, in Major Works, 41–2. The perennial authority of Anselm for adherents of this view makes one wonder if Barth also found inspiration in Anselm at this point. 135  Suárez, DM 47.15.20. 133

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two real extremes,” in which five things must be considered: (a) the subject in which the relation is found, for every relative is founded in an absolute; (b) the foundation (either a material or efficient cause) of the relation, for every relative is not only in but “from” an absolute; (c) the terminus to which the relation is ordered; (d) the related thing (relatum) which brings forth the relation; and (v) the correlated thing (correlatum) which is brought forth either naturally or volitionally. With these considerations in view, Alsted denies that God’s relation to creation is not real: Relations in God are real, and not rational, as is commonly taught. Yet neither does anything in creation accrue to God’s perfection. The reason owes to the fact that the relation (respectus) is of such a kind that it is between two extremes, God and the creature, both of which are real terms: God is the terminus from which, and the creature is the terminus to which. God is properly the relation’s foundation, and the creature its term.136

What we see in the appropriation of the nominalist tradition by Turretin and Alsted is a precedent in the Reformed tradition for something very similar to Barth’s view. God’s perfection enables him to bear a real relation to creation on account of his self-­determination “to the production of this or that thing” externally, when considered relatively.137 Barth obviously contests any distinction between absolute and relative considerations for reasons we have already seen. He suspects this distinction harbors a semi-­nominalist reservation about what is properly or improperly attributed to God, with dire consequences for the binding nature of revelation. He is also suspicious of any privileged absolute reasoning about the divine essence. However, Barth’s account of God’s relation to creation approximates the kind of real relation articulated by Turretin and Alsted insofar as he maintains that God posits himself in a genuine relation to creation through his self-­determination. Barth’s account of God’s relation to creation assumes something like Aquinas’s first three requirements mentioned earlier. The first two requirements for a real relation are self-­evident: God and creatures are both real and irreducibly distinct.138 Even in the incarnation, the relation between Christ’s two natures remains one of intimate union without confusion.139 God and creatures are not embraced within a common ontological order,   Johan-Heinrich Alsted, Metaphysica, Tribus Libris Tractata (Herbornae Nassoviorum, 1613) II.5, 261–2. 137   Turretin, Insitutio III.vii.xiii. 138   III/1:5. 139   IV/2:63–4, 86–8. 136

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which is at least part of what Aquinas means with the notion of “order.” Barth satisfies in his own way the third requirement, which pertains to the foundation of the relation in each of the terms. On the side of God, this foundation consists in God’s self-­determination since from all eternity he posits himself and humanity in relationship in and through Jesus Christ. On the side of the creature, the Holy Spirit establishes the relation of the creature to God in such a way that God relates to himself in this relation: “The creature needs the Creator to be able to live. It thus needs the relation to Him. But it cannot create this relation. God creates it by His own presence in the creature and therefore as a relation of Himself to Himself.”140 Since Barth resists any nominalist concessions in his account of God’s internal activity, then when God posits himself in relation to the creature in and through Christ, God disposes his own eternal perfection so as to order himself to this fellowship. In this light we see Barth’s departure from Aquinas’s position that God and creatures are not part of the same order, a position which Barth would maintain arises out of an illegitimate teleological concern. God disposes his inner life as well as the teleology of his grace and thereby determines himself as the foundation for a real relation to the creature, for which reason his self-­determination is described as a “primal relationship (Urbeziehung).”141 Once posited, this relationship (Verhältnis) and the decision underlying it [belong] definitively to God Himself, not in His being-for-Himself (Fürsichsein), but in His being within this relation. It belongs to the actuality of God which is His actuality, not without, but only within this decision. It is so adjoined to this reality that we must not allow any logical objectivity to prevent us from introducing the adjunct as an element of our knowledge of God. We cannot speak correctly of God in his being for Himself without considering Him always in this conduct, without allowing both our questions and answers to be dictated by this conduct.142

Read crudely, these comments might suggest some bifurcation between God “for himself” and “for us.” In fact, Barth is subverting such bifurcations. As we see here, Barth denies that any logical conception of God’s objectivity could possibly prevent us from considering God’s self-­posited relation to creation as irreducible for the confession of God as “God is.”  I/1:450/473.  II/2:52/55. Since this relation is posited, it cannot be interpreted as an “internal relation” (see I/1:389, 394, 420–1; II/1:519). 142  II/2:6–7/5, rev. 140 141

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Nothing less than the correct apprehension of God’s objectivity requires that this self-­posited relation dictate both the questions and answers viable for the obedient acknowledgment of God. Christ is the decision of God to relate in this way, and “the determination belongs no less to Him than all that He is in and for Himself.”143 All of this must be taken together with Barth’s positive sense that God allows himself to be affected in this relationship by his self-­determination. God’s self-­giving in Christ “did in fact consist in the risk of His own self-offering, in this hazarding of His own existence as God.”144 More pointedly: It is only human pride, making a god in its own image, that will know nothing of a determination of the divine essence in Jesus Christ. The presupposition of all earlier Christology . . . was a philosophical conception of God, according to which God was far too exalted for His address to man . . . to mean anything at all for Himself, or in any way to affect His deity.145

These passages suggest that for all the qualitative distinction between God and creatures, the freedom of God’s love is such that he creates, sustains, and welcomes a certain proportion to his creation. In this respect Barth is most distant from the accounts of real relations one finds in Turretin and Alsted, but the distance we see here was already articulated in his critical revision of the locus on God’s activity (de operibus Dei) in his doctrine of God’s constancy. Barth thus presents us with a portrait of God positing a real relation between himself and creatures because his self-­determination provides for its foundation. The real relation that results is one normed by God’s self-­revelation in Christ: “The legitimacy of every theory concerning the relationship of God and man or God and the world can be tested by considering whether it can be understood also as an interpretation of the relationship and fellowship created and sustained in Jesus Christ.”146 This relation is therefore characterized at every moment by what George Hunsinger calls a “Chalcedonian” pattern of “unity-in-distinction and distinction-in-unity”: it is self-­moved and maintains an irreducible inequality and irreversibility, thus preserving the asymmetry, intimacy, and integrity of God and creatures.147 All the same it is a real relation that   II/2:7.   IV/1:72/76. 145   IV/2:84–5/92–3, rev. 146   II/1:320. 147  George Hunsinger, “Karl Barth’s Christology: Its Basic Chalcedonian Character,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134; Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, 185–6. Building off the 143 144

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stands in significant contrast to the operative understanding of God’s qualitative distinction from creation voiced by Aquinas, for whom God remains beyond all real relations, to creation by virtue of his simple beatitude. Barth retains a sense of his early commitment to “the beyond principle” concerning God’s relation to the world, but interprets God’s otherness strictly in terms of God’s self-determination.148 Hence, God is beyond (jenseits) all but self-­posited relations. What Hegel says of philosophy Barth (ceteris paribus) might very well say of theology, namely, that it “does not waste its time with . . . empty and merely transcendent (Jenseitigen) things.”149 We have also seen how Barth’s account of God’s self-­correspondence contrasts with Aquinas’s method of derivation, or his so-­called semi-­nominalism. God freely grants to his dispositive act of loving the world in freedom a necessity beyond which there is nothing more absolute. Barth therefore maintains that God corresponds to himself as the electing God, and the demonstration of a correspondence beyond this is morally untoward within theology’s confinement to tracing God’s act and being strictly under the formality of God’s self-­determination. However, as with Aquinas, Barth’s account raises some critical questions. Is theology’s moral circumscription such that it cannot demonstratively say much by way of the consistency of God’s self-­determination with his nature? What does this say about the viability of Barth’s understanding of God’s actuality? And does admitting even a self-­posited real relation of God to creation sufficiently retain the sense that “God is God” in theological thought and speech? Such questions remain for our consideration in conclusion, as well as what these respective theologians have to offer a sustainable account of God’s being and activity, and relation to creation. No less important are the questions of why and how.

work of Martin Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit bei Hegel: Eine logische und theologische Untersuchung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), Nicholas Adams finds a “Chalcedonian” pattern in Hegel’s logic of preserving “distinctness-in-inseparable-unity.” Nicholas Adams, Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2013), 6 n.5. Based upon Hunsinger’s account, what seems to distinguish Barth’s Chalcedonian pattern from Hegel’s is the note of asymmetry between God and the world. 148  Karl Barth, Erklärung des Epheserbriefes, in Erklärungen des Epheser- und des Jakobusbriefes 1919–1929, ed. Jörg-­Michael Bohnet (Zürich: TVZ, 2009), 151. 149  Georg W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part I: Science of Logic, Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, trans. and ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), §94.

CONCLUSION

7 Confessing God as God

Our task has been to draw some of the contours to the question of how we may confess God as God in such a way that upholds God’s qualitative distinction from creation both noetically and ontically. In this final chapter we may now compare constructively the positions of Aquinas and Barth for the sake of discerning what they have to offer contemporary reflection on these same matters. Nothing less than deciding is encouraged by both our interlocutors. Like philosophy, theology “aims not at knowing what men feel, but at what is the truth of things.”1 And as concerns the truth of divine things, the “decisive point is the reading of the Bible itself.”2 Throughout Parts I and II we have seen two approaches to learning God’s being and activity, the whole scope of his perfection, and the account of God’s relation to creation that such approaches fund. Chiefly these approaches were traced by looking at how Aquinas and Barth define theology’s material object and the formal interest with which they seek to confess this object. Both approaches share much in common and yet nevertheless diverge on their central constructions of theology and economy. How do these similarities and differences inform the church’s task to attend reflectively and systematically to the blessed God’s glory announced in the gospel (1 Tim 1:11), and just so promote “the economy of God (ἢ οἰκονομίαν θεοῦ) which is in faith” (1 Tim 1:4)? A full consideration of the issues we have observed in analyzing God’s perfection – his divine being, activity, and relations  – would need to consider far more  Thomas Aquinas, Exposition of Aristotle’s Treatise On the Heavens, trans. Fabian R. Larcher and Pierre H. Conway (Columbus: College of St. Mary of the Springs, 1964), I.22.228. 2  II/2:148. 1

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than what we have uncovered in Aquinas and Barth. However, for the sake of such a larger consideration, what follows draws on some themes from the foregoing analysis and reflects critically on how they inform systematic theology in the present. Specifically, our reflections are unified in how they inform the confession of God as God, and thus in his qualitative distinction from creation in both affirmation and thought. What kind of judgments about God’s being and activity best serve this confession? And how does this concern inform the character of the relation God bears toward creation? Our adjudication and tentative resolution of these questions proceeds by isolating three themes: God’s actuality, the relationship between God’s activity and being, and the character of God’s relation to creation. The first section on actuality is diagnostic, and the remaining two sections attempt to chart a way toward confessing God as God by gleaning from the analysis in Parts I and II.

Actuality and Theological Reason In the introduction we suggested that theology’s responsibility is to confess God in accordance with the way that God gives himself to be known, which involves judgments about the presence and activity of God to which it responds. With the analyses behind us, we may now explore how commonalities in Aquinas and Barth with regard to theological reason are parsed into differing accounts of reason’s possibilities and responsibilities because of fundamental differences regarding the object of theological reason. These differences are set forth by attending to the relatively distinct accounts of God’s actuality that surface in light of the preceding analyses in Parts I and II. Setting these differences in view will be useful for exploring the remaining concepts of God’s being and activity, as well as God’s relation to creation, as they bear upon the confession of God as God that both theologians pursue. Distinction here is for the sake of unification. Inquiry into God’s being and activity must be balanced between the positivity of what God reveals and the negativity of what God conceals in this revelation, or of what is inaccessible even in the light of that revelation. Aquinas and Barth each in their own ways model this balancing act through distinct uses of intellectual temperance. While the contrast between the two theologians is often proposed along the lines of their different attitudes toward the analogy of being (analogia entis) and revelation, or analogy and dialectic, it is useful to see them both as engaging in a speculative inquiry with different conceptions of the restraint

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proper to theological reason. Barth specifies the requisite intellectual humility of theology in an account of its obedient binding to God’s self-­ revelation in his Word. Theology’s modesty consists in reflecting and mirroring this Word in human words, and just so it is speculation in the most proper sense.3 As the terms of his Anselmian procedure dictate, this temperance does not move beyond the actuality of God’s self-­revelation in Christ but rather seeks to discern in this actuality the truth of God’s self-­correspondence – its inescapable necessity. Aquinas voices a similar concern to temper theological reason about God’s being in light of his revelation and offers some of his most pointed remarks in the opening to his commentary on Dionysius’s The Divine Names: For the truth of holy Scripture is a kind of light in the manner of a ray derived from the first Truth – a light that does not so extend that through it we are able to see God’s essence or to know all that which is known by God in himself or by the angels and the blessed who see his essence – but [it extends] to a certain term or measure, whereby the intelligible things of divinity are manifest through the light of holy Scripture. And thus, as we do not extend ourselves to acknowledge divine things more than the light of holy Scripture extends itself, we are bound on this account as if hemmed in by certain limitations concerning divine things by temperance and sanctity: sanctity indeed when we preserve the elegant truth of holy Scripture from every error; and temperance, as we do not throw ourselves upon those things more than is given to us.4

Later when Aquinas discusses further the depth of Scripture’s extension into the divine life, he notes the ambition that must attend temperance. Those “holy minds” who cast themselves upon God and his revelation must avoid not only pride but also despair. While they do not presume to know or say anything about God that is not given them fittingly (convenienter) in revelation, neither do they shy away from the greatness of their task. Theologians must not set their eyes on anything short of the

