Any genuine field of knowledge (the older meaning of scientia or “science”) must have an object—in other words, a subject matter. Furthermore, that object must be knowable. Astronomy is a legitimate science because planets, stars, and other bodies in space actually exist and can be studied. Theology is “the study of God.” For reasons explored later in the chapter, the object shifted in the modern era (with notable exceptions) from God and his works to humanity and its morality, spirituality, and experience. Science came to refer narrowly to the empirical sciences, and religion could only be a legitimate discipline only to the extent that it was studied as a natural phenomenon of culture. As a consequence, theology has become largely a subdiscipline of psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, or history of religions, even in universities with a Christian past. As we will see, theologians themselves pioneered this turn to the self in the hope of making Christianity more relevant and acceptable in our world.
The opening claim of this systematic theology is that the triune God is the object of theology and that this God is knowable because he has revealed himself to us. To explore this claim, we will begin with the widest horizon. Although this is the most philosophical chapter in this volume, our discussion will draw on the content of the Christian faith itself in order to develop the basic presuppositions of our worldview. From this widest horizon, we will narrow our focus to the character of theology, revelation, and Scripture.
The widest horizon for theology—i ndeed for all of our knowledge—is the question of ontology: what is reality? Nothing is more central to our governing narratives than the God-world relation. In an important essay, existentialist philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965) suggested that all of the varied schools and theories in philosophy of religion can be grouped under two contrasting paradigms: overcoming estrangement and meeting a stranger.1 Adding a third, which I will call the stranger we never meet, I will define these paradigms and then defend a version of meeting a stranger that fits with the biblical drama.
The first grand narrative erases (or tends to erase) the infinite-qualitative distinction between God and creatures. Narrated in myriad myths across many cultures, this is the story of the ascent of the soul—that divine part of us, which has somehow become trapped in matter and history. Although it originates in dualism—a stark (even violent) opposition between finite and infinite, matter and spirit, time and eternity, humanity and God, the goal is to reestablish the unity of all reality. In some versions, only that which is infinite, spiritual, eternal, and divine is real, so all else perishes or is somehow elevated into the upper world. Nevertheless, the goal is to lose all particularity and diversity in the One, which is Being itself.
If one begins with a story of the cosmos in which the divine is somehow buried within us, a sacred spark or soul trapped in a body, space, and time, then the ultimate source of reality is not outside of us but inside. God does not enter into the times and spaces that he has created; rather, all of reality emanates from this divine principle of unity like rays from the sun.
In Platonism, for example, spiritual/intellectual entities possess more “being,” while aspects of reality that belong more to history and matter fall down the ladder in diminishing grades of being. To the “upper world” belong the eternal forms: unchanging, one, and real; the “lower world” consists of the realm of mere appearances: ever-changing, diverse, and shadowy in their existence. In the case of human beings, the mind or spirit is the immortal spark of divinity, while the emotions are slaves of the body and its bondage to the realm of mere appearances. We just need to go deeper within to find the truth, overcoming our sense of estrangement from “being” by returning to the source of a single Light.2
In this perspective, if God is considered in personal terms at all, not just as a unifying principle (namely, The One, Ground of Being, Absolute Spirit, the Unity of All, etc.), he is certainly not viewed as someone other, standing over against the self, especially in judgment. In other words, divinity is domesticated, brought inside of the self, so that it can no longer threaten, judge, rule, or condemn. This type of deity does not offend, disrupt, command, or save; rather than a stranger, God, the gods, or the divine principle is the most immanent and personal aspect of one’s own existence.
Although the confusion of the Creator with creation characterizes paganism generally, it formed the horizon for Greek philosophy. In the second century, a movement arose within esoteric Jewish and Christian groups that tried to reinterpret the biblical narrative in a basically Greek philosophical framework. Known as Gnosticism, this heresy was decisively challenged by Irenaeus (AD 115–202), bishop of Lyons.3 In contrast to the biblical story of a good creation, the fall into sin through transgressing the covenant, and redemption through Christ’s incarnate life, death, and resurrection, the Gnostics sought redemption from an evil creation through inner enlightenment (gnosis). Plundering the Bible for its material, Gnostic sects offered a radical reinterpretation. The God of creation (Yahweh), represented in the Old Testament, becomes the evil deity who imprisons divine souls in bodies, while the serpent in the garden sought to liberate Adam and Eve through inner enlightenment. The God of redemption (Christ), revealed in the Gnostic “gospels,” is an avatar of sorts, leading initiates away from their bodily incarceration in history, toward their divine destiny.
While distancing himself from the Gnostics, Origen of Alexandria (AD 185–254) nevertheless tried to assimilate Christian doctrine to a fundamentally Platonist scheme. In this he was following Philo of Alexandria, who had developed a system of Jewish Platonism with great success a century earlier. Origen rejected the biblical doctrine of ex nihilo creation and downplayed the reality of Christ’s physical embodiment in his incarnation, ascension, and return in the flesh. He also taught reincarnation and the final restoration of all spiritual entities, including Satan and the fallen angels. For these speculations, Origen was later judged heretical by the Christian East, but his Platonized version of Christianity remained powerful and long-lasting especially in monastic movements.
Within the history of Western Christianity there have been tendencies among some mystics to move in a pantheistic direction. An extreme example is the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart, who wrote in a characteristic sermon, “To the inward-turned man all things have an inward divinity…. Nothing is so proper to the intellect, nor so present and near as God.”4 The connection between rationalism and mysticism is as old as Platonism itself. This outer-inner dualism has characterized much of radical mysticism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as in Sufi Islam and Jewish Kabbalism. This trajectory continued in radical Protestantism from the Anabaptists to the early Enlightenment. It is especially evident in the philosophy of Benedict Spinoza (1632-77), which was revived in German Romanticism and American Transcendentalism. Its influence is evident in the dominant forms of theological liberalism and especially today in New Age and neopagan spiritualities.5
Even in its dualism (for example, between spirit and matter), the pantheistic worldview is ultimately monistic. In other words, all of reality is ultimately one. There is no distinction, finally, between God and the world. While bodies may be lower than souls on the ladder of being, all of reality emanates from a single source to which it returns. In spite of the hierarchy of being, all distinctions—even between God and creation—become gradually lost. For example, theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther seeks to go back behind Christianity to ancient Near Eastern pagan myths and Gnosticism for a holistic (i.e., monistic) worldview.6 “The visible universe is the emanational manifestation of God, God’s sacramental body.”7
Some have tried to blend pantheism (“all is divine”) with belief in a personal God (theism).8 Often identified as panentheism (“all-within-God”), this view holds that “God” or the divine principle transcends the world, although God and the world exist in mutual dependence.9 In varying degrees of explicit dependence, panentheism is the working ontology of process theology and the theologies of Teilhard de Chardin, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Jürgen Moltmann among many others, especially those working at the intersection of theology and the philosophy of science.10 Some panentheists envision the world as the body of God.11
At the other end of the spectrum from pantheism and panentheism are atheism and deism. Although Buddhism denies the existence of a personal God, Western atheism rejects any transcendent reality beyond the world of sense experience. Deism affirms the existence of a Creator God, but generally denies that this Architect of the Universe intervenes miraculously in nature or history.12 Especially as formulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, modern atheism sees religion as arising from a psychological need to project something or someone to whom one can pray in the face of the threats and tragedies in a random and chaotic universe.13
Nietzsche advocated an “inverted Platonism,” where the upper world is illusion and the lower world is real.14 In fact, the dualism of two worlds is rejected as an illusion perpetuated by Christianity. Drawing on classical Greek myth, Nietzsche identifies Apollo (the god of order) with Plato’s upper world and Dionysus (the god of pagan revelry and chaotic self-indulgence) with the lower world. Where the death of ultimate meaning led Schopenhauer to a state of depression—a passive resignation to fate—his disciple Nietzsche embraced it as a call to create meaning for ourselves. “That my life has no aim is evident from the accidental nature of its origin. That I can posit an aim for myself is another matter.”15 As Mark C. Taylor expresses it, “The lawless land of erring, which is forever beyond good and evil, is the liminal world of Dionysus, the Anti-Christ, who calls every wandering mark to carnival, comedy, and carnality.”16
Amid important differences, there are some surprising similarities between pantheism and atheism. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin. Both embrace the view that being is univocal: in other words, that there is only one kind of reality or existence. In this perspective, there is reality (that which exists) and then there are particular beings who exist, such as divine and non-divine entities. In the “overcoming estrangement” paradigm of pantheism, the physical world is a weak projection of an eternal (real) world. In the atheistic paradigm (“the stranger we never meet”), the projection is reversed; in fact, the longing for transcendent meaning and truth reflects a form of psychological neurosis, nostalgia for a nonexistent “beyond” that paralyzes our responsibility in the present. In other words, pantheism assumes that the upper world is real and this world is mere appearance, while atheism assumes that this world is real and the upper world is nonexistent. In their drive toward immanence, both paradigms locate the divine within the self (reducing theology to anthropology or psychology). When, under the influence of the pantheistic scheme, modern theologians emphasized religion as a purely inner affair of mystical experience or personal piety, the atheist was then quite warranted to regard God’s existence as an entirely subjective claim with no bearing on actual reality.
In neither the pantheistic nor atheistic paradigm is God a personal being who transcends creaturely reality yet enters freely into relationship with it. Neither scheme allows for the personal intervention of God in nature and history. For pantheism, everything is “miraculous"; the divine is indistinguishable from nature or historical progress or at least the human soul. Yet “miracles” always happen within the self; they never happen in the external world, as disruptions of the ordinary process of nature. Religion or spirituality pertains exclusively to the inner or transcendent realm, beyond history and life in this world. Of course, naturalistic atheism has no place for the supernatural and deism excludes the possibility of miraculous divine intervention—either in judgment or grace. In both paradigms, nothing strange or unfamiliar is allowed to disrupt the sovereignty of the self, which is often identified as autonomy. As different as these paradigms are in many ways, they are co-conspirators in the suppression of the knowledge of God and his relationship with creatures.
To be sure, there has been a revival of deism and atheism in our culture, but these are largely modern (Enlightenment) heresies. In our postmodern environment, radical mysticism seems more pervasive. Turning inward for divine inspiration, many today say that they are “spiritual but not religious.” Some writers today are announcing a shift in western culture from the Age of Belief to the Age of the Spirit. A revival of pantheistic and panentheistic worldviews (much like the ancient heresy of Gnosticism) is evident in academic as well as more popular circles.17
This spectrum, from pantheism and panentheism to deism all the way to atheism, plots the course of pagan ontologies (theories of reality) from primitive to postmodern cultures.
In sharp contrast, the biblical narrative tells the story of the triune God who created all of reality (visible and invisible) out of nothing for his own glory, the creation of humankind in his image and covenant, the transgression of that covenant, and the surprising announcement of his gracious promise to send a Savior. The “scarlet thread” of the promised Redeemer runs through every book of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation: Jesus Christ is the unifying center of God’s saving revelation.
The biblical ontology is not a species of a larger genus. In other words, it does not fit into a generic paradigm but generates its own ontology.
This model assumes that God and the world are distinct—Creator and creation. The world is dependent on God, but God is independent of the world. Precisely because the world is dependent at every moment on the word of the triune God, nothing in history or nature is ultimately self-caused. God is sovereign over and within every time and place. God is never “trespassing” on his own property and never “transgresses” natural laws, as if these stood above him. God is indeed a stranger, but one who has condescended to meet us in our own creaturely space, which we have in the first place because it is his gift.
From the biblical perspective, God is a stranger in two senses. First, God is a stranger in a positive sense. Intrinsically holy, God is qualitatively distinct from creation—not just more than, but different from, his creatures. There is no divine soul, preexisting throughout eternity, thrown mercilessly into the realm of time and matter. God breathed life into Adam in creation, and he “became a living being” (Ge 2:7 NIV)—an embodied soul and an animated body. And yet, God pronounced this creation good (Ge 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). It is no crime to be different from God. Finitude is not a “falling away” from some primordial infinitude. There is no part of human nature that is higher, brighter, more infinite, or more real than another. This means that the only legitimate ontological distinction is between the uncreated God and the created world, not between spiritual and material realms. Ontological difference—the strangeness that makes us stand in awe of God’s majesty—is good.
Second, God is a stranger in a negative sense. Whereas the ontological difference is a good gift of our creation, ethical difference came about as a result of the fall, when Adam transgressed the original covenant. In this sense, God is not only qualitatively different from us but morally opposed to us. We are estranged from God by sin. In his righteousness, goodness, justice, holiness, and love, God is outraged by our collective and personal rebellion. As human creatures, we are made in God’s image; as sinners, we are “by nature children of wrath” (Eph 2:3). Salvation is achieved not by human ascent from the realm of shadows into the unity of divine being but by God’s descent in our flesh. We are saved not from nature and history but from the bondage to both sin and death. The dilemma that this redemption solves is the reconciliation of sinners to God in Christ, not the reconciliation of infinitude and finitude, spirit and matter, universals and particulars. Thus, the history of the covenantal relationship of God and humanity rather than the metaphysics of being and becoming is the interest of this model.
The biblical and pagan stories and consequent doctrines could not be more fundamentally opposed at the points I have mentioned. First, the biblical God is personal, not an abstract principle. There is no such thing as “the divine,” “divinity,” or a “divine realm.” There is only the God who speaks and acts.
Second, this personal God is the Trinity rather than “the One.” Especially in dominant Greek philosophy, the highest reality (i.e., that which possesses supreme being) is inherently one. Therefore, plurality must represent a falling away from that primordial unity, away from the fullness of being. In sharp contrast, the God of the Bible is not only one in essence but is also three in persons. Among other implications, this directly challenges philosophy’s search—at least since the pre-Socratics—for the single unifying principle (logos) of reality, whether water (Thales), air (Anaximenes), a primordial and eternal chaos (Anaximander), number (Pythagoras), or mind (Parmenides). For the great Greek philosophers, the world came into being by the ministrations of semidivine entities (demiurges), through a unifying logos (rational principle). However, in the biblical worldview, the Logos is a person rather than a principle and is not semidivine, but is the eternally begotten Son of the Father, through whom all things were made (Jn 1:1–5; Col 1:15–17). The Father created the world with his “two hands": the Son and the Spirit.
