Eternal God, Eternal Life: Theological Investigations into the Concept of Immortality 9780567666833, 9780567666864, 9780567666840

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Eternal God, Eternal Life

Eternal God, Eternal Life Theological Investigations into the Concept of Immortality Philip G. Ziegler

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Philip G. Ziegler and Contributors, 2016 Philip G. Ziegler has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Resurrection, 1917, Eric Gill (1882–1940) © Tate, London 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-56766-683-3 PB: 978-0-56768-451-6 ePDF: 978-0-56766-684-0 ePub: 978-0-56766-685-7 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements Editor’s Introduction  Philip G. Ziegler List of Contributors 1 The Order and Movement of Eternity: Karl Barth on the Eternity of God and Creaturely Time  Tom Greggs

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2 ‘You Are Good and Do Good’ – Some Remarks on Eternal Life and the Goodness of God  Christopher J. Holmes

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3 The Resonating Body in Triune Eternity  Markus Mühling

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4 Angels and Immortality  Donald Wood

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5 How New is New Creation? Resurrection and Creation ex nihilo Susannah Ticciati

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6 Towards a Doctrine of Resurrection  Katherine Sonderegger

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7 The Enmity of Death and Judgement unto Life  Philip G. Ziegler

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8 Eucharist and Immortality: Reformed Reflections on the Eschatological Dimension of the Sacrament  Paul T. Nimmo

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9 ‘The Incompleteness of the Completed’: Eternal God, Eternal Life and the Eternal Now  Russell Re Manning

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10 Technological Immortalization and Original Mortality: Karl Barth on the Celebration of Finitude  Robert Song

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Index of Biblical Books Index

211 213

Acknowledgements The chapters of this book have emerged from a collaborative research project hosted during 2014/15 by the department of Divinity and Religious Studies of the University of Aberdeen. The project was generously supported by the Templeton Foundation through their funding of the multilateral Immortality Project led by Professor John Martin Fischer (University of California, Riverside). We are indebted to the Templeton Foundation and grateful to Professor Fischer for drawing us into the work of the wider research programme. One of the joys of this project has been the opportunities for extensive conversation and shared reflection it has afforded. Exploration of our themes benefited greatly from extended encounters with Anthony Thiselton and William Hoye, to whom we are much obliged. The contributions of Ivor Davidson to our common endeavour have been valued as well. I am personally also very grateful to Taido Chino and Amber Shadle who worked amiably and industriously as postgraduate assistants here in Aberdeen in support of the running of the project, the production of its website and the realization of this book. Many thanks, finally, to Anna Turton, Miriam Cantwell and the editorial and production staff of T&T Clark/Bloomsbury for all their patience and assistance in bringing this volume into print.

Editor’s Introduction In the Christian theological tradition, immortality and those concepts most closely related to it – i.e. eternity, infinity, incorruptibility, immutability – are first and properly predicates of God and God alone. Attributed to God, they designate something of the unique and incomparable quality of the divine life itself. As such they are strictly analogous, thoroughly doxological and finally, always mysterious concepts. Straining across the radical dissimilarity between God and creature, and voiced in acclamation and awe in this way, they are fragile instruments in the effort to conceive of the living God who, incomparably, has life from himself. Moreover, the concept of immortality as a distinct perfection of God is necessarily and inextricably involved in the mutually implicating logic of other divine predicates. For instance, if divine eternity be conceived, as it is classically, as timelessness, then immortality will be understood to denote a quality of divine being outside of and unaffected by the beginnings and endings in time that are the very structure of creaturely life. Here, where the perfection of the divine life is explicated by way of the utter absence of movement or change, concomitant notions of infinity and immutability are decisively implicated as traditional commentary upon Boethius’ definition of eternity – as ‘the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of complete boundless life’ – makes clear. However, where an alternate metaphysical vision authorizes a conception of the perfection of divine life as in some sense dynamic, perhaps even developing, then immortality finds itself reconceived in relation to divine eternity understood now – as for instance in the work of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics – as the full and perfect reality of beginning, duration and ending, as the eternal simul in which God ‘has and takes time’ divinely. On such revisionist grounds, the association of the immortal life of God with concepts of movement, process and becoming is thinkable in a manner as significant perhaps as it is challenging and unconventional. On-going debates in the

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philosophy of religion and philosophical theology concerning the meaning of the concepts of eternity and immortality as attributes of God – e.g. in contemporary reworking of ‘perfect being theology’ or in connection with the rationality of shifting scientific paradigms – offer Christian theology much sustained stimulus in this regard. So too, developments in biblical exegesis and scriptural hermeneutics also raise pressing challenges on this score for any contemporary theology committed to critical and constructive engagement with the fundamental sources and norms of the Christian faith and life. If it is true that immortality is properly a divine attribute and thus not a proper or natural predicate of creaturely life as such, then our analogous understanding of the latter will be decisively shaped by our doxological grasp of the former. The meaning of the creaturely promise of ‘life eternal’ is a function of the reality of the immortal God. And this means that the concept of human immortality is exposed to and entangled with debates and developments in theology proper – which is to say, in the doctrine of God as such – in ways that are perhaps not always adequately registered. Moreover, the question of the relation between divine and human immortality is not simply or even primarily one of linguistic predication and conceptual analogy. This is because the possibility of attributing immortality to human existence is understood theologically to arise solely from the free and gracious saving activity of God in the outworking of the economy of salvation in history. It is precisely and only by way of this saving activity – variously understood in the theological tradition – that creaturely life is given to partake in some sense in the character of the divine life and thereby to receive the gift of eternal life, or immortality. Immortality is thus an alien but real quality of human life, bestowed upon it by the gracious communication of the divine life itself in the economy of salvation at whose climax and centre stands the figure of Christ. The nature, meaning and consequences of immortality as a creaturely predicate must therefore be understood in light of its christological and pneumatological mediation as a fruit of redemption. The eschatological question of human immortality is unquestionably fundamental to both historic and contemporary Christian accounts of human being and human hope. Yet for the reasons just canvassed, theology can and must



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approach this theme only indirectly; it must do so by way not only of theology proper – i.e. through the doctrine of God – but also decisively of soteriology – i.e. the doctrines of grace and salvation. An approach that is too quick to treat of immortality directly as a topic in theological anthropology will necessarily distort and truncate the understanding of the theme. The doctrines of God and of salvation provide the decisively determinative contexts within which an adequate theological understanding of human immortality can be achieved. This ‘contextualization’ of the concept of immortality represents a distinctive Christian theological contribution to wider debates surrounding the idea of personal immortality and forms the first focus of the theological investigations set forth in this book. A second overarching theological concern that shapes the essays collected in this volume arises from related considerations. As noted, Christianly understood, immortality or ‘eternal life’ is attributed to human existence only as a result of the free and gracious outworking of divine salvation accomplished by the Father in the personal work of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. By analogy with its primary and proper meaning as an attribute of the divine life, when predicated of creaturely life immortality or eternality denote not merely its indefinite extension but rather something of its new quality. While it has an important future dimension to be sure – expressed in the language of unending or everlasting life or the technical concept of sempiternity – the quality of ‘eternal life’ is not entirely deferred. Rather, it presses upon and transforms the character of present existence in ways which the doctrines of the Christian life and ecclesiology must display and to which they must do justice. Precisely as an eschatological qualification of human reality, immortality is of crucial present consequence. For this reason, a full-orbed theological approach to the question of personal immortality can and must investigate the difference that the hope and promise of such eternal life makes in the living of present-day life. Theology interrogates the difference made by the presence of the gift of eternal life in all dimensions of human existence, investigating its importance in spiritual life as well as, crucially, in our common moral and political existence. The reality of immortality as an eschatological gift thus demands to be acknowledged as a formative factor at the foundations of Christian ethics, ecclesiology and political theology. With a substantive vision of hope

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for immortal life, Christian faith looks to push beyond merely formal or logical reflection: present existence is charged even now with the promiseladen reality of eschatological life. Once again, Christian theology makes a distinctive contribution to the analysis and understanding of the idea of personal immortality by holding and examining the concept in this necessary and enriching dogmatic context where its significant entailments can be discerned, described and analysed. In close connection with this second motif, among the most pressing issues explored here are the relation of the idea of personal immortality to other aspects of Christian eschatological teaching, including the reality and meaning of bodily death, the hope for the ‘resurrection of the body’ and the final advent of the ‘Kingdom of God’, as well as conceptions of heaven and hell, final judgement, and the aspiration for the beatific vision. Just what light such related doctrines cast upon the idea of immortality – as well as to what tensions and paradoxes they may also give rise – is a matter of central concern in this work as they render concrete the more general question of the formative significance of the doctrine of immortality as an element of Christian hope for the shaping of human moral existence in the here and now. The twentieth century saw resurgent theological interest in both the doctrine of God and eschatology and some of the most creative work in Christian theology of recent decades has emerged precisely at the intersection of these two fields of inquiry. A key feature of this work is a shift away from treating of the doctrines of God and eschatology as discrete topical loci toward understanding them as doctrines which provide a comprehensive and formative environment within which all other theological reflection – including theological anthropology, soteriology, ecclesiology and theological ethics – ought to be pursued. These developments continue to propel a properly ‘progressive research programme’ (in Imre Lakatos’ term) in contemporary Christian theology and ethics. The papers in this book each in their own way draw the specific question of human immortality into this continuing programme of research and bring the real explanatory power of its intellectual core to bear upon it. In short, the papers before you explore different aspects of the idea of immortality as it emerges from the nexus of the doctrine of God and finds its



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telos as an eschatological qualification of human life that presses even now in a determinative way upon all aspects of contemporary existence. Precisely by way of this kind of theologically integrated approach we hope to have made a worthwhile contribution to contemporary reflection on the question of eternal life in Christian theology. – Philip G. Ziegler, Editor

List of Contributors Tom Greggs holds the Marischal Chair in Divinity at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Christopher J. Holmes is Senior Lecturer in Theology at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Markus Mühling is Professor of Theology at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany. Paul T. Nimmo holds the King’s Chair of Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Russell Re Manning is Reader in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics at Bath Spa University, UK. Katherine Sonderegger holds the William Meade Chair in Systematic Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary, USA. Robert Song is Professor of Theological Ethics in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, UK. Susannah Ticciati is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at King’s College London, UK. Donald Wood is Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Philip G. Ziegler is Professor of Theology at the University of Aberdeen, UK.

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The Order and Movement of Eternity: Karl Barth on the Eternity of God and Creaturely Time Tom Greggs

I/Introduction This chapter seeks to draw out the distinctive and revolutionary contribution of Karl Barth to the doctrine of God’s eternity, and seeks especially to consider how eternity, according to Barth, relates to creaturely temporality. Space does not allow a thoroughgoing examination of why this is an important thing to do (except in its own terms), but, suffice it to say, the doctrine of eternity provides the christologically determined metaphysics for Barth’s radical re-description of the doctrine of election, a re-description that Bruce McCormack has said would take the theological community a hundred years to see the significance and originality of.1 Barth’s discussion of eternity immediately precedes his radical material on election and provides the framework within which talk of the eternal election of Jesus Christ is meaningful. Barth’s mature development of the doctrine of election arose from following the instincts of the work of Peter Barth presented at the 1936 Congrès international de théology calviniste and the work of Pierre Maury. These perspectives laid the foundations for Karl Barth’s own reworking of that doctrine,2 but the insights also took place before Barth’s reworking of his account of eternity in Church Dogmatics II/1: in one sense, the material on eternity dovetails precisely into the radical re-description of election and predestination in II/2. If the function of the doctrine of election is, as Barth states, ‘to bear basic testimony to eternal, free and unchanging grace as the

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beginning of all the ways and works of God’, then the doctrine of the triune eternity unpacks the dogmatic content of the descriptor ‘eternal’.3 This chapter will examine precisely the dogmatic content of the doctrine of eternity in Barth’s theology, especially the specific way in which he develops the Boethian description of eternity as interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio. The first section of this chapter will outline Boethius’ description of eternity and its appropriation in the centuries leading up to Barth’s own time, highlighting the distinctive manner in which Boethius was appropriated by subsequent generations of theologians. The second and most substantive section seeks to offer a careful examination of Barth’s own account of eternity in relation to Boethius. It is argued here that Barth engages in ressourcement of Boethius, drawing out distinctive features not attended to in the general appropriation of Boethius in theology, and that Barth adds to Boethius’ simul by filling out just what is understood to be simul within the simultaneity. One way to describe this is to say that Barth adds order and movement to his account of the eternity of God, drawing upon the inner-trinitarian relations of God and the incarnation of the Son to offer content for his description of divine eternity. His comparison of eternity to time is not a negative one but rather a positive one, in which material content is gained for understanding time in relation to eternity, and vice versa. The third section offers a brief discussion of the description of time that Barth offers in CD I/2 and III/2 in relation to the Christological form that his account of the relation of time and eternity takes. Here, particular attention is paid to the material content of the subsistence of time within the eternal election of the second person of the Trinity to be human in Jesus Christ. There is, we may suggest, an enhypostatic temporality within the divine eternal life; this displays a significant development in dogmatic accounts of eternity, comparable to the revolutionary development Barth offers in his account of election.

II/The Boethian Foundation: Aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio Boethius’ account of eternity as ‘the simultaneous and complete [or perfect] possession of infinite [or unending] life’4 is one which famously has captured the theological imagination of subsequent generations, and which tends to



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be the account to which lip-service is paid in dogmatic accounts of eternity. However, the full potential of this account has rarely been fully exploited within systematics.5 Boethius’ account draws on the Plotinian conceptualization of the relationship between time and eternity. For Plotinus eternity was the presence of the all of life as a whole – not as a sequential ordering but as perfect and whole.6 Thus, eternity is not the opposite of time in Plotinus; rather eternity is the means of understanding time. This is different to the other major philosophical account of eternity which has influenced Christian theology, namely that of Plato. His approach makes eternity timeless: the eternity of ideas and the deity in its changelessness are the opposite of the changing nature of the temporal as it is subjected to change and flow.7 Plato, it seems, has generally won the day within classical dogmatics. Augustine, for example, tended to follow the Platonic opposition of time and eternity: time is a creation of God and thus must be entirely separated from divine eternity; there is no time in the divine life, since eternity does not include time, is not present to time and is not the condition of the unity of time. Augustine related time to movement and, for him, there was, thus, no movement before the movement of bodies in creation.8 Time is, for him, therefore, the antithesis of eternity: God’s eternity is timeless. Boethius, on the other hand, does not oppose time and eternity, but he does compare time and eternity. Compared to eternity, time moves for Boethius: we pass through from past to future, through changing passing moments. But, the key distinctive between time and eternity for Boethius is that time does not embrace the whole simultaneously as eternity does. He writes: What we should rightly call eternal is that which grasps and possesses wholly and simultaneously the fullness of unending life, which lacks naught of the future, and has lost naught of the fleeting past; and as such an existence must be ever present in itself to control and aid itself, and also must keep present with itself the infinity of changing time.9

This issue of the infinity of change in time is one which is important for Boethius’ further unfolding of his definition. Through this definition of eternity’s relationship to time, Boethius relates the eternity of God to God’s ‘own single nature’. This nature is contrasted by Boethius to ‘the infinite changing of temporal things’ which try but fail to imitate the ‘simultaneous

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immutability of God’s life’. Time fails to imitate eternity precisely because it moves. Although time mirrors eternity in that a single moment may exist forever, time nevertheless in comparison to the eternal life and its immutable form, ‘sinks […] into change’ and ‘falls from the single directness of the present into an infinite space of future and past’.10 By contrast, God is ‘the eternal present’, a ‘never failing constancy in the present’. Boethius follows this discussion by relating these relatively brief observations to providence, election and free will. How does divine foreknowledge – if eternity is God’s simultaneous perfect possession of unlimited time – not undermine the integrity of creaturely temporality, removing the individual qualities of given moments? For Boethius, the answer is as follows: Without doubt, then, all things that God foreknows do come to pass, but some of them proceed from free will; and though they result by coming into existence, yet they do not lose their own nature, because before they came to pass they could also not have come to pass.11

In what is essentially only a page or two, Boethius outlines his account of divine eternity and its relation to time and uses this as a basis for his account of providence and free will. Simultaneity is the key concept for him in relation to divine eternity, but this simultaneity lies in contrast to movement and stems from the simplicity and immutability of the divine life. It is this aspect of eternity – its simplicity and immutability in contrast to movement – which Thomas Aquinas picks up in his application of Aristotle’s philosophy to the Boethian account. In his affirmation of Boethius’ definition of eternity as the ‘simultaneously-whole [sic] and perfect possession of interminable life’, Thomas draws out two points. First, eternity is interminable in that it has no beginning and no end. Second, eternity has no succession as it is simultaneously whole.12 Furthermore, Thomas also states that knowledge of eternity comes by way of contrasting it to time. In his description of eternity, therefore, he seems to bring together both the Augustinian and Boethian accounts. By virtue of the contrast of eternity to time, simultaneity is understood as lacking succession or movement. Thus, he writes that time, is nothing but the numbering of movement by before and after. For since succession occurs in every movement, and one part comes after another, the fact that we reckon before and after in movement, makes us apprehend time,



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which is nothing else but the before and after in movement. Now in a thing bereft of movement, which is always the same, there is no before and after.13

The lack of movement as a basis for the simul, pointed towards, but not explicitly expanded upon in Boethius, is identified strongly in Thomas. So, too, is interminable life described as simultaneous because it lacks succession or order: ‘whatever is wholly immutable can have no succession, so it has no beginning and no end’.14 Although the latter point holds, the lack of succession in immutability rests on a preceding metaphysics of simplicity of a particular Aristotelian form. Indeed, Thomas makes it clear in the second article of question 10 that eternity follows from immutability. The question might arise, in relation to Thomas’ use of Boethius, of how an unmoved and unordered account of the divine life can be such that we can understand there to be a simul in relation to unending life in any meaningful way. Put otherwise, just what is it that is simul other than a tautological simultaneity which is simultaneous? How coherent is this account with an account of the simul? Or what meaning does simul have? Does this mean that Boethius’ account, rather than seeking to offer a positive account of time and eternity’s relation, ends up under philosophical pressure reduced to timelessness?15 Certainly, the account Thomas offers of Boethius when he revisits the matter in the fourth article of question 10 of Summa 1 suggests so. Here, eternity is contrasted to time, as time has a before and an after: Boethius’ conceptualization is used to point to the difference between a permanent being and the movement of measured time. The simul is central, but almost stands in univocally for the simple, effectively denoting the same thing as timelessness. The Thomist perspective on Boethius seems to find bedfellows in theologians as different as Louis Berkhof and Schleiermacher. For Schleiermacher, eternity is the ‘absolutely timeless causality of God’.16 He relates both Augustine and Boethius to one another (like Thomas) in order to state: ‘the divine causality, since time itself is conditioned by it, must so much the more be thought of as utterly timeless’.17 For Berkhof, God’s eternity is ‘a timeless existence, an eternal presence’.18 In light of this general appropriation of Boethius’ work in a manner that makes eternity timeless, what does it mean, then, to say, in the words of Pannenberg: ‘Materially Barth’s theses are close to Plotinus’s philosophy of time, which stands behind the definition of Boethius

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that Barth rated so highly’?19 Given the use of Boethius in the subsequent tradition in relation to Aristotelian accounts of number and movement, in what sense does Barth draw upon Boethius? In what ways does he recover a pre-Thomistic account of Boethius? And in what ways does he develop Boethius’ thought in his own formative work? It is to these issues that this paper now turns by examining Barth’s discussion of divine eternity.

III/Barth on eternity20 Barth takes up this definition of eternity which Boethius offers, but develops it in a distinct and marked direction which explicitly attends to the form of the description of eternity presented within Boethius; he does this in contrast to those theologians who combine it with either Platonic or Aristotelian concerns.21 Barth bemoans the fact that the content of Boethius’ work on eternity has not entered fully into Christian dogmatics and not received the attention it deserves. Clearly, Boethius’ work has been used significantly, but Barth’s presentation of it suggests some degree of genuine ressourcement is required if he is to utilize Boethius’ description of eternity effectively. But even in this re-examination of Boethius’ work on eternity, Barth defines the Boethian approach in a particular way: his account of Boethius on eternity, in relation to his own dogmatic description of the eternal life of God, is one which does not repeat Boethius, but rather responds to and enhances his work. Whereas Aquinas – through whom the Boethian account has come down to most people – emphasizes eternity’s simultaneity in relation to divine simplicity and immutability, Barth re-considers just what it is that is simul. For Barth, this results in an account which seeks to draw out that simultaneity points towards order and movement in eternity – rather than simplicity and immobility, perhaps in their particular Aristotelian forms. In this section of the chapter, I wish to draw attention especially to Barth’s initial moves in the relating of time to eternity, and will dwell more on the opening section of the sub-paragraph of Barth’s work on eternity than do most commentators, who more commonly tend to focus on the threefold form of eternal life. The reason for my own focus is that this threefold form itself arises from a re-description of divine eternity which recognizes the need



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for an ordered simul in terms of the eternal life of the triune God who is alive. It is also this part of the sub-paragraph which is most significant in terms of the taking up of time in all its creaturely integrity into the divine life in the incarnation of the Christ. Barth considers divine eternity under the attributes of divine freedom, and links eternity to divine glory: because God is in and of Godself eternal, God is glorious. For Barth, being eternal is the unity of the beginning, middle and end as one and not three: it is a simultaneity.22 But even here, it is noticeable that Barth places order in the account of the simultaneity: eternity is not just a simultaneous presence to time, but a simultaneity to the order that is innate within time: ‘beginning, middle and end’ is sequential and God is present to these three as one. It is in that way Barth speaks of what it means for eternity to involve ‘pure duration’. It is important here to note what it is exactly that Barth says: ‘Eternity is the simultaneity of beginning, middle and end, and to that extent it is pure duration.’23 Pure duration is defined not as an unmoved nunc stans, but as a simultaneous existence to temporal order. But in the same breath eternity is, for Barth, clearly differentiated from time. Eternity is not time – which is of course a creation or a form of the creation of God – since time has a beginning, middle and end that are distinct, whereas in the triune life these are one. Nor can eternity be confused with that which is everlasting: eternity is not an infinite extension of time backwards and forwards as, writes Barth, ‘[t]ime can have nothing to do with God’.24 There is a distinction in eternity and time which is the distinction that there is between Creator and creature.25 It must be remembered that God is free and unchangeable in this duration. His eternity is the place where one can place one’s trust, as God is constant. Eternity must be understood in relation to God’s other perfections of freedom, and is a way of expressing God’s freedom inwards: ‘As the eternal One, He is constant and He is also the One who omnipotently knows and wills.’26 Divine eternity is a perfection of the God who is unaffected by creation and constant in Godself: in eternity, God is omnipotent in His relation to time, and this secures God’s constancy. However, in stating and securing the eternity of God as an attribute of divine freedom, Barth also goes on to state that he thinks that it is poor and short-sighted only to understand God’s eternity as the negation of all time: eternity is, instead, true duration as Barth has outlined it.27 For Barth, the

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Bible is interested in the positive quality of eternity in the first instance, and only secondarily (if at all) in its negative quality as non-temporality. There is in scripture an order in the way in which eternity is described: eternity is generally ascribed to God in terms of beginning, middle and end. It is at this point that Barth draws directly on Boethius’ definition of eternity as interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio.28 For Barth, this definition goes farther and deeper than the work of Augustine and Anselm, who are, for him, far too occupied with the confrontation of time and eternity. However, it is of note that the discussion of Boethius’ conceptualization arises in the context of God’s relation to the sequence and order of time. Barth is happy to state (classically) that total possession of unlimited life is eternal life, but he goes on to explain that this is only so long as the eternity of God is prior, above, after and under all being, and not the eternity of being as such. It is insufficient to compare simply the nunc fluens of creaturely time to the nunc stans of the divine life, according description of the one by virtue of the other. In fact Barth criticizes Boethius in his De Trinitate for doing just this. He writes: If an unmoving, persistent present is distinguished from our fluid and fleeting present, which can be understood only as a mathematical point, this distinction rightly describes the problem of our concept of time, but it does not rightly describe the concept of eternity in so far as this is to be understood as the possessio vitae.29