 “Theology is modest because its entire logic can only be a human ana-­logy to that Word; analogical thought and speech do not claim to be, to say, to contain, or to control the original word. But it gives a reply to it by its attempt to co-­respond with it; it seeks expressions that resemble the ratio and relations of the Word of God in a proportionate and, as far as feasible, approximate and appropriate way. Theology’s whole illumination can be only its human reflection, or mirroring (in the precise sense of ‘speculation’!); and its whole production can be only a human reproduction. In short, theology is not a creative act but only a praise of the Creator and of his act of creation.” Barth, Evangelical Theology, 17. 4  DDN I.1.15–16. 3

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heights to which divine revelation elicits their understanding, confession, and praise. Where theologians are led astray in this way, they succumb to the error of faintheartedness (pusillanimitas), which is the opposite of the highmindedness (magnanimitas) required for the intellectual discipline of holy teaching. Theological contemplation must be reverent, chaste, and holy: reverent because it does not transgress its boundaries, chaste insofar as it refuses to content itself with idle consideration of “inferior things,” and holy because it keeps to the tasks and objects God has ordained for it.5 The notes of continuity in these remarks are instructive: a mutual concern that theological inquiry consider God’s revelation in Scripture its cognitive principle, that theology find the full extent of the truth it confesses in and through this revelation, and that theologians neither fall short of nor transgress the boundaries set by it. Significant differences nevertheless ground these mutual convictions, and the differences are crucial for the consideration of God’s distinction from creation as it presupposes teaching about God’s being and activity, as well as God’s relation to creation. One way of accessing these differences is through the divergent understandings of divine actuality that surface in both theologians. These differences have appeared quietly throughout our study, and only now are we prepared to make them explicit. The notion that God is pure act (actus purus) leads both Aquinas and Barth to an affirmation that God is actual without any potentiality standing in need of realization. Furthermore the notion of pure act leads to an understanding of the unity of God’s being and his external activity that issues from the single, simple act of God’s being. Astonishingly, from all eternity God relates himself to creatures; surely any theology that does not separate God from creatures must essay some such affirmation. However, such a statement must be handled with care. Both theologians have different approaches to and interpretations of God’s simple actuality, as well as its unity with God’s external acts. The question of theology’s ability to understand divine actuality is thus framed for both thinkers within an account of intellectual temperance oriented toward a particular construal of divine actuality. While the precise limits of theological reason likely boil down to exegetical decisions, the viability of the notion of actuality to which it is oriented may nevertheless be helpful in adjudicating the boundaries of theological reason most befitting the acknowledgment of God as God.

5

 DDN 1.1.39.

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How then are we to understand the differences between Aquinas and Barth on God’s actuality? This divergence may be illustrated by what Kenneth Schmitz calls a difference between “the Aristotelian principle of originating actuality (energeia and entelecheia), on the one hand, and the modern concept of resultant actuality (Wirklichkeit, the facts or states of affairs), on the other.”6 As with any conceptual device summarizing a history of ideas, we need to beware letting this distinction do too much, and we need to see exactly how it plays out in the accounts of divine actuality we have considered. That said, the distinction is useful for setting the differences between the positions under consideration into relief. Schmitz considers a number of examples to illustrate the general characterization of “resultant actuality” that emerges in the modern concept of totality (Totalitätsbegriff), which privileges an explanatory framework, system, or context over the more radical (in the sense of roots or sources) active powers that stand behind and even within it. What is important here is the insight into an influential strand of modern philosophy that no longer interprets actuality in terms of both “firstness” and “plenitude,” but rather sees actuality as a realized totality or context in which things come to be. To grasp the significance of this modern transition from originating principle to resultant totality, it will be useful to review in very broad strokes some of the relevant background. Classically a principle is understood as an original source or primacy from which consequences may follow in keeping with the nature of their source. The quest for the cosmic source (άρχή) of the world generally arose in tandem with an interest in the essential features of divinity, and so philosophical reflection on ultimate principles was fundamentally theological.7 At the same time, principles have cosmological significance. Ancient philosophy understood that such first principles establish the order in which their consequences are arranged and of which these consequences, or elements, take part. Just so, principles are distinguished but not separated from the elements that are constitutive parts of the established whole. This point becomes important because throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there arises an increasing suspicion toward analysis of reality by ontological  Kenneth Schmitz, “Metaphysics: Radical, Comprehensive, Determinate Discourse,” in The Texture of Being: Essays in First Philosophy, ed. Paul O’Herron (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 2007), 14. 7  Adam Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007). 6

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principles and an attendant restriction of natural-­philosophical inquiry almost exclusively to analysis by quantitative elements.8 On the terms of this restriction, causes of things tend to be bracketed in favor of their elemental and phenomenal immediacy. In and of itself, such bracketing does not entirely do away with some principles. Within the complex order of elements arranged by a first principle, the elements may also serve as principles in the sense that they are constitutive causes of the composite whole to which they belong (like matter and form in different respects in any composition of the two). However, in any order there will be inevitably a primary principle whose primacy and originality cannot be sacrificed without the loss of the order to another. Axiomatically this means that where a principle establishes an order, that principle itself cannot be reduced to another principle without losing itself to another order entirely (or at a minimum, without its primacy being relativized). The abstractness of these terms may be eased somewhat with an example: we may reduce the order of a baseball team to its manager as its principle, but we cannot reduce the manager to another principle without taking leave of the team’s order as such. We might do this where we considered the manager together with the players as part of a larger order (the principiate, or what the principle establishes) to which they both belong, this order in turn being reducible to their labor union (the principle). What this illustrates is that the primacy of any given principle consists in its irreducibility for the order it establishes, which is exacerbated in the case of metaphysical principles that are transgeneric and universal  – above all the principle of the order of orders. In the latter case, an ultimate principle of principles would not only be irreducible for the order(s) it establishes but also would be incapable of being relativized by another principle or context. More on that in a moment. For now, these aspects of the concept’s history show, as Schmitz notes, that the metaphysical notion of principle not only designates “firstness” but also includes an element of “plenitude” or fullness relative to the order it authors. This element of plenitude is what distinguishes the classical notion of principle from the  Kenneth Schmitz, “Analysis by Principles and Analysis by Elements,” in Texture of Being (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 21–36. Further context for this transformation is provided by Michael J. Buckley, Motion and Motion’s God: Thematic Variations in Aristotle, Cicero, Newton, and Hegel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); Edward Grant, A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Oliver, Philosophy, God and Motion; Heiner F. Klemme, “Causality,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-­Century Philosophy, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 368–88.

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modern concept of totality. The difference between the two is evident in their divergent understandings of actuality as originating and resultant, respectively. For the former, knowledge finds itself in a situation where various beings have actuality from some higher principle, and knowledge is thereby ultimately resolved into the communication of actuality from that principle. For the latter, the context in which knowledge finds itself is some totality.9 How does this bear upon our analysis of Aquinas and Barth? The utility of this distinction between interpretations of actuality becomes more evident if we draw another parallel between Hegel and Barth, since Hegel is one of Schmitz’s key witnesses. Again we must stress that the purpose of this parallel is not genetic but strictly illustrative. Among other philosophers, Schmitz appeals to Hegel’s Science of Logic, book two, and observes how actuality emerges at the final moment in the development of essence in its opposition with appearance. The net result is an account of actuality that privileges “fact” or “result” over “principle.”10 The dialectic in both of Hegel’s Logics, though they differ in the details and the order of presentation, is the progressive determination of being in its actualization. Hegel himself summarizes much of this movement concisely: Actuality is that unity of essence and concrete existence [Existenz], of inner and outer, that has immediately come to be. The expression [Äußerung] of the actual is the actual itself, so that in the expression it remains something equally essential and is something essential only insofar as it is in immediate external [äußerlich] concrete existence. As forms of the immediate, being and concrete existence [Existenz] surfaced earlier; being is completely unreflected immediacy and [the] passing over into an other. The concrete existence is immediate unity of being  Schmitz offers several examples: “For Leibniz, the situation within which knowledge comes about is the pre-­established monadic harmony within which God’s wisdom and benevolence are realized. For Kant, the original situation is not the manifold of sensory data, but the conceptus cosmicus (Weltbegriff) by which pure reason apprehends a priori the totality of its interests in a rational life of speculative knowledge and practical freedom. For Hegel, situation takes definite form in the ontological category of the true infinite by which spirit acquires the explicit shape of totality. For Husserl, the situation is the open horizon within which the knowledge of objects advances. For Heidegger, it is the existential being-in-the-world in which Dasein pursues its possibilities.” Schmitz, “Another Look at Objectivity,” in Texture of Being, 77. 10  Kenneth Schmitz, The Gift: Creation (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1992), 102. See Hegel, The Science of Logic, 465–505. For the fuller account of this dialectical movement in the Science of Logic, which even Hegel thought difficult, see Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 258–96; Robert M. Wallace, Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 141–213.

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and reflection, thus appearance, coming from the ground and returning to it. The actual is the positedness of that unity, the relationship that has become identical with itself.11

Mercifully, the full intelligibility of these remarks need not concern us; it suffices for our purposes to note some of the terse logic expressed in these words. For Hegel our apprehension of the relative independence of “inner essence” is contradicted when we recognize that it is intelligible to us only through its relations to something else, in this case “external appearance.” There are two terms in this analysis, and though we may think of the first moment, inner essence, as the real unit of analysis, we cannot escape its correlation with what is dependent upon it, external appearance or concrete existence. Hegel argues that the inner essence is not something behind or above its externalization but is the manifest necessity of that external reality. The thing itself (Ding an sich) is knowable in its externality.12 Hence, actuality is Hegel’s attempt to overcome what he perceives as Kant’s false separation of noumena and phenomena in many ways parallel to how Aristotle sought to avoid Plato’s separation of form and matter.13 The relevant logic is found in the definition of actuality as the higher ground from which the unity of both inner and outer moments in their opposition is intelligible. Actuality (Wirklichkeit) is the “positedness” of essence and existence, in other words. The real unit of analysis is therefore the totality and not the essence or its existence alone, because neither taken apart from the other is actual (wirklich): “for actuality is that which is effective and sustains itself in its otherness.”14 Hegel  Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, §142.  Something’s “appearance is not only reflection-into-other but immanent reflection, and its externality is therefore the expression of what it is in itself; and since its content and its form are thus absolutely identical, it is, in and for itself, nothing but this: to express itself. It is the revealing of its essence, and this essence, accordingly, consists in being self-­revealing. The essential relation, in this identity of appearance with its inner or with essence, has determined itself as actuality.” Hegel, Science of Logic, 464. The posited unity of being in its immediacy and its reflection (“becoming and transition into an other”) is actuality. Hence, actuality is above both immediacy and reflection, internal and external, because it is their posited unity. What is actual in this sense reveals itself in its externality “only as a self-­differentiating and self-­determining movement.” Hegel, Science of Logic, 477–8. 13  Karen Ng, “From Actuality to Concept in Hegel’s Logic,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hegel, ed. Dean Moyar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 273. 14  Hegel, Philosophy of Right §82. In other words, “things that are actual must live up to their own inner principle or standard of truth and activity . . . Actuality is self-­ manifestation, a necessary relation between inner and outer, form and content, as self-­expression.” Ng, “From Actuality to Concept,” 277. 11 12

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has much more to say about all of this, and the dialectic does not stop or even reach its highest point here. What is germane to our analysis of divine actuality is the discernable tendency to conceive of actuality in terms of the posited unity of essence and existence – the totality or result of being and its self-­realization. Not only is actuality thus understood as the totality of essence and existence but it also confines our understanding of both terms to their correlation. As this finds application to God’s interaction with the world, “God does not cease to be God (does not give up universality), but God is God only in relation to a multi-­faceted totality.”15 According to Nicholas Adams, Hegel’s interests are not in ontology as much as logic, and especially in a logic learned from reflection on Chalcedonian categories. Rather than thinking of two terms in a relation oppositionally, where one term of the relation would ultimately force a choice against the other, Hegel prefers to see a deeper compatibility with a reparative “logic of distinction in inseparable relation” that is not reducible to separation or identification.16 Here both terms are what they are by virtue of their relation to one another, and so they must be learned in this relation or not at all, with the consequence that they are a “pair.”17 Since the two terms are in relation, then as a logical pair they are one; we need not choose oppositionally between absolute otherness or strict identification. What this amounts to is the logic of actuality as totality, which licenses and requires a correlationist form of inquiry. The formal logic of actuality as a posited totality is what finds a parallel in Barth, though with some significant modifications, not least of which is that Barth denies any self-­realization on the part of God. Furthermore, God remains free even in his external works, which “are bound to Him, but He is not bound to them.”18 Barth also retains a sense that God’s being is more though not different than what is revealed in his works. Everything we have already noted in previous chapters about the asymmetry between God and his external activity, as well as the freedom of God, must be registered at this point if we are not to misunderstand Barth entirely. We are strictly interested in the formal logic of totality or unity obtaining between essence and existence in Hegel, and being and act in Barth, with the significant material differences between the two  Peter C. Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 268. 16  Adams, Eclipse of Grace, 23. 17  Ibid., 8–9. 18  II/1:260. 15