Third, the world has never been divine, even in its nonmaterial aspects, and therefore finitude is not a falling away from infinite being but belongs to the nature that God pronounced good. Since “being” is not univocal, there is no place for a scale of being, with God at the top and rocks at the bottom, and human souls in between. Reality is not like the light controlled by a dimmer switch, with greater and lesser radiance. There is God and there is creaturely reality. The latter is utterly distinct from, yet created by, God, reflecting his character, and—in the case of humans—even bearing his likeness.
God alone is life: infinite, immortal, necessary, and sovereign existence; we receive a very different kind of creaturely life, as finite, mortal, contingent, and dependent image-bearers. Thus, even in those attributes that we share with God by analogy, God remains qualitatively, not merely quantitatively, different from creatures. It is not simply that God possesses more being, knowledge, power, love, and justice, but that God transcends all comparisons with us—even those that he reveals in Scripture.
Humanity was created by God’s free decision and word—by the Father, in the Son, through the Spirit. The world is not an emanation of God’s being, but a creation of his Word. It does not originate in a primordial violence between higher and lower realms, but in the eternal love of the persons of the Trinity for each other and their desire to share this love with creatures who are not and never will be divine. Since difference belongs to God’s own existence, it is not surprising that the diversity and plurality of creation should be pronounced good by God (Ge 1:25, 31). Where the pagan worldviews locate evil somewhere in the essence of created, material, plural, finite, and embodied existence as such, the biblical worldview identifies evil with a historical violation of God’s loving will and command by free creatures who demanded an autonomous existence that did not belong to them.
Fourth, biblical faith does not begin with speculation about ostensibly universal truths but with the concrete context of a covenantal relationship. In biblical faith, the relationship of the creature to its Creator is contingent and covenantal rather than natural, necessary, and essential—a relationship of giving and receiving; commanding and obeying. In other words, it is communicative. This covenantal ontology may be described as liturgical: God speaks, and creation responds, as each part of creation offers its own distinct voice in an antiphonal chorus of praise and thanksgiving. We are placed in the ethical sphere of historical, embodied, relational, and meaningful activity rather than in a sphere of emanating light cascading down silently along a ladder of being. The realm of history and matter is not a prison from which we must escape by contemplating unchanging reality, but the theater of God’s glory.
The context that God created for this relationship is a covenant. Although qualitatively distinct from the world, God is not distant, aloof, and uninvolved. God created the world as the theater of his unfolding drama, at whose heart is a covenantal relationship. The triune God created us to share in his drama, not in his essence.
The religious and philosophical worldview of Israel’s neighbors reflects a commitment to the “overcoming estrangement” paradigm. It was this idolatry that was strictly forbidden in Israel. However, the ancient Near Eastern world organized its international political life by making treaties. Having saved a lesser ruler (called a vassal) and his people from a foreign oppressor, the great king (called a suzerain) would issue a treaty or covenant with the terms of their new life under his protection and imperial governance. While Israel was strictly forbidden from adopting the religious beliefs and practices of its neighbors, this standard arrangement in secular politics was taken up by God as the heart of Israel’s relationship to him. In Israel, Yahweh alone is the Great King.
A covenant is “a union based on an oath” (McCarthy) or, more specifically, “a relationship under sanctions” (Kline).18 Under this broad definition existed a variety of treaty types.19
With important antecedents in Irenaeus and Augustine among other formative theologians, Reformed theology discerned three overarching covenants in Scripture under which all sorts of other covenants were arranged.20 The first is the covenant of redemption (also called the pactum salutis or covenant of peace). Entered into by the persons of the Trinity in the councils of eternity, with the Son as its mediator, the covenant of redemption is the basis for all of God’s purposes in nature and history. The second is the covenant ofcreation between the triune Lord and humanity in Adam as its head or covenantal representative.21 The third is the covenant of grace, which God made with his church after the fall, with Christ as its head, beginning with his promise of salvation to Adam and Eve and continuing through the family of faith leading from Seth to Noah and on to Abraham and Sarah all the way to the new covenant as inaugurated by Christ’s death. In this covenant, God promises to be our God and to make believers and their children his own redeemed family, with Christ—the Last Adam—as its federal representative, head, and mediator. Therefore, the object of theology is not God in his hidden essence but, in the words of seventeenth-century Reformed theologian Francis Turretin, “God as he has covenanted with us in Jesus Christ.”22 Each of these covenants will receive their due attention and exegetical defense as this book unfolds.
The Bible gives rise to a sense of history, with its pattern of promise and fulfillment. This outlook contrasts sharply with the Platonic (and more generally pagan) conception of eternal realities and their temporal shadows. Our history is not an allegory of the music of the eternal spheres, but a real plot with genuine twists and turns whose ultimate pattern is known only to God.
Without losing any of its particularity, history is unified by God’s eternal purposes in Christ. It moves forward toward that goal, but only because it is charged along that line at various points by God’s miraculous intervention and sustained by God’s gracious providence. Jesus Christ has undone Adam’s treason and fulfilled the trial, winning the right for himself and for his posterity to eat freely from the Tree of Life.
Yet even in this covenantal unity of its consummated state, creation does not lose its bewildering diversity. Unlike the teaching of Eastern religions and Western Stoicism/Platonism, the individual is never absorbed like a drop of water in the ocean. The world retains its own inner quantitative differences and its qualitative difference from God. Even the Pauline contrast of flesh and Spirit is lifted out of its Greek meaning and is interpreted as the clash between “this age” under the dominion of sin and death and “the age to come” ruled by the risen Christ through the Holy Spirit. The biblical contrast, therefore, is between sin and grace, not nature and grace. In its totality, creation is good, fallen, redeemed, and it will be restored to glorify and to enjoy God forever.
In addition, this biblical paradigm offers a more paradoxical eschatology than the first two, neither of which has any place for the arrival of the Stranger in our history. In the first paradigm, “God” has always been with us, a part of us, one with us, eternally. At most, the incarnation may be a symbol of that which has always been true, namely, God’s oneness with humanity. Thus, there is really nothing new in history; everything moves in an eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. The second paradigm denies the possibility of the arrival of any particular Messiah. However, biblical eschatology affirms an “already and not yet” tension. Ultimate meaning is found within history, not beyond it, although salvation comes through God’s intervention (promise and fulfillment) rather than through the powers inherent in history itself. The Stranger has arrived! There is no path from us to God, but God has blazed his own trail to us. Like the disciples on the Emmaus road, we are disoriented by the appearance of the Risen Christ whose recital of the biblical drama (with himself at its center) replots our own existence within history. He has met us along the way, in our own historical existence. And yet now is the hour of grace. He will return one day to bring a closure to history in the last judgment. The final meaning of history is disclosed in Christ’s resurrection from the dead as the firstfruits of those who sleep, but for now history remains open and frequently ambiguous; Christ’s kingdom remains largely hidden under suffering and the cross.
All of this is summarized in Paul’s speech before the philosophers in Athens. Surrounded by Epicureans (ancient deists) and Stoics (ancient pantheists), Paul told a shockingly new story. Against both schools he spoke of a Creator God who, unlike their idols, made all things and rules all things. God is independent of the world. Though he needs nothing, he entered into an intimate relationship with his creatures and so cares for the particular lives that he has “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Ac 17:26). While the philosophers were used to debating the latest ideas (v. 21), Paul concluded by announcing the latest historical event in God’s redemptive work: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (vv. 30–31).
The response was no less mixed then than it usually is today: “Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, ‘We will hear you again about this,’” and several joined two of their leaders—a man named Dionysius and a woman named Damaris—to believe his message (vv. 32–34). Therefore, God is neither identified with the world (as in the pantheism of the Stoics) nor aloof from and uninvolved with the world (as in the deism of the Epicureans). Although God is indeed a stranger, he has condescended to relate us to himself.
In Christ we meet not only the divine Stranger but our human representative—the Lord and Servant of the covenant of grace, the one who commands and the one who fulfills, the one who judges and the one who undergoes our judgment and reconciles us to the triune God. Jesus himself taught that all of the Scriptures (then, of course, the Old Testament) speak concerning him (Lk 24:25–27; Jn 5:39—40), and his apostles emphasized this point in their sermons and in their teaching. Since this is the case, we cannot bring Christ into the picture merely at the stage of redemption. The same Word who became flesh was the one in whom and through whom all things were made—and are truly known (Jn 1:1–3; Col 1:15–20).
Against the image of either modern masters or postmodern tourists, the Bible identifies God’s covenant people as pilgrims. Neither having arrived nor merely carried along by arbitrary whim, we are travelers who “seek the city that is to come” (Heb 13:14). The Creator is also the Consummator, as Jesus declared in his revelation to John: “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty’” (Rev 1:8).
Epistemology follows ontology. In other words, our theory of how we know anything depends on what we think there is to be known. If our soul (or spirit/mind) has been alienated from its eternal home through bodily imprisonment, then our epistemological goal must be “the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm,” beyond sense experience.23 Consistent with its ontology, the “overcoming estrangement” model typically understands knowing as a kind of intellectual seeing. The soul (or mind) remembers and seeks to recollect the vision of the eternal forms that it beheld before its imprisonment in time and matter. The principal metaphors for thinking are therefore visual. True knowledge is not acquired by learning new things but by remembering the eternal Truth that our souls enjoyed prior to embodiment. The objects of sense, belonging to the realm of shadows, are cloudy and always changing, while the objects of understanding, belonging to the eternal forms, are clear, distinct, fixed, and pure. In order to overcome our estrangement, “the whole soul” must be turned away from the shadows to behold the bright sun itself, namely, the Good.24
Plato’s Socrates teaches, “While we live, we shall be closest to knowledge if we refrain as much as possible from association with the body and do not join with it more than we must, if we are not infected with its nature but purify ourselves from it until the god himself frees us.”25 Only by using “pure thought” does the philosopher try “to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from his eyes and ears, and in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it.”26 Obviously, historical facts (contingent truths) are inferior to the eternal truths of pure thought (necessary truths). The former pertain to the realm of changing appearances and therefore cannot rise above mere opinion. In fact, the objects of historical study are violence, strife, and the daily business of the body that “makes us too busy to practice philosophy.”27
The influence of Platonism on the church father Origen (AD 185–254) was so thorough that the early Christian theologian taught not only that the soul was the immortal part of human beings that preexisted eternally but also that this soul was often reincarnated in different bodies.28 For Origen, Christ is primarily the soul’s educator, who, by his moral example and teaching, leads us from the transitory realm of material things to the invisible realm that is the soul’s true home. Hence, the historical incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Christ are symbols of the eternal cycle of the soul’s birth, rebirth, and return. Christ’s ascension was “more an ascent of mind than of body,” blazing the trail for contemplative disciples.29 Echoing Plato, much of ancient and medieval Christian spirituality was characterized by this contemplative ascent toward the “beatific vision”—the direct sight of the Good in itself.30 Nietzsche and his heirs also applied their ontology to epistemology. If there is no transcendent Good from which being emanates or a God who has revealed himself in historical phenomena, then all that is left is the bare willing of the self. Reality is whatever one makes of it, and knowledge is power.
From this brief survey, we can recognize there is no such thing as a neutral epistemological method. We always presuppose a certain view of reality before we ask how to investigate it. Why are we here? Is there a God and if so, what is his relationship to the world? Where is history going? The narrative we embrace (or at least assume), along with its attendant doctrines and practices, determines how we can know it. Whether we are explicitly aware of it or not, all of us think, experience, and live within the ambit of a particular story and its dogmas that answer those big questions.
According to the gospel, the divine Stranger has met us throughout our history in our own world and has even descended to us as our elder brother, reconciling us to his Father. In a covenantal perspective, we are no less dependent on God for our knowledge than for our existence. Given both the positive ontological difference and the negative ethical opposition between God and fallen humanity, we dare not attempt to ascend to heaven by our own reason, will, and works, but we must meet God where he has promised to descend to us, meeting us in grace. This is the covenant of grace, with Christ’s mediation as the only basis for a safe conduct into God’s presence. In contrast to the visual analogies that dominant our western intellectual heritage, its principal metaphors for knowing God are oral/aural—God’s speaking and our hearing rather than our seeing and mastering reality. Hearers are never autonomous, but receive both their existence and their knowledge from the God who speaks.
Drawing heavily on the ancient Christian writers, the Protestant Reformers began with the recognition of God’s transcendence and from there fixed their attention on God’s accommodation to our weakness in revelation and redemption.
Similar to our contrast between “overcoming estrangement” and “meeting a stranger,” the sixteenth-century Reformers contrasted the theology of glory with the theology of the cross, beginning with Martin Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation in 1518.31Instead of striving as masters of reality to behold God in his archetypal majesty, we must take our place as unfaithful servants and be addressed by him on his own terms, in judgment and grace. While the theology of the cross proclaims God’s descent to sinners in the flesh, by grace alone in Christ alone, theologies of glory represent human attempts to ascend away from the flesh to union with God through mysticism, merit, and philosophical speculation. Ascending upward in proud pursuit of the beatific vision, away from a supposedly lower realm of bodies, history, and particulars, we miss in our self-righteousness and vaunted wisdom the saving descent of the majestic God in lowliness, bodily suffering, and the most concrete particular imaginable, namely, a Jewish baby lying in a manger who later was to hang on a cross. God does not invite us to discover him in his glory but to meet him where he has promised to be gracious.