For Barth, God’s eternity is without question the ‘now’, the nunc, which he defines as ‘the total simultaneous and complete present of His life’.30 But this now is both a concept which must be defined with reference to our problematic concept of the creaturely now (with its instability in its passing form owing to the fluere of creaturely temporality) as stare, and a concept which must not be defined as an abstract non-temporality, for ‘the concept of the divine nunc must not exclude the times prior to and after the “now,” the past and the future, nor may it exclude the fluere’.31 To have a genuine simul in relation to unending life involves for Barth a need for order to which the simul is indexed in the divine life. One way to understand this relation of the stare and the fluere is to say that Barth’s concern in his discussion of eternity is that dogmatics must not treat eternity as if there were no time. Neither can dogmatics treat time as



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if it were not a creation of the eternal God who becomes incarnate in time. Eternity simply cannot be the negation of time: we know eternity in and by the knowledge of God as possessor interminabilis vitae. God’s eternal life (eternal now) is both stare and fluere – but not fluere in the instability of creaturely times – and fluere and stare – but without the inability to become that belongs to all creaturely stare. As Barth himself puts it with characteristic polemic and panache: ‘The theological concept of eternity must be set free from the Babylonian captivity of an abstract opposite to the concept of time.’32 Eternity has, instead, a positive relation to time. For Barth, therefore, eternity is the simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life and, as such, the eternity of God involves beginning, succession and end simultaneously, which is to say, in ordered simultaneity. Barth is free to write, therefore, that ‘God has time’ because by this he means ‘God has time because and as He has eternity.’33 The basis on which Barth is able to state that God has time is revelation. God has time for creation; this is the time of revelation, the time of Jesus Christ.34 This christocentric shift at this point gives some indication of where Barth again develops the tradition he receives, or deviates from its starting points in relation to eternity. Barth does not (as with Thomas) wish to use a principle of simplicity (stemming from a foundation in divine aseity) in order to derive and specify the nature of divine eternity. He wishes instead to point to the perfect and superabundant aliveness of the God of salvation,35 not the simplicity of God the unmoved mover, to explain what it means to speak of divine eternity. Since God is alive, for Barth, God’s unity includes multiplicity, and constancy includes movement. Allow me to quote Barth here at length: God does not first create multiplicity and movement, but He is one and simple, He is constant, in such a way that all multiplicity and movement have their prototype and pre-existence in Himself. Time, too, pre-exists in this way in Him, in His eternity, as His creation, i.e. with space, the form of His creation. The form of creation is the being of God for a reality distinct from Himself. But the form of God’s being for us and our world is space and time. The proto-types in God’s being in Himself which correspond to this form are His omnipresence in regard to space, and His eternity in regard to time. If God in Himself is the living God, this prototype, too, is in Himself identical with His eternity. The fact that He is the enduring God, duration itself, does not prevent God from being origin, movement, and goal in and for Himself.36

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For Barth, what distinguishes God’s eternity from temporality is not the order of origin, movement and goal, or of past, present and future, but that God’s eternity has no opposition: there is no conflict or competition between these orders. Again, in Barth’s words: ‘In Him all these things are simul, held together by the omnipotence of His knowing and willing, a totality without gap or rift, free from the threat of death under which time, our time, stands.’37 For Barth, these distinctions in order exist in divine eternity, but they are distinctions innate to the simul and the perfect possession of unending life, and they do not exist in contradiction to divine eternity. Just as God’s omnipresence is not the negation of our space but is first and foremost God’s space and, therefore, real space; so, too, God’s eternity is not the negation of our time but first and foremost God’s time and, therefore, real time. There is a need for a positive sense of the concept of eternity on which the main emphasis of sempiternitas (eternity) must fall. Thus, there is no place for negative theology in relation to the divine perfection of eternity. As the eternal One, God is the One who has absolutely real time and this does not sublate order or remove the integrity of each moment of time or its order within eternity. God’s eternity for Barth is not ‘timeless but supremely temporal’.38 In this way, Barth wishes to demarcate his theology from what he sees as Roman Catholic theological perspectives (read here in real terms, I suspect, Cajetan and Suarez’s interpretations of Thomas). For Barth, Roman Catholicism spends too little time on God’s time and too much time on created time. Roman Catholic theologians fail to recognize fully the fact that God really knows and wills the temporal from eternity. This is not, for Barth, to imply that created things co-exist with God in God’s eternity.39 But it is to say that God wills and ordains them in and to their temporally ordered integrity, and that God is present to them. In this way, there is a ‘part truth’ (to use Barth’s phrase) in the Augustinian approach to eternity: namely, the freedom of God in relation to our time. Time and eternity still differ; but this does not mean that their relationship is one of opposition. Barth goes on to demonstrate this in relation to two loci: first, triunity and second, christology. First, for Barth, the positive understanding of eternity becomes clear when one recognizes that one is dealing, not with an abstract a-temporal god or with an idol moved by created whims and actions, but with the triune God revealed



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in Scripture, with the God who is unbegotten, begotten and succession which is to say, with God the Father, Son and Spirit. Barth indexes the nature of eternity to the unity and simultaneity of eternal inner-trinitarian relations. This triune life is the eternal life of the eternal God, the God of the eternal now which cannot come into being or pass away. Yet, in this, there is order and succession: eternal begetting, eternal begottenness and eternal succession or spiration. Again, Barth’s concern in relation to the simul is to consider the content of it and to demonstrate that there is order and movement here. He writes: For this ‘all’ is pure duration, free from all the fleetingness and the separations of what we call time, the nunc aeternitas which cannot come into being or pass away, which is conditioned by no distinctions, which is not disturbed and interrupted but established and confirmed in its unity by its trinity, by the inner movement of the begetting of the Father, the being begotten of the Son and the procession of the Spirit from both. Yet in it there is order and succession. The unity is in movement. There is a before and an after. God is once and again and a third time, without dissolving the once-for-allness, without destroying the persons or their special relations to one another, without anything arbitrary in this relationship or the possibility of its reversal.40

Contrary to the form we find in Thomas, Barth’s description of eternity does not arise from an account of simplicity or non-movement. For Barth, the eternal subsistent relations in the divine life indicate succession and order, which retain their integrity within the simul and which are required for the simul: simultaneity requires order and succession in order to be simultaneous. This means that for Barth, there is order within the divine eternity, movement (but not a movement such that anything passes away), and succession (but succession which ‘in itself is also beginning and end’). Lest anyone should object, Barth also makes it clear that it is not enough to distinguish the principium ordinis from the principium temporis: these are, for him, simply identical in God. Second, the positive relation of eternity to time is further understood in relation to the divine economy. For Barth, the only way in which it is possible to get a positive account of the eternality of God is in relation to an account of the economy of grace, i.e. the covenant of fellowship between the eternal God and the temporal creature. This covenant means that a Christian account

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of eternity must be considered from the perspective of christology, beginning with the incarnation of the eternal God in the temporal creation.41 For Barth, the incarnation of Jesus Christ means concretely that without ceasing to be eternity and with its power, eternity became time. This is not just a matter of God granting creation time as its form (though of course, it is this as well); it is more that in Jesus Christ God takes time to Godself. In the eternal One’s becoming temporal, God submits Godself to time and permits created time to become and be the form of God’s eternity. This is not just a sovereign ruling over time, but an eternity which is capacious enough (without losing the form of eternity) to incorporate creaturely time and its forms. This does not mean God ceases to be who God is in God’s own superiority. There is no lessening of God’s deity here, but a display of the full power of deity. In this act of God, we learn what it means to speak of God as eternal, and Jesus Christ’s name is enough to be a refutation of the idea of God as only timeless.42 The incarnation means that God is not only eternally present to all time but temporal in His eternity in the act of the epiphany of the Messiah, and again in every act of faith in Him. To describe eternity, one must look at the revealed eternity of God in which Jesus was able to be temporal; this is the power of true eternity. True eternity does not have to be opposed to temporality, but speech about eternity in this form does have to ensure it does not reduce God to the level of being a creature.43 One way to consider this, in light of the Boethian conceptualization, is to say that this is perfect possession of unending life – including in the incarnation the genuine contingencies of human creaturely existence, but perfectly possessed. There is no necessity here on the part of God’s relation to time: God’s readiness for eternity to bear the form of time and be subjected to it is a gracious form which eternity eternally takes, one which arises from the eternal willing of the God who is simultaneously present to all of time to be God in Jesus Christ.44 God’s eternity is not in itself time, but the absolute basis of time and the absolute readiness for it. This is an asymmetrical relationship, however, and we cannot reverse the above principle of eternity’s relation to time in order to make time eternally coexistent with God. It might be worth, here, unpacking further the doctrine of enhypostasia, though Barth does not and generally makes less use of this concept than his commentators seem to suggest. Incarnation makes it possible only to speak of a readiness for time in the eternal triune life. God is not bound to take time to God: to be incarnate



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is all an act of free grace in creation and reconciliation, but also an act to which God is simultaneously present throughout all eternity. The implication of this readiness for time in eternity, however, is that God’s eternity is more than the unity of all times with the goal and purpose of His will; eternity is not exhausted by this description. God’s eternity is rather the presupposition of the unity.45 Again, this presupposition suggests the significance of order in the way in which Barth speaks of the simul of divine eternal life. It is, indeed, at this point in his argument that Barth rehearses the betterknown aspect of his account of eternity in identifying the pre-temporality, super-temporality and post-temporality of the divine eternal life. I have written in more detail about this elsewhere and will rehearse that argument only briefly here.46 Barth asserts that this threefold distinction in eternity is a biblical distinction within the unity of eternity in which it is possible to see eternity’s positive relationship to time since in it God has the power to exist before, through and after time.47 First, God’s pre-temporality means God’s existence precedes our existence and the existence of all things.48 It is in this that one can begin to understand the direct relationship between eternity and the doctrine of election. Emphatic in his belief in creatio ex nihilo, Barth reminds the theologian that creation is not eternal, and yet he claims its time was decided and determined before time: to reconcile the world to Godself, God decided that the world should be. Because of Jesus Christ’s central position in this, one must say that all of this was determined beforehand by and in God: To say that everything is predestined, that everything comes from God’s free, eternal love which penetrates and rules time from eternity, is just the same as to say simply that everything is determined in Jesus Christ […] we have to recognise that eternity itself bears the name Jesus Christ.49

Thus, God’s eternal decision to elect takes precedence even over creation, and results in the work of salvation being the ‘first’ (rather than a subsequent) decision of God in the ordered simultaneity of God’s eternity. Second, recalling that eternity is the simultaneous possession of all times, this pre-temporality cannot be separated from supra-temporality. God’s eternity goes with time, moves with it:50 ‘eternity assumes the form of a temporal present, all time, without ceasing to be time, is no more empty time, or without eternity’.51

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Third, God’s eternity, furthermore, is also post-temporal.52 God is when time will be no more. This is the sense of God’s being ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15.28). Again, one should not think of this as a linear procession: God is already ‘all in all’ supra- and pre-temporally.53 Nevertheless, there is in eternity a direction which is irreversible, since all humanity is led towards God’s post-temporal eternity.54 Again, the simul of eternal life is one which for Barth is ordered and involves movement, but is such as a genuine simul and thereby without creaturely time’s passing form. To summarize, we can see, therefore, that for Barth, the Boethian description is revived in its original Plotinian form, and developed in relation to the material content of what the simul might mean in relation to the complete and perfect possession of unending life – Plotinus with a touch of Barth’s fondness for ‘a bit of Hegeling’.55

IV/Barth on time In order to understand further the concrete meaning of this positive relationship of eternity to time, it is necessary not only to consider Barth’s account of eternity, but also the accounts of time which underpin and flow from this account.56 For many commentators, Barth’s account of eternity appears to suggest that, given the emphasis on simultaneity, there must be a dissolution of time and history.57 This critique fails, however, to appreciate the careful relationship of time to eternity, and to see the importance of simultaneity (in the form described above) in Barth’s thought. Time is central to Barth’s theology. Indeed, Barth discusses time on two separate occasions in his Church Dogmatics and in both what we see is a determinately Christocentric account: first in Church Dogmatics I/2, ‘The Time of Revelation’ and then again in Church Dogmatics III/2, ‘Man in His Time’. In the discussion in Church Dogmatics I/2, various moments and forms of time are accounted for. However, in relation to the account of divine eternity offered by Barth in the subsequent volume, this discussion – particularly of the narrower understanding within the paragraph of the time of revelation – adds material to the account of eternity offered above in which God’s relation to time is understood in relation to real time, that is, the time of revelation:



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the Christological determinant for the account of the relationship of time and eternity is unpacked in terms of the meaning of time in and for the event of revelation. For Barth, it is crucial that in relation to the time of revelation, revelation is the ‘event’ of God in which God can become cognizable by us by analogy with other forms known to us. This form is a human being like us who, at a definite point in time and space, lives and dies, and in Him God’s Word is revealed: it is the human form of Jesus Christ.58 As Barth writes, ‘the event of the incarnation of the Word, of the unio hypostatica, is to be understood as a completed event, but also as a completed event’.59 This event of incarnation reveals ‘God’s time’ to (and for) humanity. This is the time of revelation, which is real and fulfilled time since in this time ‘God has time for us.’60 We see here language to which Barth returns in Church Dogmatics II/1 when he defines what it means for God to live in eternal life. For Barth, God’s time is not our time, but God’s very own.61 In its form, the incarnation is still an historical event (though not historically [historisch] demonstrable).62 However, this revelation does not simply take place in our time because in this revelation time, the Word of God lives forever (Isa. 40.8), just as the Word became flesh and remains so after resurrection.63 In Barth’s account of revelation time, one is dealing with – in what might seem to be a contradiction in terms – ‘eternal time’, since eternity is not apart from time as there is a temporal presence in the Word of God becoming flesh which means revelation is not timeless.64 Revelation must be temporal or else it is not revelation – and, in that much, the idea of ‘myth’ as an account of the Christian narrative is rejected by Barth.65 Revelation time is a genuine present time, which is also a genuine perfect and future since Jesus is Lord of time, i.e. of real, fulfilled time.66 While the incarnation happened in history, it has not happened in the same way as the rest of history since in it there is no continuation, completion, pointing beyond itself, striving after a goal, addition or subtraction, as is the case with other historical occurrence: Its form cannot be changed. It has happened as self-moved being in the stream of becoming. It has happened as completed event, fulfilled in time, in the sea of the incomplete and changeable and self-changing.67

Here, we see Barth changing the language of ‘unmoved’ to ‘self-moved’ in terms of God’s relation of time to eternity, seeing the movement of God to the

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world in Jesus Christ as being an event in which we begin to comprehend the eternal time of God. Again, as with his account of eternity, there is an account here which involves movement in the divine life. For Barth, the eternal willing of God cannot be separated from the event of revelation in fulfilled time. Barth’s understanding of time demonstrates that God’s eternal act and being cannot be separated in the event of incarnation. He writes: ‘In the reality of revelation He is, in His assumed humanity, the Son of God from eternity, and we, for His sake, are by grace the children of God from eternity.’68 Indeed, in the event of incarnation, Barth sees an accomplished reality that came true in the fullness of time, which is given its ontological reference by being an objective fact, namely, the fact of the man Jesus in space time. Thus, there is a unity between the Logos incarnatus in the form of the Church’s recollection of Christ, and the Logos incarnandus in the form in which the Logos existed for the time of expectation.69 Barth’s trading on the Boethian concept of eternity as the perfect and simultaneous possession of unending life is again significant in the order and movement that is introduced into the account of the simul. In determining Himself to be the Logos incarnandus the Word of God not only ‘has time for us’ but has willed this for all eternity such that, as Barth was to write in later years, ‘[i]n the mirror of this humanity of Jesus Christ is revealed the humanity of God which is included in His divinity’.70 The theme of the supreme and perfect temporal nature of eternal life is further used in Barth’s reflections on time in his anthropology, which come after his writings on eternity. In Church Dogmatics III/2, Barth is once again concerned to point out that there is true time in the divine living. He writes: ‘Even the eternal God does not live without time. He is supremely temporal. For His eternity is authentic temporality, and therefore the source of all time.’71 The basis Barth gives for this is the hypostatic union of the true God with the true human Jesus. Barth is at pains to point out that Jesus lives in genuine human, creaturely time as the Eternal Son of God. Thus, Barth states: The eternal content of His life must not cause us to miss or to forget or to depreciate this form, separating the content from it and discarding the form, as though we could see and have the content without it. […] If we abstract Him from His time, we also lose this content of His life. If we retain the content, we must needs retain the form as well, and therefore His temporality.72



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But that is not the end of the significance of the incarnation for the eternity of God. It is not simply that the Eternal One unites Himself in time with time. Rather, the significance is that this is the basis for all existing time: because of the eternal covenant of God with humanity in Jesus Christ, there is time in the divine eternity. In an interesting reflection on the account of the Logos in John 1, Barth states that ‘[t]he Prologue [to John’s Gospel] is not speaking of an eternal Son or divine Logos in abstracto, but of a Son and Logos who is one with the man Jesus’.73 Barth expands exegetically on this claim in the following radical way: ‘The same was in the beginning with God.’ The houtos here refers to the incarnate Logos. It is He who was ‘in the beginning.’ And not only that, but even before this beginning He was with God and was Himself God, participating in the divine being and nature, before created time began, in the eternity of God. This eternity includes not only the present and future, but also the past. God’s eternity does not invalidate past, present and future, and therefore time; it legitimates them […] The man Jesus is in this genuine and real yesterday of God’s eternity, which is anterior to all other yesterdays, including the yesterday of creation.74

The simul of Boethius is once more developed to fill out its content with reference to the acts and events of God in time, acts and events which derive from God’s singular act to be God in the person of Jesus Christ in the election of Jesus Christ which is the beginning of all God’s ways.75 Eternity in its ordered simultaneity has a form, and that form is the life of the incarnate, crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ, who was and is and is to come. There is a subsistence of time in the eternal willing of God to be God in Jesus Christ: time in all its givenness and in the – albeit perfected – creaturely form it takes in Jesus Christ subsists in the divine life eternally. This Christological content cashes out what it means for eternal life to be interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio. For eternity to involve the simul and the perfecta determines that in relation to time, eternity is not the negation but the basis on which time might exist. This is a truth won, not through any analogy of the being with God to the being of creation, but through the eternal willing of the Son of God to be for creation in the person of Jesus Christ.

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V/Conclusion Barth’s account of eternity develops a tradition which stems from Boethius. He recovers Boethius’ Plotinian propensities from their Aristotelian and Platonic distortions through a ressourcement of Boethius’ account. However, such a ressourcement is not one of repetition but one of creative dogmatic appropriation of the material content of Boethius. Not only does Barth follow his instincts that Christian theology does not describe an abstract deity but the triune God of salvation, such that the account of eternity it offers must understand the dynamic relationality of the triune life and the positive relationship of the eternal God to history as the external working of the covenant of God with humanity: there is order and movement in simultaneity. But also his recognition of the temporality of the human Jesus and the power of the resurrection adds further material content to the integrity of the temporal, which is supremely real as it subsists in the eternal life of God in the Logos incarnandus, who is present in the willing of time, with the progression of time and after time, and who is supremely temporal in the event of God’s salvation in the incarnation. Time bears the name of Jesus Christ, and exists because of Him. Eternity, we might say, is the eternal life of the One whose own identity, as Calvin realized, defines God as eternal, the same yesterday, today and forever, as the One who is that which he is; who will be that which he will be; who was that which he will be; and who will be that which he was. God is alive, perfectly, totally and in a moving and ordered simultaneity.76

Notes 1 See Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Brace and Being: The Role of God’s Gracious Election in Karl Barth’s Theological Ontology’, in John Webster, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 92. 2 On this, see Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 22. 3 Karl Barth, CD II/2, 3. 4 Boethius, de Cons. Philos., prose VI.



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5 Karl Barth, CD, II/1, 610ff. 6 For a discussion of this, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1990), 75ff., and Michael Chase, ‘Time and Eternity from Plotinus and Boethius to Einstein’, in ΣΧΟΛΗ vol. 8:1 (2014), 68–110. 7 See Plato, Phaed., 97d, 80af. 8 See, for example, Civ. Dei, 11.6 and 12.15.2. 9 Boethius, de Cons. Philos., prose VI. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Thomas Aquinas, ST 1.1 q.10a. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Brian Leftow has argued this way. See his Time and Eternity (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), Chapter 6, and ‘Boethius on Eternity’, in History of Philosophy Quarterly vol. 7.2 (1990), 123–42. 16 Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1968), 203. 17 Ibid., 204; cf. §§ 53.1–2. 18 Louis Berkof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1938), 131. 19 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Erdmans, 2010), 406. 20 This is a reflection on the mature version of the doctrine as found in the Church Dogmatics. Barth’s earlier treatment of the dialectic between time and eternity (extremely important in his The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), and The Resurrection of the Dead (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2003)) essentially made eternity into timelessness. See also McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 262ff. There is a shift in Barth’s presentation in relation to the mature theology. In relating the material on eternity to Boethius and because of the limitations of space, this paper has had to limit discussion to the presentation of eternity in CD II/2. 21 The relationship between Barth’s use of the Bible and philosophy is complex. Clearly, Barth himself brings certain presuppositions to the texts he uses. He discusses the relationship between philosophy and biblical exegesis in forming dogmatics in CD I/2, 727–40. Barth is clear that philosophy is crucial in exegesis as servant but not master. He asserts here that one cannot replace philosophy with a ‘dictatorial, absolute and exclusive theology’ and that theology must not forget that in itself and apart from its object it is an hypothetical form of

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Eternal God, Eternal Life philosophy (CD I/2, 734). For Barth, to write a biblically grounded dogmatics is to be aware of ‘essential distance between the determinative thought of Scripture and our own imitative thought determined as it is by our philosophy’ (CD I/2, 730). Nevertheless, Barth admits: ‘In attempting to reflect on what is said to us in the biblical text, we must first make use of the system of thought we bring with us, that is, of some philosophy or other’ (CD I/2, 729). See here: Andrew Louth, ‘Barth and the Problem of Natural Theology’, Downside Review 87 (1969), 276; and Colin Gunton, ‘No Other Foundation: One Englishman’s Reading of Church Dogmatics Chapter V’, in Reckoning with Barth: Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of Karl Barth’s Birth, ed. Nigel Biggar (Oxford & London: Mowbray, 1988), 64ff., which, Barth argues, is still tainted with the syndrome of the Enlightenment for all of his seeming opposition to it. However, as much as philosophy may be a servant in helping Barth to understand what underlies everything, it is such only as it is servant to the master of the Bible from which Barth claims to draw his doctrines. It is worth observing, moreover, that Bruce McCormack seems correct in observing that Barth’s anti-metaphysical stance is a rejection of a particular ‘way’ of knowing concerned with observing the phenomena around one and deducing or inducing a first cause. Knowledge of God could come only in terms of God’s Self-disclosure in Christ (Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 246). However, the ‘first cause’ of this Self-disclosure is election. It is in this way that one might hazard to speak of election fulfilling the role of metaphysics for Barth. CD II/1, 608. Ibid., emphasis added. Ibid. Barth references the following biblical texts for this: Isa. 43.10; Ps. 90.2-4; cf., 2 Pet. 3.8; Ps. 102.25ff. (CD II/1, 608–9). CD II/1, 609. Ibid., 610. Ibid. Ibid., 611. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 612. The supremely living character of God is, interestingly, a quality Barth



36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53 54 55 56

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commends Hegel as having rightly emphasized. See Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 2002), Chapter 10. It may be, at this point in Barth’s argument, that we see Barth enacting his ‘bit of Hegeling’. CD II/1, 612. Ibid. Ibid., 614. Ibid. Ibid., 615, emphasis added. Ibid., 616. Ibid. Ibid., 617. For Barth’s detailed discussion, see CD II/1, 618. Ibid., 619. See my Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation: Restoring Particularity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 35–41. CD II/1, 619. Ibid., 621. Ibid., 622, justified on the basis of Jn 8.58, Eph. 1.4f. and 1 Pet. 1.18f. See John Colwell, ‘The Contemporaneity of Divine Decision: Reflections on Barth’s Denial of Universalism’, in Nigel M. de S. Cameron, ed., Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell. Papers Presented at the Fourth Edinburgh Conference on Christian Dogmatics 1991 (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1992), 151ff.; Gerhart Sauter, ‘Why is Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics Not a “Theology of Hope”? Some Observations on Barth’s Understanding of Eschatology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 52, no. 4 (1999), 420ff.; John Thompson, ‘The Humanity of God in the Theology of Karl Barth’, Scottish Journal of Theology 29, no. 3 (1976), 258ff. On the historical development of this idea in Barth’s thought, see McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 371ff. CD II/1, 626. McDowell, Hope in Barth’s Eschatology: Interrogations and Transformations Beyond Tragedy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) correctly re-emphasizes this aspect of Barth’s thought. CD II/1, 630. Ibid., 639. Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (London: SCM, 1976), 387. The centrality of this relationship cannot be over-emphasized in the Church

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58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Eternal God, Eternal Life Dogmatics. Indeed, Ford sees Church Dogmatics as ‘standing like a massive, unfinished, but formally simple and consistent sculpture – a spiral round and round the self-expression of God in time’ (David F. Ford, ‘Conclusion: Assessing Barth’, in S. W. Sykes, ed., Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 201. On time and eternity, see the informative but unsatisfactory Robert Jenson, God after God. The God of the Past and the God of the Future, Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (Indianapolis & New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1969), esp. Chapter 8. Cf. George Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 15–19; and on the ‘scandal of particularity’, Ford, ‘Barth’s Interpretation of the Bible’, in Sykes, ed., Karl Barth, 61f. and Hart, Regarding Barth: Essays toward a Reading of His Theology (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999), 56ff.); Richard H. Roberts, ‘Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Time: Its Nature and Implications’, in S. W. Sykes, ed., Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Method, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) and Richard H. Roberts, A Theology on its Way? Essays on Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), esp. Chapter 1 (cf. B. D. Marshall, ‘Review of Richard Roberts, A Theology on Its Way? Essays on Karl Barth’, Journal of Theological Studies vol. 44 (1993), 453–8; McDowell, Hope in Barth’s Eschatology 41–5, 123–6; Hart, Regarding Barth, Chapter 1). For the most thorough discussion of this, see Roberts, A Theology on its Way, Chapter 1. In this, Roberts engages in a thorough and fierce criticism of Barth on time, concluding that Barth is ultimately ‘ambiguous’ and seeing the dissolution of time by eternity in Barth’s theory. For Roberts, there is an overly strong influence of Hegel and Kant on Barth that leads him along the path of idealism and the resulting destruction of real human time. I have addressed this criticism in Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation, 38–41. See also here, Berkouwer, The Triumph of Grace. Barth’s own response to him in CD IV/3, 173–84. Also of note is McCormack, ‘Grace and being’; and Hunsinger, How To Read Karl Barth, 12–15. CD I/2, 36. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 49. CD I/1, 325. There is perhaps here the beginnings of a pointing towards where Barth will go in CD II/2 in relation to the eternal election of Jesus Christ. CD I/2, 50. Ibid., 51.