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always in mind. Nor does this similarity require an equivalence between what essence and existence mean for Hegel and what being and act mean for Barth. One may exchange the terms of the pairing without abandoning the correlationist logic of actuality understood as totality. Though located within a very different set of convictions, then, a similar logic to Hegel’s seems to govern Barth’s understanding of God’s actuality.19 For Barth, actuality “holds together being and act, instead of tearing them apart like the idea of ‘essence.’”20 The unit of analysis is therefore not a totality of God and creatures that is higher than both, but rather the totality of God’s being and activity: each is what it is only in relation to the other. So, for example, theology has to understand God as love in the “totality of this happening not only in its inner inter-­relationship and movement but also in its unity. In the totality of this happening it is the creative and also the electing and purifying basis of human, genuine, Christian love.”21 Understanding “God as an actuality” in his revelation is the “legitimate and indispensable” aspiration of realism for theology: Our life is a process of perceiving ourselves, our world, and the two in indissoluble correlation. It runs its course as an experience of actuality, as a series of operations that happen to us and with us . . . Do I experience them? Do I experience them in the unity and totality of inner and outer experience? Are they real for me? Are they real for me? How do they concern me? Whatever does not concern me wholly and finally, how can that be anything for me but a nothing? Act means being, and being can only mean act.22

Now Barth locates the givenness of God’s actuality not in creation generally, but in the specific event of revelation: “We can think and speak realistically only by presupposing the act-­character of God’s actuality (Aktcharakter der Wirklichkeit Gottes).”23 Dialectical consideration of this actuality must also beware of submitting itself to some foreign rational criterion. Presupposing the event of God’s self-­ revelation in which we encounter God’s actuality, the unity of his being and activity, theology considers the correlation between God’s being and activity  Paul M. Collins suggests Hegel’s account of the Absolute as the background to Barth’s understanding of reality but does not offer any analysis of Hegel’s texts to demonstrate this claim: Trinitarian Theology, West and East: Karl Barth, the Cappadocian Fathers and John Zizioulas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 97–100. 20  II/1:262; II/2:6–7. 21  IV/2:779. 22  Barth, “Fate and Idea in Theology,” 36; Karl Barth “Schicksal und Idee in der Theologie, 1929,” in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1925–1930, Hermann Schmidt, ed. (Zürich: TVZ, 1994), 361. 23  Barth, “Fate and Idea in Theology,” 40/366, rev. 19

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inescapable for thought that is “directed, guided and ordered by something superior to itself,” namely, the Word of God.24 Creatures are always in danger of failing to render God’s distinction from creation in thought where they speculatively identify God’s givenness in the being or activity of the creature, rather than in the being and activity of God alone. Like Aquinas, Barth is concerned in his own way to acknowledge God as God.25 Unlike Aquinas, this leads Barth toward an account of actuality that privileges result over principle. Theological reason is therefore temperate and obedient only when it submits itself to the criterion of God’s self-­revelation in his Word and consequently knows God’s being strictly in correlation with his works. Reason’s movements must therefore correspond to the movement of God. Within these parameters, as we have seen, Barth tends to restrict theological reason to tracing the correlation of God’s self-­determination and external activity. At this point, it will be helpful to see how similarly correlational understandings of divine actuality have become quite common since Barth, if only to show how Barth is in some respects to be differentiated from them. We may start with two examples from Anglophone theology. For instance, Joe Jones denies that God is pure act yet proposes to distinguish between God’s essence and actuality, and to maintain God’s actuality as the “more fundamental reality.” He continues, It is the actuality of God that is the fundamental ontological subject, and the essence of God is simply the necessary structure that is always present in God’s actuality. God’s essence is itself a logical subject, but it is not an ontological subject. Only the actuality of God is the ontological subject. And it is this subject that we have trinitarianly identified in the economic self-­communications of God.26

The basic correlationism of this construal is evident in the thin depiction of God’s essence as the logical structure of his economic activity. Another, more striking example is that of Robert Jenson, who argues for a strong identification of God with his history in Israel and the Church: “God is one with himself just by the dramatic coherence of his eventful actuality.”27 And again, “the plot of the biblical narrative . . . is the final truth of God’s  Ibid., 50.  Westerholm shows how Barth’s concern is poised between what he perceives as the failures of realism and idealism to uphold God’s distinction from creation, and so seeks an account of the ordering of thought that upholds this distinction. Westerholm, Ordering of the Christian Mind, 29–34. 26  Joe Jones, “God: Triune in Essence and Actuality,” Encounter 59.1–2 (1998): 284–5. 27  Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 64. 24 25

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own reality.”28 Jenson maintains that God’s “triune life is in its actuality a life with us,” which carries a decisive restriction on theological inquiry: “We know God in that the Word of God that is God, that is homoousios with the Father, is actual only as conversation with us.”29 Hence, Jenson notes that God’s goodness is the honor and benefit he exercises toward us, “and of a goodness in God that was not his goodness to us we yet again may not speculate.”30 We can see here again how something like a notion of resultant actuality accompanies a correlationist inquiry. In German theology, Wilfried Joest similarly identifies the actuality of God with the totality of his self-­determination to be for us in Christ and the Spirit. For Joest, Scripture only speaks of the divine persons with a forward reference to their economic activity, which prompts him to make the striking but representative claim that the Holy Spirit’s essence just is his self-determination.31 Like Jones and Jenson, such an account entails that theology is not licensed to ask what God might have been before and apart from his works in time. These examples illustrate what one finds in recent discussion within German philosophical theology where the concept of actuality is given direct attention. In such discussions, actuality assumes two primary and related meanings: the first is that of the “whole of being” (All des Seienden) and is related to the second, which is that same whole to the extent that it encounters and is effective (wirksam) in the human.32 As we would expect by now, the concept embraces the objective and existential into a higher unity. Thus understood, actuality is an intrinsically correlational concept much in keeping with its sense in Hegel’s logic. As one theologian puts the matter, God’s actuality is almost identical to, or at least coincident with, the act of faith: “The actuality of God is, as it were, the occurrence of faith itself as reflexive self-knowledge.”33 We can see  Ibid., 108.  Ibid., 238. 30  Ibid., 231. 31  “Sein ‘Wesen’ ist der Wille und die Selbstbestimmung Gottes, in seinen Geschöpfen die Kraft zu ihrem Leben und im Menschen die Kraft seines Lebens in der Gemeinschaft mit ihm selbst zu warden.” Wilfried Joest, Dogmatik I. Die Wirklichkeit Gottes, ed. Johannes von Lüpke (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 312. 32  Falk Wagner, “Kann die Theologie eine ‘Theorie der Wirklichkeit’ sein?,” in Zur Revolutionierung des Gottesgedankens Texte zu einer modernen philosophischen Theologie, ed. Christian Danz and Michael Murrmann-­Kahl (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 206. 33  “Die Wirklichkeit Gottes ist gleichsam das Geschehen des Glaubens selbst als reflexive Selbsterkenntnis.” Christian Danz, Wirken Gottes: Zur Geschichte eines theologischen Grundbegriffs (Neukirchen-­Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2007), 189; cited in Mark W. Elliott, Providence Perceived: Divine Action from a Human Point of View (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 281. 28 29

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clearly enough the influence of Hegel’s sentiment that the “expression of the actual is the actual itself.”34 While these examples illustrate the wider influence of a logic similar to the one we find in Barth, they also throw into relief Barth’s own reserve with this logic. True, theological reason is restricted to tracing the correlation of God’s self-­determination and external activity, for this is the movement in which God shows himself to be God. And similarly, in this respect it is correct to note that God’s self-­revelation is, for Barth, “irreducible” in the sense that it forecloses the attempt to render intelligible God’s existence in abstraction from the encounter of God in his demonstration of his existence (Existenzbeweis).35 No moment of inquiry or aspect of God’s life can be bracketed from the other. God’s actuality is understood primarily as the result of God’s active self-­determination to the covenant in Christ, and not the principle of that self-­determination and the history it necessitates in God’s being “as such.” We acknowledge God as God is – rather than as we might wish God to be – when we refrain from seeking to know anything beyond what is given to us in God’s self-­revelation. This much is demanded by Barth’s Christological interpretation of God’s simplicity. However, Barth is convinced the correlation within which theology traces God’s being and activity will not collapse the two because theological reason does not reproduce, replace, or become the Word of God but only “witnesses to” the Word of God.36 This eschatological and For further examples, see Eilert Herms, “Gottes Wirklichkeit,” in Marburger Jahrbuch Theologie I: Vom Handeln Gottes, ed. Wilfried Härle and Reiner Preul (Marburg: N. G. Elwert Verlag, 1987), 82–101; Wilfried Härle, Outline of Christian Doctrine: An Evangelical Dogmatics, trans. Ruth Yale, ed. Nicholas Sagovsky (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 227–33; Bruce L. McCormack, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism,” in Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives, ed. B. L. McCormack (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 185–242. 34  Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, §142. 35  Jean-Yves Lacoste, “The Appearing and the Irreducible,” in Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology, eds. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordam University Press, 2010), 65. 36  Barth, “Fate and Idea in Theology,” 49. This is not to deny places where Barth speaks with greater proximity to the contemporary examples cited. For instance, Barth does tie the actuality of conversion to God’s actuality and at one point almost goes so far as to reverse the statement: “We count on the awakening of man to conversion as an actuality . . . The actuality of this event depends wholly on the actuality of God. But it depends on it so gravely, unconditionally, and indissolubly, that we must also say that the actuality of God stands or falls with the actuality of this awakening. Only for us? It is perhaps better not to make this restriction! God would not be God if this awakening did not take place. For He would not be the God of the covenant; of His free grace” (IV/2:558/631, rev). However, even these statements must be seen as witnesses to the

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ectypal reservation about theological reason in Barth’s hands shows a bit more reserve than the earlier examples about the deliverances of any logical correlation, even that of God’s self-­determination and external works. We might say Barth was attempting to achieve something more by ambitioning something less. All the same, the family resemblances are clear in the formal commitment to a correlational inquiry. The difference now emerges with Aquinas, for whom God’s actuality is referred to God as subsistent being itself (ipsum esse subsistens) in the sense of a radical principle of plenitude that subsists prior to and apart from any determination or movement toward creatures. Metaphysically stated, the intensity of actuality is located in being (esse). Indeed “being (esse) is the actuality of all acts” and functions as the principle both of things’ existence and of those acts by which they are conformed to the good that is their end.37 In creatures primary act is ordered to secondary act because being is self-­expansive: “act is the reason for the being of being (raison d’être de l’être), its blossoming, its highest realization.”38 Employed analogously to the life of God, there is no distinction between primary and secondary act; God is pure act because he is self-­subsistent. Theologically stated, the actuality of God is the being-in-act of the mutual relations of the Father, Son, and Spirit in their eternal blessedness. The subsistent relations that are the divine persons in their mutual coinherence is the simple divine actuality. But in this simple actuality, the processions of the Word and Love from the Father “include, but secondarily, a reference to creation, inasmuch as the divine truth and goodness are the principle of God’s knowing and loving any creature.”39 In the simple act that is his being, God is eternally the one who knows and wills himself as Creator, savior, and glorifier of the creature in Christ and the Spirit. It is imperative for us to notice, however, that Aquinas teases apart this singular and simple act so that it is intelligible to our mode of understanding. Through his manipulation of positive and negative theology and his speculative grammar, Aquinas shows how the consideration of God as pure act requires two logical moments: a first moment of absolute necessity in Word rather than the Word itself. Furthermore, one commentator has suggested that it is precisely Barth’s attention to the biblical theme of covenant rather than the notion of Concept that distances him from Hegel: Wouter Klouwen, Die Wirklichkeit der Geschichte. Ein Vergleich zwischen K. Barth und G.W.F. Hegel (Zoetermeer: Uitgeverij Boekencentrum, 1998). 37  DP 7.2.ad9. 38  de Finance, Être et agir, 216. 39  Ia.37.2.ad3. See also Ia.34.3; Ia.45.6.

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which God’s will is necessarily ordered to his own goodness alone, and a second moment of hypothetical necessity in which God’s will mercifully extends to creatures. These moments are not sequential or temporal but merely logical by-­products of what Scripture prompts him to say about God. Both moments are part of the full acknowledgment of God in his relation to and distinction from creatures implicit in the concept of pure actuality. Temperate yet properly ambitious theological reason therefore may consider the intelligibility of God’s life in himself “prior to and apart from” creatures as one stage in its discursive reasoning about that which is simple. Aquinas thus agrees with Barth about the priority of actuality over possibility, but considers actuality in terms of a noncontradiction between plenitude and principle rather than as self-­ determining fact. Consequently, actuality includes demonstratively the acknowledgment of both God’s absolute necessity to be nothing but himself and God’s hypothetical necessity to be the Creator and Redeemer of his people. Therefore, for the sake of our analysis, we may draw a distinction in Aquinas’s thought between divine actuality as plenitude and as principle: the latter represents God’s causal relation to creatures, and the former represents God’s self-­subsistent fullness.40 Neither moment is sufficient in itself for the full confession of God. Crucially, perhaps the most important element to emerge in our analysis of Aquinas is how his consideration of God’s pure actuality enables him to distinguish God’s actuality as subsistent plenitude and as principle without conflating or separating plenitude and principle. At its most basic, this distinction is the insight we attempt to exploit in the remainder of this chapter because it is particularly suited to uphold the confession of God as God both noetically and ontically. We may now return to the question about the possibilities of and restraints upon reason in confessing God as God, material differences about which we have traced through divergent understandings of God’s  This is a departure from Schmitz’s characterization insofar as it draws a distinction between God’s actuality as plenitude and as principle. The latter mirrors Polanus’s distinction between God’s sufficiency and its efficaciousness: “god’s sufficiency differs from his efficaciousness in that the former may be without the latter. For God’s sufficiency is eternal and is naturally an eternal, perpetual act of possession – given, as they say; finally, it is the very essence of God. However, efficaciousness is in time, it is a voluntary rather than natural exercise of his sufficiency, and it is an operation nonessential to him. Consequently, it is false that nothing more than efficaciousness is required to determine the truth regarding sufficiency. For in God sufficiency is true from eternity, whereas its efficaciousness is brought forth in time. And so sufficiency may be found without its exercise and efficaciousness, but indeed efficaciousness may not be found at all without sufficiency.” Polanus, Syntagma II.ix, 144.