God’s majesty is not benign. A direct “beatific vision” of God in his glory is more likely a glimpse of hell rather than of heaven, of judgment rather than of grace. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, Yahweh allowed his “back”—that is, his goodness and grace—to pass by while he sheltered the prophet behind a rock. “‘But,’ [the LORD] said, ‘you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live’” (Ex 33:20). All that we know—or think we know—about God already within ourselves is a revelation of God’s law—his majestic glory. However, in our fallen condition, the glorious righteousness of God can only condemn us. Only in the gospel is the gift of righteousness through faith in Christ disclosed to sinners, so that they can stand in God’s presence without being consumed. This is the thrust of Paul’s argument in Romans 3. In the first two chapters, he explained that we by nature suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness, distorting it in order to avoid the reality of God’s wrath. We must learn to receive God’s revelation and redemption where he has condescended to us, in the lowliness of a manger, on the cross, and in the baseness of ordinary human language.
Similarly, John Calvin explained that the attributes of God are set forth in Scripture. “Thereupon his powers are mentioned, by which he is shown to us not as he is in himself, but as he is toward us: so that this recognition of him consists more in living experience than in vain and high-flown speculation ‘ (emphasis added).32 Knowing God as he is in himselfwas the familiar refrain of mystics and other enthusiasts in all ages, but God’s incomprehensible majesty is damning rather than saving. God cannot be directly known by our climbing the scale of being, but can only be known in and through the Mediator. Calvin explained:
When faith is discussed in the schools, they call God simply the object of faith, and by fleeting speculations … lead miserable souls astray rather than direct them to a definite goal. For since “God dwells in inaccessible light” (1Ti 6:16), Christ must become our intermediary…. Indeed, it is true that faith looks to one God. But this must also be added, “to know Jesus Christ whom he has sent” (Jn 17:3).33
While a theology of glory presumes to scale the walls of God’s heavenly chamber, a theology of the cross will always recognize that although we cannot reach God, he can reach us and has done so in his preached and written Word, in which the Incarnate Word is wrapped as in swaddling cloths.
Treating “God” as an object of theology, Francis Turretin noted, is very different from the way metaphysics approaches God as an object—and different from the way “objects” are treated in other disciplines.34 This is because God is different from other objects of study. Unlike planets, he is not simply “there” for our inspection. Nor can God be manipulated or dissected or subjected to repeatable experiments. If we are to know God—at least in a saving manner—he must condescend to reveal himself in terms we can understand and embrace by his grace. Therefore, this approach is opposed to rationalism on one hand and to post-Kantian moralism and mysticism on the other.35
No one finds God, but God finds us. Although they walked at Jesus’ side for three years, the disciples did not understand his person or work until he opened their eyes, proclaiming himself from all the Scriptures and celebrating the Supper after the resurrection (Lk 24). Both for our finitude and for our sinfulness, our reconciliation with God requires revelation in the form of divine initiative and condescension. The highest wisdom and knowledge are found not in a grasping, seizing, ascending, mastering vision of pure ideas but in a receiving, welcoming, seated, and descending recital of God’s works in history. Not only in the content of the gospel but in its very form, then, it is “folly to Gentiles” (1Co 1:23).
The Reformers’ insistence on God’s incomprehensible majesty had clear precedent in the ancient church, especially in the East. For example, after exploring various divine attributes, Gregory of Nyssa (335–394) cautions, “But in each of these terms we find a peculiar sense, fit to be understood or asserted of the Divine nature, yet not expressing that which that nature is in its essence.”36 God’s essence remains hidden to us, but his energies (i.e., workings or operations) are revealed. Gregory’s brother Basil argued, “The energies are various, and the essence simple, but we say that we know our God from His energies, but do not undertake to approach near to His essence. His energies come down to us, but His essence remains beyond our reach.”37 These arguments were directed especially against Platonists like the Arian Eunomius, who insisted that we can know God as he is in himself, that is, in his essence.
Similarly, John of Damascus (d. AD 749) counsels, “He revealed that which it was to our profit to know; but what we were unable to bear He kept secret. With these things let us be satisfied, and let us abide by them, not removing everlasting boundaries, nor overpassing the divine tradition.”38 We know God by his works, not in his hidden essence.
We will return several times to this crucial distinction of Eastern theology between God’s essence and energies. As I will argue more fully, Western theology—following Augustine and Aquinas—did not recognize this distinction and insisted that the only reason we do not behold God in his essence at present is our bodily form. Although the East was as susceptible as the West to the influences of Platonism, its essence-energies distinction reckoned more fully with the Creator-creature difference and often guarded against the pantheistic tendencies evident in Western mysticism.39
In this respect, the Reformers reflect the East’s emphasis on God’s incomprehensibility (in his essence) and God’s self-revealing condescension (in his energies). As we know the sun only as we are warmed by its rays, we know God only in his activity toward us, not as he is in himself.40 While medieval systems contained lengthy treatments of the divine essence, Calvin moves quickly through a necessary affirmation of God’s spirituality and immensity to discuss the Trinity. “They are mad who seek to discover what God is,” he says.41 “What is God? Men who pose this question are merely toying with idle speculations What help is it, in short, to know a God with whom we have nothing to do? … The essence of God is rather to be adored than inquired into.”42
Through this Word of reconciliation—the gospel—God becomes a stranger in a third sense: not only because he is our creator (ontological difference) and judge (ethical difference), but because he is our redeemer. This is a strange Word from a strange God because it contradicts our moral reasoning, which is captive to a theology of glory. Limited to “the moral law within” (the most certain universal truth, Kant observed), the gospel can only be dismissed as foolish superstition. Contrary to our distorted intuitions, the gospel does not encourage our conquest of heaven through intellectual, mystical, and moral striving. It announces that even while we were enemies, God reconciled us (Ro 5:10). While we were dead in sins, he made us alive in Christ (Eph 2:5). We are saved by God’s good works, not our own (Eph 2:8–9). Because we are sinners, God’s speech is disruptive and disorienting. It is not we who overcome estrangement, but God who heals the breach by communicating the gospel of his Son.
A God who eludes our comprehending gaze—who masters but is never mastered—is a terrifying prospect for the fallen heart until Christ steps forward as our mediator. This is not because we remain embodied creatures seeking to overcome estrangement, but because we are fallen from our original dignity, under God’s wrath. Calvin reminds us:
In this ruin of mankind no one now experiences God either as Father or as Author of salvation, or favorable in any way, until Christ the Mediator comes forward to reconcile him to us It is one thing to feel that God as our Maker supports us by his power, governs us by his providence, nourishes us by his goodness, and attends us with all sorts of blessings—and another thing to embrace the grace of reconciliation offered to us in Christ.43
Apart from the gospel we flee from God’s self-revelation, dressing folly in the robe of wisdom and ungodliness in the garments of virtue. It is ultimately an ethical revolt against the God who made us.
It is this marvelous strangeness, both of God’s ontological majesty and of God’s amazing grace toward estranged sinners, that leads us to doxology:
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
“For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?” [Isa 40:13].
“Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?” [Job 35:7; 41:11].
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Ro 11:33–36)
Created in God’s “image” and “likeness” (Ge 1:26), we “live and move and have our being” in God (Ac 17:28). Only because God gives us life and truth are we capable of existing and knowing, but this means we are capable of true knowledge. Although we do not know anything exactly as God knows it, true human knowledge does not stand in contradiction to divine knowledge but depends on it. The essence of the sin of our first parents was that they wanted to have an independent, autonomous existence and knowledge, no longer depending on “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4). In fact, this reference is taken from Jesus’ temptation by the serpent in the wilderness, in which he undoes Adam’s transgression by answering back properly.
Neither being nor knowledge is ever shared univocally (i.e., identically) between God and creatures. As God’s being is qualitatively and not just quantitatively distinct from ours, so too is God’s knowledge. God’s knowledge is archetypal (the original), while ours is ectypal (a copy), revealed by God and therefore accommodated to our finite capacities.44Our imperfect and incomplete knowledge is always dependent on God’s perfect and complete knowledge.
A covenantal ontology requires a covenantal epistemology. We were created as God’s analogy (image bearers) rather than as self-existent sparks of divinity; therefore, our knowledge is also dependent rather than autonomous. So there is indeed such a thing as absolute, perfect, exhaustive, and eternal truth, but this knowledge is possessed by God, not by us. Rather, we have revealed truth, which God has accommodated to our capacity.
Following Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), our older theologians therefore argued that human knowledge is analogical rather than either univocal or equivocal (two terms are related analogically when they are similar, univocally when they are identical, and equivocally when they have nothing in common).45 Take the word ball. There is no obvious connection between a formal dance and an object that I bounce. Thus, the use of the word “ball” in these different contexts is equivocal. However, in sports, “ball” is used analogically. Football and baseball are not the same games; even the balls they use are qualitatively different. Nevertheless, they are similar enough for them both to be called ball games. Only when I am comparing one baseball game to another is ball used univocally—referring to exactly the same thing.
When we say that God is good, we assume we know what good means from our ordinary experience with fellow human beings. However, God is not only quantitatively better than we are; his goodness is qualitatively different from creaturely goodness. Nevertheless, because we are created in God’s image, we share this predicate with God analogically. Goodness, attributed to God and Sally, is similar but always with greater dissimilarity. At no point is goodness exactly the same for God as it is for Sally. The difference is qualitative, not just quantitative; yet there is enough similarity to communicate the point.
God reveals himself as a person, a king, a shepherd, a substitutionary lamb, and so forth. These analogies are not arbitrary (i.e., equivocal), but they are also not exact correspondence (i.e., univocal). Even when we attribute love to God and Mary, love cannot mean exactly the same thing for a self-existent Trinity and a finite person. In every analogy, there is always greater dissimilarity than similarity between God and creatures. Nevertheless, God judges that the analogy is appropriate for his self-revelation. We do not know exactly what divine goodness is like, but since God selects this analogy, there must be a sufficient similarity to our concept of goodness to justify the comparison.
This doctrine of analogy is the hinge on which a Christian affirmation of God’s transcendence and immanence turns. A univocal view threatens God’s transcendence, while an equivocal view threatens God’s immanence. The former leads to rationalism, while the latter engenders skepticism.
Challenging the doctrine of analogy, Duns Scotus (1266–1308) held that at least some of our knowledge must coincide univocally with God’s knowledge if there is to be any real knowledge of reality. At least being (existence) must mean the same thing for God as it does for us, Scotus argued; otherwise, the predicate is vacuous.46 This displays once again the connection between ontology and epistemology. For Scotus, the univocity of being means that “the difference between God and creatures, at least with regard to the pure perfections, is ultimately one of degree”—quantitative rather than qualitative.47 Scotus’s demand for absolute certainty of truth, unaided by divine grace, drew him into conflict with the more Augustinian theologian Henry of Ghent (1217–1293).
Affirming God’s incomprehensible majesty, the Reformers and their scholastic heirs embraced the doctrine of analogy but offered a critical revision. Instead of our speculative ascent from the familiar to the less familiar, choosing our own analogies, we must restrict our thinking to the analogies that God offers us by his condescending grace. God became human; humans do not rise up to God. Therefore, we do not use our own analogies to climb the ladder of contemplation; rather, God uses analogies from the world he created to communicate with us.48 We know God not by contemplating and speculating (terms that derive from the verb “to see”), but from hearing God tell us how things are and how we can know them. There is a certain plausibility to the argument of modern atheists from Ludwig Feuerbach to Sigmund Freud that metaphysical reasoning attempts to project onto an imaginary Infinitude the superlatives (or negations) of finite human beings. “God”—the “Perfect Being”—becomes a mirror of our own prejudices: an idol created in the image of the worshiper. However, unlike metaphysics, theology begins with God’s self-revelation and listens to God in his gracious condescension.
Like Scotus, however, many modern theologians (both conservative and liberal) have regarded the doctrine of analogy as a halfway house on the way to skeptical equivocity. If we cannot be sure that our predications correspond exactly to the inner being of God, then how can we claim true knowledge? This charge has been leveled in recent decades, for example, by writers as diverse as liberal theologian Langdon Gilkey and conservative evangelical Carl F. H. Henry.49 According to Gordon Clark (Henry’s mentor), truth is only given in the form of propositional statements and if our knowledge is only analogical of God’s, we have no foundation for certainty.50 “The main logical difficulty with the doctrine of analogy,” writes Henry, “lies in its failure to recognize that only univocal assertions protect us from equivocation; the very possibility of analogy founders unless something is truly known about both analogates.”51 For a certain proposition to be true, according to this perspective, it must mean exactly the same thing for God as it does for us.
Especially as refined by Protestant scholasticism, however, the doctrine of analogy affirms that finite and creaturely knowledge is nevertheless true knowledge because it has its ultimate source in God even though it is not identical with God’s knowledge. God’s existence is not a threat to but is the necessary precondition and source of our own. So why would not the same be true of God’s knowledge and ours? Creatures can attain finite knowledge (dependent truth) because God possesses infinite knowledge (absolute Truth). Therefore, against certain forms of postmodern theory, Christian theology affirms that there is a God’s-eye perspective from which genuine truth can be communicated, but, against the tendency of modern thought, it denies that anyone but God occupies this privileged perch. We must be satisfied with God’s Word and leave God’s sovereign knowledge to himself.
Although not all representatives (certainly not Carl Henry, for instance) would embrace an “overcoming estrangement” paradigm, univocity has been the characteristic ontological and epistemological presupposition of this scheme, just as equivocity is the ground of “the stranger we never meet.” If univocity breeds rationalism, equivocity generates epistemological skepticism. Both positions presuppose human autonomy and are, therefore, unwilling to regard reality and access to that reality as a gift that comes to us from outside of ourselves. It is significant that Paul describes this perverse refusal to accept our role as covenant creatures as ingratitude (Ro 1:20–21). This refusal is not, therefore, simply an intellectual problem, but is rooted in an ethical rebellion that is willfully perpetuated. As Paul goes on to relate in that passage, the biblical term for this pursuit of autonomous metaphysics is idolatry.