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

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Ibid., 52. CD I/1, 116. CD I/2, 238. Ibid., 165. Karl Barth, ‘The Humanity of God’ in God, Gospel and Grace (Edinburgh: London, 1959), 42. CD III/2, 437. Ibid., 440; cf. T. F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 95. CD III/2, 483. Ibid., 484. Note the ‘singularis’ here. CD III/2, 484f.: ‘A thing which is resolved from all eternity necessarily has the character of absolute singularity. At this last and highest stage, the pre-existence of the man Jesus coincides with His eternal predestination and election.’ John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, (Louisville: WJK Press, 1960), I.10.2. Calvin realized the divine eternity is contained in the name YHWH: ‘let us observe that his eternity and self-existence are announced in that wonderful name twice repeated’.

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‘You Are Good and Do Good’– Some Remarks on Eternal Life and the Goodness of God Christopher J. Holmes

I/Introduction Augustine, in Book I of the Confessions, states that God is ‘utterly good’.1 God is goodness. Goodness is indicative of the nature of God. God is good all the way down. In my paper, I unfold this truth with a view to how it informs an account of eternal life. Although we are fallen creatures, we, nonetheless, share in the divine goodness by our constitution; our being as creatures is a divine gift. The divine being is in mission to us, healing us through his providential care for and perfection of our creatureliness. God does such good in relation to us because God is good. Thus, we say with the Psalmist, ‘I have no good apart from you’ (Ps. 16.2). God communicates his divine nature to us in such a way that we are able to glimpse his goodness, indeed, ‘taste’ his goodness (Ps. 34.8). In the world without end, however, we will not only know and love his goodness; we shall also see him. Life eternal is seeing the goodness God is as ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15.28). In order to pursue this line of inquiry well, I attend to three matters. First, I sketch, in conversation with Augustine, some first principles concerning God’s goodness, especially the sense in which God’s goodness is not a participated goodness. Second, in conversation with Thomas Aquinas, I explore what the Psalter teaches us about God’s goodness and our relationship to it. Third, and last, I offer some remarks on goodness and eternal life. ‘We will be like him,’ says John the elder (1 Jn 3.2). I reflect on how God is, and ever shall be, our good in the world without end.

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If one is to pursue these three points with integrity, one has to respond at the outset to an objection. Calvin raises the objection best. In Book I of the Institutes Calvin writes, ‘What is God? Men who pose this question are merely toying with idle speculations.’2 The question ‘What is God?’ is not the most important question. Calvin continues, ‘It is more important for us to know of what sort he [God] is and what is consistent with his nature.’3 Our concern should be with God’s character and nature towards us, not with the abstract question, ‘What is God?’ For Calvin, talk of God’s deity and nature does not trespass into forbidden territory. Such talk does not ask after ‘What is God?’ Indeed, Calvin’s problem with this question is that it assumes a kind of neutrality on the part of the questioner. Calvin argues that clear beholding of God’s nature, and a right apprehension ‘of what sort he is’, involves an acknowledgement. Specifically, ‘You cannot behold him clearly unless you acknowledge him to be the fountainhead and source of every good.’4 Clear beholding is possible only if one acknowledges God’s goodness. In sum, if we are to offer a responsible account of the absolute goodness of God and creaturely sharing in it as eternal life, we must take Calvin’s advice. Our inquiry ought to do with ‘what sort’ God is. Eternal life is best understood as our participation in the ‘sort’ God is. Eternal life is a matter of our participation in God’s absolute goodness.

II/Some first principles of God’s goodness, in conversation with Augustine First, God is good by virtue of his own goodness. God’s goodness is not a participated goodness, as is ours. To be good in the way that God is belongs only to God. Goodness is not connected to God; goodness is not something God has. Rather, God’s goodness is apart from us and prior to us, true of God in se. God is his own goodness. What does this imply about creaturely goodness? Augustine writes: ‘The good which you love is from him. But it is only as it is related to him that it is good and sweet. Otherwise it will justly become bitter; for all that comes from him is unjustly loved if he has been abandoned.’5 Creaturely goodness is a derivative goodness, a connected goodness. Goodness does not belong



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to us, for goodness is received. As Calvin writes, God is its ‘fountainhead and source’.6 Augustine also thinks that the goodness of God that we enjoy through the good things he has made is an ethical goodness. The goodness of material things compels us to relate them to their source. Thus, Augustine says: ‘I thought them [i.e. magnitude and beauty] in you as if in a subject, as in the case of a physical body, whereas you yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty.’7 Created being has a pedagogical function: namely, it teaches us to relate things to their origin. Such relating, however, should not take place in a haphazard way. Augustine does not encourage us to mix human and divine categories, ‘as if you too were a subject of which magnitude and beauty are attributes’.8 The relation between the Creator and the creature is irreversible. The problem with mixing is that it confuses what is corruptible with what is incorruptible, the immortal with the mortal. Of God only must we say, ‘Our good is life with you and suffers no deficiency (Ps. 101.28); for you yourself are that good.’9 God’s goodness is not a participated goodness, whereas our goodness is. The second principle is that God is our incorruptible good because God is not good by virtue of any other, whereas we are. By virtue of God are we good and perfected in goodness; God is not good by virtue of us. And we enjoy the goodness of God in and through the Mediator between God and humanity, Jesus Christ. Goodness and joy are grounded in and caused by God.10 The goodness of God is present within us, retained in our memory. Commenting on Luke 15.8, Augustine says that what was true of the woman’s memory of the lost coin is true of God: ‘The object was lost to the eyes, but held in the memory.’11 Note the last four words: ‘held in the memory’. Once Augustine has begun to learn of God, he is able to make a retrospective judgement regarding God’s indwelling of his memory. What does learning of God involve? To learn of God involves remembering of God’s goodness, a goodness that we have forgotten. We forget that existence is a created goodness that testifies to an uncreated goodness. We forget that created goodness presupposes an uncreated goodness. For Augustine, being a creature involves an ongoing task. That task is a matter of connecting created existence to its source, something that is not natural to us on this side of the fall. We do not do well at connecting things to their source because we do not love God very well. We try in vain to

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enjoy God and things in relation to God apart from the Mediator, Jesus Christ. We forget that happiness happens only in relation to the Goodness by whom all things are good, the goodness that makes us happy and is present to us in the Mediator. The third principle has to do with not mixing up the human and the divine. God’s goodness is not constituted by anything outside of God, whereas the goodness of creaturely being reflects the Creator’s mixing with us, not our mixing with the Creator. So Augustine says: To know you as you are in an absolute sense is for you alone. You are immutably, you know immutably, you will immutably. Your essence knows and wills immutably. Your knowledge is and knows immutably. Your will is and knows immutably. In your sight it does not seem right that the kind of self-knowledge possessed by unchangeable light should also be possessed by changeable existence which receives light.12

The divine being that abides in its own fullness does not of course need the creature in order to be, whereas without God we would not be. We do not exist with reference to ourselves. Human beings do not ascend to the One who is uncreated light by themselves but rather only in relation to the light itself. Augustine writes: ‘Where was I when I was seeking for you? You were there before me, but I had departed from myself. I could not even find myself, much less you.’13 If the Creator is not mixed with creaturely existence insofar as the Creator is the source of all creaturely good and happiness, how does Augustine describe God’s ongoing relationship to creatures? Augustine suggests that God’s goodness is compatible with the goodness of things, and it is a goodness that continually causes creatures to do the good. Not only are God’s acts good, but also God’s nature is good, and that nature, while not being mixed with ours, is generative of acts of goodness on our part. Good things are connected to the goodness of God itself; they refer to him. God, as one who is abundantly good, acts out of his own goodness to destroy what kills enjoyment of him, and in so doing causes creaturely goodness. In sum, let us briefly rehearse our first principles. First, God is good by virtue of his own goodness. Second, God is our incorruptible good. Third, the relationship between the goodness God is and creaturely good is irreversible. The irreversible character of the relationship, however, does not foreclose the



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effective communication of the relation, insofar as our sharing in the good that God is constitutes us but not God.

III/Goodness and the Psalter, in conversation with Thomas Aquinas ‘O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever!’ (Ps. 118.1). God is good. Goodness belongs to God’s very substance apart from us and prior to us. And it is that substance or essence by which God is present to creatures in ‘His effects, either of nature or of grace’.14 It is by the mission of the Son and Spirit that we are delivered from what enslaves us to what opposes that goodness, namely sin, death, and the devil. So Psalm 16.2 states: ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.’ The Psalmist does not suggest that he can have some good apart from God; rather he has ‘no good apart from you’. One of the implications of this is that the Psalmist cannot enjoy any created good apart from the good that is God. By the good that God is are all things good. Yes, their goodness is derived, but not in such a way as to short-change God’s reconciling and perfecting work that not only restores lost goodness but elevates us to see the ultimate goodness in which our life lies. I have ‘no good apart from you’: this is the cry of the creature. It is not said of God who is the highest good, who ‘alone is good essentially’.15 The one whose God is the Lord is led to say, ‘I have no good apart from you’. That good, however, belongs to us ‘accidentally’.16 As creatures created in God’s image, we are good. Indeed, ‘all things are good inasmuch as they have being’.17 The goodness we have by simply being increases to the extent that we are assimilated with its source. Such an increase cannot be measured in a qualitative sense, however. As Thomas argues, our participation ‘in the first being [God] by way of a certain assimilation’ is distant and defective.18 Put another way, God who is the highest good, the agent and cause of goodness amongst all that is not God, ‘does not agree with its [goodness’s] effects either in species or genus […] between creatures and God’s goodness there can be no proportion’.19 To cry out that we have no good apart from God is a cry that the ‘one goodness’ of God evokes. Such a cry is demonstrative of ‘yet many goodnesses’.20

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One of the many interesting points that Thomas makes in Question V of the prima pars of the Summa Theologica – ‘Goodness in General’ – is that ‘goodness and being are really the same’.21 As we shall see in a few moments, Thomas will not say this of God’s other perfections, or what he calls the ‘names’ of God. Mercy and being, for example, are not the same. And yet, even though ‘goodness and being’ are the same, Thomas does not simply collapse them into one another. Thomas writes, ‘The essence of goodness consists in this, that it is in some way desirable.’22 This is not said of being but of perfection. Goodness and desirableness belong together. The reason they belong together is because ‘perfection implies desirability and goodness’.23 What is perfect – that is, God – is therefore good and desirable. Why is this important to think about? The Psalmist’s declaration that God is good implies God’s goodness ‘as formally constituting others’ good’.24 We are made good by the goodness God is. God moves us to say, ‘You are my only good’. I cannot say ‘I am my only good’ but of God I can say ‘you are my only good’. God’s goodness – unlike mine which is ever only a participated goodness – is actual goodness. As Thomas says of the perfection of God, ‘all the perfections of all things are in God’.25 In the idiom of the Psalms, this is to say, ‘I have no good apart from you’. The good that I receive from God is but a participated goodness. In this sense I can be said to be like God, but that is not to imply ‘that God is like a creature’.26 The relationship between the Creator and creature is irreversible. It is hopefully clear by now that what it is said of God is that he ‘alone is good essentially’.27 What then do we make of the Psalter’s declaration that ‘The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love’ (Ps. 103.8)? Is mercy ascribed to God differently than is goodness? In short, the answer is yes. This requires explanation. The goodness that denotes the perfection of God’s essence ‘may be a principle of action’.28 What does it mean to speak of goodness as a ‘principle of action’? God acts in the way that God does because of his essence. God’s essence is ‘the principle’ of his action. The acts of God are good because the perfect essence of God to which God’s acts refer is good. Thomas continues, ‘But good does not always refer to an act, since a thing is called good not merely with respect to its acts, but also with respect to the perfection in its essence.’29 God is good. We say this because of God’s perfect essence. In a particularly felicitous comment, Thomas says that justice ‘in God is sometimes spoken of as the fitting accompaniment of His



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goodness; sometimes as the reward of merit’.30 Justice is what the good God effects, as is the case with mercy. Both justice and mercy are attributed to God as that which his goodness effects. Put differently, the perfection of goodness in God is such that it removes defects in the creature, and this removal is just and merciful. The removal of creaturely defects has a source, and that source is the perfect essence of the God who is good. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider briefly how Thomas’s treatment of God’s perfection and goodness differs from Karl Barth’s treatment of the perfections of God. For Barth, God is said to live his life in the abundance of his perfections of love and freedom. God is each perfection; each perfection is identical with the other; and each is identical with every other.31 For Thomas, however, to say that God is mercy in the same way that God is good is problematic. Mercy is found in God’s works ‘provided mercy be taken to mean the removal of any kind of defect’.32 Mercy is attributed to God whose perfect essence is the principle of merciful action. But the kind of identification Barth makes between God and each perfection, whether they be perfections of the divine loving or the divine freedom, is foreign to Thomas. What is at stake in this difference between these two doctors of the church? Barth and Thomas talk quite differently about what God ‘is’. God is merciful and gracious, and God is good. Both concur. But Thomas goes further than Barth in suggesting that God is not these in the same way. God is good, he is merciful and gracious; and because God is good, his steadfast love endures forever. God’s goodness – his ‘perfection in its essence’ – is the principle of action that is merciful, just, and gracious.33 Much more could be said about what is at stake between the two, but I want to leave that for now in order to think through the last major point of the chapter, that is the relationship between goodness and eternal life.

IV/Goodness and eternal life In the previous section we noted, following Thomas, how the good God is desirable. In this section, we shall think through how God’s goodness determines an account of eternal life as the perfection of the creature in the goodness God is.

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Christian teaching on eternal life is derivative of teaching on the eternity of God. Teaching on eternity is itself derivative of teaching of divine immutability – ‘eternity’, as Thomas argues, ‘follows on immutability’.34 Talk of God’s immutability is what grounds talk of God’s eternity. Thus, Thomas says, ‘as some beings receive immutability from Him, they share in His eternity’.35 Creaturely sharing in God’s eternity, which is the hope of eternal life, rests upon the unchangeable one. To describe God as immutable is to speak of him as unchangeable, in either being or operation. Contemplation of such unchangeability generates creaturely bliss. Immutability is what grounds the gift of eternal life, which we receive by faith. So Thomas states: ‘Some, again, share more fully than others in the nature of eternity, inasmuch as they possess unchangeableness either in being or further still in operation; like the angels, and the blessed, who enjoy the Word, because as regards that vision of the Word, no changing thoughts exist in the saints.’36 Thomas’s point is that God’s unchangeableness in being and operation makes the hope of eternal life strong, precisely because in eternity the saints will never cease enjoying the Word. There will be no possibility of the blessed absconding from such enjoyment of God, for ‘they possess unchangeableness’ in terms of who they are and what they do.37 We share in eternity ‘by the contemplation of God’.38 Contemplation of God is our eternal enjoyment. That contemplation is blessed because the saints shall be transparent to God who will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15.28). Insofar as eternal life is concerned, it will be inconceivable for the blessed to think that they could have another good outside of God. The saints share in God’s immutability throughout eternity, and such is their happiness. 1 John 3.2 helps us to appreciate this point. ‘We shall be like him,’ writes John the elder. We shall be like the God who is eternal, whose being is interminable. Moreover, our being like him has no possibility of being otherwise. The second fact of eternity, Thomas notes, is that it ‘has no succession, being simultaneously whole’.39 The gift of ‘eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ is not a gift that can be succeeded by those who receive it (Rom. 6.23).We do receive eternity in him, what Thomas calls, following Augustine, a ‘participated eternity’.40 God, however, does not participate in eternity, just as God does not participate in goodness. Eternity, as with goodness, ‘is nothing else but God Himself ’.41 We shall in eternity be like God, sharing eternally in God and therefore in what is ‘simultaneously whole’.42



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Eternity denotes something specific with respect to God’s being that goodness does not. Eternity is what Thomas calls ‘the proper measure of being’.43 Eternity measures being in contradistinction to time which ‘is the proper measure of movement’.44 Time cannot be applied to God because God is ‘simultaneously whole’.45 God again is ‘permanent being’, meaning that God ‘is wanting in nothing’.46 It will be impossible for the blessed in eternity to want in anything other than God. The blessing of ‘participated eternity’ is given voice in Psalm 23.1: ‘the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want’. We shall not want for there shall be no possibility of wanting anything other than the One who wants nothing. To want nothing is beatitude. Immortality is a fruit of beatitude. To put immortality on this mortal body is possible because of God’s beatitude. Beatitude, like goodness and eternity ‘belongs’, avers Aquinas, ‘to God in a supreme way’.47 However, beatitude says something different of God than do either goodness or eternity. With reference to God, beatitude denotes ‘the perfect good of an intellectual nature which is capable of knowing that it has a plentitude of the good it possesses, and which is properly the subject of good and evil and hence master of its own actions. Whence beatitude belongs to God in the highest degree.’48 Divine beatitude has two principal features. First, it is said of ‘an intellectual nature’, that is a nature that ‘is capable of knowing’. And what God knows is that God ‘has a plenitude of the good’. Because he does not want in anything, God is the master of his own actions. The second point is that God is not mastered by any or anything: good and evil are that to which God is ‘the subject’. The divine beatitude is not locked up in itself. Thomas says, ‘the divine beatitude embraces every beatitude’.49 Our beatitude, the beatitude that is eternal life, one of whose characteristics is immortality, is an embraced beatitude. Intrinsic to the participated character of our beatitude is the indefectibility we receive in relation to it. We shall not be capable of wanting other than the One who is the plentitude of good. Importantly, our not wanting otherwise is not something that is coerced from us. ‘We shall be like him’ means in part that we too shall be master of our actions (1 Jn 3.2). Our actions will participate in the One who is always the master of his own actions. We shall be unable to act contrary to the good he possesses by nature and we possess by his grace.

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One further characteristic of the immortality that we shall put on is its surety. Because our beatitude is embraced, it cannot depart from God, who ‘is the highest good absolutely’.50 In eternity will the ‘only’ be removed. Our cry of praise will not be ‘you are my only good’; rather, it will simply be ‘you are my good’, for it will be impossible to consider other goods as good apart from God. In other words, our stubborn propensity toward idolatry that characterizes our life here and how will have passed away. Our intelligence will be renewed such that it shall be like his.

V/Some concluding thoughts ‘We will be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 Jn. 3.2). Our being like him is a consequence of our seeing him as he is. Immortality is a characteristic of our being like him. I say characteristic because I am not convinced that immortality is said of God, in the same sense that goodness, eternity, and beatitude are said of him. Immortality is said of God in a manner like mercy is said. Immortality points to an effect of eternity. Immortality is attributed to God, yes, but only insofar as God’s perfect essence is the principle of actions that remove the defects of our mortality, thereby rendering it immortal. Expressed otherwise, immortality is the ‘fitting accompaniment’ of God’s eternity.51 In this paper, I have sought to think about one word – namely the word ‘is’ – and how that word works with respect to God. I have also thought about how eternal life is related to what sort of God we encounter in Scripture. What we have discovered with Augustine’s and Thomas’s help is that Scripture implies God’s perfection. For Thomas, God’s perfection is the principle of action, whose effects we by grace consider. Mercy is attributed to God, but only insofar as it is an effect of the goodness that is God’s perfect essence. ‘The free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom. 6.23). This gift is a matter of participating in God’s eternity, which is nothing other than participating in God himself. But the kind of participation envisaged is a quite specific and a highly qualified one. God does not participate in us. God receives nothing from us. However, we do participate in God’s eternity in terms of a ‘participated eternity’.52 God shall not be like us but we shall be like



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him. While ‘God will be all in all’ the ‘all in all’ will not be God (1 Cor. 15.28). A strict asymmetry and irreversibility will hold true throughout eternity. We neither are nor shall be God’s good, but God is and ever shall be our good, world without end.

Notes 1 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), I.iv. 2 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited by John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), I.II.2. It is interesting to note that Karl Barth’s question in his treatment of the perfections is ‘Who and What is God?’ See G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, eds, Church Dogmatics, II/1, The Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 353. 3 Calvin, Institutes, I.II.2. 4 Ibid. 5 Augustine, Confessions, IV.xii. 6 Calvin, Institutes, I.II.2. 7 Augustine, Confessions, IV.xvi. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., IV.xvii. 11 Ibid., X.xviii. 12 Ibid., XIII.xvi. 13 Ibid., V.ii. 14 Thomas Aquinas, Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, God and the Order of Creation, edited by Anton C. Pegis (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1a.1.7 ad 1. 15 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1a.6.3 resp. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 1a.6.4 sed contra. 18 Ibid., 1a.6.4 resp. 19 Ibid., 1a.6.2 resp; 1a.21.4 resp. 20 Ibid., 1a.6.4 resp. 21 Ibid., 1a.5.1 resp. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 1a.5.3 resp.

36 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Eternal God, Eternal Life Ibid., 1a.5.5 ad 2. Ibid., 1a.4.2 resp. Ibid., 1a.4.3 ad 4. Ibid., 1a.6.3 resp. Ibid., 1a.21.1 ad 3. Ibid., 1a.21.1 ad 4. Ibid., 1a.21.1 ad 3. See CD II/1, 333. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1a.21.4 resp. Ibid., 1a.21.1 ad 4. Ibid., 1a.10.3 resp. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 1a.10.3 ad 1. Ibid., 1a.10.1 resp. Ibid., 1a.10.2 ad 1. Ibid., 1a.10.2 ad 3. It is fair to say that Thomas would not say that of mercy as mercy is an effect of God’s essence and will turned outward. Accordingly, mercy is not a perfection in the same sense as is goodness, eternity, and beatitude. Ibid., 1a.10.1 resp. Ibid., 1a.10.4 ad 3. Ibid. Ibid., 1a.10.1 resp. Ibid., 1a.10.1 ad 3. Ibid., 1a.26.1 resp. Ibid. Ibid., 1a.26.4 sed contra. Ibid., 1a.26.3 ad 1. This is Thomas’s language, see ibid., 1a.21.1 ad 3. Ibid., 1a.10.2 ad 1.