40

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actuality. If, starting with a notion of God as pure act, both Aquinas and Barth operate within a correlation of act and being under the formality of God’s relation to the world, what distinguishes the two accounts is how Aquinas’s intricate pattern of considering God’s causal efficacy subverts this correlation sufficiently to account for something higher than it. As we argued in Chapter 2, Aquinas’s concern to acknowledge God as God leads him to construe the relationship of theology and economy in such a way as to secure the insight into God’s simple blessedness, which corresponds to the higher truth of the divine processions. Through the formal orientation of a causal analysis of God’s ways we come to understand that God’s possession and enjoyment of his own goodness has a modality that surpasses the necessity of creation for its intelligibility. As blessed, God himself is the principal material object of theological inquiry. This characterization of God’s perfect life in himself enables theology to think of God as independent of the world and possibly being all that exists without pretending to think of God apart from creatures’ relation to him. In other words, Aquinas’s construal of theology’s principal material object understands God’s actuality as plenitude, while the formal orientation of his inquiry understands God’s actuality as principle. Theological inquiry is bound to think of God within his relation to creation according to the order of knowing, but the character of God’s internal life that this inquiry achieves renders intelligible the thought of God absolutely and thus without creation according to the order of being. Theology’s principal material object is thus God himself, understood as the internal life of the blessed Trinity. Barth’s procedure contrasts with Aquinas’s in many respects, but it begins with a similar concern to acknowledge God without compromising God’s qualitative distinction from creation. However, Barth’s appropriation of the way of causality (via causalitatis) means that he is concerned to confess God as God is, and thus in the concrete actuality of God’s self-revelation.41 Barth achieves this by reinterpreting the notion of God’s perfect life so as to render intelligible God’s actuality as the unity of being and act that is God’s self-­determination to be God for us in Christ. That is, God’s actuality is “His own conscious, willed and accomplished decision.”42 At the conclusion to Chapter 4, we suggested that this line of thought tends on proportion to construe theology’s material object as God in his self-­determination rather than God himself “as 41 42

 II/1:348.  II/1:271/304, rev.

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such.” Whereas Aquinas accounts for God’s distinction from creation by subverting the formal orientation of theological inquiry that traces the correlation between God’s being and external activity, Barth tends to account for the same without subverting this formal interest but discerning God’s perfection within the contours of the boundaries set by God’s will to be this way and not another. The question we must consider is which approach best accounts for what theology must say about God’s being and activity on the one hand and the relation to creation this precipitates on the other in order to secure the confession of God as God both noetically and ontically. Pursing this question will involve us retracing elements of our analysis in two broad strokes. First, for theology that prioritizes actuality over possibility like both Aquinas and Barth, what kind of actuality serves the confession of God as God sufficiently? The initial steps toward an answer are provided in critically reflecting on the accounts of God’s being and activity traced thus far. Specifically, it will involve answering two further implied questions: If God is qualitatively distinct from all things ontically and noetically, then would God be God without creation? And if so, must a fitting coordination of divine act and being sustain the counterfactual statement that God might not have created the world without any detriment to God’s being as God? Second, is it necessary for the confession of God as God that theology subvert with its movements of thought the formal orientation of correlating God’s external works and being? Or is it sufficient to confess God’s perfection within the limits of this correlation, with the caveat that theology does not capture the full truth of God? Answers to this question are suggested through critical reflection on the relation God bears to the world and its metaphysical intelligibility. The question about how best to confess God as God noetically and ontically is therefore indexed to broader questions about God’s being and activity and the character of God’s relation to creation we have sought to understand. The remainder of this chapter now takes up each of these issues respectively.

Being and Activity What we have suggested are divergent understandings of actuality between our interlocutors are also evident in their equally divergent views concerning God’s goodness. Not insignificantly, differences over God’s goodness are also the site of their different construals of divine being and activity. Exaggerated for the sake of comparison: Where divine actuality is understood primarily as plenitude, it is intelligible as God’s possession

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and enjoyment of his goodness in eternal blessedness. Conversely, where divine actuality is construed in terms of “result” or “totality,” God’s goodness is identical with the decision for its communication. In the first case Aquinas understands God’s goodness absolutely with principal material priority and derives certain relative divine attributes from its communication, such as mercy or grace. In the second case Barth equates God’s goodness with love, defining the intelligible characteristic (ratio) of goodness with its communication, and derives the divine perfections from the dialectical movement of God’s history with creatures in a unity of form and content, internally and externally. This helps Barth to historicize the correspondence between God’s being and activity, since the unity of the form and content of God’s perfections in his history with creatures corresponds to their unity in form and content in God’s eternal decision for this history between himself and humanity. Both construals of divine goodness parallel how God’s being relates to his external activity and his internal activity. But which best serves the insight that God would be God without having created the world? Our task in what follows is not to offer an exhaustive account of divine being and activity, but to sketch some parameters of an account that enables the full confession of God as God. First, we discuss the notion of God’s self-­correspondence, which describes the relationship between God’s being and external activity. Second, we analyse the function of God’s self-­consistency, which is to demonstrate how God would be the self-­same God “prior to” and without creatures. Particularly in this latter notion we are occupied with the “reducibility” of God’s external and internal activity to God’s perfection and the intelligibility as well as priority of his perfection over any activity with an external reference. In what follows, reducibility functions to show how even internal acts like God’s outgoing immanent activity (opera immanentia donec exeunt) logically presuppose God’s perfection as their basis, and so are logically reducible to God’s perfection insofar as the latter is intelligible without them. The purpose of such language is not to suggest positively some absolute priority of possibility over actuality or to deny that God’s being is identical with his activity. The logical priority of divine perfection is in view because only where this has demonstrable priority is the confession of God as God secured with the depth and radicality it requires.

God’s Self-Correspondence First we consider the relationship between God’s being and his external activity, which we have followed throughout our analysis in terms of

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divine self-­correspondence. Our analysis concentrated on the doctrine of the divine attributes in each thinker, and here we need to reflect on how questions about the divine attributes bear upon the confession of God as God. In this section we address first the relationship between the orders of knowing and being, and second the question of the derivation of the divine attributes. How do we navigate these issues most fittingly to confess God as God? The noetic principle operative in the hermeneutical concept of divine self-­correspondence is that God’s acts reveal his being, which is where we find the truth of the dictum that being follows activity (esse sequitur operari). The question is how this noetic commitment about the order of knowing relates to the order of being. Barth is adamant that it cannot be reversed into a metaphysical statement about the order of being, or at least that if it is reversible, it refers us to something only God could know.43 Beyond this denial, what our analysis has shown is that what Barth might want to affirm about the relation between the orders of being and knowing is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand Barth seeks to understand God’s being in light of his external works and vice versa, restricting theological inquiry to thinking of God’s relation to the world. At least insofar as Barth applies the methodological commitments developed in his Anselm book, it is impossible to think God apart from his relation to the world because this relation is God’s freely posited necessity. On the other hand, there are moments where Barth gestures toward an ontic reserve beyond this noetic restriction. This is visible where he appeals to the counterfactual that God might not have created without being any the less loving, gracious, or merciful. Barth invokes such counterfactual arguments formally to reinforce the gratuity of God’s external works, and it is difficult to discern whether or not he means for there to be anything more material in these claims.44 Quite apart from affirming the hypothetical possibility of a positive will in God not to create, the claims require for their substantiation some demonstration of the intelligibility of God’s perfection logically “prior to and apart from” God’s self-­ determination to be for us in Christ. Otherwise, these claims risk being hollow. The ambiguity about how Barth relates the order of being and the order of knowing surfaces in light of Barth’s affirmation, and yet inability or unwillingness to demonstrate, that God would be just as gracious and  II/1:82–4; cf. von Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 191–2; Johnson, Karl Barth, 170–88. 44  Again, see Jones, Humanity of Christ, 73–4; Asbill, Freedom of God for Us, 185–91. 43

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merciful without his self-­determination to be for us in Christ. Thus, the question that interests us about the relation between act and being for Barth concerns how God’s internal being and perfections relate to God’s outgoing internal acts. What coordination of the orders of knowing and being sustains the hypothetical counterfactual that God would be God in undiminished perfection and goodness without creation? Where the question is considered an illegitimate abstraction, then at least one of two concessions is possible. First, one might maintain that God’s perfections are those of the electing God and knowledge of any other God we neither have nor need. Only knowledge of this God binds our thought and speech to the covenant in which God has bound himself to us and us to himself. This indeed has precedent in Reformed theology, as we see in Turretin: But when God is set forth as the object of theology, he is not to be regarded simply as God in himself . . . but as revealed and as he has been pleased to manifest himself to us in his word, so that divine revelation is the formal relation (ratio formalis) which comes to be considered in this object. Nor is he to be considered exclusively under the relation of deity (sub ratione Deitatis) . . . but as he is our God, that is, as he is covenanted in Christ.45

However, when wed to Barth’s polemic against semi-­nominalism this restriction creates the difficulty that the intelligibility of God in himself “prior to and apart from” his decree is something beyond or more than what God reveals to us in Christ.46 But to the extent that Barth wants something of this “beyond” in his counterfactual statements, he ultimately falls back upon the nominalism his procedure is designed to avoid when he discusses God’s grace and mercy. The second response presses into the tension consistently and contracts the ontic to the noetic: God gives himself his essence through an act of self-determination.47 Questions about the logical implications of counterfactual statements are thus considered “nonsense.”48 Consequently the order of being and order of knowing  Turretin, Institutio I.v.iv.  Though we do not have space to pursue the thought here, many of the tensions in Barth’s doctrine of God could be resolved if he abandoned his concerns about semi-­ nominalism and the attendant notion of correspondence in both form and content. 47  For example, McCormack, “The Actuality of God,” 210. 48  Robert Jenson, “Once More the Logos asarkos,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 13.2 (2011): 131. A full response to Jenson’s objection would require engagement with his account of eternity and time, or at least his framing of the objection on these terms. For a cogent analysis of Jenson’s thought that seeks to learn from Aquinas and Barth, see Scott R. Swain, The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology (Downer’s Grove: IVP Academic, 2013). 45 46

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are coextensive and there is nothing of God knowable  – and perhaps nothing of God  – beyond the correlation of his decision and external works. There are clear signs that while Barth’s methodological approach to God’s self-­correspondence may lean in this direction at moments, he nevertheless wants something more than this method can offer. How then are we to proceed? Aquinas’s sapiential inquiry into divine act and being adopts something like a noetic “being follows act.” But Aquinas is insistent that the order of knowing is distinct from the order of being, and so it does not follow ontically that being is strictly correlative with activity, understood as either external works or outgoing internal acts. Thus Aquinas maintains that ontically “act follows being” (agere sequitur esse). What we have to learn from Aquinas is how to subvert the correlation of being and externally terminating acts to confess God himself not only in his aseity but also in his inseity; God not only has life from himself but abides in himself. While theology’s formal orientation seeks to know God strictly in light of God’s relation to creation, the operative thought patterns must subvert this noetic restriction in order to arrive at the material insight into God as God if we want to maintain that God would remain in undiminished perfection without creation. Barth clearly wants the same thing but resists any metaphysical reversal of the order of knowing that would pretend to a greater knowledge of God than we are given in revelation. The fundamental question thus concerns how exactly God has revealed himself to be: one who consumes our attentions with the historical drama of his fellowship with us, or one who in this fellowship beckons our thoughts to things that are above by the fact of his sheer majesty? In essaying an answer to this, we turn to the paradigmatic event of Moses’s vision of God’s glory. This text suggests two things relevant for our question. First, we see here grounds for drawing a distinction between God’s goodness and the various forms it acquires in God’s covenant history with his people. This suggests something material about the distinction between the orders of being and knowing. And second, in this account we find implicitly the importance of the divine names for an account of God’s being and activity that registers a truth higher than the correlation between the two. First, from God’s disclosure of his glory to Moses, we may glimpse the truth of the maxim that in the order of being “act follows being” (agere sequitur esse). When Moses petitions God to reveal his glory, God responds, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name, ‘The lord’” (Exod 33:19). As God “passes” (‫) ׇעַבר‬ before Moses, the movement of all God’s goodness is articulated