In spite of itself, not even modernity can be entirely novel. Though considered the founder of modern philosophy, René Descartes (1596–1650) employed a system that was to a large extent another verse in the hymn of Western Platonism. If this rationalistic side of modernity extended the life of the “overcoming estrangement” paradigm, modernity’s other side—“the stranger we never meet”—lives on in postmodernity. In both cases, the tie that binds is the univocity of being—the confusion of Creator and creature. Either all of reality is in some sense divine and infinite (pantheism/panentheism), or all of reality is material and finite (atheism). Even David Hume’s skeptical empiricism (rejecting universals in favor of particulars) and Nietzsche’s “will to power” represented the full flowering of seeds sown by late medieval nominalism. In fact, the postmodern theorist Gilles Deleuze declared, “There has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal. There has only ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave being a single voice…. From Parmenides to Heidegger it is the same voice which is taken up, in an echo which itself forms the whole deployment of the univocal. A single voice raises the clamor of being.”52
What especially distinguishes modernity, however, is the rigor with which it pursued the project of absolute autonomy (self-creation and self-rule) over against all external authorities. Whether through reason, empirical investigation, ideas, or will, the individual will rise to the heavens in conquest over gods and mortals.
Especially in the shadow of the Wars of Religion, which engulfed most of Europe in a century of horrendous bloodshed between Roman Catholics and Protestants, many thinkers longed for universal foundations in reason and morality that could transcend confessional distinctives. How could Christianity serve as the common foundation of Western culture if “Christendom” was embroiled in wars over its proper interpretation? Descartes, a Jesuit polymath who saw the religious wars at first hand, even briefly as a soldier, tried his hand at discovering this universal foundation once and for all.
After demolishing the edifice of so-called knowledge that had been constructed over his lifetime from external instruction, authority, empirical observation, and opinions that he has acquired from tradition, Descartes erects a new skyscraper for himself and by himself on a perfect foundation that could never be shaken. Locking himself in his apartment, away from all human society, Descartes announces, “I have freed my mind of all kinds of cares; I feel myself, fortunately, disturbed by no passions; and I have found a serene retreat in peaceful solitude. I will therefore make a serious and unimpeded effort to destroy generally all my former opinions.”53 He will, for methodological purposes, imagine that the world he knows is an illusion created by a malignant demon. Furthermore, “I will consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing that I have all these things.”54 Appealing to the example of Archimedes’ fulcrum, he writes, “I shall have the right to entertain high hopes if I am fortunate enough to find a single truth which is certain and indubitable.”55 Only by this method of absolute skepticism does Descartes think he can demonstrate the one thing that cannot be doubted: the “clear and distinct idea” that, it turns out, is his own existence as “a thing that thinks” (res cogitans)?56
Ironically, from this autonomous epistemological method, Descartes seeks to demonstrate the necessity of God’s existence. And finally, he argues that God is not a deceiver, but that the only reason for errors is the fact that the self is suspended between God (perfect being) and non-being (finitude).57 Just as he promised, Descartes has argued for the indubitable foundation of knowledge in the existence of the soul and God by the light of nature alone, without any appeal to the biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. However, the result is a “natural religion” that identifies truth with intellectual ascent rather than with the incarnation, sin with creaturely finitude, and redemption with enlightenment. He may arrive at God’s existence; however, it is by a method of autonomous reason (which he assumes is neutral), starting with himself as an incorporeal mind—“a thing that thinks”—with no inherent relationship (covenantal or otherwise) to others, including the God whose existence he seeks to demonstrate. It is indeed lonely at the top. “The logic of Christian faith differs radically from this Cartesian logic in at least two respects,” notes Daniel L. Migliore. “First, the starting point of inquiry for the Christian is not self-consciousness but awareness of the reality of God, who is creator and redeemer of all things. Not ‘I think, therefore I am,’ but ‘God is, therefore we are.’ Second, for Christian faith and theology, inquiry is elicited by faith in God rather than being an attempt to arrive at certainty apart from God.”58
The earlier synthesis of Christianity and Platonism, which dominated medieval thought, leads to idolatrous projections—a “theology of glory”—but the modern turn to the subject actually makes the self the master of all reality. Contrary to popular assumptions, the Enlightenment was not antireligious, although it was critical of inherited orthodoxies.59 In fact, its roots reached deeply into the soil of medieval and Renaissance mysticism, especially with the revival of Neo-Platonism, Kabbalism, and quasi-Gnostic esoteric speculations.
Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202), founder of the Spiritual Franciscans, had written a profoundly influential commentary on the book of Revelation that divided history into three ages: the Age of the Father (law: the order of the married); the Age of the Son (grace: the order of the clergy), and the Age of the Spirit (direct and intuitive experience of God: the order of the monks). In the third age, there would be no need for God to reveal himself through the veil of creaturely mediation. Everyone will know the truth inwardly, apart from Scripture, preaching, sacrament, and church.60 The mystical ascent from the realm of appearances to the realm of spirit was transformed into a historical ascent that would become secularized as the modern idea of progress. In other words, the Platonic ladder of being was laid on its side: ascending horizontally rather than vertically.
Joachim’s speculations shaped many of the apocalyptic movements of the late Middle Ages, including the early Anabaptists. In fact, although Joachim was hardly the only influence, a line may be drawn from him to Renaissance Neo-Platonists like Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, and Pico della Mirandola, all the way to the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, and on to the Enlightenment.61 In his On the Peace of Faith (1453), Nicholas of Cusa envisions a conference in heaven where the religions are finally reconciled, recognizing that they are one in their moral and spiritual core. Cusa’s influence is obvious especially in Giordano Bruno and Gottfried Leibniz, as also in the German idealists and Romantics. Lessing, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Marx all refer to Joachim. Though secularized, the expectation of a new age of direct, immediate, and inward gnosis was indebted in no small measure to Joachim’s millennial enthusiasm.
In The Education of the Human Race (1778), rationalist philosopher G. E. Lessing (1729–1781) announced that Joachim’s Age of the Spirit had finally dawned. Sharply contrasting “necessary truths of reason” and “accidental [or contingent] truths of history,” Lessing professed that he could not get across this “ugly ditch.” In other words, he said, regardless of whether Christ literally rose from the dead, such facts of contingent history are insufficient to ground or to challenge eternal principles of reason.62 On the basis of this Platonist prejudice, Lessing asserted that Christianity’s supernatural claims are indemonstrable simply because they are historical. This “ugly ditch” between “necessary truths of reason” and “accidental truths of history” that Lessing said he could not get across was widely influential in modern thought.63 Lessing says, “It follows that the religion of Christ and the Christian religion are two quite different things.”64 It may also be added that this trajectory leads to the theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), who said, “The Jesus of history is of no concern to me … I am deliberately renouncing any form of encounter with a phenomenon of past history, including an encounter with the Christ after the flesh.”65
So there is a basically “gnostic” contrast in modern theology between the outer and the inner, time and eternity, body and spirit, particular and universal. We know the infinite reality only within ourselves—immediately, directly, and intuitively. We meet the divine in our mind or spirit, or in our inner sense of morality, in the feeling of dependence on the Absolute, or in an existential encounter. Whatever the path inward, these philosophies agree in rejecting an external revelation that comes to us from a transcendent God who speaks and acts in concrete history, embodied in our flesh, publicly accessible in our phenomenal experience.
The central problem with this whole line of thinking, from a Christian perspective, is that the most important and interesting things the Bible says concern historical events rather than eternal truths. If we know God only according to his works, not in his essence, then the history of God’s action—revealed and interpreted in Scripture—is our only access. The search for an inner core of pure morality, religion, and spirituality that unites humanity—over against the particular narratives, doctrines, and practices that distinguish Christians from others—is hardly a postmodern pastime. Religious pluralism and relativism lie at the heart of modernity, as is evident in Lessing’s clever parable of Nathan the Wise (1778), which is similar to Nicholas of Cusa’s On the Peace of Faith—not to mention, John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
In contrast to rationalism and idealism, the Scottish empiricist David Hume (1711–1776) argued that the phenomena of sense experience are the only objects of our knowledge. In radical opposition to rationalism, Hume argued that Descartes’”self” was an illusion and that our sense experience, passions, and social custom not only are unavoidable for apprehending what we call knowledge but provide our only access to it. In fact, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”66 In his essay “On Miracles,” Hume buttressed deistic objections to miracles—even anticipating the atheistic critique that such claims in every religion are nothing more than an illusion, a coping mechanism in the face of overwhelming natural forces.67
I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that knowing God became especially problematic in modernity—at least for philosophers and theologians. We have to assume that “God” exists, they have said, in order to acknowledge the laws of nature and morality, but we cannot know anything about this God. The necessity of God’s existence may be deduced from our practical need for morality or from our experience of transcendence, but God cannot be an object of knowledge. Though associated more generally with deism, this approach was developed with rigor by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and it remains one of the most pervasive assumptions of our Western thought today. It was after reading Hume’s Enquiry that Kant was awakened from his dogmatic slumbers in rationalism and thereafter set out to create a harmonization of reason and sense experience. “The world is tired of metaphysical assertions,” he wrote.68 Not only the univocal speculations of rationalism but also the analogical revelation of God in Scripture was ruled out of court as claiming the kind of knowledge (“metaphysical”) that we cannot have.
Kant believed that the idea of God, like the concepts of time and space, structure our minds in their encounter with the phenomena of our otherwise chaotic sense-experience. Yet these concepts (“noumena”) themselves can never be the object of our knowledge. Philosopher David Walsh observes:
The distinction he sought to maintain between knowledge of appearances and the thing-in-itself could not be sustained once it was subjected to self-examination. To know appearances as appearance is already to go beyond mere appearance; it is already to know the thing-in-itself…. Without actually admitting it, Kant disclosed the extent to which reason rests on faith. The central question of his philosophy—“How are synthetic a prior judgments possible?”—is never and can never be answered.69
In Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant says that the final purpose of human beings “is the value that he alone can give to himself, and which consists in what he does … in the freedom of his faculty of desire; i.e., a good will is that alone by means of which his existence can have an absolute value and in relation to which the existence of the world can have a final end.”70
It is this moral autonomy—free will and commitment to duty—that Kant regards as our link with divinity. Ironically for Kant, as Walsh notes, “It is our capacity to do without God that discloses our closeness to divinity. Not even the desire for union with God can deflect us from the severe path of duty for its own sake. What is right takes precedence over all else…. As moral beings we stand at the summit of our existence, sharing the transcendence of God himself.”71 Thus, hypertranscendence came full-circle to hyperimmanence; from the abandonment of the self-revealing God came the enthronement of the autonomous (divine) self.
The implication, as Kant himself explicitly states, is that religion is founded on morality rather than vice versa. Furthermore, he says, “The right way to advance is not from grace to virtue but rather from virtue to grace.”72 So Kant reverses the order of dependence: morality is not grounded in God; the idea of God is inferred from the practical dictates of morality; our sense of justice depends not on a future judgment, but the idea of a future judgment is an inference drawn from the necessity of punishment in the case of moral failure.73
Kant was concerned that the flames of rationalism as well as Hume’s skepticism threatened to destroy morality. That is why he said, “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”74 Besides his unwarranted antithesis between faith and knowledge, Kant’s definition of faith was no more than “a confidence in moral duty.”75 But, of course, this left the self to stew in its own juices, with the lid firmly set on top of the boiling cauldron of religious and moral enthusiasm. Without any supernatural in-breaking of communication from God to human beings, religion could occupy an island of irrational subjectivity, each spiritual person and religious community talking to itself about its own pious experience and duties. The outward forms that “pure religion” (morality) takes in various cultures (“ecclesiastical faiths”) may be objects of study, but not God and his works. As a science, then, “theology” was reduced to “religious studies,” with a concentration in ethics, psychology, and sociology.
It is worth noting that all of the paragons of the Enlightenment were reared in evangelical homes and churches. Unwittingly, pietism and rationalism conspired to drive out orthodoxy by pitting reason against faith, doctrine against practical experience and morality, and the external means of grace (the church and its formal ministry of Word and sacrament) against the inner life of the individual believer.76
If God transcends our rational investigation, the existence of “God” is predicated for Kant on the basis of practical reason (the focus of his second Critique).77 At first, it sounds as if Kant is affirming the orthodox maxim that God is known by us not as he is in himself but as he reveals himself in his works. In fact, he even employs the distinction between archetypal and ectypal theology.78 However, where orthodoxy grounded ectypal theology in historical revelation (viz., Scripture), Kant grounded it in autonomy: the self’s inner sense of moral duty—“and it cannot first come to us either through inspiration or through tidings communicated to us, however great the authority behind them.”79 The moral law within, not the external gospel revealed miraculously from heaven, was normative for Kant. The only way forward is to presuppose God as a transcendental category necessary for moral action—practical reason, not pure reason. Typical of non-Christian thought, autonomous rationalism (certainty) is founded on an irrational leap, demanded by practical rather than rational necessity.
Kant was not consistent with his own method. “In a famous inconsistency,” notes John E. Wilson, “Kant says that the (transcendent) ‘thing in itself’ is the unknown nonsensible ‘cause’ of an object.”80 How could Kant know that something possesses the capacity for causing things if it is inherently unknowable? In spite of the “learned ignorance” of this position, it turns out that Kant actually thought he knew a good deal more than his method allowed. Kant’s transcendental method presupposed a host of doctrines that he believed must be true if we are morally responsible creatures. Besides God’s existence, the immortality of the soul and the gradual moral improvement of humanity in this life and the next are (he thinks) necessary presuppositions of practical reason.
Kant also seems to know a lot about what cannot be true, given the presuppositions of moral reason. On this basis of practical reason, it cannot be true that humans are born in original sin, and there is no need for a divine Redeemer, his atoning sacrifice, justification by grace through faith, and gracious regeneration. In fact, these doctrines are subversive of moral (practical) reason.81 The Christian teachings concerning Christ’s bodily resurrection and ascension create enormous philosophical problems by claiming that, instead of being freed from material existence, the immortal soul is bound to its body forever. Again we are simply told that this violates “the hypothesis of the spirituality of the rational beings of this world”—ironically, Kant’s own ecclesiastical faith of the Enlightenment, which he universalizes as the metanarrative of pure reason.82 These doctrines (i.e., the Christian gospel) belong to “the external cover” that should never be confused with the “pure religion” of inner morality.83 The former are “based on faith in a particular revelation which, since it is historical, can never be demanded of everyone” (emphasis added).84
I have already referred to the tendency of modern thought to “demythologize” the Christian story in terms of nonhistorical principles (rational, ideal, ethical, or existential). Hans Georg-Gadamer goes so far as to suggest that modern hermeneutics arose out of an explicit concern for “the liberation of interpretation from [church] dogma.”85 Whatever we find in the Bible that comports with “pure religion” (universal morality) is acceptable, and whatever we find that speaks of God’s miraculous intervention in history is merely the mythological husk of “ecclesiastical faith.”