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The Resonating Body in Triune Eternity Markus Mühling

I/Starting points – triune eternity 1. The normal way to attain insight into divine eternity is through natural theology, i.e. by deriving notions of eternity from time by means of negating, integrating or extending time. The particular way time is understood and the concrete methods used will determine what kind of eternity one gets as an outcome. By contrast, a genuinely theological way to talk about eternity would have to start with divine self-presentation and perception.1 2. Revelation and experience are not contradictory. Revelation as divine self-presentation happens through life experience and constitutes the notion of experience. God presents Godself in the entanglement of human life stories and the story of the Gospel, which is itself a story entangled in a threefold manner that can be formally expressed in terms of irreflexivity, asymmetry and transitivity.2 3. The entanglement of the story of believers with the story of the Gospel can only be divine self-presentation if God is in eternity, i.e. etsi mundus non daretur, as he is in his revelation. Therefore, God is a triply entangled story with the three agents or persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which would have a life together even if there were no entanglement with creaturely stories. The essence of God is the love of dynamic, internally related relata (i.e. persons). In other words: the essence of God is a framework of dynamic relations, or a dramatic story. Since all attributes in God have to be identical due to the doctrine of divine simplicity,

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eternity is the inner-Trinitarian relational life. Eternity is the love-story that is the divine essence. In God, epistemic self-identification becomes ontic constitution.3 4. The formal structure of divine eternity – expressed in terms of irreflexivity, asymmetry and transitivity – is the formal structure of time – also expressed in terms of irreflexivity, asymmetry and transitivity.4 Theologically this means that God created a world in correspondence to his own being-as-becoming. God created a world that resonates his own eternal becoming in its very spatio-temporal structure. This creaturely spatio-temporal becoming can happen as a harmonic or a disharmonic resonance (sin).5 5. The relata of triune eternity can be called persons in the sense of particular whence-and-whither becomings.6 Created persons (e.g. humans and perhaps other creatures) can also be seen as persons in the sense of particular whence-and-whither becomings. The specific difference between divine persons and human persons is that whereas divine persons are eternally particular whence-and-whither-becomings, human persons are spatio-temporally particular whence-and-whither-becomings.

II/The resonating body Thesis 1 – Bodiliness indicates the constitutive role of the spatio-temporal dimensions of the relational framework of created persons. The body therefore is the means of the communicative becoming of created persons. A Cartesian mind/ body dualism is just as wrong as any naturalistic reductionism. The third-person perspective as well as the first-person perspective is important to describe the living body in syntopy. Syssomatism (i.e. inter-bodiliness or inter-corporeality) is at the heart of bodiliness and it is expressed in the fact that the body is at once withdrawn from the ‘me’ and available to others. The body has therefore to be distinguished from the physical organism in being a resonating system between physical organism and environment. The body is always a resonating body. Unlike the other concepts at stake in this paper, the term ‘body’ is a biblical one. And here it is preeminently Paul’s concept of a body that is interesting.



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In the Septuagint soma is used as a translation mostly for basar, which is frequently used as one among other expressions to denote humans. In the Psalms, basar is used in a parallismus membrorum together with nephesh, which means that they both carry the same meaning (see Pss. 16.9-10a, 63.2, 84.3). Therefore, nephesh and basar constitute no kind of dualism whatsoever. Basar and nephesh are not the only expressions for a total human being. According to W. H. Schmidt, basar denotes whole humans insofar they are perishable, impotent and invalid, nephesh insofar they are directed to goals, ruach, insofar they are subjects of affections, and leb insofar they are reasonable beings.7 But the scriptures of the Old Testament contain so many different and rewritten texts as well as theologies that there seems to be no definite and constant meaning of basar or soma, its Greek translation. The only thing that seems clear is that soma refers to the whole human person and that the Hebrew Scriptures know something like a holistic anthropology. There is also no single meaning for soma in the New Testament, though in Paul we find a somewhat more conceptually shaped use. The Corinthians seem to have distinguished an outer human being from an inner one. Salvation and personal identity concerned the inner one, not the outer one: one can eat whatever one wants (1 Cor. 8 and 6.13), have sexual intercourse with whomever one is attracted to (1 Cor. 6.12ff. and 5.1ff.), and inner and individualistic spiritual edification like speaking in tongues appeared not to rely on interpersonal communication (1 Cor. 12–14). In all these cases, Paul voted against the Corinthian separation between an inner and an outer being, asserting against it that salvation is a matter of whole persons including all the relations of their existence. Paul uses soma in these contexts for the human being as an essentially relational being. The examples of sexual intercourse with a prostitute (1 Cor. 6.16f.) and of saving a non-believer by marriage (1 Cor. 7.14) show that for Paul the human soma is no closed entity, but is dependent and constituted by relations to other somata and their use. On the one hand, humans can use their somata in resonance with God and relational dimensions so that the soma is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6.19). On the other hand, they can use their somata in a disharmonic way. In this case, the soma becomes sarx, flesh, which in Paul means chiefly a restriction of the bodily relations to a pure determination by mundane relations. Paul

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differentiates between a sinful use of the body and a use that is consonant with the Gospel; in contrast to the Old Testament, Paul dissolves the identity of soma and basar/sarx and creates a new understanding of both terms.8 Unlike Jewish tradition, Paul does not simply identify the whole person, the ‘me’, with ‘body/soma/basar’, but distinguishes between personal identity and the body. This distinction is not the same as the one made in Corinth between an inner and an outer being. In 2 Corinthians 12.2-4 he reports a personal ecstatic experience and declares that it does not matter whether it happened bodily or in a disembodied way. Paul here presupposes a distinction between the identity of the ‘me’ and its body. But this does not mean that Paul votes for a neo-Platonic or Cartesian soul. Also in 2 Corinthians 5.8 and Philippians 1.23f., where he longs to ‘be with Christ’ in a postmortem but pre-eschatical state, a distinction between a ‘me’ and the body seems to be presupposed. What kind of distinction could that be? Peter Lampe writes: In order to verbalize the “me”, Paul simply uses personal pronouns and not terms such as “spirit” or “soul” […] the “me” is “with Christ” (syn Christo) – not “in his memory” or anything like that. Syn Christo is a relational term. The existence of the “me” […] is stripped of any substance […] Thus, the “me” of this stage cannot be described in substantial terms. The existence of the “me” during this intermediate stage can only be described in relational terms. In fact, the “me” is reduced to a single relation; it is reduced to the syn Christo; to being “with Christ” […] For Paul, a multitude of relations apparently requires bodily existence.9

Paul’s use of the concept of a body already presupposes its Christological transformation. Therefore, we can also look to his speech of the church as the body of Christ (Rom. 12.5), speech which cannot be seen as purely metaphorical any more: if personal identity consists for Paul in the single relation of being syn Christo and if the body as the epitome of all other relations is surrendered to Christ in a ‘reasonable’ service (Rom. 12.1), then it is logical that all relata of this surrendering activity driven by being syn Christo also form a body. Consequently this is the body of Christ, because for Christ all other relations belong to his body. Our suggestion that ‘body’ should signify all created relations of a created person and therefore her means of communicative relatedness, fits to Paul’s use of the term body. Nevertheless, we must stress the following:



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1. The ‘body’ is not identical with ‘person’ or ‘created person’. It signifies a part of the relational framework of persons: it is the epitome of all spatio-temporal relations, i.e. the epitome of all relations directed from and to other created persons, to the pre-personal natural realm and the self-relation. 2. While only a part of the total constitution of personhood, the body is constitutive for being a created person and contributes decisive elements to personal identity. However, neither any particular part of bodily relations nor all together are able to safeguard the identity of a person. 3. The body denotes a dynamic, rather than static, relationship. Like the person, the body is not something that has a separable story. Rather it is a story. The body is not therefore what is circumscribed at a specific time by skin. Points or circles cannot picture the body. Rather, the body is like a curved line. 4. Like all created becomings, the body is finite, has finite resources and is subject to illnesses. These signs of created finitude have to be seen as restrictions in the active capabilities to respond to challenges presented by relatedness. Also a dead human body is still a body (and a person) because she is subject to being related to other persons and the pre-personal realm, but without the possibility of responding. One may also say that the sum of all spatio-temporal relational media of communication (= the body) is perishable. Here, the Hebrew tradition of basar is reflected. 5. The body in this sense cannot be compared with the Cartesian or functionally materialist ‘body’. In both cases, ‘body’ has a different intension and extension. In Cartesian dualism, ‘body’ means the unanimated physical organism, the inert substance of the res extensa, which has to be animated by the immaterial substance of the res cogitans. This is strictly excluded here, for the body itself is what is alive not because it ‘thinks’ but, because it communicates in relationships. The body itself is the means of communication. On the other hand, this kind of vivid communication in relations is not an epiphenomenon of a material computational unit based on non-perceptive communications between different spatio-temporal parts of matter-energy equivalences. It is more the other way around: the person’s means of communicating

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is the body, and the body’s means of communication is its physical organism. 6. As a consequence of rejecting both dualism and naturalistic reductionism, neither first-person speech nor third-person speech provides a privileged access to the body. In both kinds of speech, two different perspectives appear which are related in syntopy (i.e. at the same spatio-temporal place) to the same phenomenal body. Both are necessary: without the first-person perspective the body cannot be understood as a sentient, communicating and perceiving entity. Without the third-person perspective constitutive relationality cannot be grasped. Neither one’s back nor one’s face nor one’s inner organs are perceivable in the first-person perspective without external means; such observations depend upon the third-person perspective. Both perspectives are inseparable. Therefore, the second-person perspective is also decisive as it crucially unites the first- and third-person perspectives. The diagnosis ‘His stomach is in this or that condition’, is useless until someone says concretely, ‘Your stomach is in this or that condition.’ Moreover, everyone is always addressed as you by others long before being able to develop a first-person perspective. There is perceptive inter-corporeality in the mother-child dyad long before the child is able to conceive of herself as an ‘I’.10 7. Since the body signifies means of being in communicative relations, bodiliness is always inter-corporeality. A single body is as inconceivable as a single person. This means that the body is at once withdrawn from one’s own disposal and available for others. This constitutive function of the other for one’s own body is expressed in Ephesians 3.6. There: the biblical name for the constitutive role of other bodies for one’s own body is syssomatism, a term coined to address the problem that Jews and pagans are united in the church as the body of Christ, where Jews and pagans are defined by their reciprocal alterity. The writer suggests that ‘the Gentiles should be fellow heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel’. The creative solution is to create the concept ‘syssoma’, the being together of the same soma. Jews and Pagans are syssomatic in the body of Christ. We can exploit the concepts of syssoma/syssomatic/syssomatism not only for the combination of



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different identities in the church, but also for the constitutive function of the other also for any particular body. Syssomatism therefore is the biblical equivalent of inter-corporeality. In using syn instead of inter it is more precise: ‘Inter’, meaning ‘between’, always suggests the combination of two potentially separable relata, whereas syn, ‘with’, designates the inseparability of the other body for my body. 8. Since the body is at once relational and dynamic, its spatial extension varies during different narrative sequences. In concentrating while writing an article, the keyboard becomes part of my body; afterwards it becomes an external entity again. 9. It is obvious that the body is not identical with the physical organism as such. In English, ‘body’ can be used to denote the body or the physical organism. But what, then, is the relation between the body and the individual physical organism? Since the body denotes the means of communicating in spatio-temporal relationships, the physical organism is an important part of the body’s relational framework, but nevertheless a part. With the help of ecological biology and the concept of the ‘functional circuit’11 the relationship between the body and the physical organism can be explained in a more precise way: the body is the whole functional circuit of the communication between the physical organism and its environment. Both the environment as well as the physical organism provide ‘open loops’ that have to be closed by the resonating relatum (i.e. the physical body or parts of the environment). body

environment

physical organism

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10. To sum up this thesis, we can say that the body, as the means by which a person’s spatio-temporally communicative relationships are realized, is always a resonating body in different respects. It is a resonating body in the relation to other bodies – a feature expressed with the help of the concept inter-corporeality; it is a resonating body in the relationship between the environment and physical body; and it is a resonating body in its relationship to God by behaving in a manner that either resonates with the creatural conditions of its possibility or by denying its creatural conditions. In the last case, the body resonates in a disharmonic way and it has become a sarcic body or ‘flesh’. The statement ‘it resonates’ denotes not external, but internal or constitutive relationships where the relata are constitutive for each other and where the relata cannot be separated. Thesis 2 – The theological concept of the body as the means of communicative personal becoming connects with extra-theological research from different realms of philosophy and science including (a) Peter F. Strawson’s designation of the person as a primary concept, (b) Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the living body, (c) contemporary approaches to the brain as necessarily embodied and (d) the so-called extended-mind thesis.

Strawson’s thought experiment Further confirmation of both the inseparability of contents of consciousness from the body and the relational constitution of the body comes from a classical thought experiment by Peter Frederick Strawson. In Individuals he writes: When I was discussing the concept of a pure individual consciousness, I said that though it could not exist as a primary concept to be used in the explanation of the concept of a person […] yet it might have a logically secondary existence […] each of us can quite intelligibly conceive of his or her individual survival of bodily death […] One has simply to think of oneself as having thoughts and memories as at present […] whilst (a) having no perceptions of a body related to one’s experience as one’s own body is, and (b) having no power of initiating changes in the physical condition of the world, such as one at present does with one’s hands, shoulders, feet and vocal chords […] Then two consequences



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follow […] The first is that the strictly disembodied individual is strictly solitary […] The other […] is that in order to retain his idea of himself as an individual, he must always think of himself as disembodied, as a former person […] Since then he has, as it were, no personal life of his own to lead, he must live much in the memories of the personal life he did lead […] In proportion as the memories fade […] to that degree his concept of himself as an individual becomes attenuated. At the limit of attenuation there is, from the point of view of his survival as an individual, no difference between the continuance of experience and its cessation. Disembodied survival, on such terms as these, may well seem unattractive. No doubt it is for this reason that the orthodox have wisely insisted on the resurrection of the body.12

Strawson contends that mind/soul and body are secondary concepts, abstracted from the logically primitive or primary concept of the person. Any kind of ontological mind/body dualism has to be excluded. First, the logical and ontological dependence of states of consciousness upon the body and the material world is established. Furthermore, the body is not defined in terms of materiality in the physical sense of mass-energy equivalences. Strawson’s concepts of the body here rest upon the senses, perception and the use of signs to communicate. Here, a person is defined by the capacity for communicative relationships with other persons, the body being the means of communicative relationships in receptivity and active sign use. The body, not consciousness as such, communicates and perceives. Strawson’s argument is closely akin to the identification of the bearer of intentionality with the body in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Merleau-Ponty’s perception of the living body Husserl had shown that consciousness has an irreducibly relational structure in several respects: it is always intentional, relating to external relata that are not the consciousness both receptively and actively. And these intentional relations always presuppose a structure of temporality, being ordered sequentially.13 From these presuppositions, Merleau-Ponty goes on to identify the bearer of intentionality not with an abstract concept of consciousness, but with the concrete concept of the living body. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the living body follows the method of phenomenological reduction,14 and discerns nine defining characteristics:

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1. The living body is the bearer of perception, action and life such that both mind/body dualism and physicalist reduction of mind are rejected.15 2. The living body is ‘our general medium for having a world’.16 3. The living body is internally related to the living bodies of others such that, ‘[i]t is through my body that I understand other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive “things”’.17 4. The living body can be extended toward the world by external things incorporated in one’s body-scheme, as e.g. in the case of a white cane: ‘The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term.’18

5. The living body is also the ground of the constitution of the perception of space and time, not vice versa: ‘Experience discloses […] a primitive spatiality of which experience is merely the outer covering and which merges with the body’s very being.’19 6. The living body has an open dynamic structure such that it is ‘intervolved in a definite environment’ and able to identify ‘with certain projects and be continually committed to them’.20 7. The living body has, therefore, a dramatic, open narrative dimension.21 8. The living body is the means of being available to one another,22 and at the same time, 9. is withdrawn from one’s personal power of disposal.23 Merleau-Ponty’s living body, in short, is a means of communication.24

The living body in contemporary brain research Contemporary brain research has confirmed Merleau-Ponty’s observations. According to Thomas Fuchs, Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi and others, the brain cannot be seen as an organ of representation, but is an organ of relationships that is imbedded in the living body, which is in turn imbedded irreducibly in its environment.25 The naturalistic tendency to attribute all personal attributes in a representational and neuro-constructivist way to the



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brain as subject is refuted by empirical proof that attributes and processes once attributed to the brain or the mind are in fact properties of the whole resonating system between the living body and its environment. As part of the living body the brain does not fill the role of a substance or substratum, but rather is a necessary organ of coordination. Its role is best pictured like the role of the train station that is a necessary part of the railway network, but has no role apart from that.26 The brain is ineluctably ecological.

The extended mind thesis All these insights fit excellently with the post-analytic philosophical ‘extended-mind thesis’. In a classic article, David Chalmers and Andy Clark claimed that spatially external entities like notebooks can fulfil the same functional role for persons as their own memory and that these relationships to external entities, therefore, belong to the mind as an internally related functional entity. In the original article, Chalmers and Clark speak of an extended mind as well as of extended persons.27 A few years ago, Andy Clark extended his thesis to the body and gave a definition of the body in line with his earlier argumentation: At this point, it may seem as if the body is, just as it happens, the locus of willed action, the point of sensorimotor confluence, the gateway to intelligent offloading, and the stable (though not permanently fixed) platform whose features and relations can be relied upon (without being represented) in the computations underlying some intelligent performances. But I am inclined to go further and to assert not just that this is what the body does but that this (or something quite like it) is what, at least for all cognitive scientific purposes, the body is. I am inclined, that is, to simply identify the body with whatever plays these (and doubtless some additional) roles in the genesis and organization of intelligent behavior.28

Clark seems to parallel Merleau-Ponty’s views but is clearly distinct from them. Clark advocates, reductively, for a functional understanding of the body; furthermore, Clark does not address many of the phenomena discussed by Merleau-Ponty. We have overlap but not equivalency, clearly. Thesis 3 – Incarnation and ascension show that eternal personhood and bodily personhood are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, since the incarnation is

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part of the identity of the Son it also is part of the identity of Triune becoming. Consequently, there is no bodilessness (or disembodiment) of God after the incarnation. Viewed ontically, the death and resurrection of Christ presuppose incarnation as the basis of their saving benefit. Viewed epistemically the matter is reversed: only as the crucified Christ is perceived to be risen for us, only as the saving activity of the Holy Spirit is experienced, is the incarnation acknowledged as a logical interpretative element.29 The incarnation, therefore, was not originally a matter of perception, but of interpretation, indeed necessary interpretation in order to provide dramatic coherence to the story of Christ. Although talk of incarnation may have emerged as an interpretative element of reflexive theology, it necessarily migrated from second order theological speech into the first order speech of the communication of faith. In the biblical witness incarnation does not appear as a theory, but rather narratively in the Christmas legends and in the hymn of John 1 where it expresses immediate praise with worship as its likely Sitz im Leben.30 In becoming part of the story of Christ, incarnation now belongs irreducibly to the story of the Gospel. Thus, for all who come after the very first witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection, incarnation shapes all believers’ experiences of perception just as does the whole story of the Gospel. This development is already visible in the scriptural witness which attests only the logic of the ontic narrative of Christ. To then conceive of the incarnation as an implicate of Christ’s saving death and resurrection is a rational conjecture and construction. This fact does not devaluate the epistemological perspective, and I regard it as a correct hypothesis. But it does not resolve our theological questions about incarnation, questions which arise from the fact that Christians perceive reality in the light of the Gospel and therefore also in the light of incarnation as an irreducible part of the Gospel story. Our theological questions arise as second order questions, as questions of reflection and reasoning in the form of questions like ‘What does incarnation mean?’, ‘How is incarnation possible?’, ‘What are the implications of incarnation for our lives?’, etc. In other words, since God is Creator of the whole person including its faculties of reasoning, perceiving reality does not exclude but rather includes reasoning. Narrative and conceptual approaches do not exclude each other. What is needed is a narrative ontology. What then, does incarnation mean conceptually?



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In the light of Thesis 2, incarnation means that the eternal Son has assumed a second temporal story. The identity of the Son is no longer exclusively determined by his eternal story in his becoming amidst the becomings of Father and Spirit etsi mundus non daretur. His identity is additionally determined by his creatural and temporal story. The person of the Son, i.e. the eternal particular whence-and-whither-becoming of the Logos has assumed a body. This means that all creaturely dimensions of relational becoming including the personal relations to particular other creatural persons and relations to the concrete forms of the a-personal realm now belong to the identity not only of Jesus but also of the Son. The eternal Son therefore is the Jew Jesus living in Palestine in the first century. Assuming the identity of Jesus therefore means assuming a particular and contingent historical story. In the framework of traditional metaphysics, the incarnation causes problems that are expressed more than resolved by the classical two-natures doctrine of Chalcedon. These are problems such as ‘How can a divine, invisible, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient person that is creator become a visible being, spatio-temporally localizable, with restricted power and knowledge, that is at the same time a creature?’ This and similar problems vanish when we shift to thinking in relational narratives of processes and stories. We have seen that eternity possesses the same structure as the created spatio-temporal world. Therefore, being an eternal person of the Trinity does not exclude becoming a created person in time. Becoming in eternity does not exclude becoming in time. And having – or better being – an agent of the divine story does not exclude being an agent of a creatural story. The condition of the possibility of this dramatic coherence is precisely the fact that the spatio-temporal world is created by grace as an image or resonance of the eternal divine being. Essential attributes, like love, fidelity, being personal, etc., can be expressed and lived in the divine story as well as in the creaturely story.31 One might object that there are still some divine attributes – the classical metaphysical ones, like omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, invisibility and immutability – that are inapt for an embodied person. But this is mistaken. The classical metaphysical attributes are attained by a kind of ‘natural’ reasoning remote from the story of the Gospel. One may well doubt that such

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pure ‘natural’ reasoning exists, in fact representing the power of other identity stories to fashion human reasoning. But be that as it may, it is decisive that our knowledge of God begins with the story of the Gospel itself. It is the Gospel story – including incarnation – that determines the meaning of the divine and therefore also the meaning of divine attributes, not the other way around. Following this route, it is easy to see that the attributes of omnipotence and omniscience are not attributes of the divine essence: the divine essence is the divine framework of relations. The divine essence is the divine story to be told, even if there were no creation. In this story it makes no sense to speak of omnipotence and omniscience in the life of the Trinity. Omniscience and omnipotence are only meaningful as relational attributes expressing how the divine story might be related to the creatural story. Therefore, they are certainly relational but not absolute divine attributes. They might be meaningful in the one or the other way, but they belong not to the doctrine of God, but to the doctrine of creation.32 At first glance, the same might also be true with the idea of divine invisibility: it makes no sense to say that Father, Son and Spirit are invisible to each other. Therefore, invisibility cannot be an essential divine predicate. But it could be a relational predicate within the divine and the creaturely story: perhaps the two stories are related such that story B is visible for story A but not vice versa. However, the fact that the invisibility of God is conceivable by way of creatural analogies does not mean that it is factually the case. We would therefore be wise to leave the question of the invisibility of God open. With respect to immutability, everything depends upon what immutability means. The most common answer of contemporary theologians is that immutability is simply not a predicate of the divine, neither essentially nor relatively.33 The divine essence is a story and it necessarily incorporates a kind of change. Further, what takes place between God – who is himself a story – and the world – which is also a story – is itself a story. Changeability is also included here and we cannot maintain the idea of immutability as a relational attribute, as in the case of Aquinas’s ‘Cambridge change’.34 However, immutability has another non-classical meaning which can be attributed to God: whereas the divine persons are changeable in terms of their living the life of a story, the entire divine story itself is an event, or more precisely an open event. But events in themselves are not changeable.35 They are as they are. Events



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incorporate changeability but they are not changeable in themselves: the event of a particular football game includes a lot of motion and change, but as an event it is itself immutable. In the same sense it would be possible to speak of a kind of immutability of God. But on the same score we could also speak of the immutability of the world! This tells against the utility of the idea of immutability. While events are immutable in a specific respect, no event is isolated from others; they are always combined in stories as sequences. And it is hard to imagine a story that is once for all closed. Every story is able to undergo retelling or extension. Therefore stories are also changeable in another respect. For faith, the decisive question is not whether God is immutable but whether God is faithful through change. Stated positively, the incarnation means that the person of the eternal Logos has a body, i.e. that he is part of a multitude of relations in the framework of (a) the natural, (b) the syssomatic (or inter-corporeal) and (c) the self-related dimensions. Furthermore, none of these dimensions are (d) static, but all are dynamic. These dimensions thus contribute to the identity of the eternal Son and therefore also to the identity of the eternal God.