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alongside the proclamation of God’s name: “The lord, the lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty” (Exod 34:6–7). In the condescension of its movement toward God’s people, God’s goodness is reflected as mercy, grace, patience, and love. The communication of God’s goodness is therefore the occasion for God’s self-­ declaration as the merciful and gracious God. For similar reasons a long scholastic tradition maintains that “God’s goodness is the fount of the grace, love, mercy, patience, and gentleness of God.”49 As God moves toward creatures in his goodness, he shows himself merciful to those in misery, gracious to sinners, patient with all, and abounding with covenant love in supreme fidelity to his nature as God. Commenting on the word “all” in “all my goodness” (Ex 33.19), Aquinas says that “the divine nature is sufficiently full, because every perfection of goodness is there.”50 Every perfection of goodness includes all the relative perfections of grace, mercy, patience, and so forth. Barth is unsatisfied by this reading of the passage, not only because it results in semi-­nominalism but also because, in his own interpretation, he focuses almost exclusively on God’s passing before Moses.51 Thus Moses hears God’s name, but only in “God’s passing before and going before, in God’s work and action, in which he does not see God’s face but in which he can only follow God with his eyes.”52 It means that “God is the One whose being can be investigated only in the form of a continuous question as to His action.”53 Barth’s reading of the text demonstrates a unidirectional coordination of names and acts, making the former subservient to the latter. But nothing in the text demands this prioritization of act over name, “passing before” over “goodness.” What might an alternative reading look like, and how is it suggested to us? At several points Scripture suggests a distinction between the content of goodness and its many forms in God’s grace, mercy, and steadfast love. Thus the psalmist says, “Oh give thanks to the lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!” (Ps 118:1, 29). We are told first that  Polanus, Syntagma II.xx, 163. For a more extensive account of God’s goodness in the sense intended here, see Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 210–16. 50  Phil. 2.2.57. 51  II/1:18–19. 52  II/1:19. 53  II/1:61/66. 49

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God is good, and subsequent to this identity statement is the fact that his steadfast love is inexhaustible. Something of this same order is present elsewhere in the Psalms: “The lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Ps 145:9); “For the lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations” (Ps 100:5). Throughout Scripture God’s goodness is glossed in this confessional manner with its many perfections (Ps 86:5; 106:1; 107:1; 1 Chron 16:34; Ezra 3:11; Jer 33:11; Nah 1:7).54 Israel waits on God’s “name, for it is good” (Ps 52:9, 11). Again, a similar pattern is found in Isaiah: “I will recount the steadfast love of the lord, the praises of the lord, according to all that the lord has granted us, and the great goodness to the house of Israel that he has granted them according to his compassion, according to the abundance of his steadfast love” (Isa 63:7). Here God’s goodness is said to be given in the forms of, or “according to,” his compassion and steadfast love. All of these statements cohere with the order found in God’s response to Moses: God’s goodness passes before Moses and is accompanied by the declaration of its manifold forms. God not only names the forms (mercy, grace, patience, steadfast love, and faithfulness), but their essential content (goodness). Indeed, these acts of naming are proof enough that God’s “passing” before Moses does not exhaust God’s activity. For just such reasons, when explaining the perfections of God’s goodness such as grace, mercy, patience, and clemency, Polanus constantly refers back to God’s goodness through a series of related terms like benignity and propensity. God’s grace is thus “the most benignant will and favor of God, through which he is truly and properly gracious, and by which he is favorable and gratuitously beneficial to his creatures.”55 Similarly, God’s mercy is the “utmost propensity of his will” to come to the aid of those in need, and God’s patience is “his most benign will” to moderate his wrath and defer the penalties of sin so that the creature may repent.56 Finally, God’s clemency is “the utmost benignity of his will, by which even in wrath he remembers his mercy, is favorable and lenient toward us, although otherwise we deserve dung, he prefers

 See Robert P. Gordon, “‫טֹוב‬,” in New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, ed. Willem A. VanGemeren (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), vol. 2, 353–7. An account companionable to the one set forth here may now be found in Holmes, The Lord Is Good. 55  Polanus, Syntagma II.xxi, 163. 56  Polanus, Syntagma II.xxiii, 175; II.xxiv, 179. 54

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our recovery and conversion over our death.”57 But rooting these manifold perfections as relative forms of God’s absolute goodness is not an abstract principle with which the divine attributes are deduced. Each perfection is addressed as exegesis demands, and Scripture says that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). Thus, Polanus accounts for God’s love in both absolute and relative dimensions while still rooting it in God’s goodness. First, he defines God’s love as “the essential property or essence of God by which he delights himself in and wills good to that which he approves. For this is to love: to delight oneself in that which pleases, and to will and bestow good upon it.”58 He then proceeds to distinguish between God’s natural and voluntary love. Naturally, or absolutely, God’s love is that “by which God loves himself before all things: the Father loves the Son and the Holy Spirit; the Son loves the Father and the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit loves the Father and the Son.”59 Voluntarily, and thus with reference to economy, God either loves creatures generally or specifically and singularly God loves the elect in his love for Christ. These distinctions between natural and voluntary, absolute and relative, assume heightened significance in light of the concern to confess the truth of God’s plenitude apart from his efficaciousness toward creatures. We saw in our analysis of Aquinas’s account of God’s mercy the importance of designating God’s goodness as the source from which relative attributes like grace and mercy derive. Chiefly this understanding of Scripture’s metaphysical intelligibility means that what is most essential about mercy and grace is already true of God apart from any hint of privation, opposition, and overcoming. The perfection of God is thus intelligible apart from the contingencies of history, and above all apart from the sinful creature’s rebellion. Second, we may note how God’s naming of both his goodness and the manifold perfections of that goodness highlights the importance of God’s own acts of self-­naming. Aquinas internalizes the importance of this feature of the biblical texts in his use of both negative and positive theology, which is an instance of the doctrine of the divine names operating with the full “threefold way.” This interplay allows divine names such as “goodness” to inform the doctrine of God by virtue of their capacity to name God’s being analogously, and not merely to serve as descriptors for, or transcendental conditions for the possibility of, God’s economic

 Polanus, Syntagma II.xxv, 180.  Polanus, Syntagma II.xxii, 173. 59  Ibid., 173. 57 58

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activity  – much less as pointers to an “experience of his working.”60 Barth’s approach to divine self-­correspondence is one among many similar modern approaches to deriving the divine perfections or statements about God’s being from God’s activity.61 But to discern God’s life only from God’s external acts is to operate within the confines of a particular construal of the way of causality alone, which presumes that Scripture only speaks to God’s being by witnessing to God’s external acts. To an extent, Aquinas’s inquiry into divine act and being is similar insofar as it proceeds as a causal analysis of God’s external works that traces these works to their foundation in God’s being. Through the notion of “procession” he demonstrates how God corresponds to himself in his act of creating because how and why creatures proceed from God has an inner basis and archetype in the Father’s begetting of the Son and their common spiration of the Spirit. Yet this is not all Aquinas marshals to his inquiry, for he also considers it indispensable for theology to consider God’s names, careful analysis of which is directly relevant for consideration of God’s works but not strictly correlated with those works.62 One of the chief names of God, “i am who i am” (Exod 3:14), signifies God’s self-­subsistent being that “comes before the idea of cause” absolutely – hence God’s being is presupposed to his causal activity and is demonstrable as such.63 Patient reflection on the biblical names of God therefore serves a critical function in securing the reducibility of God’s externally directed acts to his being. What this suggests is that, properly set forth, a retrieval of the divine names might be one of the more promising tasks for contemporary theological reflection on the doctrine of God that seeks to uphold the confession of God as God.64  Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 360. 61  For a short overview and a defense of this approach in its modern guise that is much indebted to Hegel, see Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 359–70, 384–96. Cremer states the view directly: “we can say nothing about God that we do not know objectively from his action and subjectively by the faith this action evokes, and so in such a way that the priority lies with God.” Cremer, Christian Doctrine of the Divine Attributes, xxii. 62  “God is not said to be wise because wisdom comes from him, but rather created things are said to be wise insofar as they imitate divine wisdom – because it is true to say that God is wise, good, and so forth from eternity when creatures were non-­existent, even if they never would exist in the future.” Sent. I.2.1.2.corp. 63  Ia.13.11.ad2. 64  See here R. Kendall Soulen, The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity, vol. 1, Distinguishing the Voices (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011); Scott R. Swain, “On Divine Naming,” in Aquinas Among the Protestants, ed. Manfred Svensson and David VanDrunen (Hoboken: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2018), 207–27. 60

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This is not, however, to separate names from God’s external acts; both are still required. If some names  – like Father, Son, or Spirit  – tell us something about God that is true apart from God’s external works, it nevertheless remains true that these names are explicated in the economy. A name like “blessedness” (1 Tim 6:15) leads Aquinas to affirm that God possesses and enjoys his own goodness in supreme bliss. Since nothing can give God a good he does not already possess and enjoy in himself, then God has no need to create, “nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). Thus understood, God is God apart from and antecedent to any element of economy. Significantly, however, the theological intelligibility of divine beatitude through naming is only part of a process that must proceed to its identification in history. God’s economy is the wider context in which the concepts acquired through naming are articulated, which is why a robust account of God’s perfect life he lives from and in himself is insufficient if it separates theology from economy. God’s reconciling activity in Christ and the Spirit is therefore essential to grasping the proper significance of God’s goodness and beatitude alike. From revelation we learn that it belongs to the nature of goodness to communicate itself, and so God’s creative activity befits God’s possession and enjoyment of his own goodness without adding anything to it. Moreover, God’s blessedness is not the false bliss of the pagan gods; God does not to lock himself up in stolid isolation but extends his life miraculously to creatures to elicit their gratitude and joy at “the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Understanding the economic articulation of perfections like God’s goodness and beatitude help us discern how the truth of God’s perfection obtains apart from his economy. This is in very abbreviated form an account of God’s self-­correspondence that notes the utility of both action and names for a theology of God’s perfections. Neither one is sufficient apart from the other. Names possess an essential significance that is inseparable from their intertextual connection with other words across the biblical canon, as well as the immediate logic implied in their grammar and syntax. Yet the full significance of any name acquires its articulation across the whole history of God’s works, in which the gospel events critically chasten otherwise infelicitous associations of concepts abstracted from their articulation.65 Much more  On the relationship between concept and articulation, see Robert Sokolowski, Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology (Notre Dame, IN:

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should be said to vindicate such a coordination, but this outline suffices to gesture toward a more constructive account that takes the concerns of both Aquinas and Barth seriously insofar as their approaches recognize the importance of both general and specific inquiries into divine being and activity. What might these brief reflections suggest about the character of divine actuality that best enables the confession of God as God? God’s decisive self-­demonstration in Christ is indeed paramount for our understanding of God’s being, but an unwarranted historicism that failed to discern the full depths of Christ’s deity in his eternal beatitude with the Father and Spirit would fail to understand God’s self-­demonstration. No moment of the theologian’s inquiry into God can be “bracketed” from the others, but this does not mean consequently that within this encounter theology is unable to say anything more comprehensive about the actuality of God without violence to its determinacy. God’s activity in the economy is absolutely binding on us, but it need not for that reason be irreducible. Indeed we have every right to question the polarization of general and specific or comprehensive and determinate elements of theological inquiry; these two need not be competitive, depending on the kind of inquiry into divine actuality theology proposes. Contrary to some entrenched dispositions this side of Kant, it is not manifestly less speculative to adopt an account of actuality that leans toward determinate totality rather than originating plenitude. Both involve wide-­ranging judgments about what there is to see in revelation. The question is rather more explicitly what kind of actuality best enables theology’s task of biblical reasoning to confess adequately the God of the gospel as God. We have suggested that the way Scripture talks about God’s goodness suggests the very distinction between form and content that Barth resists, and that furthermore this reinforces the distinction between God in himself and toward us as something more than merely heuristic. While an emphasis on God’s action is crucial for the chastening of concepts and names in accordance with the gospel, a retrieval of more traditional accounts of the divine names could help theologians resist the correlationist impulse of some contemporary theology. Theology needs to subvert its noetic restriction in the order of knowing, not to master God but to acknowledge an ontic Object that is infinitely more and greater than the dialectics with which He is confessed. Therefore, to the extent that University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 93–4; Wittman, “Not a God of Confusion But of Peace,” 168–9.

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resisting a strictly correlationist inquiry into divine being and activity is necessary to confessing God as God, an account of actuality as original fullness is more accommodating to theological reason’s responsibilities. As we turn now to consider divine self-­consistency and then God’s relation to creation, the reasons for resisting a strictly correlationist inquiry will become more transparent.

God’s Self-Consistency In our analysis of Barth’s doctrine of God, we saw how he leans proportionately on articulating God’s self-­correspondence as the electing God rather than God’s self-­correspondence as God “as such.” Barth would see this as a distinction without a difference, but it is nevertheless implicit in the tension between his invocation of the counterfactual hypothetical that God would be self-­identical without the decree and creation, and yet his inability to render this invocation intelligible when discussing the divine perfections of grace and mercy. The problem, therefore, is one of not being able to demonstrate how the election of grace is itself an act self-­consistent with his nature. Some responses to this problem in the wake of Barth suggest that the true problem lies in the question itself and the counterfactual that implies it. This section proposes a different response. To this end, we first set forth a brief apology for the conceptual import of analysis into divine self-­consistency, and second provide an outline of how it helps render coherent and intelligible theology’s appeal to God’s self-­sufficiency as the one who would remain in undiminished perfection without creatures, and thus the confession of God as God. Self-consistency is itself a conceptual gloss on the biblical theme of God’s faithfulness, and since dogmatic reasoning should be an extension of exegesis, we should start by seeing how Scripture orders the question of self-­consistency. Moses’s encounter with God in the burning bush is instructive on the question of self-­consistency if we pay attention to the grammatical features of the text and its literary order. When God calls to Moses from the burning bush and says, “i am who i am” (Exod 3:14), the tautologous character of the statement performs grammatically what it communicates: something absolutely self-­referential that requires nothing relative for its intelligibility.66 That is, the self-­sufficiency of this name’s form as a tautology speaks to the self-­sufficiency of God, who here refers himself to himself in concise but pregnant reflexivity. After this  On the relation between Exod 3:13–15, see Andrea D. Saner, “Too Much to Grasp”: Exodus 3:13–15 and the Reality of God (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2015).