Reflecting this approach, Kant insists that even the Bible must be read “in a sense that harmonizes with the universal practical rules of a pure religion of reason.”86 Demonstrating once more the ironic similarity of mystical enthusiasm and rationalism, Kant says that this approach places the Spirit above the letter of Scripture.87 This misreading of 2 Corinthians 3:6 pervades modern philosophy. It was already anticipated by Gnostics and radical mystics like Eckhart, whose Spirit—letter dichotomy was invoked directly by the radical Anabaptist leader Thomas Müntzer against Luther.88
Paul’s contrast is between the written law that condemns us apart from Christ and the gospel that the Spirit reveals to us in Christ. By contrast, in the interpretation of the enthusiasts, “Spirit” refers to the inner core of religion: its morality (Kant/Lessing), spiritual experience (Schleiermacher), and absolute reason (Hegel). As such “Spirit” is universal. “Letter,” however, refers to the particular and historical expressions of religion, such as the Bible. Basically, “Spirit” and “letter” are interpreted in Platonic—even Gnostic—terms, associated with the upper world and lower world, respectively.
Routinely today, polls and surveys of contemporary religious views reveal the popularity of being “spiritual but not religious": believers in God—even in Jesus as supreme idea or example—but not committed to the “externals” of religion, such as church membership, creeds, preaching, and sacraments. True faith or spirituality is a private, inward, and moral disposition that lies at the core of every religion. This universal experience of the divine unity of all things cannot be identified with a particular revelation or creed or be put into words. Whenever we encounter these popular assumptions, they are in large measure the continuing legacy of Kant—which is itself an extension of a line of medieval and Protestant radicalism. The Reformers called this “enthusiasm” (God-within-ism).
The “one thing in our soul which, if we duly fix our eye on it,” cannot help but instill wonder, says Kant, is “the moral law within.”89 Consequently, the chief end of humanity is the ethical kingdom of God, in which every person fulfills his or her moral duty.90 He argued that whatever Jesus teaches that is in conformity with the moral law is acceptable to practical reason, but we would have known this without his life and ministry.91 Everything in Christianity that pertains to supernatural revelation is but the outer garment that may be stripped from the inner core of universal morality that unites all genuine religious experience.92
Already the “demythologizing” project is well underway: that is, trying to interpret the miraculous accounts in the Bible as provoking a higher knowledge or way of being in the world rather than as referring to actual events in the past. In fact, in a famous interchange with Bultmann, Julius Schniewind posed exactly the right question: “Has the invisible ever been made visible, and if so, where? … And the only answer is the Christian answer—the invisible God has entered into our visible world.”93 So even before tackling the question of faith and reason, the real problem for modernity is the relationship of history and reason. Like the thought of deists more generally, Kant’s thought is simultaneously characterized by hypertranscendence (an unknowable God) and hyperimmanence (the divinity of the inner self as a moral legislator).94
G. F. W. Hegel (1770–1831) tried to resolve the inconsistencies in Kant’s thinking, rejecting (among other things) Kant’s distinction between unknowable noumena and knowable phenomena. For Hegel, everything that exists in reality is rational. Reason must draw itself away from the noisy clamor of historical particulars toward participation in the “passionless calm of purely thinking knowledge.”95In the transition from Kant to Hegel we see the pendulum from dualism to monism in mid-swing.
Far from denying rational access to constitutive truth concerning God, Hegel regarded the Christian religion as the summit of finite representations of his own infinite and absolute system. For Hegel, “speculative” is the highest compliment, whereas for his Lutheran and Reformed forebears, it was a term of derision. He was convinced he knew the “absolute system” of knowledge that contained the whole and its parts.96 Hegel believes that, far from being beyond rational access, his system makes it possible to know God as he is in his inner being, “no longer concealed and secret.” “The development of the thinking spirit only began with this revelation of divine essence. It must now advance to the intellectual comprehension of that which originally was present only to the feeling and imagining spirit.”97
It should be noted that the paragons of German idealism (such as Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel and Schopenhauer) were students of ancient Gnosticism, Kabbala, and radical mystics like Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) and Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), the latter of whom Hegel hailed as “the first German philosopher.”98
In a further step toward Hegel, F. C. Oetinger (1702–1782), a pastor and devotee of Böhme, various Anabaptist mystics, and Emmanuel Swendenborg, wrote:
The spirit contains all within itself; to a certain degree reason exalts the whole to the level of an abstract idea and at the time of the Golden Age one will find true to the highest degree what is, after so many false definitions, the true definition of knowledge, the true knowledge. The quintessence of divine things, the base of which is in the spirit and which then spreads into the reason. God buried it in the spirit. The seeker has with God’s help to take it in to the reason. Reason must be in accord with the spirit, and the spirit by the same token must be in accord with God.99
Invoking Joachim of Fiore, Oetinger promises that in the third age, “analytic learning will be replaced by intuition.”100 Everyone will know the whole meaning of history intuitively rather than merely parts. In fact, all disciplines will become one and revelation will be the fountain of law, the arts, and the sciences.
To these indigenous Western resources were added generous doses of Indian Buddhism. Anonymous, but probably written by Hegel, “The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism” anticipates the imminent dawn of the new age. The Age of the Spirit will bring “through reason itself the overthrow of all superstition, and the persecution of the priesthood, which recently pretends to reason.”
Then comes absolute freedom of all spirits, which carry the intellectual world in themselves, and which may not seek God or immortality outside themselves. Finally, the idea that unites all others, the idea of beauty, taking the word in a higher Platonic sense…. We must have a new mythology, but this mythology must be in service of the ideas; it must be a mythology of reason … then will rule the universal freedom and equality of the spirits! A higher spirit sent from heaven must establish this new religion among us. It will be the last and greatest work of humanity.101
For Hegel, Absolute Spirit realizes itself in the historical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Thus, conflict is always the necessary passage to higher development. Nevertheless, the real winner is always infinite spirit over finite matter. The thesis (matter) is contradicted by its antithesis (spirit), and the latter goes on its way, fueled by its destruction of the particular.102
For Hegel, religion is “the innermost region of spirit.”103 It is here where finite spirit realizes its unity with Absolute Spirit. Drawing inspiration for his pantheism from radical mystics, Hegel writes, “Master Eckhart, a Dominican monk, says in one of his sermons: ‘The eye with which God looks at me is the eye with which I look at Him, my eye and His eye are identical. In justice, I am weighed in God and He in me. If God did not exist, I would not exist; and if I did not exist, He would not exist either.’”104 “The Divine, and hence religion, exists for the Ego,” so that Hegel can even say that “man is an end in himself,” yet “only by virtue of the divine in him—that which we designated at the outset as Reason, or, insofar as it has activity and power of self-determination, as Freedom.”105 “Without the world,” Hegel concluded, “God is not God,” since God (Absolute Spirit) is identical with the process of history.106 Once more we recognize the recurring pattern in the “overcoming estrangement” paradigm: a fundamental dualism striving toward an ultimate monism that brings the truest (inmost) self back home to its original unity with divinity.107
Because Hegel identified Absolute Spirit with the unfolding of history to ever-higher stages through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, he was able to inspire contradictory programs. Robert S. Hartman summarizes the ironies of his influence:
The influence of his philosophy confirms his thesis that universal Reason, through men, shapes history. The fate of this philosophy bears witness to its dialectical form. The most rational and religious philosopher, Hegel unchained the most irrational and irreligious movements—Fascism and Communism. Often regarded as the most authoritarian, he inspired the most democratic: Walt Whitman and John Dewey. The philosopher who equated what is with what ought to be, he released the greatest dissatisfaction with what is; and thus, as the greatest conservative, unchained the greatest revolution… [Some] became conservatives and so-called “Hegelians of the Right.” Other thinkers accepted the form of his philosophy and opposed its content. They became revolutionaries and “Hegelians of the Left.” The two opposing factions met finally in the mortal embrace of Stalingrad.108
Walsh explains concerning Hegel’s interpretation of Christianity:
His Jesus never even suggests that men and women believe in him, for he has come to invite them to believe in themselves. They are called to hearken to “the holy law of their reason, to pay attention to the inner judge of their hearts, to conscience, a measure that is also the measure of divinity” (Theologische Jugenschriften, 119) Hegel reads the message of Jesus as salvation from the dead letter of the law to obtain the living reality of spirit, a perfect bond of friendship between those who share the same spirit. “Faith is a knowledge of spirit through spirit, and only like spirits can know and understand one another” [Early Theological Writings], 239 There can be no suggestion of Christ’s actions as an external sacrifice for the sins of mankind.109
According to Hegel, “The infinite cannot be carried in this vessel.”110
Following mystics and radical Anabaptists like Thomas Müntzer, Hegel contrasted the “Spirit” with the “letter” in terms reminiscent of Kant and Lessing. In fact, “The complaint against the dead letter of historical religion is at the core of the project in which Hegel is engaged,” notes Walsh. Focusing on the person of Jesus Christ—his divinity—distracts the community from the pursuit of “spirit.”
Spirit cannot be manifest in the material, because it is the nature of spirit to be that which can be known only through itself. Clothing spirit in a miraculous display is really its concealment. Miracles are a forced conjunction of spirit and body that are essentially opposites Such a purely physical resurrection has now become an obstacle to the inner resurrection of his spirit within existence Spiritual union can occur only inwardly.111
Similar to Kant and Lessing, Hegel writes, “The series of different religions which will come to view, just as much sets forth again only the different aspects of a single religion, and the ideas which seem to distinguish one actual religion from another occur in each one.”112 The relation of spirit to spirit is “complete immediacy.”113 “The divine nature is the same as the human, and it is this unity that is beheld” in the revelation of Christ.114
If the object of theology is really ethics for Kant, and Absolute Spirit for Hegel, then for the father of modern theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), it is universal religious experience, especially “the feeling of absolute dependence.” The revolution in epistemology—the “turn to the self”—now dominated the theological academy, and increasingly the churches of Europe and eventually the West generally. As Idealism blended with Romanticism, feeling and willing replaced both Kantian doing and Hegelian knowing. Louis Dupré’s verdict concerning Goethe could be as easily applied to Romanticism generally: It “epitomizes the Promethean attempt to create a cultural universe which would absorb transcendence itself to a point where the very distinction between immanent and transcendent ceased to make sense.”115 Courageous souls broke down Kant’s barricade against the supposedly unknowable noumena, seeking not to know God according to his accommodated revelation but to discover their own unity with divinity. Neo-Platonist, Gnostic, and radical mystical speculations of a decidedly pantheistic tendency shaped the German idealists and Romantics in England (William Blake) and America (Transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville).
Yet none perhaps was more explicit in his debt to this “overcoming estrangement” paradigm than the German Romantic-Idealist Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854). In the conflict between darkness and light, divinity and humanity struggle together to emerge in moral struggle. God has fully overcome this antithesis (darkness or evil) in himself, but we haven’t yet. Evil is the primordial chaos even from which God emerges as positive good, overcoming this dark side in his own nature.116 God suffers with creation as spirit overcomes the strife of matter.
Behind Schelling’s Romantic philosophy is the recurring pagan myth of primordial chaos (darkness, evil) being overcome by the higher gnosis. In fact, he realizes that this is “a concept which is common to all the mysteries and spiritual religions of ancient times.”117 “It is the path to glory. God leads human nature down no other path than that down which God himself must pass Spirit exists from that which it is not and can arrive there only by submitting to the pain of its incarceration. All creation arises from the unconsciousness whose bonds it must burst in a moment of ‘divine and holy madness.’”118 In The Ages of the World, he wonders, “Perhaps the one is still coming who will sing the greatest heroic poem, grasping in spirit something for which the seers of old were famous: what was, what is, what will be. But this time is not yet come.”119 When this day does dawn, we will know God not according to his works, but as he is in himself.120
The nineteenth century was characterized by a tug-of-war between neo-Kantians and neo-Hegelians. In between, there were occasionally alternative voices, such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), who wanted to turn thought back toward actual existence and to reaffirm the infinite-qualitative distinction between God and humans. However, the Kantian barricade against constitutive knowledge of God through revealed truth remained firmly in place. Reacting against a moribund state church as well as Hegelian rationalism, Kierkegaard lodged the essence of Christian faith in inwardness and subjectivity.121 The criticism of orthodoxy by the pietists remained influential in the thinking of those who had been reared in it. Kierkegaard spoke for many when he wrote, “There is only one proof of the truth of Christianity and that, quite rightly, is from the emotions.”122
Criticism became the constant refrain of liberal neo-Kantian theologians, such as Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889), who dismissed the most important Christian doctrines on the basis that they were metaphysical. Again the circularity of such reasoning is obvious, at least to us now in retrospect: Christian doctrines make objective truth-claims about God; but God cannot be an object of our knowledge; therefore, such doctrines are unfounded speculations.123 Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) sought a gospel “freed from all external and particularistic elements.”124 Rather, the gospel is for Harnack simply the law of love.125 “How you are to maintain yourself in this life on earth, and in what way you are to serve your neighbor, is left to you and your own liberty of action. This is what the apostle Paul understood by the Gospel and I do not believe he misunderstood it.”126 Whatever the gospel is, it is definitely not a dogma.127
At most, said these theologians, these doctrines express, symbolize, or otherwise represent eternal truths about something else, a higher and more universal reality. In truth, such criticism is actually more metaphysical and more susceptible to critique as a metanarrative than is orthodox Christianity. That is because “Greeks”—ancient and modern—point away from God-in-the-flesh toward the unspoiled vision of eternal truths, while in the gospel the eternal Father focuses the world’s attention on the eternal Word made flesh: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (Mt 17:5).