The natural dimension of the Son’s bodiliness With regard to the natural dimension, the incarnate Son becomes subject to physical development as well as to physical decay and disturbance. Christ’s incarnation includes receptivity, exposure to natural effects and contingency. In Jesus Christ, the body is available to others, also to those who want to destroy it and his person. This also means that the body of Christ is withdrawn from its own power of determination. But that is no defect, but precisely an expression of the fact that the body is not only constituted by its relations, but more precisely by relations of love. Further, in the inner-Trinitarian story, love means mutual availability and a withdrawal from autarkic power. Where the perfect love of the divine story does not lead to any conflict, bodily involvement in creaturely temporality means being subject to injury, at least under the conditions of a fallen world. Since the body is a system resonating between physical organism and environment, it can be asked how far the body of Christ is extended into the natural world. The most radical and perhaps fascinating thought is here Niels

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H. Gregersen’s notion of deep incarnation: Gregersen adopts the term ‘deep incarnation’ as an answer to Arne Naess’s philosophy of ‘deep ecology’.36 He shares with Naess the objection of anthropocentrism, but at the same time criticizes Naess for sacralizing of the whole system without weighing the interests of particular beings involved in the biological system.37 At the same time, Gregersen tries to correct a post-Kantian move in theology – e.g. visible in Schleiermacher – which divides humans between nature and culture and sees biology as the basis of sin rather than of salvation.38 Gregersen starts from the observation that the New Testament never says that God became human, but that God became flesh.39 Contrasting Schleiermacher, he says: ‘Christology is here as much about the biology of growth, vulnerability, and decay as about the heights of religious awareness and as much about the world of creation as about Jesus as human individual.’40 This means that the divine Logos has assumed the ‘whole malleable matrix of materiality’,41 since in ancient Greek thought the notion of the body covered the whole flux of material beings: In modern translation, sarx [Jn 1] would cover the whole realm of the material world from quarks to atoms and molecules, in their combinations and transformations throughout chemical and biological evolution […] In Christ, God is conjoining all creatures and enters into the biological tissue of creation itself in order to share the fate of biological existence. God becomes Jesus, and in him God becomes human, and (by implication) foxes, and sparrows, grass and soil.42

His extensive interpretation of John 1.1-14 relies on the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of philosophical preconditions in the New Testament by Troels Engberg-Pedersen and others,43 which stress the Stoic background of terms like ‘logos’‚ ‘body’, ‘pneuma’.44 The Logos should be seen as the ‘divine informational resource’,45 which explains the ‘unity of differentiation and structure within the cosmos’.46 Adapting these ideas Gregersen applies them to the incarnated logos, not to the logos asarkos: Where Christians departed from the Stoics was in their insistence on the pre-material status of the divine Logos […] the later Alexandrian distinction between the immaterial Logos “in the beginning” (logos asarkos) and the incarnate Logos “in the midst of time” (logos ensarkos) is to some extent supported by the logic of the text itself of John’s Prologue. The Christian tradition here retained a Jewish sense of God’s transcendence (1Kgs 8:27), while



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balancing this “Platonizing” element with a strong “Stoicizing” doctrine of the incarnation of the Logos: “And the Logos became flesh (sarx)” (John 1:24).47

John 1.1-14 is, therefore, seen as a witness of a deep incarnation in which the ‘most high […] and the very lowest […] are united in the process of incarnation’.48 But deep incarnation not only means that the Logos became the whole of nature. Several other claims are integral to the argument. First, incarnation refers not simply to the event of becoming a human being, but to the process of the whole life of Jesus including his death.49 Second, Jesus is not only the second Adam, but also the second Job in assuming pain.50 Given that, third, whatever ‘is touched by Christ will not remain unaltered’,51 after Christ’s crucifixion no sparrow dies without the Son of God. Fourth, the body of the risen Christ is not only the church, but it is present ‘also at the very core of material existence’ because ‘the death of Jesus fulfills the self-divesting nature of the divine Logos for all sentient and suffering beings, human or animal’.52 And fifth, God in Christ bears the costs involved in a complex world in which ‘what is unique and precious is bound to disintegrate in the end’.53 The notion of deep incarnation has found a strong positive echo in recent years54 and I do not want to criticize it in any significant way. One might worry that this account leads to a sacramentalization of nature. Gregersen speaks not of a direct incarnation of Christ in nature, but of one by implication and that is precisely what we mean with the body as a system of resonance in the functional circuit between physical organism and environment. One other criticism might remain: the term ‘deep incarnation’ could be misleading if not seen specifically as an answer to Naess, suggesting perhaps that there could also be something like ‘shallow incarnation’. This is certainly not the case. As the assumption of a body, incarnation is not a matter of degrees; either there is incarnation or not. Incarnation is always ‘deep incarnation’. Perhaps this suggests that Gregersen’s thinking about incarnation is not novel, but simply highlights resources available in the theological tradition. But now we must extend the natural dimension of the Son’s bodiliness in Jesus further: 1. Maintaining the idea of the body’s receptivity, we have to go further into the relationship between Christ’s body and space. There is no question

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that bodiliness and spatio-temporality belong somehow together. However, Merleau-Ponty had the idea that the objective space in which the body is situated presupposes and is constituted by a primordial space. This primordial space was a dimension or function of the body. This can be correct, but only if applied to the bodiliness of Christ: it is the body of Christ that creates its own space, whereas all other bodies are dependent on space being constituted for them. In the incarnation, the space constituted by the body of Christ and creaturely space overlap because natural space is created by Christ as the logos of creation. I suggest that we interpret ‘He came unto his own’ (Jn. 1.11) spatially: all creaturely spaces are spaces created by the bodiliness of the incarnated Christ. While creatures did not and may not acknowledge that the space of creation is an effect of the incarnation of the Son, space remains a function of Christ’s bodiliness, not the other way around.55 2. If this is so, then it is not enough to extend the idea of incarnation to the whole span of Christ’s life unto death. Incarnation is not reversed by the resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the Father. On the contrary, the ascension is part of the process of bodily incarnation. Luther interpreted the right hand of the Father as a trope for divine omnipresence and therefore declared that ascension and heavenly session mean that Christ’s human nature and body also partake in divine omnipresence.56 If it is true that the body of Christ creates its own space, then this is no mystery: all spaces and times are immediate to Christ’s body, and therefore, all created bodies are related immediately to the person of Christ in an embodied way. 3. Thus, the sacramental bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper are part of Christ’s body, just as the church and the wider natural realm are also the body of Christ. However, since fallen humans are displaced, they cannot recognize this; the factual co-presence of the risen Christ at any spatiotemporal location is a possibility that has to be actualized in concrete acts like the proclamation of the Gospel in word and sacrament. The eschatical destiny is the complete bodily co-presence of Christ and creatures, i.e. the transformation of nature into grace57 or the lifting of the story of nature fully into the divine story.58 4. Recalling that bodiliness always means being primarily receptive and only secondarily reactive, we observe that Christ is not the only agent in



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the story of God and his creation. Indeed, the agent initiating the process of incarnation is not the person of the Son, but the person of the Holy Spirit, something expressed narratively in the Christmas story and set out in the confessions of faith. The Holy Spirit that presents Christ to Mary in a bodily way is the same agent who presents Christ bodily to believers in word and sacrament, and who unites them bodily to the body of Christ. This does not mean that the Holy Spirit is actually incarnate, but that no incarnation is possible without the Holy Spirit. Elsewhere I have suggested we might express this by describing the activity of the Holy Spirit as ‘concarnation’.59 5. If this conception of the natural dimension of embodied incarnation is correct, then incarnation is not a kind of post-lapsarian divine crisis management: the incarnation would belong to creation even if there were no fall. The incarnation is the centre of creation and therefore its anticipatory perfection.

The syssomatic dimension of the Son’s bodiliness The Son’s incarnated bodiliness also involves syssomatism or inter-corporeality. This inter-corporeality not only refers to the mother–child dyad during his childhood. And it does not only refer to the people he knew during the course of his life. Rather, it must be extended to the church and to all embodied persons. By syssomatism, we name the fact that other bodies are constitutive for my body and vice versa without reducing the alterity of the other bodies such that even where other bodies resonate with mine only in harmful disharmony, they do so in a syssomatic way. For Christ, this means that in the end not only the church, but also bodies that reject and harm the body of Christ and bodies that are not aware of the presence of the body of Christ belong to his very body. It is precisely this feature that enables salvation. At this point we have to correct those traditional views that claim the Logos assumed a kind of ideal, sinless humanity. With Luther we have to say that the assumption of the body precisely means the assumption of dis-placed or fallen bodiliness; it means partaking in a disturbed creatural story that affects the very personal identity of the Son. For Luther, the assumption of a sinful

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human nature was the very heart of the Gospel, as he explains in commenting upon Galatians 3.13: In sum: [Christ is the one] who has had and has carried everyone’s sins in his body. Not because he has committed them by himself, but because he has assumed the sins committed by us in his body […] We must really involve Christ and recognize that because he is involved in flesh and blood he is also involved in sin, blasphemy, death and all our evil […] All sins whatsoever I, you, and we all have ever done and will ever do, they are Christ’s property, as if he had done them by himself. In sum, our sin has to become Christ’s own sin, or we are lost eternally […] Ps 40:12: ‘For innumerable evils have compassed me about.’ And Ps 41:4: “I said, Lord, be merciful unto me: heal my soul; for I have sinned against thee.” And Ps 69:5: “O God, you know my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee.” In these Psalms the Holy Spirit speaks in the person of Christ and witnesses in manifest words that he sinned or has sins […] And this is all our consolation, that Christ wears and is involved in my, your and the whole world’s sins.60

If we take the assumption of a fallen body seriously it implies that sin is not identical with guilt; that sin might originate among interpersonal relations, but since there are no creaturely interpersonal relations that are not at the same time syssomatic or intercorporeal, sin harms primarily bodies, not minds; that if Jesus partakes in his incarnation bodily on disturbed or fallen bodiliness, and if Christ’s body is syssomatic to all created persons at any time and place, then also non-believers partake in the extended body of Christ; further it suggests that if Jesus partakes in fallen bodiliness, the atonement also has to be conceived as a bodily endeavour, such that its effects in justification and sanctification also have to be embodied effects.61

The self-related dimension of the Son’s bodiliness Since the texts of the gospels tell us absolutely nothing about Christ’s inner life and his states of consciousness, rendering Christology with the help of any ontology of consciousness might be of doubtful value. However, there must be a self-relating dimension to Christ’s bodiliness and therefore also a dimension of awareness. At this point we can only speculate and the value of the following suggestion may be questionable: if sin consists in a disturbance of the creaturely framework, if sin resonates with one’s personhood in



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a disharmonic rather than harmonic way, if sin is the perversion of love, and if sin means being curved in upon oneself, then as a consequence of sin we cannot be aware of our bodily constitution as syssomatic or inter-corporeal. Perhaps we might infer by reason that we are syssomatic or inter-corporeal bodies, but we do not feel and are not immediately aware of being syssomatic. Hence we do not really experience and know another’s pain, though we may abstractly infer it. If fallenness consists in being sinful and being guilty, and if the Son has assumed in Christ sinful nature without becoming guilty, does this mean that Christ’s bodiliness is subject to an awareness of syssomatism by reasonable inference or by immediate awareness? I would suggest the second alternative for it reflects Jesus’ divinity, i.e. his participation in the inner-divine story. If this is correct, then an effect of Christ’s bodiliness as the eternal Son would be that he is able to feel every pain of any embodied creature immediately. And therefore, Christ’s bodiliness is nearer to my own bodiliness than is my own consciousness.

The narrative dimension of the Son’s bodiliness All bodily dimensions of the incarnated Christ – the natural, the syssomatic and the self-related – are dynamic epitomes of relatedness. The body of Christ is not a point, but a kind of line. It is a story that frames all partial creaturely narrating. If we are right to think of the incarnation of the Son as irreversible, then his risen and ascended body is also part of the real body. And the eschatical body of the parousia is also an integral part of the body of Christ. But we have to go further: not only is the person of the Son involved in his incarnated life, but so too is the Person of the Holy Spirit. The Person of the Holy Spirit is not incarnated, but his concarnating activity enables Christ’s embodiment: it enables Christ’s embodiment in the birth of Jesus, it enables the resurrection of the crucified body and the dead person of the Son, and it enables Christ’s co-presence in word and sacrament. Incarnation, including its receptive and contingent elements, belongs to Christ’s body, and Christ’s body belongs to Christ’s identity. The identity of Christ in its temporal narration is at the same time the identity of the eternal Son in the eternal narrative of God. Therefore, incarnation affects the very essence of the divine story. Eberhard Jüngel once declared that there is ‘no humanlessness of God’.62

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Pressing further we must say that after incarnation there is no bodilessness of God! This also means that the story of God and the story of creation are entangled inseparably. The idea that God’s essence would also be a story etsi mundus non daretur is a regulative, but counterfactual rule. The decisive word is the etsi, the ‘as if ’: it was not necessary for God to create a story different from Godself; it was not necessary to create this or any other world for God to be God. God would be also a framework of whence-and-whither-becomings in love without the world. But there is a world. And the basis of creation, therefore, can only be pure grace. But given that there is a world and that there is incarnation, the bodily identity of the world also affects the identity of God in eternity. That will sound risky. Being entangled with the story of the world by the embodiment of the Son, the identity of God also changes. But what does not change are the essential attributes of love and faithfulness of the divine becoming. Divine as well as creaturely becoming have a destiny, namely to become fully resonant with the risen Christ. The risen Christ still has scars as signs of his identity. But scars are not wounds. They do not hurt anymore. The scars of the risen Christ’s body are marks of his beauty.63 Thesis 4 – The defining context or story of what a living body can be is the story of Christ. Creaturely bodies are bodies not in an identical, but rather in a resonating way. The destiny of creatural bodies is to become what the body of Christ already is: a spiritual body. Obviously, what is assumed in incarnation, retained in resurrection, ascension and parousia, is of eschatical (or ultimate) value and represents the only possibility for human personal becoming. As the Son has assumed a body, so also creaturely personal becomings are always bodily becomings in all dimensions. However, there are differences between human bodiliness and the bodiliness of the Son. Like the Son’s bodiliness, human bodiliness is more a dynamic narrative of becoming than anything timelessly substantial. And like the Son’s bodiliness human bodiliness is the epitome of the dimensions of natural, syssomatic and self-related relations. And like the Son’s bodiliness, human activity always means reactivity on the basis of prevalent receptivity. And also like the Son’s bodiliness, human bodiliness is bound to space and time. However, unlike the



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Son’s bodiliness, the kind of the constitutive relationship between the body and space-time is reversed. Merleau-Ponty observed that human bodies are not simply in the world, but to the world; they are not simply in time, but to time. This means that time belongs constitutively to the body. From this he concluded that the primordial or constitutive space – and we can also add primordial and constitutive time – is a function of the body, not vice versa (as discussed). However, is this really still phenomenology in the sense of a description of phenomena? Or does Merleau-Ponty here introduce some hidden ontological commitments? I think both are the case. My very existence as a body implies time and space. But the time and space implied by my body is factual, coinciding with the ‘objective’ space and time that can be described by the third-person perspective of the general theory of relativity.64 Factually, the affections and use of my body often create an arrhythmic coincidence between perceived time and objective time, revealed in the phenomena of boredom and hectic rush. In reality, space and time are not constituted by our creaturely bodies. But with regard to the Son of God, the relationship is the other way around: the Son’s body constitutes its own space and time, which has to be seen as identical with created space and time. Incarnation as a process, then, starts not with Christmas, but with creation. Another distinguishing feature consists in the fact that while the risen body of Christ is still the body of sinful bodiliness, it is one of healed sinful bodiliness. And the healing of sinful or harmed bodiliness happens precisely in a way that is in accordance with the primordial constitution of the body. The primordial constitution of the body does not consist in the fact that we are able to behave actively in a motor-like way or that our body provides the possibility of active self-awareness. The primordial constitution of the body is the fact that the body in all its dimensions is always given. Any activity presupposes receptivity. In the case of Christ, the same is the case and the author of Christ’s bodiliness is identified in the story of the Gospel as the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit, who resurrects the crucified Christ according to Paul (Rom. 1.4; 8.11) by his self-surrender to the dead Son65 is also the agent behind Christ’s healed bodiliness of resurrection, ascension and parousia. Christ’s bodiliness resonates at all times with these conditions of its constitution, whereas we contradict these conditions in our constitution most of the

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time. Far more, a consequence of sin is not only harm but also the ignorance of the origin of our bodiliness. Since we do not know the Holy Spirit as the author of our bodiliness, we (unlike Christ) are not able to live a life of embodied personal becoming in harmonic resonance with the Holy Spirit. To use the body in a harmonic resonance with the origins of bodiliness in the Holy Spirit is to have a spiritual body, i.e. one completely determined by its relationship from and to the Holy Spirit. Not only Christ’s resurrected body, therefore, but also his body during Jesus’ lifetime has always been a spiritual body. This concept of a spiritual body corresponds, by the way, with Paul’s understanding of a spiritual body in Romans 15: the word ‘spiritual’ does not say anything about the material or energetic structure of this new body. It does not try to describe a Lichtleib, some sort of concentration of light or energy. Nor does it convey that this new body is composed of miniature particles of matter, as the Stoics would have described the pneuma (spirit). For him [Paul], the term ‘spiritual’ emphasizes that God’s Spirit is the only force that creates the new body. The creation of this new body is totally beyond all the possibilities of the present nature and creation. Is this all we can say about Paul’s concept of the ‘spiritual body’? We can be a little more specific about one particular point: God’s Spirit (pneuma), which is the only force that creates the new spiritual (pneumatic) body, already dwells in Christians now (Rom. 8.9–11.23). This pneumatological statement presents an interesting piece of realized eschatology – in spite of all the emphasis on the future aspect of resurrection; the external force that will resurrect us is already in us. However, although perceived as a force inherent in the Christian, the pneuma is not a human force, not an anthropological factor of the natural person, but given to him or her as a gift of grace.66 For this reason, Lampe concludes that the spiritual body of the resurrected will be ‘something “unnatural”, that is, something beyond the possibilities inherent in the present creation. It will be part of a new creation with new possibilities’, since as Paul envisages it, the post-resurrection body ‘will transcend the earthly body in the same way that a beautiful, intricate plant transcends the plain seed of grain’.67 A spiritual body is really a body, i.e. a centre in a multitude of natural, syssomatic and self-related relations, but one whose reactivity in all these dimensions is exclusively driven by the Holy Spirit, who is the constitutive



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origin of resurrected bodiliness, as well as the bodiliness of Jesus and of bodiliness in general. Paul surely is right in declaring that our resurrected body will transcend all possibilities inherent in nature. But precisely this is the case with Jesus’ body, a fact expressed in a narrative way in Jesus’ conception by the Holy Spirit. It is because the Spirit is the Spirit of unimaginable possibilities that we do not know of what shape a resurrected spiritual body would be. Moreover, the vivification of a figure made out of clay by God’s breath in Genesis 2.7b narratively renders the claim that all natural bodiliness is also made by the Spirit and by grace. Nature itself, from the beginning on, is graciously made by the Spirit; this is precisely what a Christian understanding of creatio ex nihilo implies. Nevertheless, nature remains nature and is called into co-creativity with its Creator. But this co-creativity has to be a harmonic resonance with nature’s relational constitution by the Spirit. If this harmonic resonance is lost, both nature and bodiliness are thereby estranged. Talk of the spiritual body makes plain that nature and bodiliness are more than merely immanent. We should then correct Peter Lampe’s interpretation of Paul’s grain–plant analogy: the point is not that, as a transformed body, the resurrected body has become a spiritual one. Rather, because Jesus’ body on earth also has to be seen as a spiritual body the point is that if natural bodies are also constituted by the Spirit, and if created persons lead their lives in harmonic resonance with Christ (syn Christo), then the possibilities of bodiliness are able to transcend all natural availability and can surprise us only in a radically retrospective68 way. This stage of a spiritual body, however, can only be achieved in resonance to Christ’s body. And as Christ’s body is a story including decay and resurrection, we can only attain a spiritual body – i.e. a body not only constituted by the Holy Spirit, but which is accompanied by the concarnating activity of the Holy Spirit permanently and in all its dimensions – by harmonically resonating Christ. And that means nothing other than that we have to undergo death: the complete dissolution of our body, the means of our personhood. Death, therefore, can be seen as the confirmation of justification,69 because in death there can be no more hope in intra-natural possibilities. If it were possible to show scientifically that there are possibilities of eternal life in nature, Christian hope – and I would also think Christian faith as such – would be falsified. The eschatical hope that we might have the same form as Christ in becoming a spiritual body is only eschatical, i.e.

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ultimate hope at all, if it is not grounded on extrapolations from any natural horizon of expectation. We cannot imagine what the spiritually resurrected body will be precisely because its concrete ‘shape’ can only be an absolutely retrospective surprise.70 However, the fact that we will rise with a spiritual body is not an absolute, but only relative retrospective surprise. It is not an absolutely retrospective surprise, because within our eschatical horizon of experience is the certainty of the resurrection of Christ as an irreducible part of the story of the Gospel that shapes our perception. Therefore, that we will rise is expected in hope by faith. How it will feel to be resurrected or how to conceive of this body, remains an absolutely retrospective surprise.

III/The resonating body in triune eternity Thesis 5 – Resonating bodies will be and are already are living in triune eternity.

Resonating bodies will live in triune eternity As unimaginable as the resurrected spiritual body of creaturely persons might be, it is not completely inconceivable. Some formal features can be derived by implication from Christ’s spiritual body. First, the spiritual body is to be a body including the multitude of relationships, the natural, the syssomatic and the self-related ones. Second, the resurrected body is still a means of communication. And third, the resurrected body is still a narration, a process of life. We said becoming a spiritual body like Christ means being determined in all these dimensions by the Holy Spirit, which is identical with being in immediate communication with the Holy Spirit. It means that our life story has to be at the same time the life story of the Trinity, just as the story of Jesus is at one and the same time the story of the eternal Son. Obviously, this is only possible, if we – our temporal story and stories – are able to participate in divine eternity. Our story has to be lifted into the eternal story, not by nature, but by grace. To communicate by grace immediately with the persons of the Trinity can be expressed by the traditional concept of theosis.71 When our stories become a part of the eternal story of the Trinity, this also means that the frame of our personal individuation becomes the Trinity. We will



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be individuated in God, in eternity, not in space and time. This is possible because eternity has the same structure that is able to individuate by the means of being a communicative relation of order – like time, as we have seen before. This kind of eternalization of our spatio-temporal story into God cannot be dated. It makes no sense to date it from the point of view of time at the end of time or at the death of particular persons. It makes no sense because eternity and time might share the same logical structure, but eternity in contrast to time lacks a metric.72 Freed from fantastic speculation, the conceptual content of an eternalization at the end of history and of an eternalization at the end of the particular person in death are the same, as I have shown elsewhere.73

Resonating bodies are living already in triune eternity But we press further. To say that ‘Our stories can be lifted into the eternal story of God’ is the same as to say ‘Our bodies will be transformed into spiritual bodies’, which means ‘We will be individuated by the eternal, intra-Trinitarian framework’. But the last sentence contains a problem: our eschatical life will be individuated by the eternal relationships of being and becoming in immediate communication within the Trinity. This means that the principle of our personal identity is the complex of immediate relations between the divine persons. But what is the ‘we’ in this sentence? Does not this ‘we’ presuppose that we are already individuated? And obviously, we are able to identify each other and ourselves in our life stories in space-time. And if we are able to identify others and ourselves by narrative means or deictic means in spacetime, do we not already have to be individuated? If this were true, there would have to be one objective story of space-time, one objective relation of order that can provide this individuation. But perhaps this is precisely what is not the case. This can be shown with the help of different approaches: 1. We can use particular stories in order to identify others and ourselves, but these stories vary: different people tell differing stories which identify the self-same people differently. And we can also err in our telling of identifying stories. We cannot recount our own autobiography. And no one can give the biography of the world. We have only fragments of

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stories, and cannot make a dramatically coherent grand narrative out of these fragments by ourselves. From the point of view of our natural abilities, it seems that Lyotard is right: we are at the end of all grand narratives.74 But this inability to tell encompassing narratives and to identify ourselves thereby appears less a characteristic of our postmodern age than a feature of our general spatio-temporal becoming. 2. The third-person perspective of natural science also confirms that it is not possible to individuate spatio-temporal things spatio-temporally.75 Quantum physics is one of the best-confirmed theories including its principle of spatio-temporal uncertainty. But one of its consequences is that on the basic level, physical ‘things’, i.e. matter–energy equivalences, are not individuated at all. Different quarks are not really ‘different’; they cannot be individuated or identified. They are somehow relata of processes that might be identifiable in broader frames of reference, but not in themselves. The uncertainty principle affects matter-energyequivalences in space-time but it also affects space-time itself (with the notions of Planck-time and Planck-space76). As a result, we confront a basic paradox: despite the fact that we are identifying ourselves, others and unanimated things spatio-temporally either through deictic acts or by narrative identity description, it is impossible to be individuated spatio-temporally. As a conclusion, only two alternatives remain: either we (i.e. our bodies and anything else spatio-temporally identifiable) are not individuated at all; or else we (i.e. our bodies and anything else spatio-temporally identifiable) are individuated, but not in a spatio-temporal way. Seen in a theological perspective both claims are meaningful. To the first, if we are not individuated at all now, but only will be individuated in the triune eternity in ‘the future’, this means a reversal of what only seems to be evident. It is not what is hereand-now that is actual, and the perfection of the kingdom of God in triune eternity that is what is possible, but precisely the other way round: what is here-and-now is only possibility, and that which is to come is the actual. It is not the here-and-now that is reality and what is coming that is unrealized, but what is coming is (eschatical) reality and the here-and-now the unrealized. It is not the future that is uninformed, but rather the present that is uninformed.