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initial and ambiguous statement, God proceeds to tell Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘i am has sent me to you’” (Exod 3:14). On the basis of the self-­referential statement, a further declaration follows that is relative to Israel; the “deep logic” of both statements is that because God is “i am who i am,” then he can be the same for his people.67 Taken together, the first two declarations are clear indications of God’s self-­consistency: God is self-­identical and proves himself the same in his presence with his people. Though God’s consistency with himself is left without much by way of metaphysical intelligibility, part of theology’s task of dogmatic reasoning is to render this statement intelligible in light of what it confesses about God’s nature. For the moment, it is crucial to observe the order of these two statements declaring God’s self-­consistency. God for Israel is the same God who is in himself, but if the grammatical details of the passage are of any significance then they suggest that the first statement’s self-­referential character means that God’s self-­identity is irreducible and his economic condescension is not. Only on the basis of the first statement’s absoluteness does the second statement’s relativity acquire its comforting power. The sequence of the two statements therefore speaks to a material order between them. However, God is not finished naming himself. Both of these initial “i am” statements are preparatory for the final statement, in which God reveals the Tetragrammaton, the most proper of God’s most proper names.68 If the first two statements are unique in what they mean, the third, “in contrast to both, expresses God’s uniqueness merely by what it is.”69 In this sense it is set apart from the other two; indeed, it is God’s “holy name” (Lev 20:3). The difference between God’s proper name yhwh (‫ )יהוה‬and his name “i am” in its absolute and relative pronouncements is that the first two statements are plays on and therefore encompassed within the third. In an important sense logically, the Tetragrammaton has priority over the two “i am” statements “by virtue of its status as a personal proper name that fixes the referent of biblical discourse.”70 What may we make of this? If the Tetragrammaton fixes the referent of the other two, then it shows how discourse about God’s self-­consistency fundamentally concerns the God of Israel who reveals himself in Jesus Christ. However, discourse about God’s self-­ consistency will require absolute and relative moments corresponding to God’s pronouncements  Soulen, The Divine Name(s), 141.  Ia.13.11.ad1. 69  Soulen, The Divine Name(s), 141. 70  Ibid., 142. 67 68

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as “i am who i am” in the first moment and the “I am” pronounced on the lips of Jesus in the second (John 8:58). In the conceptual idiom of our present analysis, divine self-­consistency will therefore be a matter of elucidating that with which God’s activity is faithful, both internally and externally. This is part of the significance of “i am who i am” preceding the Tetragrammaton in our text.71 The scholastic vocabulary and distinctions are particularly useful in a consideration of God’s act and being for precisely these reasons. Specifying the logical consistency of God’s outgoing immanent acts with his perfection corresponds to the absolute moment, and specifying the consistency of the former with God’s external works corresponds to the relative moment. Something similar is found in Aquinas’s two-­step consideration of God’s will as pure act, in which he identifies God’s absolute necessity to be himself and only his hypothetical necessity to be the Creator. Whatever approach one adopts, both absolute and relative moments are part of rendering intelligible the self-­consistency of the God of Israel in the missions of the Son and Spirit, and thus confessing the God who is faithful to save because faithful to himself. When God swears to Abraham, God swears by himself and not merely by his promise or decree (Gen 22:16; Heb 6:13). God’s self-­consistency is therefore a matter of articulating that with which God’s activity is faithful, both internally and externally. Most theologies have an explicit or implicit account of that with which God’s external and internal activity is consistent; bringing these notions to light is the critical task of dogmatic reasoning about God’s self-consistency.72 On one level God’s external activity is consistent with God’s internal activity that is its ground: the Trinity’s external works are indivisible and yet preserve their personal properties and order because these common external works correspond to the distinctive internal acts logically grounding the

 Saner, “Too Much to Grasp,” 226–8 recognizes the limitations of Soulen’s analysis in this regard. 72  Such a task has a long pedigree, on which see Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 41–79; Torstein Theodor Tollefsen, Activity and Participation in Late Antique and Early Christian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 47–158; Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-­Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 125–90 (especially 177–82, 185–90). For the wider portrait, see also Michel René Barnes, The Power of God: Dynamis in Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001); Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-­Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 71

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divine persons’ relations to one another.73 And yet on another level God’s essential internal activity is logically self-­consistent with God’s perfection, which is intelligible as the notional acts of begetting and spirating (opera relationis), as well as the self-­referred personal internal activity among the Father, Son, and Spirit on the basis of their preexisting relations (opera Dei simpliciter personalia). Various theologies might construe the details of this general structure of God’s faithfulness differently given doctrinal differences in other areas. Where differences in soteriological conceptions of Christ’s mediatorship obtain, differences likely also find expression in God’s outgoing internal act that grounds God’s works of grace. Thus the visible mission of the Son could be self-­consistent with the Trinity’s predestination of Christ’s humanity and his procession from the Father. Alternatively, the visible mission of the Son could be self-­consistent with his appointment as the Mediator in the covenant of redemption, which itself follows the pattern of the intrapersonal activity of the Trinity (opera simpliciter personalia). Despite their differences, both are accounts of the self-­consistency of God’s external activity with his essential internal activity that seek also to show the consistency of God’s outgoing internal works with what logically precedes them: notional and self-­referential intratrinitarian activity. That is, both accounts seek to reduce God’s acts to his perfection so as to account for God’s self-­consistency as God, and not merely God’s self-­consistency as the electing or covenanting God. Aside from concerns about unwarranted vestiges of voluntarism, why is it crucial for the acknowledgment of God as God to observe the logical reducibility of God’s acts to his perfection? To outline an answer to this question, we must concentrate on the function of God’s internal activity relative to divine perfection. God is pure act and therefore God’s internal activity is identical with his essence, but certain of God’s internal acts are not essential to the truth of his perfection, whereas others are. This distinction must be articulated theologically by distinguishing between absolute and relative moments of theological inquiry, which results in an account of God’s perfection as both plenitude and principle, or sufficiency and efficaciousness. Both aspects are part of theology’s concentration on its material object, but the former, self-­referential moment has material priority over the relative moment. The reason why is that God’s notional acts of begetting and spirating are constitutive of God’s perfection, thereby serving as the ontological  See further Tyler R. Wittman, “On the Unity of the Trinity’s External Works: Archaeology and Grammar,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 20.3 (2018): 359–80.

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presupposition of any common acts whereby God relates to anything outwith himself. If this ontological order is not observed and carefully rendered in speech and thought, God’s outgoing internal acts become logically irreducible and thus function to designate divine perfection tout court. To render God’s internal activity proceeding to an external term irreducible is in effect to adopt a correlationist inquiry companionable to a notion of divine actuality as totality. However, the problem with failing to specify God’s perfection as something logically antecedent to and intelligible without God’s outgoing immanent operations is that God’s perfection becomes either really rooted in or coterminous with his will, or else it remains something unknown. Under these circumstances, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate how God’s outgoing internal acts do not contribute essentially to God’s perfection either ontically or noetically. That is, even where one affirms that God’s outgoing internal acts are free and nonconstitutive, without a demonstration of their logical consistency with God’s perfection, one jeopardizes this affirmation by making God’s perfection unintelligible without at least an anticipatory reference to creatures. The consequence is that affirmations about God’s intrinsic perfection become subject to easy abuse or dismissal. An account of actuality as originating fullness helps guard against such failures by enabling theology’s ministerial metaphysics to confess God’s internal activity as principle and plenitude. Robust teaching about God’s intrinsic perfection will therefore have something to say about God’s internal activity, including the distinctions noted here between essential and personal internal activity. These distinctions serve the articulation and intelligibility of God’s absolute self-­referentiality as part of theological reason’s two-­step, complementary inquiry concerning God’s pure actuality. The distinction of moments in this inquiry renders God’s outgoing internal acts logically reducible to God’s perfection as God, in a way that the intratrinitarian activity is not. Note: logically reducible, and not actually reducible. There is no physical motion in God, and so nothing imperfect that is reducible to something perfect. God is perfectly simple, and so the reducibility in question is only logical. Specifying these notions proves important for the character of what Robert Sokolowski calls the “Christian distinction,” namely, that “God could and would be God even if there were no world.”74 For unless God is intelligible as blessed and glorious apart from and prior to any reference to creatures, description of God’s perfection is likely to be exhausted in description of  Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 33.

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the conditions for the possibility of God’s relation to creation at best, and in description of God’s relation to creation at worst. To see why, we now need to consider the relation that follows from the character of God’s self-­correspondence and self-­consistency outlined earlier. Once the character of this relation is in view, we will see why confessing God as God is best secured by distinguishing the complementary confession of YHWH’s simple perfection as plenitude (“i am who i am”) and as principle (“i am has sent me to you”).

Relation and the Confession of God Throughout our study we have seen the central importance of teaching about God’s intrinsic being and activity for the interpretation and intelligibility of God’s relation to the world. In the previous section we argued for the importance of discriminations about God’s perfection antecedent to and without those initiating acts that refer God’s fullness of life to his presence with creatures. Such considerations have material priority over questions about God’s relation to creation because the latter is intelligible only in light of the former. This is true for both Aquinas and Barth, though we have observed notable differences in light of their understandings of God’s actuality and self-­consistency, differences that emerge in light of their distinct approaches to God’s self-­ correspondence. The question about God’s relation to the world involves for both thinkers the no less important question of God’s distinction from creation; the proper confession of God as God is at the forefront of their deliberations. If arguing God’s absolute self-­consistency discloses the “special sense of sameness in God “before” and “after” creation,” then arguing God’s noetic and ontic distinction from all things in his relation to the world discloses “the special sense of otherness between God and the world.”75 In this final section we need to consider in summary fashion how best to negotiate God’s relation to the world while taking seriously this concern for confessing God as God and thus rendering in speech as well as thought the insight that God is not a kind of thing (Deus non est in genere). How then are we to understand God’s relation to the world in terms that capture both ontically and noetically God’s qualitative distinction from all things? We acquire some initial orientation toward these questions by returning to Barth’s analysis of God’s relation to creation. At the conclusion of the previous chapter we noted that Barth’s view is formally 75

 Ibid.

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parallel to late-­medieval nominalist conceptions of God bearing a real relation to creation. The medieval nominalists in question adopt a line of thought Anselm advances in his Monologion. Notably when Anselm considers how God might bear an accidental relation to creation that does not violate his immutability, he frames the question in terms of God’s self-­consistency: God’s “essence is, as is clear, entirely the same as itself, substantially. But is it not sometimes different from itself in terms of its accidents?”76 Anselm’s goal is to procure both divine immutability and yet the accidental or contingent character of God’s relation to the world. Prayerfully thinking out loud without really landing on any concrete proposal, Anselm proceeds to distinguish proper from improper accidents: the former indicate some change in the substance to which they adhere, whereas the latter, like relations, do not. He illustrates this with an example of his relation to someone who will be born next year: at the moment he is not taller than this other person, but when they are born he is considered taller relative to that person and thus bears a relation to them without having undergone any substantial change himself. We should note what is unexpressed in Anselm’s example, namely, that it presupposes a foundation in the subject of the relation for the comparison with the term of that relation. On this basis he notes that any accidental relation God bears to creatures impugns neither his immutability nor simplicity because the accident does not really add anything to him. He concludes: “The supreme essence is, therefore, never different from itself, not even accidentally. Just as substantially, it is always the same as itself. Whatever the rules are for using the term ‘accident’ properly, this is true and beyond doubt: nothing may be predicated of the supreme and immutable nature which might suggest that it is mutable.”77 What secures God’s self-­consistency in relating to the world is that God does not undergo any change at the onset of this relation because, presumably, there is always already a foundation in God’s being and activity for this relation. Through a purely formal comparison, such a foundation is what we find in Barth’s account of God’s self-­determination, in which God posits himself in relation to creatures in and through Christ. What should we make of this? Recall that the nominalist theologians affirm three of Aquinas’s criteria for real relations, and yet only reject the fourth. Thus they affirm that (a) God and creatures are both real, (b) both are distinct, and (c) that  Anselm, Monologion §25, in Major Works, 41.  Anselm, Monologion §25, in Major Works, 42.

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both have a foundation for the relation in question. However, they deny that (d) both terms must belong to the same ontological order if there is to be a real relation between them. When Suárez addresses these nominalists’ views, he notes pacifically that the difference between this view of real relations and Aquinas’s view of nonreal relations is not a question of orthodoxy because they affirm God’s perfection. This is a welcome preface to everything that follows as we try to navigate the full confession of God as God. That said, Suárez raises an important objection to the metaphysical details of the nominalists’ position that is relevant for our analysis. Even though the nominalists’ view avoids attributing imperfection to God through the acquisition of accidents, Suárez maintains that God cannot “be related to creatures through his intrinsic form and entity. For this is proper to being of the same order, but God and a creature are of entirely diverse orders, as is self-evident.”78 If God and creatures are not part of the same order, then how or why would we understand his relation to creatures as real? Suárez implies that the question about order is not as superfluous as the nominalist tradition in view supposes, because if God relates to creatures through himself then can God’s relation to creatures even begin to be described as real? On Suárez’s terms one would need to assume at least a formal proportion between God and creatures to get such a claim off the ground. Another way of registering this concern is to ask whether positing a real relation of God to the world sufficiently keeps God’s qualitative distinction in view noetically and ontically. That is, does the metaphysical intelligibility of our confession of God’s relation to creation maintain the confession of God as God ontologically in terms of what we say about God’s being, but also noetically in the sense that God’s perfection is intelligible without this relation? We need to address the ontic and noetic aspects in turn. First, we must confess that ontologically God and creatures are not part of the same order. Aquinas and Barth are almost of one mind on this score. Aquinas’s denial of a mutually real relation between God and creatures relies in no small part on the immeasurable disproportion between the two as concerns order. The intrinsic structure of God’s life is described in how God is ordered to himself in the reflexive circularity of his eternal beatitude. God’s will is determined to his goodness, for which reason all contingent acts of God’s will are acts self-­consistent with his nature: “because God’s will is content with His own goodness it follows that He

 Suárez, DM 47.15.22.