The liberal religion is subjective from beginning to end, whether this subjectivity is considered in individualistic or communal terms. Accordingly, the Bible is regarded as Holy Scripture because of the unique place given to it by the community. Jesus Christ is the “Son of God” for the same reason.128 Sin is not objective guilt, provoking an objective wrath of God, but is a subjective experience of alienation and lack of dependence on God. Christ redeems us by the powerful impression of his personality, his sense of dependence on and nearness to God, and the persuasive force of his moral purpose. Is it any wonder that the modern atheists from Feuerbach to Freud diagnosed religion as neurosis, an illusory projection of the self on the basis of wish-fulfillment?
Even more radical than Kant’s system, a movement centered at Marburg known as Neo-Kantianism profoundly shaped a generation of thinkers, including theologians such as the liberal pietist Wilhelm Herrmann and especially his pupil, Rudolf Bultmann.
Another bright student of Herrmann’s, who eventually broke more radically from his mentors, was Karl Barth (1886–1968). Barth recognized that the whole liberal program could only mean that theology is a species of comparative religion or anthropology. Unless God is the object of theology, and the self-revealing subject, Barth properly emphasized, theology cannot be considered a true science—that is, a field of genuine knowledge.129 We will consider in later chapters whether Barth himself offers a coherent and scriptural account of this claim, but he decisively shifted the focus back to God as the revealed object and revealing subject.
In our own day, hypertranscendence (deism and atheism) continues its secret pact with hyperimmanence (pantheism and panentheism).130 This is what happens when we refuse to receive our existence and knowledge as a gift and to be judged and justified by the Stranger who calls out, “Adam, where art thou?” Either we can know and master reality as gods, or our existence is nothing more than an illusion and our knowledge a collage of advertisements and slogans. However, Christianity teaches that because God exists, there is absolute (archetypal) truth, even if our knowledge of that truth is—and remains into eternity—finite, creaturely, and accommodated revelation from God.
In many ways, postmodern skepticism about the possibility of language conveying transcendent truth and meaning reflects the exhaustion of modern rationalism, a sense of having had high hopes dashed. If we cannot have absolute (archetypal) knowledge, then we cannot even have relative (ectypal) knowledge. If we cannot know as God knows, then we cannot even know as creatures. As a result, in Nietzsche’s words, “‘Interpretation,’ the introduction of meaning—not ‘explanation’…. There are no facts, everything is in flux, incomprehensible, elusive; what is relatively most enduring is—our opinions.”131 Modern philosophy merely mined Christian doctrines and transformed them into “concepts” and “categories.” In truth, they are merely metaphors.132 “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”133 Metaphors do not refer to extralinguistic “reality” but merely to other metaphors.134
Nietzsche’s vehement protest against Christianity as “Platonism for the masses” makes a certain kind of sense in the light of the modern forms of religion in his day. Scheiermacher had declared, “True religion is sense and taste for the Infinite.”135 Herrmann asserted, “Personal, living Christianity … is inaccessible to that method of knowledge which holds in material affairs.”136 Why wouldn’t such a religion become irrelevant for those who lacked a sufficient appetite for “the Infinite"? Yet this is surely something other than the biblical faith, which sympathizes more with Nietzsche than with many modern theologians when he argues, “When one places life’s center of gravity not in life but in the ‘beyond’—in nothingness—one deprives life of its center of gravity altogether.” If our goal is the flight of the soul from this world, “Why communal sense, why any further gratitude for descent and ancestors, why cooperate, trust, promote, and envisage any common welfare?” Nietzsche asks.137
Yet this confusion of Christ iani ty with Platonism (and German idealism) Nietzsche never seems to have questioned. He could only offer sweeping generalizations, contrasted with his equally sweeping (and extreme) alternatives. “Christianity is the hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy itself.”138 He could even concede, “Oh, I understand this flight up and away into the repose of the One.”139What kept him from making this move was his hatred for “that overleaping of this world” that occurs in religion.140 Yet Nietzsche’s own version of the apocalyptic dawn of the Age of the Spirit—the reign of Dionysus over Christ—became the inspiration of tyrants throughout the twentieth century.141
However, at this point at least it was a Platonized form of religion that he was rejecting rather than the Bible’s world-affirming narrative of creation, incarnation, redemption, resurrection, and the consummation of created reality. Not in a flight into a “beyond,” away from the supposedly lower world, but in the arrival of the age to come; not in a renunciation of life here and now, but in the embrace of life as the anticipation of feasting with God and each other in joy, does Christian hope prove itself the only true rival of Platonism.142
From beginning to end, biblical faith is opposed to any notion of a world emanating from God’s essence, with divine souls thrown mercilessly into bodies and the realm of appearances. God created a world distinct from himself out of loving freedom, not necessity. Sin is ethical (covenant-breaking), not ontological (a falling away from infinite Being). And redemption comes through this God’s assumption of our humanity, fulfilling the covenant and bearing its sentence in our place, raised from death to the right hand of the Father, from which he will return to judge the living and the dead and make all things new. Gone, then, is Plato’s “upper world” (as Nietzsche understands it), which forever consigns this “lower” world of embodied living nothing more than a shadowy realm. “God” is not an abstract, dualism-grounding principle, for God transcends even the highest heavens. Indeed, heaven itself is part of creation, and God is no less at home in the world that he made than in any other part of his creation.
Nietzsche loves the real world of ever-changing dynamism over Plato’s realm of unchanging forms, but God loves this world more. In fact, in joy he created its diverse forms of life and his providence keeps history’s ever-moving, ever-changing dynamism in play. It was not by the self’s escape from this world and embodiment to achieve union with the upper world, but by God’s becoming flesh that salvation has been brought to the earth.
Christ iani ty can only concur with Nietzsche’s insistence, against much of ancient and modern philosophy, that reason adheres in reality itself, not above it or in speculative reason. That which actually happens in this world, not what philosophers argue must be the case, should always take precedence.143 For that very reason, the gospel’s claims must be allowed to disorient and reorient our presuppositions about God and the world. However, Nietzsche’s fondness for this world of genuine play is thwarted by his affirmation of the basically Buddhist “eternal recurrence of the same.” Each cycle may have its own power, but it is always a repetition. By contrast, the Bible keeps pilgrims moving toward the “new thing” that God will do in history, something that has continuity with the past, yet is altogether different.
By surrendering to the eternal cycle of nature, Nietzsche shows himself a greater disciple of Plato than of Paul. This world is affirmed, but at the expense of any transcendent source and meaning. Following in Nietzsche’s wake, nihilism wants to affirm becoming over being, but there is no purposeful origin or goal in which “becoming” even makes sense. This world and its history are affirmed, but for what reason and with what practical effect, since it is simply the theater of competing wills to power? There is plurality, but it is random, lacking any ultimate unity or purpose that is willed by someone other than the sovereign self or the sovereign state.144
For all of his revolutionary flourishes, Nietzsche (and, hence, postmodernism) did not break with modernity but encouraged the consummation of the Enlightenment program. Mark C. Taylor writes, “The ceaseless play of opposites renders transition permanent and passage absolute.”145 Packed into this laconic statement is both the idea that there is a journey without origin or destination and that, despite his profession of atheism, “God” is this pointless becoming (rendering “passage absolute”). Following in Nietzsche’s wake, this is but a small step beyond Hegel, who had already identified God with the process of history. All that was left was to remove Hegel’s deterministic telos—that is, the inexorable destiny of a history that is already fully present (immanent) throughout its development.
However, neither Nietzsche nor his heirs have actually overthrown Platonism and Idealism; they have merely reversed its dichotomies and therefore continue to work within its ambit.146 Nietzsche’s preference for symbols and eternal truths over Christianity’s historically based dogmas betrays the fact that he was the real Platonist. If Christianity were truly “Christian,” he argued, it would join the Buddhist way of life: “it is a means to being happy.”147 “A god who died for our sins: redemption through faith; resurrection after death—all these are counterfeits of true Christianity for which that disastrous wrong-headed fellow Paul must be held responsible.”148 The Reformation was the consummation of this hatred for everything noble, meritorious, and praiseworthy in humanity.149
It is remarkable that in this vast and highly influential trajectory of idealism, from Kant to Nietzsche, the ontological source or principle of infinite reality behind the objects of sense remains invisible and unknowable. No more than the sovereign noumena (concepts) for Kant is the sovereign will visible to us for Nietzsche. The infinite principle on which our existence and knowledge depends is itself unknowable. Contemporary philosopher Hilary Putnam is exactly right when he says that “almost every philosopher makes statements which contradict his own explicit account of what can be justified or known.”150 Hegel asserts, “The spiritual as such cannot be directly confirmed by the unspiritual, the sensible [i.e., that which is known by the physical senses].”151 Schleiermacher’s universal “feeling” that grounds existence can only be experienced, never revealed once and for all in history. Nietzsche’s “will” is absolute, but never visible.
In sharp contrast, the gospel tells us that “the Word became flesh … and we beheld his glory.” The one by whom the worlds were made has become one of us, yet without surrendering his transcendence. The Eternal Logos was apprehended by ordinary sense experience and his resurrection from the dead in history was a public event that secured the restoration of the fallen creation.
Central to a biblical worldview, over against its rivals, is the qualitative distinction between God and the world. This distinction holds with respect not only to ontology (reality), but to epistemology (how we know it). In his existence and knowledge, God transcends us. At no point do the lines intersect, not even “spirit to spirit.” Our souls are no more divine than our bodies. Only the Triune God is eternal, infinite, and omniscient.
And yet, God is not only transcendent in majesty, but immanent in loving in his covenantal condescension. Just as his transcendence is not sacrificed to a supposedly direct and immediate relation of our spirit to divinity, God’s immanence is more thorough than philosophical dualism allows. God did not merely assume a human soul, but our flesh in its entirety. God does not speak secretly in our spirits, but publicly in our human language, and the creaturely elements of water, bread and wine. Jesus Christ is not a symbol of the ontological unity of God and humans; he is the unique incarnation of God in our humanity—and retains the distinctness of his two natures in one person. Ever transcendent, he is nevertheless Immanuel, “God with us.”
One implication of the Creator-creature (i.e., archetypal-ectypal) distinction is that although human beings, more than other creatures, strain naturally toward transcendence, they, no less than other creatures, never know reality as pure object. Only God sees reality in independent objectivity. God alone knows things as they really are in themselves. Beyond time and space, though moving freely within both, God knows the world as other than himself—not as inherently antithetical, but as qualitatively different. There is no essential antithesis between spirit and matter or even between God and humanity, so there is no higher synthesis between them. There is absolute difference between Creator and creation and relative difference within creation itself. Neither divine nor demonic, creation is good even in its difference from God. We are worldlings. Whatever excellencies pertain to our nature and office as God’s image-bearers, we know the world only as participants, never as detached observers.
The problem of relating subject and object, which in our Western culture goes all the way back to the Greeks and became especially acute in modernity, is aroused in the first place by a presupposition that at least in that supposedly divine part of us (the soul or mind) we transcend the world. Obviously, this means that although we are subjects and participants in the world with respect to our bodily and sensual constitution, we should aspire to rise above this realm of appearances and by this ascent of mind contemplate things as they really are in themselves. Pure objectivity is attained by the unity of our mind with divinity. This presupposition binds the otherwise disparate programs of modernity (as in ancient Greek philosophy), even where they disagree about how to attain this.
All of this symmetry is broken, however, with the biblical doctrine of ex nihilo creation, where the line is drawn not between spirit and matter, but between Creator and creature. If we are worldlings even in our intellectual and spiritual aspect, then we do not—in fact, cannot—transcend the world of phenomena. The world—even souls, minds, or wills—is not related naturally or necessarily to God. Yet God is free to relate the world—in all of its fullness—to himself. We swim in the world like fish in the sea, but of God we sing, “The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land” (Ps 95:5).
Only in biblical covenantalism is the God-world relation truly analogical. Especially in French poststructuralism (associated with Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida), the point has been well made that all of the philosophical systems we have considered contain with them the seeds of their own de(con)struction. As the Reformed apologist Cornelius Van Til recognized, modern rationalism is grounded in irrationalism.152 Although at first blush antithetical, the two non-Christian paradigms we have considered share more in common than either does with “meeting a stranger.” They are united by the view that being and knowledge are univocal for God and creatures. In other words, they confuse the Creator with the creature, either by divinizing humanity or by humanizing deity. Whether by seeking to deepen Platonism or overturn it, modernity does not know how to treat a stranger, especially if that stranger is God. Thus, the liturgy of two voices—the speaking Lord and the answering servant—is aborted. And all we hear are the clashing voices of competing wills—humanity talking to itself, creating itself, and fulfilling itself through its own speech.
It is never a question of whether, but of which theology and metaphysics. The most dangerous metaphysics is one that pretends that it is not one. The demand for sovereignty, in whatever version it takes, lies at the heart of both of the alternatives to “meeting a stranger.” Heralds of the first paradigm follow Apollo—the god of order—to ascend from the realm of shadows to the heights of spirit, while devotees of Dionysus—the god of pagan revelry—descend into the depths with Nietzsche to make their own fire.
Either way, we refuse to hear and receive our existence and knowledge from the Sovereign Creator who speaks. One is reminded of Paul’s contrast in Romans 10 between “the righteousness that is based on the law” and “the righteousness based on faith": the one ascends to the heavens as if to bring God down; the other descends into the depths as if to bring Christ up from the dead—when all the while God is as near as the Word that is preached. In the Christian ontology, we are created and sustained by God’s Word; in the Christian epistemology, we interpret God and the world through this same Word, either as rebels in the covenant of works or as children of God and co-heirs with Christ in the covenant of grace.
1. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), 10. Tillich most frequently states this contrast in terms of the “ontological” versus the “cosmological” paradigms, but since every worldview includes an ontology and cosmology, I prefer his synonyms—“overcoming estrangement” versus “meeting a stranger.”