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For example, Martin Luther went precisely this way: ‘The philosophers bound their eyes so much into the presence of things, that they only can perceive their essence and attributes, but the apostle calls our eyes from the glance to the present things, from essence and its accidents, and directs them to that, what things really are – in future.’77 Therefore, humans of this life are pure potentialities for the life of their future form. In the same way as the whole creation – now submitted to the void – is potential matter for God in order to realize its future glorious form.This is not simply an ontology of realization. A dramatic development of the possibilities, a determinative force for the possibilities of the here-and-now for the future would be possible, and a judgement would be necessary in order to pronounce not only continuity but also discontinuity. To the second alternative: the view that, we are already individuated but not in a spatio-temporal way would be expressed if we assume that we are individuated by the space of the body of the incarnated Christ. Since it is the body of Christ, it is understandable that we are already individuated: we are never more real than in hearing the proclamation of the Word and in enjoying the sacraments; we are never more real than in being part of the church of the body of Christ; we are never more real than in faith; we are never more real than in the co-presence with the spiritual body of Christ. But since our bodies are not yet transformed into spiritual bodies, we can only grasp our reality and reality in general in faith and by hope. Faith and hope, then, would not be diminished kinds of knowledge, but privileged ones. We would be individuated and real precisely insofar as we are syssomatic with the body of Christ. This possibility would also allow the possibility of the radical rupture of the judgement. Ultimately, we need not decide between the two possibilities, in fact they may be taken to amount to the same thing. Since persons and their bodies are not particles or places in space independent of time, and since there are no beings independent of the sequences they are undergoing – but becomings or stories – the alternative between the two vanishes: I am living now in the presence of triune eternity in a mediated way by the proclamation of the gospel in word and sacrament and I will live immediately in communication in triune eternity. ‘I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor

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depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Rom. 8.38f.).

Notes 1 Markus Mühling, T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Eschatology, J. AdamsMassmann and D. A. Gillard, trans. (London: T&T Clark, 2015), 80–102. 2 Markus Mühling, Resonances: Neurobiology, Evolution and Theology. Evolutionary Niche Construction, the Ecological Brain and Relational-Narrative Theology (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 121–36. 3 Mühling, Resonances, 170–7, and Markus Mühling, Liebesgeschichte Gott. Systematische Theologie in Konzept (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013). 4 Markus Mühling, ‘The Eschatical Perfection of the World in God’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 13 (2011), 213–14. 5 Mühling, Resonances, 177–80. 6 The concept of the person as particular whence-and-whither becoming is influenced by the concept of incommunicabilis existentia in Richard St. Victor, de Trin. 4:18 and by Ramon Llull’s substitution of essences by activities. See Tim Ingold, Life of Lines (London: Routledge, 2015), 115–29. For a detailed discussion of human personhood, see Mühling, Resonances, 184–7. 7 W. H. Schmidt, ‘Anthropologische Begreffe in Altes Testament’, Evangelische Theologie 24 (1964), 374–88. 8 However, sometimes soma appears where one would expect the Pauline notion of sarx (Rom. 7.24, 8.10f.) and in other texts Paul follows more traditional uses. 9 Peter Lampe, ‘Paul’s Concept of a Spiritual Body’, in T. Peters, R. Russell and M. Welker, eds, Resurrection. Theological and Scientifical Assessments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 103–14. 10 Tomas Fuchs, Das Gehirn – ein Beziehungsorgan. Eina phänomenologischökologische Konzeption (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007), 198. 11 For the idea of the functional circuit cf. Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretische Biologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 150. 12 P. F. Strawson, Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959), 115f. The 2011 movie ‘Perfect Sense’ by the Scottish director David Mackenzie can be interpreted as an elaborated model of this thought experiment. 13 For an interpretation of Husserl’s concept of intentionality in the framework of



14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24

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his theory of the experience of time cf. Yvonne Förster-Beuthan, Zeiterfahrung und Ontologie. Perspektiven moderner Zeitphilosophie (München: Fink, 2012), 32–52. Another question is, whether and in what way and to what amount perception is driven by ontological commitments, which has to be formed in the process of narrative traditions as human becoming’s ‘second nature’. Cf. John McDowell, Mind and World. With a New Introduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 84–6. If this assumption is correct, phenomenology is no ontology-free area, precisely because there are nothing like ontology-free areas. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002), 162, 170, 261, 229f., 501f. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 216. Ibid., 165, cf. 166: ‘To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body.’ Ibid., 17. For Merleau-Ponty’s conception of time see Yvonne Förster-Beuthan, Zeiterfahrung und Ontologie. Perspektiven moderner Zeitphilosophie (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012), 162–7. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 94. Ibid., 115, 120, 114f. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1966), 405. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 104: ‘but my body itself is a thing which I do not observe: in order to be able to do so, I should need the use of a second body which itself would be unobservable’. Ibid., 106: ‘Thus the permanence of one’s own body … led it to the body no longer conceived as an object of the world, but as our means of communication with it, to the world no longer conceived as a collection of determinate objects, but as the horizon latent in all our experience and itself ever-present and anterior to every determining thought.’ Cf. Fuchs, Das Gehirn, 198; Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind (London: Routledge, 2013); Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); and for an analysis and a dicussion with theology see Mühling, Resonances, 36–85. Mühling, Resonances, 52–83. Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’, Analysis 58 (1998), 10–23.

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28 Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind. Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 206–29 Cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematische Theologie II (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 410. 30 Cf. Jürgen Becker, Das Evangelium nach Johannes, vol. 1 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1991), 81–104. 31 For the understanding of the attributes of God see Mühling, T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Eschatology, 74–5. 32 Cf. Gottfried Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk. Darstellung der evangelischlutherischen Dogmatik vom Mittelpunkte der Christologie aus. Erster Theil (Erlangen: Theodor Bläsing, 1853), 47–54; and Mühling, Resonances, 175–7. 33 Cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematische Theologie II (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 472–3; Jürgen Moltmann, Der gekreuzigte Gott. Das Kreuz Christi als Grund und Kritik christlicher Theologie (Gütersloh: Kaiser, Gütersloher Verl.-Haus, 2002), 255–9; Jürgen Moltmann, In der Geschichte des dreieinigen Gottes. Beiträge zur trinitarischen Theologie (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1991), 18; Michael Welker, Gottes Offenbarung. Christologie (Neukirchen– Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2012), 165; Eberhard Jüngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1980), 511; Philipp Stoellger, Passivität aus Passion. Zur Problemgeschichte einer ‘categoria non grata’ (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010) 130–1. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Radikale Theologie (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2010), 150, however sees immutability implied by God’s faithfulness. 34 Cf. Peter T. Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 91. 35 Cf. Edmund Runggaldier, Was sind Handlungen? Eine philosophische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Naturalismus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1996), 36; Markus Mühling, Gott ist Liebe. Studien zum Verständnis der Liebe als Modell des trinitarischen Redens von Gott (Marburg: Elwert, 2005), 306f. 36 Developed in Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 37 Niels Henrik Gregersen, ‘Deep Incarnation: Why Evolutionary Continuity Matters in Christology’, Toronto Journal of Theology, 178, cf. 185: ‘The holistic notion of the interconnectedness of all things must be balanced by a sense of the frailty of individuality, of the uniqueness of human life, of the singularity of each sparrow, and of the particular beauties of lilies, of grass, and of weeds.’ 38 Ibid., 175. 39 Ibid., 174. 40 Ibid., 175.



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41 Ibid., 176. 42 Ibid., 177, 182. 43 See, e.g. Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9–38. 44 Gregersen, ‘Deep Incarnation’, 178–81. 45 Ibid., 180. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 181. 48 Ibid., 182. Gregersen shows that there are also Pauline and synoptic correlates to this Johannine idea, see 182–5. 49 Ibid., 183. 50 Ibid., 184. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 185. 54 Cf. e.g. Jan-Olav Henriksen, Life, Love and Hope. God and Human Experience (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014), 225–34; Celia DeaneDrummond, Christ and Evolution. Wonder and Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 128–59, 178–80; Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation. God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 75–7; Denis Edwards, Ecology at the Heart of Faith (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006), 58–60. 55 Of course this can only be said in a trinitarian framing of theology, see Mühling, T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Eschatology, 131–2. 56 Cf. Markus Mühling, ‘Ascension of Christ IV: History of Dogma and Dogmatics: Protestantism, Religion Past and Present’, in Hans Dieter Betz et al., eds, Religion Past and Present (RPP), vol. 1, 14 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2011), IV.2. 57 Cf. Henriksen, Life, Love and Hope, pos. 6401. 58 Markus Mühling, Resonances: Neurobiology, Evolution and Theology. Evolutionary Niche Construction, the Ecological Brain and Relational-Narrative Theology (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 195. 59 Cf. Markus Mühling, ‘The Incarnation of the Word and the Concarnation of the Spirit as Modes of Divine Activty’, in Anselm K. Min and Christoph Schwöbel, eds, Word and Spirit. Renewing Christology and Pneumatology in a Globalizing World (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 29–45. 60 Martin Luther, Martin Luthers Werke (WA) (Weimar, 1883–2009), 401, 433, 32–434b,12; 434, 26–8; 435, 28–436,13; 435, 28–436, 13; 436, 24–6. 61 Cf. Henriksen, Life, Love and Hope, 318–22.

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62 Cf. Eberhard Jüngel, ‘... keine Menschenlosigkeit Gottes … Zur Theologie Karl Barths zwischen Theismus und Atheismus’, Evangelische Theologie 31 (1971), 376–94. 63 Mühling, T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Eschatology, 150. 64 Cf. Albert Einstein, Grundzüge der Relativitätstheorie (Berlin–Heidelberg: Springer, 2002). 65 Cf. Markus Mühling, Versöhnendes Handeln – Handeln in Versöhnung. Gottes Opfer an die Menschen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 333–4. 66 Lampe, ‘Spiritual Body’, 108–10. 67 Ibid., 106–7. 68 Mühling, T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Eschatology, 32–5. 69 Ibid., 214–18. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 299 and Anastasius vom Sinai, Wegweiser (Viae Dux Adversus Acephalos), PG 89 (Paris, 1865), 36. 72 Cf. Richard Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 72–9 and Mühling, T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Eschatology, 98–101. 73 Mühling, ‘Eschatical Perfection’. 74 John-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 9–16. 75 Mühling, Liebesgeschichte Gott, 204–12. 76 Ibid., 209–10. 77 Luther, M., WA 56, 371,1–6: Quia philosophi oculum ita in presentiam rerum immergunt, vt solum quidditates et qualitates earum speculentur, Apostolus autem oculos nostros reuocat ab intuitu rerum praesentium, ab essentia et accidentibus earum, et dirigit in eas, secundum quod futurae sunt; and WA 39/I, 177, 3–5; Quare homo huius vitae est pura materia Dei ad futurae formae suae vitam. Sicut et tota creatura, nunc subiecta vanitati, materia Deo est ad gloriosam futuram suam formam. For Luther’s eschatology see Markus Mühling, ‘Eschatologie’ and ‘Geschichte/Geschichtsauffassung’ in Das Luther-Lexicon (Regensburg: Bückle & Böhm, Verlag, 2014), s.v.

4

Angels and Immortality Donald Wood

Immortality is neither a primary nor a simple concept in Christian theology. In topically ordered presentations of the Christian faith, it has three principal employments: it has a role in the doctrine of God, where it rests on teaching about the oneness and the fullness of the divine life, and where it is associated most closely with teaching about the divine aseity and immutability. It is used in the doctrine of creation in reference to the original constitution of those creatures – angels and human beings – intended for rational and voluntary fellowship with God. And it features complexly in discussion of the final end of human and angelic creatures. A theology of immortality that aspires to systematic coherence and to a materially fitting expository sequence must attend to each of these uses in turn and to all in concert, each in its right place with a view to the organic unity of the whole. The interest of what follows lies centrally in asking how the language of immortality takes form in Christian teaching about rational creatures and, in particular, angelic creatures. This is, it need hardly be emphasized, a widely neglected theme, not least in those modern Protestant dogmatics in which a principled interest in the christological and soteriological coordinates of the faith is coupled to a cultivated anxiety about the richly adorned angelologies of medieval art, piety and doctrine. The reasons for the widespread decline of serious interest in the angels are manifold and complex and they need not detain us here. For our purposes, two things will suffice: firstly, to observe that the locus de angelis is of special methodological significance, revealing in a distinctive way (also in its absence or in its austerity) something of the spiritual tenor, the doctrinal convictions and the procedural commitments

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that animate any given presentation of the faith.1 And, secondly, to recall Calvin’s exhortation: ‘if we desire to recognize God from his works, we ought by no means to overlook such an illustrious and noble example’ as the angels, but rather ‘lift up our minds higher than our eyes can reach’.2 One further matter, by way of orientation: in considering immortality and the angels, a distinction may be made between two lines of approach. The first sets out from the observation that the angels are ‘ministering spirits’ (Heb. 1.14), sent by God in service of the saints, the children of Adam born into sin made the children of Abraham and so heirs of the promise. In heeding scripture’s instruction in this matter we are invited to consider the angels as they prevent Adam and his children from returning to Eden, lest they – lest we – go on unendingly in death’s shadow (that is not immortality). Again, we are called to observe and to wonder at the angels in their service of Christ during the days of his visible mission – announcing his birth; attending him in the wilderness; refusing to prevent his betrayal and death, knowing it is not his will or the will of his Father; rolling the stone from his tomb. Again, we are called to hear the angels attend Christ in his glorious return as the judge of the living and the dead (and, remarkably, to hear also that in the resurrection we will judge the angels (1 Cor. 6.3)). And we are called to consider the angels at worship around the throne of God and to hear the angel say – in a passage that distils all that scripture teaches us of the angels: I am but your fellow servant; worship God (Rev. 22.9). This way into our topic reminds us that the angels are the primary witnesses and instruments of God’s gracious governance of his creation and especially of his human creatures. The angels are woven into the fabric of scripture’s teaching about Adam’s fall, Israel’s election and preservation, Christ’s coming in humility and in glory. We do not learn from scripture about the immortal God and the life and immortality brought to light in the gospel without also hearing of the angels and hearing from the angels. But there is a second, complementary way – a more speculative way – of considering the angels and immortality. In attending to this way, we consider what it means for the angels themselves to be immortal. And that is the way we will take here. To anticipate: in pursuing this line of enquiry, we will arrive at a twofold conclusion. 1) As creatures, angels endure unendingly in life only if and as God so wills it; they are utterly reliant for their continuance upon the



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providential care of their creator. Created ex nihilo, they do not have life from and in themselves; just so, they have no absolute, independent claim to life. This utter dependence of angelic and other creatures upon their creator may be expressed in the formula: whatever is ex nihilo tends ad nihilum, unless it is preserved in existence by the one who has life in himself and freely gives it. 2) As heavenly, spiritual creatures, angels live under God’s rule differently than embodied human creatures. In scriptural terms: angels are not made of the dust of the earth and the breath of life; they do not suffer the corruption of the body; they neither marry nor are given in marriage (Lk. 20.36); they are not of the seed of Abraham or among the children of God whom Christ calls his brothers (cf. Heb. 2.10-16); so they are not, in the manner of the sons of Adam and the heirs of Abraham gathered, judged and blessed by Christ, children of the resurrection. And yet they do have a place in the end of all things, in the new heaven and earth, where death no longer has purchase on creaturely life. Angels, that is to say, have a share in immortal life in their own manner and way, according to the perfection of their own created nature. Perhaps we may, with Thomas, render this scriptural teaching in a more nearly Aristotelian idiom: as pure created spirits, angels are not hylomorphically composite creatures; in this very limited sense, they are not susceptible to dying as human creatures are; they stand, as it were, in closer proximity to the immutability and immortality that belongs properly to God alone. And so we may, in a properly qualified sense, speak of the contingent, natural immortality of angels; and we may do so by distinguishing between two kinds of composition: a composition of act and potency (definitive of all creatures, who are not simply their own act of existence); and a composition of matter and form (characteristic of composite but not of immaterial spiritual creatures or separated souls). In any case, angels live now in a different relation to death than human creatures; and they will live then, too, when death is no more. The intent of what follows is simply to unfold these claims at greater length. In doing so, we may gladly recognize that other conceptual schemes are available and variously recommend themselves; we may speak of angels well, otherwise. But in any analytical framework, intelligent and fruitful talk of the immortality of angels will turn on clarity in regard to their radical dependence upon God as creatures, their distinctive nature and role in the economy and the particular perfection of their created nature.

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Our exposition proceeds in three stages. It begins with some general reflections on the use of the language of immortality in the doctrine of God and its analogical application to creatures. Secondly, it analyses some central elements of the doctrine of angelic immortality set forth in Thomas’s Summa theologiae, sketching in outline its leading features and its doctrinal situation before attending in more detail on Thomas’s treatment of the immortality of angels according to their own nature and the graced perfection of their nature in their final condition. In this connection, I consider the coherence of Thomas’s teaching on the natural immortality of created spirits, taking up Paul Griffiths’s recent suggestion that it threatens to obscure the extent to which angels, with all creatures, depend for their continuance upon God. It concludes with some summative reflections on the difference between angelic and human creatures and to the differentiated use of the language of immortality in reference to them.

I The God who communicates his grace to us in Jesus Christ, revealing to us a life beyond and victorious over death, is one. Scripture has been heard to say so both affirmatively and exclusively, attesting in its own manner both God’s simplicity (his utter self-identity, beyond derivation, composition and division) and his uniqueness (his utter incomparability, beyond all classification). This is not, of course, to posit a real distinction in God between simplicitas and singularitas; the one God transcends this conceptual distinction between the simple and the unique. God’s simplicity entails his uniqueness and his uniqueness his simplicity. In Thomas’s formulation: God himself is his own essence or nature; therefore, that by reason of which he is God and that by reason of which he is this God are one and the same.3 The one God who by the exercise of his own power has revealed in Jesus Christ the grace that conquers death and imbues human creatures with immortal life is himself immortal and is, being the one God, simply and uniquely so. Thus, 1 Timothy 6.16: ‘It is [God] alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.’ To speak thus of God as alone immortal stricto sensu is to honour God by



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way of a negative precision. We deny that God is susceptible, as we are, to the power of death, that his life could be interrupted in any way or concluded in anything other than itself. God lives, not because he receives the gift of life from another, but because he has life from himself and in himself. God does not live in the shadow of death; in reference to God, life and death are not paired terms, but life is attributed to God absolutely. He is the living one. Put otherwise: immortality is not a primary concept in the doctrine of God, but an extension of teaching about the aseity and fullness of the divine life. The intelligent use of the concept of immortality in Christian theology sets out, then, from the primal confession that the one God is life in himself, originally and abidingly full, wanting nothing: God is singularly and utterly himself, regardless. He is the living God as the unoriginate Father, perfect power, wisdom and goodness at its source; he is the living God as the Son, eternally going forth from the Father by way of generation, the Father’s perfect likeness, true light from true light; he is the living God as the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, the perfect donation and return of love, the Lord and giver of life. God is; God lives. These are, of course, only approximations to the God whom we may truly know but whom we cannot fully comprehend, whom we may love even though we have never seen him. Precisely as the one who alone is and has life in himself and so is immortal in the full and proper sense, God cannot be seen and known as a creature may be seen and known. In Thomas’s terms: God is entirely immutable (Deus autem est omnino immutabilis) and so incorruptible and so immortal. And from this it appears that God transcends all that is, and all that is comprehensible, in created nature (transcendit quidquid in creaturis est comprehensibile), for all creatures, considered in themselves are in some respect changeable and so corruptible, susceptible to mortality, ever dependent upon the Lord, the giver of life.4 The living God, then, is to be recognized and known and honoured precisely in his unapproachability: solus Deus comprehendit se. But if no created intellect attains to the knowledge of God of its own accord, per propria naturalia, we can approach to the true knowledge of the immortal God, in this life per gratiam, in the light of Christ that shines forth in the darkness, and in the future in the light of glory. In your light, we will see light (Ps. 33.6).