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wills nothing else except on that account, not that He wills nothing else.”79 Because this self-­reflexivity of divine bliss means that God’s acts of creation and grace order creatures to himself and not vice versa, then God’s blessedness is the plenitudinous principle of the benefit God bestows in creation. The notion of order here serves the purpose of showing that God and creatures do not belong on the same plane because God does not order himself to creatures but only creatures to himself, and there is an infinite disproportion that attends this spontaneous act of mercy. The important thing to note is that the character of God’s perfection does not require that God is intrinsically ordered to anything other than himself to be everything for us. Barth construes matters differently precisely out of a concern for the character of God’s perfection. Resistant to any general teleological constraints on God’s perfection, Barth affirms that God is free in his love to give himself to creatures by virtue of a dispositive act of lordship in which God orders himself to creatures and creatures to himself in the covenant. This self-­posited teleology is consistent with God’s perfection because God’s act of self-­determination is understood in terms of a self-­qualification that does not impugn God’s constancy or perfection. In this regard, Barth shares some similar convictions with Anselm in a considerably different register. Therefore, both Aquinas and Barth affirm that God is not part of the same order as creatures ontologically in the sense that God is not another piece of furniture in the room. However, Barth’s account of God’s inner-­divine teleology does depart from Aquinas’s notion of order. Insofar as Barth affirms that God’s actuality is unthinkable apart from God’s self-­posited relation to creatures through Christ, his view prompts the kind of question Suárez asks the nominalists: Is this sufficient to confess God as God noetically? In other words, is this view of self-­posited real relations sufficient to render God’s perfection intelligible without God’s movement toward creatures? The argument thus far leads to the conclusion that we should affirm the intelligibility of God antecedent to and possibly without his relation to creation and just so preserve the Christian distinction. This relates to the thread we have been tracing in trying to discern the appropriate construal of God’s actuality that theology recognizes, which we have argued is bound up with decisions about God’s being and activity. Understanding God’s self-­correspondence and self-­consistency properly requires that we  Ia.19.2.ad3; “God’s will is naturally inclined to his goodness, and so he can will only that which is fitting to it, namely the good. Nevertheless, he is not determined to this or that good, and it does not follow that the good things which are from him proceed necessarily” (DP 3.15.ad16).

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demonstrate the intelligibility of God above and without his works, and so show the logical reducibility of God’s activity to God’s perfection. This concern is easily misunderstood if interpreted as licensing detached and curious contemplation of God’s inner life, as if knowledge of God’s essence in itself were possible for pilgrims or as if such knowledge exhausted theology’s responsibilities. Employed responsibly, construing God himself as the principal material object of theology and the demonstration of its intelligibility prior to and apart from creatures serves the confession of God as God that is the requisite backdrop to understanding God’s works of creation, reconciliation, and consummation as acts of God. The material object of theology in its full scope is, after all, God and his works of nature, grace, and glory. Yet if these works are not constitutive of God’s perfection ontically, then theology should be able to render this confession noetically such that God is intelligible as possibly having been without them. These considerations bear upon the question of God’s relation to creation because they demonstrate how the proper understanding of this relation upholds the recognition of God as God noetically. We may better appreciate the relevance of this aspect of the Christian distinction by surveying some alternatives. Contemporary reflection on God’s distinction from creation sidelines this noetic aspect to the extent that reflection is situated within correlationist frames of inquiry.80 God’s distinction from creation is thus thought to  For example, one might consider Kathryn Tanner’s important analysis in God and Creation. In this work, Tanner is highly attentive to linguistic practices and self-­ consciousness about the contextual nature of metaphysics, and is concerned that the Christian community’s speech arises from practical concerns and results in faithful practices. She thus canvasses traditional forms of speech about God and, in light of how some statements apparently conflict, characterizes the role of theologians as supplying “conditions for the possibility that justify the need Christians feel to meet certain linguistic obligations” (God and Creation, 20). This results in a chastened form of transcendental argument as the primary means for supplying these conditions: “Transcendental arguments are shifted in our case to a linguistic arena: conditions for coherent Christian talk are themselves linguistic” (God and Creation, 26). As an analysis of the rules for forming first-­order statements, the analysis is highly apophatic and not exclusionary to other, more positive inquiries into God’s relation to the world. But her apophatic approach illustrates the limitations of so exclusively framing an inquiry into God’s relation to the world, which are visible in the two indispensable rules governing the grammar of theological talk about God and creation: first, “avoid both a simple univocal attribution of predicates to God and world and a simple contrast of divine and non-­divine predicates,” and second, “avoid in talk about God’s creative agency all suggestions of limitation in scope or manner” (God and Creation, 47). Within these terms God’s transcendence and involvement with the world may be acknowledged, but the character of the relation that results need only be something like a transcendental relation without further attention to positive teaching about God’s life

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be secured where God is confessed as ontologically distinct from creatures, without pressing the inquiry further to acknowledge God as intelligible antecedent to and possibly without his relation to creatures. This is where Barth’s account would be best served by his earlier insight that God is beyond all relations and not simply all but self-­posited relations. The point is a fine one, but it nevertheless bears consideration. Where God’s relation to the world is understood as a transcendental relation, for example, theology’s understanding and description of the terms of this relation is restricted to and exhausted by description of the relation itself.81 Similarly, God’s relation to creation could be understood in terms of a “Chalcedonian pattern” stressing the irreducible asymmetry between God and creatures that coherently acknowledges God’s qualitative distinction from creation ontically, without ever managing to render this acknowledgment noetically. Whether it is a mutually real relation of the nominalist variety, a transcendental relation, or Chalcedonian pattern that construes the relation between God and creatures, none capture the full insight that God is not in a genus, which is one of the linchpins of the denial of any real relation of God to the world. How does the traditional account secure this? We have already noted that to construe God’s relation to creatures as a rationate relation is not to deny any relation of God to creatures, but to prescind from any positive description of that relation. It is fair to ask Aquinas if his apophatic reserve is so thoroughly necessary, and whether theology is not licensed to depict and name God’s unique relation to creatures without the strictures of the conceptuality of relation. Regardless of how we answer that question, teaching about the mixed character of the relation between God and creatures serves helpfully to remind us of the radical difference of the relations that obtain in God himself and the relations he bears to creatures. God’s internal relations are intrinsic to his perfection: the relation between the Father and Son, as between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is that which “follows from the perfection of the thing.”82 This is precisely what an account of God’s self-­consistency in himself and how God is intelligible as God without reference to creation. The correlationist framework of transcendental arguments tends, though perhaps not necessarily, to leave theology merely saying things about God in himself to the extent that they are the conditions for the possibility of his economic acts. 81  Christoph Schwöbel, God: Action and Revelation (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1992), 40–1. Whether Schwöbel sufficiently alleviates this concern when stressing that the relation be understood as “constituted by divine action” is unclear (Action and Revelation, 42). What do we mean by “constituted by divine action,” and is this action demonstrably self-­consistent with God’s perfection and thus reducible? 82  DP 8.1.ad9.

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enables us to deny demonstratively of God’s relation to creation. God’s external relations do not simply follow from God’s perfection itself, but are those to which God’s matchless perfection de facto extends itself in spontaneous gratuity. The relation God bears to creation is characterized by his reflexively perfect bliss and simplicity. God’s perfection is complete in reference to nothing but itself: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are what they are by virtue of their relative opposition to one another, and not even in part by virtue of a relative opposition to the world. God’s possession and enjoyment of his goodness in triune fecundity mean both that God’s relation to creation is supremely appropriate and becoming of God, while nevertheless being a complete miracle. There is nothing inhering in God that requires or inevitably leads to this relation, but this relation is nevertheless fitting of God. If God is such, then understanding his presence is no straightforward undertaking. The nonreal relations with which we try to understand God’s presence are grasped only indirectly in Scripture, but acutely at those moments where God presents himself indirectly.83 When God discloses himself to Moses, God descends in the cloud and stands with Moses in his presence (Exod 34:5), but God does so only by obscuring and thereby protecting what Moses sees (Exod 33:20–23). Moses must hide behind a rock and be covered by God’s hand so that Moses does not see God like he sees anything else. Moses may only see God’s “back”; he sees God indirectly, and it is enough to make his face shine (Exod 34:29–30). Similar instances could be marshaled when Christ is questioned or accused in the Gospels and yet responds indirectly, redirects questions, and subverts accusations. In each instance the reality of God’s presence in Christ is not as directly available and transparent as creatures think. And so the metaphysical intelligibility of God’s presence to creatures likewise involves a critique of any parallel we might draw to the directness with which we render intelligible the relations among creatures. The conceptuality of nonreal relations can serve this critique by reminding us that God’s relations to creatures do not follow from his perfection in its essential intelligibility. God is free from composition in himself, but also from any ontic or noetic composition with a greater whole outside himself – even where he is understood as relating to it in irreducible asymmetry and qualitative transcendence. God must be confessed and should be known as such. The reason: “as that which participates is posterior to that which is essential, so likewise is that which is  For what follows, see Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 429–31.

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participated.”84 In other words, God’s primacy is not qualified and contingent upon the creature’s existence. God is unqualifiedly primary and absolute in himself, “i am who i am.” Hence, in himself God is God in simple blessedness, in perfectly free love, antecedent to and possibly without any reference to the economy. Just so the confession of God as God is rendered with the radicality positive teaching about God’s perfect life in himself requires. Such positive teaching will require the kind of metaphysical thought forms, like acts of reduction (zurückdenken), necessary to render God’s perfect life in himself intelligible to the extent this is possible for pilgrims. Such thinking does not look away from the determinacy of God’s activity for us but attends radically and comprehensively to the depths of that activity. The insight we touched upon at the beginning of this chapter concerned Aquinas’s complementary consideration of pure act and how it enables him to confess the distinction in God between absolute and hypothetical necessity, thereby demonstrating the intelligibility of God’s perfection as such, or theologically. In this section we have offered a minimalist account of why such a process is warranted biblically and sound theologically. Systematic theology reckons with God as pure act through a complementary inquiry that assumes several steps, similar to how it reckons with God’s name, YHWH, as the primary referent of biblical discourse about God. However theologians do this, and whatever specific philosophical tools they employ, the procedure in question must account for the two moments of inquiry into God’s pure actuality that correspond to God’s two pronouncements that play on and are encompassed within the Tetragrammaton. God says first, “i am who i am,” and to this performative grammar of self-­reference theology recognizes in one logical moment that God’s life as plenitude is entirely self-­referred. This account of self-­referential plenitude serves a critical function in an account of God’s self-­correspondence that shows how God’s relative perfections and activity derive radically from his intrinsic perfection, a process which we suggested is secured in a traditional concept of God’s goodness. Thus is God’s perfection intelligible as antecedent to and possibly without creatures and the contingencies of history. God says second, “i am has sent me to you,” and eventually we find in Jesus Christ both the “i am” and the sending in one man (John 8:58). To this pronouncement theology recognizes in a second logical moment that God’s life as principle refers creatures to himself as their Creator. As the thrice-­holy God, God is not 84

 Ia.3.8.corp. See the discussion of this text in Chapter 2, 42–4.

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ordered to creatures but set apart in himself; his works are holy in that they set creatures apart and order them to himself (Isa 6:3; Lev 20:26). The relation of theology and economy is thereby given shape. Theology’s principal material object is God himself considered as God’s perfection, intelligible without the economy, and as such this object outpaces the formality with which the mind directs itself in prayerful expectation to this object. The subversion of the correlation of theological inquiry into God’s being and activity, and the confession of God this subversion enables, therefore does not follow from formal principles of thought or general metaphysics necessarily but from material teaching about the fullness of life God enjoys in himself from and to all eternity. Imperatively, recognition of this principal material object is only a passing moment of theology’s obedient concentration on its genuine material object: God and all things in relation to God as their principle and end. Only where the confession of God as God serves and does not marginalize such concentration on the divine economy is it genuinely theology. *** We have sought an account of God’s perfection that does not separate God from creatures or identify God with creation, but which upholds God’s Godness both ontically and noetically. This involved an exploration of distinct construals of theology and economy and how reflection on God’s being and activity grounds the intelligibility of God’s relation to creation. In so doing, a number of issues surfaced that deserve to be on the agenda of contemporary systematic theology. First, systematic theology must not so occupy itself with polemics against metaphysics that it fails to see how the ambition required of its response to revelation involves metaphysical questions implicitly or explicitly. Competing understandings of divine actuality are but one example of why explicit attention to metaphysical matters is wise. Our analysis has also suggested that reflection on such issues in traditions as different as those represented by Aquinas and Barth has always involved accounts of the moral determinations of theological reasoning and the habits and virtues proper to such reasoning. Approaching concepts like pure act in isolation from the intellectual virtues and movements of thought within which these concepts are employed traditionally is therefore to miss their ministerial meaning entirely.85 So, for example, questions about commonalities of a “single-­act  For a recent example of such misunderstanding, see R. T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 139.