2. It is not an overstatement to suggest that pantheism/panentheism has, since antiquity, represented the most dominant rival to biblical faith in both the East and the West, and continues to do so today. According to the Hindu Vedas and Upanishads, the Atman (soul/self) of individuals is one with divinity (Brahman). For all of their differences, it was the onto- logical horizon of Thales, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Stoicism. This paradigm was taken over by Plato and continued in Middle Platonism (through the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria) and (with some revision) in Neoplatonism. The key difference is that “the One” of Plato, from which all reality emanates, is for Plotinus and other Neoplatonists not only pure being but “beyond being” and therefore also beyond rational knowledge.
3. The study of Gnosticism has become a cottage industry today, especially with many scholars advocating a recovery of Gnostic emphases. The vast secondary literature has highlighted the diverse schools of this movement, although Irenaeus (Against Heresies) has stood the test of time as an account (and Christian refutation) of the various types. See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (3rd ed.; Boston: Beacon, 2001); Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and Structure of Gnosticism (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); Birger A. Pearson, Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007).
4. Meister Eckhart, Sermons and Treatises (trans. Maurice O’Connell Walshe; Longmead, England: Element, 1987), 3:46. “And since likeness flows from the One,” neither the seeking intellect nor the One itself (God) is satisfied “till they are united in the One” (78). The contemplative soul strives upward, “transformed in God and estranged from all multiplicity … or shadow of difference,” and together with “one God-Father-Son-and- Holy-Ghost loses and is stripped of all distinctions and properties, and is One alone” (85). J. Deotis Roberts (A Philosophical Introduction to Theology [London: SCM, 1991], 118) comments, “God appears to imply what Plotinus meant by ‘Mind,’” while Godhead corresponds to the ‘One’ in Plotinus’ Godhead; it is Being itself and not an individual being.” Roberts further notes the similarities of this view to the Hindu idea of Brahman, although he tries to make these views consistent with Christianity. Everything “outer,” even about Jesus Christ (his bodily incarnation, life, suffering, pain, passions, etc.), is dispensable; the truth is “inner” unity with the divine. Like Mary, Jesus “inwardly was in a state of unmoved detachment” (Eckhart, Sermons and Treatises, 124).
5. Eckhart was also a personal favorite of Hegel. Ernst Benz (The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy [Allison Park, Pa.: Pickwick, 1983], 2) observes that the continuity between German medieval mysticism and German idealistic philosophy has been thoroughly recognized at least since Wilhelm Dilthey. For this connection especially between Hegel and Eckhart (as well as ancient Gnosticism), see also Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994).
6. Rosemary Radford Reuther, Liberation Theology (New York: Paulist, 1972), 118; Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon, 1993), 52, 60, 87.
7. Reuther, Sexism and God-Talk, 87.
8. The term pantheist seems to have originated with John Toland’s Socinianism, truly stated, by a pantheist (1705). Panen- theism was coined by Karl Christian Friedrich Karuse in 1828.
9. Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (Hamden, U.K.: Archon, 1964).
10. See, for example, Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, eds., In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
11. Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993).
12. The term deism was apparently coined in 1564 by John Calvin’s colleague Pierre Viret and is typically regarded as the religion of the Age of Enlightenment.
13. See Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (trans. George Eliot; New York: Harper and Bros., 1957); Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1989). More recently, the New Atheists have rehabilitated this theory. See, for example, Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2007).
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (trans. Duncan Large; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 20.
15. Quoted in Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern Theology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 66.
16. Ibid., 157.
17. Examples are too numerous to cite, as mysticism and technology, magic and science, spirituality and materialism merge. The second-centur y heresy of Gnosticism has enjoyed a renaissance ever since the Nag Hammadi discovery in 1945 and is especially popular today in academic circles. In some ways, contemporary advocacy of Gnosticism is the next stage of the New Age movement. Theologians like Harvey Cox, in TheFuture of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009), and popular writers like Brian McLaren, in A New Kind of Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2010) defend this shift from Scripture and creeds to inner experience and deeds.
18. Dennis J. McCarthy, Treaty and Covenant (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1963), 96; Meredith Kline, By Oath Consigned (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 16.
19. A growing number of ancient Near Eastern scholars have demonstrated the striking parallels between these ancient secular (especially Hittite) treaties and the covenants between Yah- weh and Israel. For the connections to the ancient Near Eastern “suzerainty treaty,” see G. E. Mendenhall, Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (Pittsburgh: The Biblical Colloquium, 1955); Meredith G. Kline, especially Treaty of the Great King (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961); Delbert R. Hillers, Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1969). While obvious differences between biblical covenants (especially those depending on Israel’s obedience distinguished from those promising unilateral divine deliverance even beyond Israel) is widely recognized, some (following Moshe Weinfeld) argue that these differences find more formal classification in the contrast between suzerainty treaties and royal grants. The former is a conditional relationship, while the latter is an outright gift—an inheritance to be passed down in perpetuity to a loyal servant’s descendants. For this distinction, see especially Moshe Weinfeld, “The Covenant of Grant in the Old Testament and the Ancient Near East,” JAOS 90 (1970): 184–203. For more recent critical interaction with Weinfeld’s thesis, see Walter Brueggemann, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, I & II: Structure Legitimation,” in Old Testament Theology: Essays on Structure, Theme, and Text (ed. Patrick D. Miller; Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992); Gary N. Knoppers, “Ancient Near Eastern Royal Grants and the Davidic Covenant: A Parallel?” in JAOS 116 (1996): 670–97. I am grateful to Bryan Estelle for suggesting these last two references. Although I find Weinfeld’s thesis compelling, it is probably unwise to make the law-covenant/promise-covenant too heavily dependent on formal similarities with ancient Near Eastern treaties. Regardless of parallels, only the exegesis of particular covenants in Scripture can determine its basis and terms. The Reformed (covenant) theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were able to see distinctions between various types of covenants in Scripture long before these comparisons in ancient Near Eastern studies. Nevertheless, such recent scholarship only serves to confirm their exegetical insights.
20. For example, the Westminster Confession includes the covenant of works and the covenant of grace in chapter 7, with the covenant of redemption at least assumed in chapter 8. For patristic sources, see Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds to Early Christianity (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 92, 288, 292, 405, 425, 468–69, 507–8, 524–27, 547—50. See also Ligon Duncan, “The Covenant Idea in Melito of Sardis: Introduction and Survey,” along with “The Covenant Idea in Irenaeus of Lyons: Introduction and Survey” (Greenville, SC: Reformed Academic Press, 1998).
21. Various synonyms are employed for the covenant of creation, such as the covenant of law, works, life, and nature.
22. François Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology (Philadephia P&R Publishing, 1992), 1:16–17.
23. Plato, The Republic 8:1135-36 (517b-18e), in Plato: Complete Works (ed. John M. Cooper; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).
24. Ibid., 8:1136 (518d).
25. Plato, Phaedo 59 (66e-67a), in Plato: Complete Works: “I think the true philosopher despises them [the body with its senses] So in the first place, such things clearly show that the philosopher more than other men frees the soul from association with the body as much as possible” (56 [65a]). Physical vision and hearing—the lower senses even more—because of their attachment to the body, deceive and confuse the soul (56 [65b]).
26. Ibid., 57 [66a].
27. Ibid., [66c–d].
28. Origen, First Principles 2.9.2, in ANF, 4:290.
29. Ibid., 23.2.
30. The profoundly influential fifth-century writer known by the pseudonym Dionysius counseled his interlocutor “to leave behind everything you have perceived and understood, everything perceptible and understandable, all that is not and all that is, and, with your understanding laid aside, to strive upward as much as you can toward union with him who is beyond all being and knowledge” (Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works [trans. Colm Luibheid; Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1987], 135. Luther, who said of Dionysius that he “Platonizes more than he Christianizes,” had this scheme especially in mind when he thundered against the theology of glory.
31. See Walther von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1976); A. E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985); B. A. Gerrish, “To the Unknown God: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of God,” JR 53 (1973): 263–92.
32. Calvin, Institutes, 1.10.2.
33. Ibid., 3.2.1.
34. Turretin, Elenctic Theology, 1:17-18.
35. Turretin, ibid.: “Reason is the instrument which the believer uses, but it is not the foundation and principle upon which faith rests” (1:33). Richard Muller summarizes the consensus of the Reformed orthodox: “Reason never proves faith, but only elaborates faith toward understanding” (PRRD, 1:34). Arminian and Socinian thinkers were hitching their wagons to Descartes, while French and Dutch Reformed theologians criticized the new system of rationalism. Even Roman Catholic theologians employed the Cartesian method against the Calvinists (Richard H. Popkin, Problems of Cartesianism: Cartesianism and Biblical Criticism [ed. Thomas M. Lennon, John M. Nicholas, and John W. Davies; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1982], 71–72). The Reformed theologian Voetius went into direct combat with Descartes, and the former’s disciple (Schook) wrote a critique that provoked a response from Descartes (Theo Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy 1673—1650 [Carbondadle and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1992], 20). Consequently, there is no historical basis to the claim that Reformed orthodoxy was shaped by modern rationalism.
36. Gregory of Nyssa, On ‘Not Three Gods,’ To Ablabius, in NPNF2, 5:333.
37. Basil, Epistle 234, in NPNF2, 8:274.
38. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, in NPNF2, 9:1.
39. See Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 65-89, 220.
40. B. B. Warfield, Calvin and Augustine (Philadelphia: Pres byterian & Reformed, 1956), 153. Warfield notes, “[Calvin] is refusing all a priori methods of determining the nature of God and requiring of us to form our knowledge of Him a posteriori from the revelation He gives us of Himself in His activities.” See further his excellent summary of this reticence in Calvin and the tradition generally to explore the “whatness” (139–40).
41. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (ed. John Owen; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 69.
42. Calvin, Institutes 1.2.2. Early Reformed writers such as Musculus repeated this approach, launching their discussion of God with the question of who God is rather than what God is. See Muller, PRRD, 3:228.
43. Calvin, Institutes 1.2.1.
44. See Willem van Asselt, “The Fundamental Meaning of Theology: Archetypal and Ectypal Theology in Seventeenth- Century Reformed Thought,” WTJ 64, no. 2 (2002): 319-35. According to the Lutheran scholastic J. A. Quenstedt, this distinction (carried over from medieval theology by the Reformed theologian Franciscus Junius) was also affirmed by Lutherans (Luther Poellot, ed., The Nature and Character of Theology: An Introduction to the Thought of J. A. Quenstedt [St. Louis: Concordia, 1986], 22-23; this is an abridged translation of the first chapters of the 1696 edition of Quenstedt’s Theologia didactio- polemica sivesystema theologicum; see also Heinrich Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church [3rd ed.; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1961], 16).
45. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, Q. xiii, a.5, 10. For Aquinas’s view of analogy, see David Burrell, “Analogy,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology (ed. Alan Richardson and John Bowdon; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983). For the various subtleties of this position, see Ralph M. McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy (Washington, D. C.: Catholic Univ. Press, 1999); Bernard Montagnes, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being according to Thomas Aquinas (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette Univ. Press, 2004).
46. John Duns Scotus, Opera Omnia (Civitas Vaticana: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanus, 1950-), includes Ordinatio 1 and 2, where Scotus argues these positions against Aquinas. For an English translation, see Allan B. Wolter, trans., Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). Key interpreters of Scotus include Allan B. Wolter and Felix Alluntis, John Duns Scotus: God and Creatures (Washington, D. C.: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1975); Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).
47. Cross, Duns Scotus, 39. This is an important recognition, since Cross is a formidable defender of Scotus against critics who suggest that he denied the Creator-creature distinction. See his essay “Idolatry and Religious Language,” Faith and Philosophy 25, no. 2 (2008): 191–92. I am grateful to Brian Hecker for this reference.
48. Cf. Poellot, ed., Nature and Character of Theology, 22-23: “Archetypal theology is essentially in God, and it is that very same infinite wisdom of God by which God knows Himself in Himself … and outside of Himself all things through Himself by an indivisible and immutable act of knowledge. Ectypal theology is nothing else than a certain expressed or rather foreshadowed image and form of that infinite and essential theology, either shared in this world or to be communicated in that which is to come by God, graciously and out of pure goodness, with intelligent creatures, according to their ability. (Note: This distinction is not of a univocal in its one meaning, but of an analog in its counterpart.)”
49. Langdon Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,” JR 41 (July 1961): 200; Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1976), 1:237–38. I interact with both figures on this point in Covenant andEschatology: The Divine Drama (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 189–91.
50. Cornelius Van Til led the defense of analogy, insisting against Gordon Clark that God’s knowledge and our knowledge do not “coincide at a single point.” See Herman Hoeksema citing Gordon Clark’s “Answer,” in Herman Hoeksema, The Clark-Van Til Controversy (Hobbs, N.M.: Trinity Foundation, 1995), 9.
51. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, 4:118.
52. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (trans. Paul Patton; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), 66-67.
53. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (trans. Laurence J. Lafleur; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), 17.
54. Ibid., 22.
55. Ibid., 23.
56. Ibid., 24-32. His own synopsis in Meditations on First Philosophy begins, “In the First Meditation, I offer the reasons why we can doubt all things in general, and particularly material objects…. In the Second, the mind, which in its intrinsic freedom supposes that everything which is open to the least doubt is nonexistent, recognizes that it is nevertheless absolutely impossible that it does not itself exist.” This argument rests on “the clearest possible conception” of the immortality of the soul, “and one which is entirely distinct from all the conceptions one can have of the body” (13–14). The Third Meditation argues for God’s existence, without “any comparisons drawn from physical things, in order that the minds of the readers should be as far as possible withdrawn from the use of and commerce with the senses” (15). “In the Fourth, it is proved that all things which we conceive or perceive very clearly and very distinctly are wholly true” (15). He explicitly excludes from consideration here errors produced by sin or “beliefs which belong to faith or to the conduct of life,” focusing only on “those which pertain to speculative truth and which can be known by the aid of the light of nature alone” (16). The Fourth Meditation offers a new argument for God’s existence as the basis for even the certainty of geometry, and the Fifth defends the distinction (emphasized by Plato) between genuine understanding and imagination or opinion. “All the errors which arise from the senses are here exposed, together with the methods of avoiding them” (16).