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II Thus far by way of a first complication in the Christian use of the concept of immortality. God is immortal; some creatures are immortal. But God is not a creature or like a creature and the language of immortality runs aground when it obscures the original and infrangible difference between the creator and the creation. Holding to that first principle, we turn now to consider the employment of the concept of immortality in reference to creatures, and particularly to angelic creatures, asking how we might appropriately name the special way in which an angel and the angels may be said to be immortal. Our guide into the difficulties here will be Thomas; our text the prima pars of the Summa theologiae; our focus especially on the questions de conservatione (q. 104) and de substantia angelorum absolute (q. 50). We begin, however, with some remarks, by way of general orientation, on the doctrinal location of the treatise de angelis in the Summa. The simplest of outlines will suffice: Thomas, recall, opens the prima pars by treating of God, considered firstly according to the unity of the divine essence and then according to the procession of the divine persons. He then turns to consider the procession of creatures from the triune creator and organizes his remarks under two main headings: the production of creatures by the first cause; and the distinction of things. In considering creational distinction, Thomas investigates some general matters in the grammar of created difference, equality and unity; and he entertains questions about the particular distinction between good and evil and between spiritual and corporeal creatures. This last distinction provides the framework within which Thomas develops an account – in a venerable and broadly conventional sequence – first of purely spiritual creatures (angels), then of wholly corporeal creatures and lastly of ‘the composite creature’ – the human being, both corporeal and spiritual.5 The treatise on the angels comprises four sections: Questions 50–3 treat of what belongs to the angels according to their substance, considered firstly in itself and then in relation to corporeal things; discussion of the power, means, object and mode of angelic knowing follows in Questions 54–8; this leads to a treatment of the angelic will in itself and in its movement of love (Questions 59–60); and Thomas concludes his investigation with a consideration of the



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original production and perfection of the angels, as well as the fall of some into wickedness (Questions 61–3). The punishment of the demons is taken up in Question 64: it is introduced as ‘a sequel’ to what came before and does not stand in fully articulated relation to what comes before or after. Thomas approaches the doctrine of angels presuming a distinction between spiritual and corporeal creation, and it is precisely this distinction that Thomas interrogates in the first question of the treatise on angels, asking whether angels are indeed altogether incorporeal (omnino incorporeus).6 The leading issue here is the relation of creatureliness and corporeality: are creatures, qua creatures, embodied? Is it meaningful to speak of a purely incorporeal creature? Thomas, appealing to Psalm 103, which speaks of God ‘making his angels spirits’, insists that it is and that we may rightly affirm the existence of incorporeal creatures. His argument: what God principally intends in creatures is the good; the good of creatures consists in assimilation to God himself; the perfect assimilation of an effect to its cause occurs when the effect imitates the cause according to its causality (as heat causes heat); the cause of creation is God’s intellect and will – creation is a rational (intentional, approbative) and voluntary act – and so the perfection of the universe requires that there should be intellectual, volitional creatures. But intelligence and will is not an action of a body nor of any corporeal faculty; hence the perfection of the universe requires the existence of an incorporeal intellectual creature. This whole argument turns on a sharp distinction between intellection and sensation, presuming that the exercise of rationality is an essentially immaterial operation.7 As purely spiritual creatures, angels ‘rank between God and corporeal creatures’.8 As creatures, they are so fundamentally different from God that one might say that in comparison with God they are indeed material and corporeal; but this is only a way of speaking and it must not be taken to suggest anything corporeal really exists in them. As immaterial substances, further, angels are not composed of matter and form.9 We grasp them, of course, according to their presentation in the world available to our senses, not according to their own mode of being but in the manner of composite things. In this respect, the dynamics of our perception and recognition of the angels is analogous to that of our knowledge of God: in each case our minds ascend through visibilia to grasp, imperfectly, what is beyond material

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composition.10 Lacking matter, angels – who ‘exist in exceeding great number, far beyond all material multitude’11 – have no principle of individuation within a species: each angel is its own species and (in creative appropriation of the Dionysian doctrine of the angelic hierarchy) ‘all the angels differ in species according to the diverse degrees of intellectual nature’.12 The final question in Thomas’s treatment of the substance of angels is whether angels are immortal (incorruptibiles) and here we must proceed more slowly. Are angels immortal? It would seem not, Thomas says, for three reasons: 1. The first arises from consideration of the eschatological dimension of the doctrine of immortality. Immortality, it seems, names a perfection of rational creatures in the order of grace and glory, not a condition of creatures as such. Thus, John of Damascus’s characterization of an angel as ‘an intellectual subject receiving immortality as a gift of grace, not as a natural endowment’.13 On this view, we may predicate immortality of angels not already with reference to their essential condition as creatures but only in respect of some graced modulation of their created being. 2. The second rests on the invocation of a philosophical authority: Plato, in the Timaeus (a text long formative of Christian reflection on the ratio of the act of creation), speaks of a natural tendency to dissolution in created ‘gods’, who are held in being only by the will of the creator. These created gods must in Christian appropriation be understood as angels. And so it appears that angels are mortal by nature (angeli natura sua sunt corruptibiles). 3. The third reason may be read as a Christian theological elaboration and intensification of the second: it is not only angels who are marked by a natural inclination to dissolution but all creatures as such, for creatures exist ex nihilo, whatever is created ex nihilo tends ad nihilum. So Gregory the Great says: ‘All things would tend towards nothing, unless the hand of the Almighty preserved them’ (omnia in nihilum deciderent,14 nisi ea manus Omnipotentis conservaret).15 The principal countervailing consideration, for Thomas, finds expression in Dionysius: the angels, understood as intellectual substances (intellectuales substantiae) ‘have unfailing life, being free from all corruption, death, matter, and regeneration’.16 Without prejudice to the complexity of Dionysius’s work



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and the difficulty of clearly ascertaining the precise shape and force of its appropriation by Thomas, we may perhaps grasp something of the force of this Dionysian claim by understanding it as a conceptual translation of the scriptural teaching that angels are not given in marriage and that, unlike human beings in the present age, angels do not die and are not involved in the processes of reproduction required to ensure the continuance of any created kind despite the death of every individual member of that kind (cf. Lk. 20:34–6). What is decisive in Dionysius’ formulation is the way in which the sequence corruption-death-generation is punctuated by an explicit reference to the material condition of the biological-social processes of death and birth. Corruption here is indexed to materiality; and in developing his own account of the incorruptibility of angels, Thomas exploits just this relation. He does so by characterizing corruption as the dissolution of the hylemorphic bond that constitutes any substance as the substance it is.17 ‘Nothing is corrupted’, Thomas says, ‘unless its form is separated from its matter.’ But this is just to say that only composite substances are liable to corruption. And an angel is not a composite creature in the manner of a human being but a purely intellectual substance, entirely incorporeal, a ‘subsisting form’ (a substance that subsists in its own essence). In this precise sense, angels are incorruptible. Thomas illustrates the matter in this way: ‘Roundness can never be taken from a circle, because it belongs to it of itself ’, while a bronze disc (a composite of matter (bronze) and form (roundness)) can lose its roundness by a process of deformation, where deformation means corruption, a change that entails a loss, and so implies a kind of death. A substance composed of matter and form ceases to be what it is when its form is removed. But form considered in itself has something like a native purchase on being: ‘to be belongs to a form considered in itself, for everything is an actual being according to its form’. ‘And if the substantial form subsists in its own being, as happens in the angels, it cannot lose its being.’ In sum: angels are incorruptible of their own nature; and this because angels are immaterial.

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III In a recent, deeply impressive essay on the last things, Paul Griffiths devotes a substantial section of his treatment to consideration of the nature, fall and last things of angels.18 In the course of his argument, he offers a fresh analysis of the strictures and speculative extensions of catholic doctrine on the angels, seeking especially to hold open space for a doctrine of creaturely – and also angelic – annihilation. In doing so, he raises in a new way the question of the two ways in which the concept of immortality accrues to the angels in the theological tradition. The question: how are we to understand the relation of the axiom that angels, as creatures, exist ex nihilo and tend ad nihilum and the Thomistic claim that we find in the angels, considered as created spirits, no structural occasion for corruption. We may better grasp the force of this question if we pause briefly to consider the larger shape of Griffiths’s enquiry. His study is, in his own terms, an attempt to ‘understand and re-present the Christian doctrine of the last things, and to speculate about the various things that doctrine might reasonably be taken to mean’.19 Theological speculation is understood here as an intellectual return on the divine gift of doctrine, authoritatively set forth in scripture and the church’s magisterial texts. And much of his attention is given over to clarifying the distinction between what belongs to the settled doctrinal tradition and what is open to speculative extension. In respect of the angels, he observes, there is a relative lack of developed doctrine: it is catholic doctrine that there are angels; that some bear names known to us and undertake acts revealed to us; that they can and have interacted causally with us; that they are creatures of a distinct kind; that their ordinary occupation is the worship of God; and that some have fallen and are corrupt. He notes further the pronouncement of Lateran IV, whose definiton ‘makes the existence of the angels and their location in the world of [created] spirits a matter of faith’, arguing that the allocation of the angels to the spiritual order in contrast with the corporeal order provides a non-negotiable framework for all future speculative theological thinking on the angels.20 The same, however, cannot be said of the speculative teaching that angels have no bodies and that the specification of their location in spacetime should not involve the attribution of bodies to them. This, Griffiths argues,



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is not a matter of faith but a point of generative contestation in the tradition. And his treatment of the nature of angels takes its cue from the thirteenthcentury debate between the Dominican and Franciscan commentators on the Sentences on the corporeality of angels. As we have seen, Thomas denies corporeality to angels tout court; Bonaventure, on the other hand, considers Thomistic teaching on subsistent forms a dangerous approximation in the realm of creatures to the logic of divine simplicity. It is, Bonaventure says, ‘less dangerous’ to speak of angels as [hylomorphically] composite creatures than to say they are uncompounded form and thus far simple. To attribute bodies to angels is, for Bonaventure, a fitting way to identify them as creatures in distinction from the simple Creator. And this is the insight that Griffiths seeks to develop, in conversation with contemporary scientific conceptualities of the embodiment. His thesis: ‘If the created order is by definition spatio-temporal, and if the Lord is by definition not, then angels, being creatures, must be located firmly within the created order, and that is best done by clarity about their spatio-temporality and (therefore) the fact that they are bodies.’21 ‘Body’, then, for Griffiths names ‘capacity for spatio-temporal location, and thus for availability and responsiveness to other creatures with spatiotemporal location’.22 Bodies come in varied kinds: those of the angels are permanently disincarnate animate bodies; the ‘permanently’ distinguishes angels from separated souls; ‘discarnate’ distinguishes angels from all other animate creatures. On this analysis, angels are permanently what separated souls are temporarily: animate bodies without flesh, apparently discontinuously but always genuinely located in space-time. (Put otherwise: they are massive but not material bodies, something like quanta of energy capable of intentional action.) Griffiths’s analysis here turns, it seems, at least in part on the thought that creaturely contingency – the distinction in created things between essence and existence – always finds expression in structural complexity. Precisely as creatures, angels cannot be simple in the manner Thomas envisages. The ‘cause’ of angelic immortality, for Griffiths, cannot be traced back to a notion of subsistent form. Angels are immortal, rather, because and to the extent that they have not fallen into sin and so into corruption and death. In this regard, immortal angels keep close conceptual company not with separated souls but with Adam and Eve in their pre-lapsarian condition. Angels, in this

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view, were (like human beings) created for immortality. Perduring in their original condition, angels cannot die; declining from it, human creatures do, and in their declension, the whole fabric of time-space is distorted – in Griffiths’s terms, the ‘cosmos’ becomes ‘the devastation’. As fleshless bodies, angels are not subject to the contortions of space-time as human creatures are; as unfallen, ‘there is nothing about them that requires their implication in the devastation that defines the fallen world’.23 Rather, angels belong still and enduringly to the cosmos – to the created order in its original integrity – a state that may perhaps be depicted in the location of the angels as the guardians of Eden after the exile of Adam and Eve. Angels, then, are for Griffiths contingently immortal. But considered according to their natures they may be said to be capable of passing out of existence by way of self-annihilation. This follows from a simple application of three axioms: 1. Creatio ex nihilo: angels have been brought into being out of nothing; they can and do exist, insofar as they do, only by way of participation in God the creator 2. Sin as privation: there are fallen angels; they have fallen on account of their sin, having become sinners; and their sin – all sin – means (and this is decisive) ‘the active attempt to return themselves to the nothing from which they came by attempting to extricate themselves from participation in the Lord’.24 Sin is diminution in being. 3. Sin as effectual: there is nothing about the fallen angels or the Lord that prevents the angels succeeding in this continual endeavour at self-annihilation.25 We have already observed something of Thomas’s position on this matter: not distinguishing in the way that Griffiths does between graced immortality and natural incorruptibility, Thomas’s remarks on the impossibility of angelic corruptio directly answer to Griffith’s proposal that fallen angels may indeed take themselves from existence. And here we return to our discussion of Thomas’s doctrine of the natural hold on existence enjoyed by intellectual substances. Griffiths’s analysis of Thomas’s position turns on what he perceives as a deep tension in Thomas’s thought that surfaces in his consideration of the



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immortality of angels (and, more generally, of separate substances). It is a tension between the implications of the doctrine of creation out of nothing and of the Aristotelian metaphysics underwriting the theory of incorporeal intellectual substances. On the one hand, recall, Thomas affirms that an intellectual substance has no necessary dependence on anything corporeal; corruption pertains to intellectual substances only in their individuating material coordinates – that is, to compound substances. The intellective soul and the angels as subsisting forms both in this respect elude the claim of death: the former continues in a separated state between death and resurrection, being reunited with the self-same body it laid down at death; angels endure until and through the last judgement; all intellectual substances, human and angelic, find their final place unendingly in heaven or in hell. No intellectual substance can, considered per se, pass out of being. Griffith’s question is how all this relates to the formula – which he takes to be an entailment of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo – that ‘everything that comes from nothing is capable of returning to nothing’. For his part, Thomas limits the application of this principle by a simple appeal to the divine preservatio: all that exists ex nihilo tends ad nihilum – unless kept in being by the one who made and governs it.26 Is this not then to say that angels, and also intellective souls, are corruptible? On Griffiths’s reading, we may begin to perceive here an unhappy tension in Thomas’s thought at this point. On the one hand, Thomas clearly wishes to affirm the creature’s radical, continual dependence on God; on the other, he wishes to affirm that intellectual substances enjoy a kind of structural stability in being, such that they cannot properly be said to be ‘corruptible’. (Something is properly said to be corruptible only if it bears an intrinsic principle of corruption; ‘corruptible’ and ‘incorruptible’ are used here, we might say, as essential predicates.) In the end, Griffiths’ suggests, Thomas’s teaching that wholly incorporeal creatures have no intrinsic principle of corruption ‘commits him to the claim that being created out of nothing is not essential or proper to the anima humana and to other intellectual substances such as the angels’. And this is, in Griffiths’s judgement ‘to give altogether too much independence to natura’.27 For his part, as we have seen, Griffiths wishes to develop an alternative vision – one that involves a creative redeployment of a broadly Franciscan view

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that takes embodiment as a necessary marker of creatureliness. By claiming that all creatures, qua creatures, are embodied – that is, located in time-space – Griffiths opens up space to claim that all creatures are doubly complex, both contingent and marked by an intrinsic principle of corruptibility. By virtue of their origin and their native constitution, creatures tend towards nonexistence: ‘This is a property that belongs to all creatures just because they were created out of nothing; they – we all – remain uneasily in being, hovering over the void from which we came.’28 And this situation is aggravated under the conditions of sin, which is precisely a turning to the nihil.

IV We need not enter here into an extended examination of the details of Griffiths’s exposition of Thomas or of the leading features of his constructive proposal; we may think Thomas more successful in drawing a clear distinction between the two kinds of composition (matter-form and act-potency)29 than Griffiths admits, so that creaturely contingency perhaps need not, after all, be strictly indexed to corporeality. The more fundamental lessons that may be drawn from this consideration of Thomas’s teaching in Griffiths’s analysis are three. Firstly, we need fully and clearly to affirm that angels are never more or other than creatures, wholly dependent upon God for their being (to ascribe a natural immortality to angels is not to deny their original and abiding reliance upon God as their origin and end). Secondly, we need clearly to distinguish the forms that the gift of life takes when it is communicated, originally and finally, to angelic and human creatures. Thirdly, the extent to which and the manner in which the contingency of created existence takes form in the creature, human or angelic, are questions of considerable complexity, requiring of us a certain delicacy of judgement. More broadly, we may suggest in prospect that any theology of immortality that seeks to recognize and honour God also as the creator and Lord of his angels will rest on some few fundamental affirmations. Chief among these is that God alone possesses immortality in the strictest sense of the term (cf. 1 Tim. 6.16); if a creature may in any sense be said to be immortal, that is by virtue of their relation to God. This relation originates in God’s creative act:



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God brings all creatures into being ex nihilo and they severally exist only as he holds them in being, in their proper manner and place. Angels occupy a distinct and superior place in the order of things, manifesting a certain propinquinty to the divine life and its perfections. Yet the nature and destiny of creatures, their original orientation and their final condition, cannot exhaustively be specified in the doctrine of creation. A full account of the confirmation of creatures in being and the perfection of creatures according to their kinds cannot be fully and properly discerned without reference to the grace of reconciliation and redemption given in Jesus Christ, ‘who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light in the gospel’ (2 Tim. 1.10). It belongs to the tasks of a theology of immortality to trace the victorious movement in which he brings many children to glory; just so, it belongs to its tasks to learn what it means to say that he was for a little while made lower than the angels.

Notes 1 Cf. Theodore Haering, The Christian Faith. A System of Dogmatics, vol. 1, trans. J. Dickie and G. Ferries (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913), 409. 2 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F. L. Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), I.xiv.1 (160–1). 3 Summa theologiae, 1.11.3: Deus est sua natura [cf. 1.3.3] … Secundum igitur idem est Deus, et hic Deus. Thomas Aquinas, Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, edited by Anton C. Pegis (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). On this, see J. F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 486. 4 Super I ad Tim. VI, lect. 3 [§268]; cf. M. J. Dodds, O.P., The Unchanging God of Love: Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Theology on Divine Immutability, 2nd ed. (Washington: Catholic University Press of America, 2008), 77. 5 This sequence is visible already in, e.g. Gregory Nazianzus, Oration 38; more proximately, it is the order of presentation in Lombard’s Sentences. 6 Summa theologiae, 1.50.1. 7 See David S. Oderberg, Real Essentialism (New York: Routledge, 2007), 245. 8 Summa theologiae, 1.50.1 ad 1. 9 Ibid., 1.50.2. 10 Ibid., 1.50.2; cf. 1.1.3–4.

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11 Ibid., 1.50.3. 12 Ibid., 1.50.4. 13 Ibid., 1.50.5, citing John of Damascus, de fide orthodoxa 2.3: substantia intellectualis gratia et non natura, immortalitatem suscipiens. 14 Or, perhaps, tenderent. 15 Moralia, 16. 16 Summa theologiae 1.50.5, sed contra, citing Dionysius, The Divine Names, 4. 17 Cf. Oderberg, Real Essentialism, 66. 18 Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation. The Last Things of All Creatures (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014). 19 Griffiths, Decreation, ix. 20 Ibid., 117–18; cf. the constitution De fide catholica of the Fourth Lateran Council (N. P.Tanner SJ, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. Volume One: Nicaea I to Lateran V (London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 230. Further to the conciliar tradition, Vatican I, Constitutio dogmatica de fide catholica, Ch. 1. (Tanner, Decrees, 1:806); and see also The Catechism of the Catholic Church, §328: Exsistentia entium spiritualium, non corporalium, quae sacra Scriptura generatim angelos appellat, fidei est veritas. Tam dilucidum est Scripturae testimonium quam dilucida est Traditionis unanimitas. This tradition finds expression also in many Protestant confessional texts and systems of doctrine: see the ‘comparative creedal syndogmaticon’ in J. Pelikan and V. Hotchkiss, eds, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. Volume II. Part Four: Creeds and Confessions of the Reformation Era (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 949. Among the Protestant scholastics, see, e.g. A. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae Christianae (1610) 5.11 (esp. cll. 1772–8): Angeli sunt entia, non rationis, sed realia. That is, they exist in natura, (in rerum universitate) and so extra intellectum, etsi mens nostra non concipiat. Thus, existing in their own right, angels are to be regarded as substantiae completae, and more closely as spiritus seipsis subsistentes, that is, veras substantias et hypostases. As true substances, angels are properly understood as creatures, not the byproduct but a direct object of the divine creative intention: substantiae enim sunt proprie creatae: accidentia autem concreata. Angels are made in the image of God, and so the image of God is in angels; that is, angels possess and manifest a twofold similitude to the divine nature, in respect of the divine incorporeality and the excellentes proprietates of their life and immortality, beatitude and glory. 21 Griffiths, Decreation, 120–1. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexameron, F. Delorme, ed. (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1934), 54. See also



22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

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D. Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 97. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 137. As Griffiths notes, for all its elegance, this line of reasoning does not enjoy broad support in the theological tradition. The very nearly universal view is that ‘angels do not and cannot take themselves out of existence, and that, therefore, they do and must remain forever’ (ibid., 138). Ibid., 140. Ibid., 140–1. Griffiths, Decreation, 142. Cf. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 586.

5

How New is New Creation? Resurrection and Creation ex nihilo Susannah Ticciati

I/Introduction How new is new creation? This question has become a pressing one for me as someone whose theological thinking has been formed in the constant – and forceful – company of Karl Barth. My reading of him has drawn me to the simultaneously attractive and worrying conclusion that for Barth the new creation is the creation, from which we are only separated in the present by the distortion of sin. Thus old creation is simply a distortion of new creation. Alternatively, we might say that for Barth there is no new creation. There is only creation, the true reality of which is yet to be fully manifest – present reality being false and illusory to the extent that it falls short of this true reality. More specifically, true reality is redeemed reality in Christ, and to sin is to live in denial of our redemption in Christ. To push this one step further we might say that, for Barth, Christ (as the one in whom all reality has its true being, and as God’s originary decision on behalf of that which is not God) is the creation ex nihilo. And in yet a further step we might conclude that the resurrection, as that which establishes the eternity of Christ’s history, making it the universal history, is the original act of creation ex nihilo. What this amounts to is a collapse of old into new creation; of creation into redemption; and of creation ex nihilo into the resurrection.1 This vision is attractive because of its wonderful simplicity and coherence; it is worrying for the same reason. In this essay my aim, first and principally, will be to interrogate it as a reading of Barth, and in particular of his Church

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Dogmatics – which as an expression of his mature theology is most likely to have moved beyond an over-enthusiastic and one-sided collapse, therefore giving my hypothesis the greatest run for its money. Ranging freely across the several volumes of the Church Dogmatics, I will attempt to pinpoint the grounds for such a reading in a number of Barth’s theological axioms, as well as in some clearly recognizable patterns of his theological thought.2 If my hypothesis gains confirmation, I will, nevertheless, be able to claim no more than to have uncovered a tendency within the work (albeit a significant one), rather than to have offered a consistent and thoroughgoing reading of the whole – given its multifaceted character. The exposition and exposure of this theological vision in Barth’s Church Dogmatics – the essay’s first aim – will lead in turn to the interrogation of its attractiveness per se. While it might be critiqued on various theological grounds, I will focus on just one: its inability to distinguish between the good of creation and the good of reconciliation. I will argue, furthermore, that in collapsing creation into reconciliation (or redemption), Barth, contrary to what one would expect, in fact loses sight of the distinctiveness of the good of reconciliation. In the light of Barth’s elision, I will briefly indicate the potential theological importance of maintaining a distinction between these goods, appealing to a recognizable scriptural pattern.

II/Creation, reconciliation and redemption Before getting into the nitty gritty of reading Barth, we need to situate the old/ new creation distinction in respect of Barth’s more familiar idiom of creation, reconciliation and redemption (which is equivalent for him to eschatological consummation). It is not clear in advance how the twofold distinction relates to the threefold one. But we will find that for Barth, reconciliation is the pivotal term, and reconciled reality the centre of gravity. Thus, an old/new creation distinction is likely to show up either as a distinction between created and reconciled reality, or as a distinction between reconciled and redeemed reality. A first subsection will be devoted to interrogating the former, and will conclude that Barth tends towards an elision of created into reconciled reality. A second subsection will interrogate the latter, coming to a conclusion which



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is a mirror-image of the first: that Barth tends towards an elision of redeemed into reconciled reality. Barth also from time to time uses the traditional language of new creation, and where he does so he affirms in a traditional manner a new creation over and above the first creation – a new heaven and a new earth in the terms of Revelation 21. I have not found any place at which he explicitly questions a traditional view. Thus my argument that he elides old and new creation (in the above twofold manner) is not made with regard to his intentions, but with regard to the logical consequences of his other explicitly held theological views.