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perspective” between Barth and Aquinas are underdetermined to the extent that they fail to reflect on the dispositions and strategies that ply concepts like pure actuality apart in service to theological ends.86 Second, while many theologians in the twentieth century and the present have considered the relationship between theology and economy in terms of the relationship between the immanent and economy Trinity, or concerns with “Christocentrism,” our analysis shows that there are equally fundamental matters that often receive insufficient attention. These are matters of what we have called God’s self-­correspondence and self-­consistency, consideration of which is aided by recovering that locus of theological inquiry devoted to God’s works (de operibus Dei). Contemporary theology would benefit from renewed critical attention to God’s internal and external activity, including the distinctions and relationships between the two. Carefully tracing out the requisite distinctions for confessing God’s perfection in his self-­enactment in time and his blessed self-­ sufficiency from which these acts spring is part of the task of a doctrine of God’s internal activity. So, too, is construing the subject of God’s external works, the proper construal of which requires an intelligible articulation of God’s self-­consistency. This will involve a demonstration of the intelligibility of God’s self-­identity without his self-­posited relation to creatures as only one provisional but essential moment of a complementary inquiry into God’s actuality. The question is neither nonsensical nor an inordinate occupation with magisterial metaphysics necessarily, but is prompted by positive teaching about God’s majesty. Finally, contemporary reflection on God’s relation to the world would benefit from careful considerations of how this relation depends upon materially prior teaching about God’s life in himself and how the proper understanding of this relation attends questions of the proper confession of God. The details of how systematic theologians should negotiate these issues will remain a topic of critical reflection. At a minimum, theology must see itself in Moses’s predicament, having to heed both the Lord’s prohibition, “Do not come near” (Exod 3:5), and command, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak” (Exod 4:11–12). Webster comments: “The command is also a promise – that God will make holy reason capable of that  Compare Bruce L. McCormack, “Processions and Missions: A Point of Convergence between Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth,” in Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, 111– 19; Hunsinger, Reading Karl Barth, 167–9.

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of which sin makes it incapable . . . Idolatry is reproved, not by silence, but by speeches that set forth what God has taught.”87 We have suggested that the Christian distinction grounded in an account of God’s perfect life in himself should find a place among these speeches. This means securing the intelligibility of God’s perfection antecedent to and possibly without creatures because this most coherently grounds the confession of God as God without violence but in supreme service to the confession of the humanity of God. Our preliminary suggestions throughout this chapter have only gestured toward a fuller account, development of which is the joyful and prayerful task of theology: “Great are the works of the lord, studied by all who delight in them” (Ps 111:2).

 John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 28–9.

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1. Works by Thomas Aquinas Aquinas, Thomas. In XIII libros Physicorum Aristotelis expositio. Edited by M. Maggiolo. Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1954.   Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. Translated by Kenelm Foster and Sylvester Humphries. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.   Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Translated by John P. Rowan. Notre Dame: Dumb Ox Books, 1995.   Commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, 2 vols. Translated by C. I. Litzinger. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964.   Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. Translated by Richard J. Blackwell, Richard J. Spath, and W. Edmund Thirlkel. Revised edition with introduction by Vernon J. Burke and foreword by Ralph McInerny. Notre Dame: Dumb Ox Books, 1999.   Commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. Translated by Jean T. Oesterle. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1962.   Commentary on the Book of Causes. Translated by Vincent A. Guagliardo, Charles R. Hess, and Richard C. Taylor. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996.   Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. In Latin/English Edition of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas, vols. 33–34. Translated by Jeremy Holmes and Beth Mortensen. Edited by The Aquinas Institute. Lander: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013.   Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, 3 vols. Translated by Fabian R. Larcher and James A. Weisheipl. Introduction and Notes by Daniel Keating and Matthew Levering. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010.   Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians. In Latin/English Edition of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas, vol. 38. Translated by Fabian R. Larcher, Beth Mortensen, and Daniel Keating. Edited by John Mortensen and Enrique Alarcón. Lander: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012. 297

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  Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians. In Latin/English Edition of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas, vol. 39. Translated by Fabian R. Larcher, and Matthew Lamb. Edited by John Mortensen and Enrique Alarcón. Lander: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012.   Commentary on the Letter of Saint Paul to the Hebrews. In Latin/English Edition of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas, vol. 41. Translated by Fabian R. Larcher. Edited by John Mortensen and Enrique Alarcón. Lander: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012.   Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. In Latin/English Edition of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas, vol. 40. Translated by Fabian R. Larcher. Edited by John Mortensen and Enrique Alarcón. Lander: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012.   Commentary on the Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans. In Latin/English Edition of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas, vol. 37. Translated by Fabian R. Larcher. Edited by John Mortensen and Enrique Alarcón. Lander: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012.   Compendium of Theology. Translated by Richard J. Regan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.   De potentia Dei. Edited by P. M. Pession. In Quaestiones disputatae, vol. 2. Edited by R. Spiazi. Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1965.   De veritate. In Sancti Thomae de Aquino opera Omnia, vol. 22. Leonine Edition. Rome: Editori di San Tommaso, 1975–76.   The Disputed Questions onTruth, 3 vols. Translated by R. Schmidt. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954.   In duodecem libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio. Edited by Ceslai Pera. Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1950.   Exposition of Aristotle’s Treatise On the Heavens. Translated by Fabian R. Larcher and Pierre H. Conway. Columbus: College of St. Mary of the Springs, 1964.   In librum beati Dionysii de divinis expositio. Edited by Ceslai Pera. Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1950.   On Creation [Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia Dei, Q. 3]. Translated with introduction by Susan C. Selner-Wright. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011.   On the Power of God, 3 vols. Translated by the English Dominican Province. London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1932–4.   In Psalmos Davidis expositio. In Sancti Thomae Aquinatis opera Omnia, vol. 14. Parma: Typis Petri Fiaccadori, 1963.   Quodlibetal Questions 1 and 2. Translated by Sandra Edwards. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983.   Scriptum super libros Sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi episcopi Parisiensis, vols. 1–2. Edited by P. Mandonnet. Paris: Lethielleux, 1929, vols. 3–4. Edited by M. Moos. Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1933–47.   Sententia libri De Anima. Edited by A. M. Pirotta. Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1959.

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  Sententia libri Ethicorum. In Sancti Thomae de Aquino opera Omnia, vol. 47/1–2. Edited by R.-A. Gauthier. Rome: Ad Sanctae Sabinae, 1969.   Summa contra Gentiles, 4 vols. Translated by A. Pegis, J. Anderson, V. J. Burke, and C. J. O’Neil. Garden City: Doubleday, 1955–6.   Summa Theologiae. Edited and translated by Thomas Gilby, et al. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–81. Reprinted by Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.   Summa Theologica. Translated by the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947.   Super Evangelium S. Joannis Lectura. Edited by R. Cai. Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1952.   Thomas Aquinas: The Academic Sermons. Translated by Mark-Robin Hoogland. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010.   Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings. Translated by Ralph McInerny. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

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Index

Acar, Rahim, 87 Activity of God external works, 35–6, 144 internal acts, 148, 207–10, 239, 282–5 internal and external distinction, 66–7, 122, 144–5, 282–3 order of, 103–6 Actuality and possibility, 10, 133–4 as originating fullness, 257, 266–7 as resultant totality, 257, 259–65 distinction between plenitude and principle, 267, 284, 292–3 of Christ, 196–7 primary and secondary, 57–8, 82, 84, 215, 266 Adams, Nicholas, 250, 261 Alsted, Johann-Heinrich, 246–7 Anselm of Canterbury, 14, 135–41, 286 Aquinas, Thomas and speculative grammar, 48–54, 86–90, 123–4 five ways, 32–37 importance of creation for, 76 formal object of theology, 31 material object of theology, 31, 71 on circularity of God’s life, 79–82, 97 on complementarity between negative and positive theology, 44–5, 48–50 on divine ideas, 83, 95 on divine processions, 92–8 on esse, 46–8 on God’s blessedness, 65–70, 108–9 on God’s essential operations, 82–91

on God’s freedom, 69–70, 86–90, 97–8 on God’s goodness, 55–65 on God’s mercy, 109–10 on God’s modus essendi, 51 on God’s perfection, 44–8 on God’s simplicity, 39–44, 86 on order, 101–6, 115–16, 287–8 on practical knowledge, 83–5, 94 Augustine, 8, 72, 188 Barth, Karl and “extent” (inwiefern) question, 134–7, 179, 184, 186, 196, 223 and analogy, 178–83 and Christology, 164, 171–2, 183–6, 194–7 and id quod maius cogitari nequit, 142 formal object of theology, 143 material object of theology, 150 on Aquinas, 20–21, 155–6 on divine processions, 147–8, 166 on election, 152, 190, 199–200, 202–3, 220–9 on form and content of God’s being, 150, 180–1 on God’s actuality, 142 on God’s blessedness, 161, 218–9 on God’s constancy, 212–6 on God’s decision, 149, 152, 167 on God’s freedom, 162–9 on God’s grace, 231–4 on God’s holiness, 234–5 on God’s love, 151–62 on God’s mercy, 235–6

313

314

Index

Barth, Karl (cont.) on God’s righteousness, 237–8 on God’s self-determination, 161–2, 167–8, 216–8 on God’s self-revelation, 142, 180 on God’s simplicity, 166, 188–97 on God’s singularity, 146–7, 191–2 on order, 172, 248–9 on way of causality (via causalitatis), 268, 277 Burrell, David B., 32 Collins, Paul M., 262 Confessing God as God, 4–14, 287–92 Correlationist logic, 261–3, 289–90 Creation and Trinity, 91–8 as benefit, 107–8 as immanent or transitive act, 118 end of, 106 goodness of, 57–8 out of nothing (ex nihilo), 112 Cremer, Hermann, 154, 277

freedom of spontaneity, 208, 239 glory, 77, 101, 218–9 intellect and will, 82–91, 138–9 pure act (actus purus), 36, 41–2, 67, 84, 145, 256–7, 266–7, 293 self-consistency, 16, 280–5 self-correspondence, 15–16, 78, 270–80 simplicity, 4, 12, 14, 39–44, 87, 192–5 Goodness of God and divine operations, 66, 89, 105–6 and love, 153–7, 276 as self-diffusive, 61–5, 157 differences between Aquinas and Barth, 269–70 distinction between content and forms, 274–5 priority among divine attributes, 109, 153, 232, 273–6 Gunton, Colin, 232 Hegel, Georg W.F., 214, 259–61 Hunsinger, George, 135–6, 228, 233, 249–50

Decree of God, and Christology, 223–30, 283 and propensity or tendency, 152, 211, 236 as outgoing internal act, 206–7 Barth’s critique of Reformed doctrine, 203–5 necessity and contingency, 208–11 Doolan, Gregory, 118 Dorner, Isaak, 152, 181, 215–6 Drury, John L., 233 Dümpelmann, Leo, 118

Jenson, Robert W., 263–4, 272 Joest, Wilfried, 264 Jones, Joe, 263

Emery, Gilles, 91

Necessity absolute, 88 according to Barth, 139–41, 168, 213 and contingency, 90 forms of, 69–70 hypothetical, 88 of incarnation, 196–7, 202 of objects of faith, 137–8

Fichte, J.G., 146 Fittingness (convenientia), 64, 140, 237, 255 God actuality, 10–11 blessedness, 278 distinction between sufficiency and efficaciousness, 267, 283 distinction from creation, 17–18, 290–3 freedom of contrariety and contradiction, 239 freedom of indifference, 208, 239

Knowledge of God, 4–6, 13–14 and idolatry, 6–7 and intellectual temperance, 8, 254–6 ethical dimension, 190–3 natural, 34–35 McCormack, Bruce L., 138–9, 272 McKenny, Gerald, 157

Orders of being and knowing, 271–3 Pieper, Josef, 76 Polanus, Amandus, 207–8, 267, 275–6 Principles (principia), 9, 257–9 Pryzwara, Erich, 48–9

Index Realism, 8–9 Relation(s) and “Chalcedonian pattern,” 249, 290 and election, 202, 248–9 as category of being, 113 between God and creation, 124 definition of (ratio), 114 features of, 114, 245–7, 286–7 foundation for, 116–18 nonreal (rationis), 119–21 of creation, 112–13 of opposition, 291 real (realis), 114, 245–9 transcendental, 290 Ritschl, Albrecht, 143–4, 157–9 Rosemann, Philipp W., 80 Schmitz, Kenneth L., 257–9 Schwöbel, Christoph, 290 Selner-Wright, Susan C., 118 Sokolowski, Robert, 284

315

Sonderegger, Katherine, 181 Speculation, 9–10, 292 Suárez, Francisco, 245–6, 287 Tanner, Kathryn, 289–90 te Velde, Rudi A., 48, 89 Teleology, 100–3, 157–60, 221, 230–43 Theology and economy, 11–12 material and formal objects, 31–2, 38, 173–4, 267–9, 280–2 principles of, 30 Thomasius, Gottfried, 156 Trinity and blessedness, 71–2 and election, 224–5 and self-revelation, 144–5, 180 psychological model, 94–7, 144 Turretin, Francis, 245–6, 272 Webster, John, 21, 157, 192, 294–5 Westerholm, Martin, 137, 146, 263