57. Ibid., 50–53.
58. Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 5.
59. See, for example, the well-researched and elegant work by David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2008).
60. An abridgement of Joachim’s commentary is found in Bernard McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of Montier-en-Der, Joachim ofFiore, the Franciscan Spirituals, and Savonarola (Classics in Western Spirituality; Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1979).
61. Marjorie Reeves, Joachim ofFiore and the Prophetic Future (London: Sutton, 1999); idem, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (South Bend, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1993); Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002); Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998), 126-60; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970).
62. Henry Chadwick, ed., Lessing’s Theological Writings (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1967), 53.
63. Ibid., 32: “Lessing’s antithesis between the ‘accidental truths of history’ and the ‘necessary truths of reason’ foreshadows the language of German idealism. For Fichte (deeply influenced by Lessing), ‘only the metaphysical can save, never the historical.’ And for Kant before him, ‘the historical can serve only for illustration, not for demonstration.’ Lessing is preparing the way for the divorcing of the Gospel history from the ‘eternal truths’ of Christianity in D. F. Strauss (strikingly anticipated in Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve, 1806), and for the high valuation of idea and depreciation of past event which runs through [John Henry Cardinal] Newman’s Essay on Development.”
64. Chadwick, ed., Lessing’s Theological Writings,106.
65. Bultmann, “Reply to Theses of J. Schniewind,” in Ker- ygma and Myth: A Theological Debate (ed. Hans Werner Bartsch; trans. Reginald H. Fuller; London: SPCK, 1953), 117. Famous for his method of “demythologizing” (i.e., “translating” what he regarded as the myths of Scripture into truths of our contemporary existence), Bultmann distinguished sharply between the Jesus of History (of no significance to faith) and the Christ of Faith (known only in personal encounter here and now).
66. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Dover, 2003), 295.
67. David Hume, “On Miracles,” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (ed. Eric Steinberg; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), sec. 10.
68. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (ed. Lewis White Beck; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), 126.
69. David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), 30, 35.
70. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:443.
71. Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution, 41, 47.
72. Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Gesammelte Schriften, 6:202.
73. Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), 256.
74. Immanuel Kant, “Preface to Second Edition,” in Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith; 2nd ed.; New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), 29.
75. Ibid.
76. The close connection between pietism and the German Enlightenment is often noted by historians. See, for example, Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Norton, 1995), 62, 291, 326, 328–29, 348, 351.
77. Kant anticipates the arguments in the first Critique, Critique of Pure Reason, in his earlier work, The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979).
78. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology (ed. Allen W. Wood; trans. Gertrude M. Clarke; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), 23.
79. Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology (ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 14.
80. John E. Wilson, Introduction to Modern Theology: Trajectories in the German Tradition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 29.
81. Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, 76-97, 104-41. The effects of grace, miracles, mysteries, and means of grace do not belong essentially to pure religion (96). Thus, “the dogmatic faith which announces itself to be a knowledge appears to reason dishonest and impudent …” (96). Reason—including practical reason—cannot incorporate within it anything “supernatural,” since this is beyond our concepts and experience (96). “It is totally inconceivable, however, how a rational human being who knows himself to deserve punishment could seriously believe that he only has to believe the news of a satisfaction having been rendered for him, and (as the jurists say) accept it utiliter [for one’s advantage], in order to regard his guilt as done away with No thoughtful person can bring himself to this faith” (147). “Faith in a merit which is not his own, but through which he is reconciled to God, would therefore have to precede any striving for good works, and this contradicts the previous proposition” (148). Christ’s example, rather than the dogmas concerning his unique person and work, is consistent with practical reason (149).
82. Ibid., 157.
83. Ibid., 123.
84. Ibid., 141.
85. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (2nd. ed.; trans. Joel Weisenheimer and Donald G. Marshal; New York: Continuum, 1994), 176.
86. Ibid., 142.
87. Ibid., 144, 284.
88. Thomas Müntzer, “The Prague Protest,” in The Radical Reformation: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (ed. and trans. Michael G. Baylor; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991): All the parsons have is “the mere words of Scripture” (2). God speaks to pure hearts “in his own person” and “this is then the paper and parchment on which God does not write with ink, but rather writes the true holy Scripture with his living finger, about which the external Bible truly testifies” (4). “I pledge on my highest honor that I have applied my most concentrated and highest diligence in order that I might have or obtain a higher knowledge than other people of the foundations on which the holy and invincible Christian faith is based” (9). Lacking new revelations, ministers “gobble whole the dead words of Scripture and then spit out the letter and their inexperienced faith (which is not worth a louse) to the righteous, poor, poor people” (6). All believers should have new revelations: “The office of the true shepherd is simply that the sheep should all be led to revelations and revived by the living voice of God…” (6-7). The true, secret, and inborn “word” (in contrast to the “outer word” of Scripture and preaching) “arises from the abyss of the soul” and “springs from the heart” (“Sermon to the Princes,” in The Radical Reformation, 20). According to Anabaptist scholar Thomas N. Finger, Müntzer proclaimed a higher (inner) spiritual authority, “surpassing even Scripture’s” (Thomas N. Finger, “Sources for Contemporary Spirituality: Anabaptist and Pietist Contributions,” Brethren Life and Thought 51, no. 1-2 [Winter/Spring 2006]: 37).
89. Ibid., 93.
90. Ibid., 132-35.
91. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (trans. Theodore M. Greene and H. H. Hudson; New York: Harper and Bros., 1960), esp. chs. 3-4. For a sympathetic—even laudatory—yet carefully researched treatment, see Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), esp. ch. 5.
92. The covenantal outlook of the Bible binds Jews and Gentiles together through faith in Christ. This covenant of grace runs through both Testaments. However, the Greek spirit triumphs over the “Jewish element” in Kant and in much of philosophy and theology in his wake. Kant’s judgment that the dogmatic and cultic elements of religion are the superstitions of “ecclesiastical faith” draws him into an explicit criticism of “Jewish faith,” which he says “stands in no essential connection” with Christianity (Religion and Rational Theology, 154). Judaism only awakened from its own dogmatic slumbers “when much foreign (Greek) wisdom had already become available to this otherwise still ignorant people, and this wisdom presumably had had the further effect of enlightening it through concepts of virtue and, in spite of the oppressive burden of its dogmatic faith, of making it ready for revolutions which the diminution of the priests’ power … occasioned” (156).
93. Julius Schniewind, “A Reply to Bultmann,” in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate (ed. Hans Werner Bartsch; London: SPCK, 1953), 50. Schniewind points out that Bultmann’s “demythologization” project is hardly new. “Modern man is by no means the first to feel the difficulty of accepting it [the gospel]. The great majority of mankind have always been ready and willing enough to accept a vague and general belief in God which makes no specific demands upon them, but the more definite Christian belief in Christ they prefer to reject as myth. The cultural scorn of a Celsus and the coarse ribaldry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are at one in this” (51).
94. See Allen W. Wood, “Kant’s Deism,” in Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Re-examined (ed. P. Rossi and M. Wreen; Blooming- ton: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991), 1-21.
95. Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (trans. David E.
Green; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991), 28.
96. Hegel regarded Schleiermacher’s “feeling of absolute dependence” as pure subjectivity—“the genuine objectivity of truth is annulled” (G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion [ed. Peter C. Hodgson; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008], 157). “As soon as mental content is placed into feeling, everybody is reduced to his subjective point of view” (G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History [trans. Robert S. Hartman; New York: Macmillan, 1956], 17).
97. Hegel, Reason in History, 17.
98. There is perhaps no better study of Hegel’s relationship to Gnosticism than Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994). See also Ernst Benz, Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy (Pittsburg: Pickwick, 1983); Glenn A. Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001).
99. Quoted in Benz, Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy, 40.
100. Ibid.
101. Anonymous, “The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism,” in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (ed. and trans. Frederick C. Beiser; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 4-5. See also Beiser’s masterful study, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
102. Hegel, Reason in History, 20: “To begin with, we must note that world history goes on within the realm of Spirit…. Physical nature does play a part in world history…. But Spirit, and the course of its development, is the substance of history…. [Humanity] constitutes the antithesis to the natural world; he is the being that lifts itself up to the second world. We have in our universal consciousness two realms, the realm of Nature and the realm of Spirit… One may have all sorts of ideas about the Kingdom of God; but it is always a realm of Spirit to realized and brought about in man.” He adds, “The nature of Spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct opposite—Matter. The essence of matter is gravity, the essence of Spirit—its substance—is Freedom” (22). This writing may also be found in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion; Vol III: The Consummate Religion (ed. Peter C. Hodgson; trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M Stewart; Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985).
103. Hegel, Reason in History, 24.
104. Hegel, Philosophy of Religion, 17.
105. Hegel, Reason in History, 45.
106. Hegel, The Christian Religion, 235.
107. Hendrikus Berkhof comments, “One wonders whether in the end Hegel’s monism is a dualism of God and the historical world of human beings after all” (Two Hundred Years of Theology [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989], 54).
108. Robert S. Hartman, “Introduction” to G. F. W. Hegel’s Reason in History, xi.
109. Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution, 82, 85-86.
110. Ibid., 86.
111. Ibid., 89.
112. G. F. W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller; Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 417.
113. Ibid., 459.
114. Ibid., 460.
115. Louis Dupré, A Dubious Heritage: Studies in the Philosophy of Religion after Kant (New York: Paulist, 1977), 9.
116. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (trans. James Gutmann; New York: Open Court, 2003), 373.
117. Ibid., 403-4.
118. F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World (trans. Jason M. Wirth; Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 101-2.
119. Ibid., xl.
120. Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution, 165. See also Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism (1781—1801) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), ch. 8 (esp. 588–95).
121. S0ren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (trans. David E. Swensen and Walter Lowrie; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), 201.
122. S0ren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Seren Kierkegaard (1849) (trans. and ed. Alexander Dru; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938), 314.
123. Concerning Ritschl, Herman Bavinck offers this insightful observation: “His real intention, after all was no other than—following in Kant’s footsteps—to make a complete separation between religion and science. But he failed to make the separation complete. In religion he continued to incorporate theoretical elements, bound it to history, adopted a biased viewpoint in favor of Christianity, made exegesis and the history of dogma subservient to a system, and fundamentally remained a dogmatician” (Reformed Dogmatics; Vol 1: Prolegomena (trans. John Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003], 70).
124. Adolf Harnack, What Is Christianity? (trans. Thomas B. Saunders; New York: Harper Bros., 1957), 74.
125. Ibid., 70—77.
126. Ibid., 116.
127. Ibid., 146.
128. Albrecht Ritschl, “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” in Ritschl, Three Essays (trans. Philip Hefner; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 229.
129. This emphasis especially dominates volume 1 of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, on the doctrine of the Word of God (eds. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975]).
130. This analogy of a secret pact between irrationalism and rationalism is articulated by Cornelius Van Til in The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R, 1979), 125-26.
131. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (ed. Walter Kaufmann; trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale; New York: Random House, 1967), 327.
132. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s (ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 83.
133. Ibid., 84.
134. Ibid., 87.
135. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (trans. John Orman; London: Paternoster, 1893), 36.
136. Wilhelm Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 11.
137. Nietzsche, The Antichrist (trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche [New York: Penguin, 1976], 618).
138. Ibid., 589. “This God has degenerated into a staff for the weak, the god of the poor, the sinners, the sick par excellence. The result of this is that the kingdom of God has been enlarged. Formerly it was only his chosen people … but now the kingdom has spread and is a ghetto kingdom” (585). Nietzsche celebrates the constant striving after nobility, strength, and superiority. The poor “Teuton” became a monk, “a ‘sinner,’ stuck in a cage, imprisoned among all sorts of terrible concepts … full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy. In short, a ‘Christian’” (Twilight of the Idols, in ibid., 502).
Instead of allowing the natural development of higher and nobler human life, it has encouraged sympathy for the weak and the suffering (ibid., 573). Michael Silk summarizes, “For Nietzsche, decadence is any kind of saying no to life; decadence is whatever defies and negates life, the real, and the world” (Michael Silk, “Nietzsche, Decadence, and the Greeks,” New Literary History 35 no 4 [2004]: 594). Silk adds, “He regularly refers to the fondness for the “other world” as part of the emasculating of true existence. Freedom “means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of ‘pleasure’” (Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, 542).
139. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 112.
140. Ibid.
141. Harry Ausmus even includes Nietzsche in the line that leads from Joachim: “Although Nietzsche’s language is different, he too believed in a three-stage view of history, consisting of the premoral, moral, and ultramoral ages.” The third is the age of the Ubermensch, who “will complete the transvaluation of all values, by which the individual will arrive at a perfection which could not be otherwise achieved” (“Nietzsche and Eschatology,” JR 58, no. 4 [1978]: 351–59).
142. I engage Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity as “Pla- 143. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable tonism for the Masses” in Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Nietzsche, 558. Drama (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 20-46.
143. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, 558.
144. For a masterful treatment of the “one and many” problem in culture from a Trinitarian theological perspective, see Colin Gunton, The One, The Three, and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
145. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern Theology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), 11.
146. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 98. For example, we may dis cern not only the dualism but the preference even for Plato’s “upper world” in Nietzsche’s comment. Although he called Christianity “Platonism for the masses,” Nietzsche asserts, “Precisely that which is Christian in the ecclesiastical sense is antiChristian in its essence: things and people instead of symbols; history instead of eternal truths; forms, rites, dogmas instead of a way of life.”
147. Ibid., 87.
148. Ibid., 101.
149. Ibid., 114
150. Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 3:226.
151. Hegel, The Christian Religion (AAR Texts and Translations 2; ed. and trans. Peter C. Hodgson; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1979), 19.
152. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 123-31.