Creation and reconciliation We begin, then, by considering the distinction between created and reconciled reality. A good place to start is the first volume of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, where he makes the boldly comprehensive claim that Jesus Christ is ‘the history of God with man and the history of man with God. […] He is Himself [the reconciling] God and [the reconciled] man, and therefore the presupposition, the author, in whom all human existence has its first and basic truth in relation to that of God’.3 This introduces us to what we might call Barth’s participatory christo-logic: Christ’s history is, as it were, the ‘container’ of all other history, as that in which all other history is determined, as that within the parameters of which all other history gains its meaning and truth, and as that which accompanies all other history. In this sense we can say that all other history takes place within Christ’s history. A strong (ontologically literal) reading of Barth’s participatory logic along these lines is confirmed in his reading of the resurrection (in the third subsection of the same paragraph) as that which reveals Jesus’ history to be eternal history, present to all time: The resurrection of Jesus Christ tells us […] that as the Crucified […] He is not of the past, He did not continue to be enclosed in the limits of the time between His birth and death, but as the One who was in this time He became and is the Lord of all time, eternal as God Himself is eternal, and therefore present in all time. […] His being on the way from Jordan to Golgotha, His being as the One who suffered and died, became and is as such His eternal being and therefore His present-day being every day of our time.4

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In other words, to say that Christ’s history accompanies all other history is to say more than that all other history takes place in the light of it, pointing forward and back to it, but that in its transcendence of time it really is present to all other history. To say that Christ’s history is the container of all other history is to say the same thing but from the other side. By giving Christ’s history, as the history of the reconciling God with the reconciled man, ontological primacy over all other history, Barth goes further than a traditional typological approach according to which history before Christ can be read as typologically prefiguring the Christ event, and history since can be understood as typologically recapitulating it. For such typological imagination presupposes a literal understanding of history in which it has integrity in relative independence of Christ. The interpretative space opened up between history as historical and history as allegorically related to Christ is effectively closed down by Barth.5 History has no reality outside Christ, and thus no integrity other than the reality of reconciliation as achieved in Christ.6 Does this amount to a closing of the gap between reconciliation and creation, or reconciled reality and created reality? To answer this question, we must investigate Barth’s understanding of the relation between creation and history, developed in his doctrine of creation. Barth’s characterization of creation as the external basis of the covenant is well known. But it is not often followed through to its logical conclusion in the context of his thoroughgoing christological characterization of that covenant (perhaps even by Barth himself). In the summary paragraph at the opening of § 41, ‘Creation and Covenant’, Barth characterizes creation as follows: Creation comes first in the series of works of the triune God, and is thus the beginning of all the things distinct from God Himself. […] [T]he meaning of creation is to make possible the history of God’s covenant with man which has its beginning, its centre and its culmination in Jesus Christ.7

The first thing to note is that creation is characterized by Barth as a work or act of God. In this sense, it is certainly distinct from God’s act of reconciliation. But what I am interested in here is creation as reality, potentially to be distinguished from the reconciled reality God brings about in Christ. On this score, Barth so clearly harnesses the act of creation to the history of the covenant that no room is left for any sort of created reality independent of that history,



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with its own relative integrity. Thus, the inclusion of all history in Christ’s own history is tantamount to the inclusion of all creation in Christ’s history. In other words, the reconciled reality of Christ’s history is not a second reality in respect of a prior (non-fallen) creaturely reality. Reconciled reality is the reality to which God’s act of creation is geared in the first place. God creates, as it were, simply to provide the material for the history of the covenant (whose content is reconciliation). As Barth’s understanding of Christ’s history can be distinguished from a traditional typological approach, so his understanding of the relation between Christ and creation can be distinguished from two more traditional approaches. The first is a protological account of creation through the second person of the Trinity, as the one in whom God later becomes incarnate to reconcile a fallen creation. Christ is thus involved both in creation and in reconciliation, but there is no necessary collapsing of created reality into reconciled reality. Barth is at times interpretable precisely along these lines: ‘the One from whom the world comes and on whom it depends […] [is] He who in the process of history reconciles the world to Himself in order to give to it, as its Redeemer, its new and eternal form’.8 Such an interpretation is decisively ruled out, however, by Barth’s rejection of a logos asarkos:9 his interpretation of the divine Son always concretely as the incarnate Jesus Christ.10 Specifically, Barth presses beyond an account of creation in and by the Son as ‘inner divine reality’ by arguing that ‘the Son’ in this connection gains its content also from the life of the Son of Man: ‘[God] created [the world] because He loved it in His Son who because of its transgressions stood before Him eternally as the Rejected and Crucified.’11 And a few pages later he concludes explicitly that the ‘ground of creation and of the creature is […] the incarnate Word of God as the content and object of the eternal divine decree of grace – the pre-existent Jesus Christ’.12 This confirms that when Barth, in his summary statement, identifies Jesus Christ as the ‘beginning, centre and culmination’ of the covenant, he has the incarnate Christ robustly in mind (and not simply the divine Logos) – from which it follows that the reconciled reality which forms the content and achievement of Christ’s life is the reality for the sake of which God creates. There is no created reality independent of this. However, this also rules out a second traditional approach: a traditional Reformed supralapsarianism. Barth discusses this at length elsewhere13 and

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my intention here is not to rehearse that debate, but simply to highlight the distinction between Barth and supralapsarianism as it is pertinent to my present argument (beyond the obvious distinction that election and rejection are summed up, for Barth, in Christ and not in a hidden decree beyond God’s revelation in Christ). For the supralapsarian, the decree of creation is ordered to the more fundamental, or prior, decree of election, according to which God predestines human beings either to salvation or to damnation, and to that end creates human beings in such a way that they then (through their own fault) fall. However, while creation may be with a view to election and rejection (via the fall), this does not undermine the relative integrity of created reality in distinction from the final destiny of the elect and rejected. For Barth, by contrast, the ‘meaning of creation’ as ‘[making] possible God’s covenant with man’ in Christ is not just its orientation towards a future covenant of election (which because of the fall will also entail reconciliation), but its covenantal constitution from the start. Thus, elaborates Barth: Even as [the history of the covenant of grace] follows [creation], it constitutes the scope of creation. It would be truer to say that creation follows the covenant of grace since it is its indispensable basis and presupposition. As God’s first work, it is in the nature of a pattern or veil of the second and therefore in outline already the form of the second.14

While the supralapsarian would also give (in her terms) election/rejection priority over creation, and thus agree that creation in truth follows election/ rejection, she would stop short of saying that creation already has the form of election/rejection. In not stopping short at this point, Barth elides the distinction between created and reconciled reality: the covenantal constitution of creation is its characterization by the life, death and resurrection of Christ, and thus its characterization from the start as reconciled reality. We have come into very close proximity with Barth’s doctrine of election, and it might thus seem natural to turn to that next, in further – indeed clinching – confirmation of our argument. For it is here that Barth establishes Christ as the beginning of all God’s ways with what is not God – and not just the eternal Logos, but the incarnate Christ. However, to do so would be to short-circuit some of the more surprising implications of the equation of created reality with reconciled reality. Remaining within the doctrine of



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creation, we might ask what this astonishing equation does to a traditional creation-fall narrative. What does it mean to say that God creates reconciled reality, with the implication that the fall (or something like it) is always already behind creation? To answer this, we turn to Barth’s exegesis of Genesis 1 in § 41.2, ‘Creation as the External Basis of the Covenant’. The first thing to consider, since it sets the tone for all that follows, is Barth’s astounding and highly controversial interpretation of Genesis 1.2 (‘And the earth was waste and void (tohu wa-bohu); and darkness was on the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’). Barth rejects two well-trodden interpretative options here: first, that tohu wa-bohu is a primeval, chaotic reality, independent of God’s creating, which God must struggle with when he creates; and second, that tohu wa-bohu is that which God posits as the raw material for his ordered creation (an option which affirms creation ex nihilo). Thus tohu wa-bohu is neither independent of God nor created by God. It is, he concludes, the surd reality (or non-reality) ‘of evil, of sin, of the fall and all its consequences’ – irrational and inexplicable to its core.15 Barth does something very unusual in finding evil to figure within the first creation narrative, and right from the beginning. While he does not allow it to intrude into the well-ordered creation and God’s positive intention for it, its shadow-presence does significantly inform the way Barth conceives of God’s act of creation. Like salvation, creation involves the rejection and overcoming of evil: ‘in the face of this horror [of the final judgement] there is deliverance on the one hand and creation on the other – in both cases as God’s act in contradiction to the threats of tohu wa-bohu’.16 Thus, creation always has evil at its back, as something which it has left behind and which is excluded by it: ‘The state of chaos portrayed in v. 2 is […] [that] of the past of the real cosmos created by the Word of God. […] [I]t was originally and definitively superseded and declared to be obsolete by what He chose and accomplished by His Word.’17 This does not entail, for Barth, a denial of the force and reality of evil as it overtakes us in the present. But he makes clear that the latter is none other than the past evil referred to in Genesis 1.2, which the creature foolishly looks back to in contradiction of its own nature and in disregard of the Word of God. Indeed, he maintains that evil never oversteps its reality as past: ‘That chaos can also become present and future cannot alter the fact that it is essentially the past, the possibility negated and rejected by God.’18

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Its rejection as a reality that has, in fact, obtruded in creation is achieved in Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, where God reconciles the cosmos to himself. Creation is not itself this victory and reconciliation, but it does correspond to it.19 Most importantly, for our purposes, created reality cannot be distinguished from reconciled reality as that which has evil before it rather than behind it. God’s act of reconciliation within time serves rather to secure creation in its created identity, definitively establishing the pastness of the evil God rejects when he creates. Indeed, here again we might follow Barth in saying that creation is more truly said to follow the covenant of grace as the ontologically primary reality. Barth’s reading of Genesis 1.2 gains correspondence in his reading of the first three of God’s positive acts of creation in the ensuing verses as involving a dual creation and rejection, or separation.20 On verses 3–5, he comments: ‘The fact that the divine fiat is: “Let there be light,” and not: “Let there be darkness,” means that the possibility of the latter creation and creature is rejected by God. […] Here […] to create is to separate.’21 Similarly, on vv. 6–8: ‘The waters created by God are the waters which are divided and bounded by the raqia‘ [firmament]. […] The state of undivided and unbounded waters [chaos] […] lies behind as the world which God did not will or create […].’22 Finally, on verses 9–13, he says: ‘As heaven was created by the separation of water from water, so the earth is created by its separation from the water under heaven. Again, therefore, this time in the form of the terrestrial sea, that which is past is revealed, rejected, displaced and banished.’23 In this context, too, we can distinguish Barth’s reading from a traditional one which it otherwise resembles. Within his literal commentary on Genesis, Augustine allows for a figurative reading, over and above the literal one, according to which the darkness of verses 4–5 signifies the evil of sinners, and the evening and morning the sin and renewal of rational creatures.24 That we are dealing with a figurative truth in Barth’s discovery of evil in the creation account is suggested by the fact that he embraces a typological connection between creation and covenant. Thus he affirms that ‘[the light created by God] is a sign […] of the divine covenant of grace’.25 More precisely he claims that ‘a true and strict analogy to the relationship between light and darkness is to be found […] in the relationship between the divine election and rejection’.26



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But the question is whether, like Augustine, he maintains a distinction between the literal and the typological. That he does not do so at this point is suggested by the fact that he nowhere qualifies the darkness of v. 4 as good (in keeping, one might note, with Genesis 1 itself). While it is, in a sense, a creature of God, it is so only as a sign of that which has been rejected: ‘The subject is natural light and natural darkness: natural darkness as that which declares the reality which was rejected by God and has therefore vanished.’27 More boldly, as we read above, darkness is that from which light is separated, and hence that which God rejects. Barth thus leaves no room for understanding it as the good creation of God, alongside its typological significance as that which prefigures evil. Its typological significance is its only significance. That this ‘monological’ character of Barth’s typological reading can be generalized to the whole of the creation narrative becomes manifest in the following interpretative development: As Elohim’s utterance in Gen. 13f. fixes the boundary from which the monstrous world of Gen. 12 can be seen and understood only as past, so Yahweh fixes a boundary – is it not ultimately the same boundary? – when he says to Abraham: “Get thee out of thy country […]” (Gen. 121). […] Within this history this boundary will continually be drawn afresh by the divine utterance […].28

As we read on, we discover (as we might have anticipated) that the definitive divine utterance is made in the incarnation, and all previous divine utterances (including that of creation) are directed towards this one.29 Once again we can conclude that God’s act of creation aims at and makes way for the reconciled reality achieved in God’s act in Christ. God’s creation, right from the start, has the stamp of reconciled reality. We can no longer hold off turning to that doctrine which, arguably, determines all the others into which we have dipped so far and which, therefore, has the potential to clinch our argument at its root: the doctrine of election. Because of the detours taken through other doctrines, however, it will be a matter of joining up the dots rather than drawing a picture from scratch. Two things come together in this fundamental doctrine which secure a connection between created and reconciled reality at the deepest level. First is Barth’s refrain throughout his development of the doctrine: that Jesus Christ is ‘the beginning of all God’s ways and works ad extra’.30 Barth elaborates on this in his identification of the logos of John 1.1 with Jesus Christ and thus

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his implicit rejection of a logos asarkos.31 Second, Barth characterizes God’s orientation towards human beings in Christ right from the start as an orientation towards ‘sinful man’ and, therefore, as one that is shaped by rejection and election. Barth’s summary paragraph at the head of § 33 (‘The Election of Jesus Christ’) states: ‘In Jesus Christ God in His free grace determines Himself for sinful man and sinful man for Himself. He therefore takes upon Himself the rejection of man with all its consequences, and elects man to participation in His own glory.’32 There is no turning of God ad extra, to a reality other than God, which is not characterized by rejection and election, or reconciliation. In other words, there was never a relationship between God and human beings, even in Christ, prior to the entry of sin into that relationship and the need for reconciliation. There is no room, in other words, for a created reality which is not already reconciled reality.33 As in the doctrine of creation, the problem of evil obtrudes here as a genuine problem, and one which Barth will not seek to solve, thereby rationalizing evil. Nevertheless, he makes some bold remarks on this score in his portrayal of a ‘purified’ supralapsarianism.34 Barth characterizes God’s will in relation to Godself as dual, as involving what he wills and what he does not will; and he maintains that creation in turn testifies to this twofold will, to God’s Yes and God’s No. However, while God’s victory over what he does not will is self-evident in his own case, it is not self-evident in the case of human beings. Thus the form that the dual testimony of creation must take is as the history of humanity’s confrontation with evil as a hostile power. Barth draws the following conclusion: It is not God’s will that elected man should fall into sin. But it is His will that sin, that which God does not will, should be repudiated and rejected and excluded by him […] He wills man as the one who is thrown wholly and utterly upon the resources of His grace. He does so in order that man should proclaim His glory as the one who is freed by Him from the dominion of sin […] 35

As in creation, God’s will in election involves ‘a marking off, a separating, a setting aside’.36 Again, it will be revealing in this connection to distinguish Barth’s position from supralapsarianism. For the supralapsarians Christ is merely the means by which God effects his eternal decree of election. Creation is in a limited sense ‘with a view’ to Christ, but there is no sense in which Christ is God’s



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primary act of turning towards the creature. For Barth, by contrast, while Christ’s history occurs in the middle of history, Christ as the God-man is most truly the first creature, without whom there would be no creation. So again, while it is true that creation is needed as a theatre for the being of Christ, Christ’s being is the ontological presupposition of creation. As Barth puts it, we must, following Augustine, [look] upwards to the place where the incarnation, the reality of the divinehuman person of Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world and all other reality, is identical with the eternal purpose of the good-pleasure of God, and where the eternal purpose of the good-pleasure of God which precedes all created reality is identical with the reality of the divine-human person of Jesus Christ.37

In this sense, Jesus Christ might be said to be the creation ex nihilo. We will return to this bold claim below.

Reconciliation and redemption We have now shown from a variety of angles how Barth tends to identify created with reconciled reality, and thereby elide the distinction between creation and reconciliation. There is no moment or dimension of God’s relating to what is not God which does not involve the vanquishing of evil and sin. Christ is both the presupposition of all reality and the one in whom, at the centre of history, God secures a definitive victory over sin. The whole of reality has its raison d’être here, and is established from this centre, in which it subsists. The primary reality which is not God is therefore the humanity of Christ, and all other creaturely reality exists from and to this humanity, to furnish the context for it and in turn to be constituted by its relationship with God. In this sense, the reality which God brings into being and sustains is, at every point, reality which has been reconciled to God in Christ. This is a significant step on the way to establishing our initial hypothesis: that Barth collapses old into new creation. But there is a further step to be taken. We have shown the collapse of creation into reconciliation, but reconciled reality is not yet new creation. Does Barth maintain a significant gap between reconciled reality and eschatological or redeemed reality, between reconciliation and eschatological consummation, or in Barth’s idiom, reconciliation and redemption? There are some good reasons to think that he does.

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Barth’s references to new creation are comparatively infrequent. But they are not non-existent. And where he does refer to new creation, he does so in an apparently traditional way – no collapse being implied. Thus, in the very first paragraph of his doctrine of creation, in discussion of the historical (and supra-historical) character of creation, Barth says that the creed ‘can also look forward to the creation of a new heaven and earth – no less contingently historical than the first’.38 He refers to ‘the definite expectation of a new heaven and a new earth in Revelation 211 and 2 Peter 313’.39 And commenting on Isaiah 65.17f., he says: ‘This creation of a new heaven and a new earth will take place and will be revealed in the exercise by Jesus of the power of the One who has already created this heaven and this earth.’40 There are also more embedded reasons why we might want to take seriously in Barth a genuine distinction between reconciled reality as that which is historical by nature, and redeemed reality as that which is eschatological or eternal. In the context of the doctrine of election, as we have seen, Barth suggests that God’s covenant with that which is not God must take historical form, as the creature confronts evil as a hostile power, and as God’s defeat of evil is accomplished in history.41 In his doctrine of creation Barth reads the firmament of Genesis 1.6 in terms of this historical confrontation with evil – as that which keeps the destructive upper waters at bay, warding off the threat of evil.42 And this makes way for the contrast with a new heaven in which the menace of evil will be no more: With this transformation [the upper sea becoming a sea of crystal in a new heaven] the raqia‘ [firmament] will obviously become superfluous as a barrier and a boundary. […] [The] unique opening of heaven [in Jesus and for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit] means [the firmament’s] final removal, its replacement by a new heaven.43

And by contrast with historically constituted reconciled reality, the new heaven and new earth – redeemed reality – is eternal: ‘[T]he One from whom the world comes and on whom it depends […] [is] He who in the process of history reconciles the world to Himself in order to give to it, as its Redeemer, its new and eternal form.’44 While this is apparently promising in terms of a genuine distinction between reconciled and redeemed reality, there is simultaneously a danger that Barth reduces the distinction to that of the presence or absence of evil,



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history merely being the form of reality in its confrontation with evil. The following passage would seem to confirm such a reduction: ‘He will exalt this one creature, the man Jesus Christ, as a sign of the promise given to the cosmos, so that His end in this vulnerable form will be the beginning of a new form in which He is no longer assaulted by this sinister possibility [of the evil of Gen. 1.2].’45 To conclude thus would be to endorse our initial hypothesis: that old creation (even as reconciled reality) is a mere distortion of the new. However, I suggest that such a conclusion is prematurely reductive not only in the light of the fact that Barth celebrates history as the form of God’s relation to all else throughout the CD, but also in the light of another resource within the CD which we have not yet tapped: the second part of his doctrine of creation, in which he discusses the constitution of the creature, and in particular, creaturely life in time (by contrast with eternity). We turn to this now. Barth makes the comprehensive affirmation that time ‘is a form of all the reality distinct from God’.46 And he contrasts the time in which human beings live, with its succession of past, present and future, with God’s eternity in which they are simultaneous.47 He affirms, more specifically, that ‘time as the form of human existence is […] willed and created by God’, going as far as to say that ‘[h]umanity is temporality’.48 It would seem to be clear from this that time (and therefore history?) has its own creaturely integrity in distinction from eternity, and thus cannot be written off as a mere distortion of eternity. In order to interrogate this claim, we need to look at the larger context. The paragraph in question, entitled ‘Man in His Time’, is divided into four subsections, the first of which treats Jesus’ time, and the subsequent three of which treat the time of all other human beings in the light of Jesus’ time, culminating in Barth’s surprising affirmation of human mortality as a God-given good. We will discover that both in his discussion of Jesus’ time, and in his discussion of human time in general, Barth potentially opens up a distinction between temporal (created-and-reconciled) reality and eternal (redeemed) reality; but that in each case he fails to maintain it, collapsing one back into the other. Barth famously begins the first subsection, entitled ‘Jesus, Lord of Time’,49 with an exposition of the forty days of Jesus’ resurrection appearances, which he calls his Easter history. In their unity with his life from birth to death, this history establishes and reveals Jesus’ time on earth as fulfilled time – ‘the

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time which [God] took to Himself, thus granting it as a gift to the men of all time’.50 In his material development of this claim we see his participatory christo-logic. On the one hand, Jesus’ time is a finite span like others, but on the other hand, it is not subject to their limitations. His Easter time reveals it to be eternal time: simultaneously past, present and future, his present transcending his finite duration so that he becomes the contemporary of those who were not his contemporaries, his history becoming history again;51 his past encompassing the whole history of the covenant and even the time of creation;52 and his future embodied in his being as the one who is to come at the conclusion of time, when he will appear as ‘Judge, Consummator and new Creator’.53 As such he is ‘the Lord of time’, ‘the real divine centre of all time […] which embraces and controls all time before and after Him’.54 It was just this participatory christo-logic which closed the gap between created and reconciled reality, all creation being summed up and included within Christ’s history. In short, Christ is both created and reconciled reality. And insofar as Christ is also redeemed reality, one would expect the gap between reconciled and redeemed reality similarly to be closed in him. However, it is just in this respect that Barth’s account of Christ’s time as fulfilled time promises to open up within Christ what has been included – and apparently collapsed – within him. In his discussion of Christ as the one who is to come, Barth appears to make room for something genuinely new, repeatedly affirming the promise of a new creation. At his boldest, Barth claims: ‘This future will be a wholly new order […]. [It is not] merely the result of what Jesus Christ was yesterday and is to-day. It is again He Himself, His own person and work, in a new mode and form.’55 However, as we read on, our hopes for genuine newness and distinction are dashed. For having opened up a distinction between present and future in Jesus, Barth goes on to reaffirm that the one who is to come is the same as the one who is now present – that nothing new is accomplished which has not already been accomplished. This is his well-known interpretation of the resurrection and the parousia as a single event, which is interrupted by the interim time in which we live, and which thus appears to us to be separated into two events.56 Barth’s language shifts from that of newness to that of hiddenness and manifestation. The latter becomes the dominant idiom in which the dynamic of the parousia is captured. Alternatively, the newness of the parousia is



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explicated as a newness of manifestation. Commenting on the New Testament witness, Barth makes the following various affirmations: ‘For Christians living in time the enacted salvation has become past. But in its general revelation it is still future’57; ‘[The apostles and their communities] knew of their hidden life with Christ in God, but only when Christ their life was made manifest would they be manifested with Him in glory (Col. 3:3f.)’; ‘What has still to be realized, as Paul sees it, is the manifestation of the life of Jesus in His body (2 Cor. 4:10)’.58 He reads the Gospels as looking forward, in the person of Jesus, inseparably to the resurrection and parousia. In Jesus’ lifetime and in the time of his community the kingdom of God is ‘present in reality, but not in revelation’. Jesus’ goal is ‘the kingdom with the veil removed, manifest, and visible in glory’; ‘[to] look to His future is to look to the revelation of His actuality, to the irresistible, invincible and triumphant visibility of His kingdom as it has already come’.59 While manifestation may involve significant change, such a characterization of the parousia nevertheless fuels the argument for the collapse of redeemed into reconciled reality. The reality achieved at the centre of time in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is redeemed reality, and reconciled reality, as the name one might give supremely to the time between Jesus’ resurrection and parousia, is to be distinguished from it only as that in which it is concealed. In short, there is only one true reality: hidden now and manifest at the eschaton. Insofar as hiddenness takes the form of sin and suffering, we are returned to the view of history as a sinfully distorted eternity. Let us turn, however, to the second potential locus of a genuine distinction between reconciled and redeemed reality: human time as a created, finite good, whose reality is guaranteed by Jesus’ time. Far from undermining the integrity of creaturely time in its distinction from eternity, Jesus’ time as fulfilled time is precisely that which secures the non-illusory character of our otherwise fleeting and ephemeral time. More strongly, the (sinful) disintegration by which our time is threatened is contradicted by God’s act in Jesus of taking time to himself, and therefore relating it to his eternity. Our time, in its sequence of past, present and future (by contrast with the simultaneity of eternity), is real because Jesus is at its centre as the Lord of time.60 In ‘Given Time’ (§ 47.2) Barth looks at time in its sequential nature as past, present and future, showing how the paradoxes of time gain a definitive

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answer in God, and concretely in Jesus Christ (and that it is only sinful time, by contrast, which flees from us into oblivion). In ‘Allotted Time’ (§ 47.3) Barth turns to view time as a finite span with beginning and end. Crucially he affirms here, and in the following two subsections (‘Beginning Time’ and ‘Ending Time’), that it is appropriate for human beings to live in an allotted, limited span, because this is how we can have fellowship with God.61 In ‘Ending Time’ (§ 47.4) this argument culminates in an astounding affirmation of human mortality. While death is experienced as a curse, and has become so in the sphere of sin, death in itself is to be distinguished from judgement on sin.62 While it is hard to imagine a more definitive case for the goodness and integrity of temporal (created-and-reconciled) reality in distinction from eternal (redeemed) reality, our hopes for a genuine maintenance of the distinction once more come to nothing. On closer reading, what we discover is that our creaturely temporality is not just the mode of our relation to God’s eternity during the span of our mortal lives, but that our finite temporal span is the content of our eternal life. There is no replacement of a temporal by an eternal life, in other words. Rather, our eternal life is the participation of our temporal lives in God’s eternity: ‘Man is only as he is in his time. Even in eternal life he will still be in his time. For he will then be the one who, when there is no time but only God’s eternity, and he is finally hidden in God, will have been in his time.’63 What, then, is the nature of redemption, if it is not the exchange of temporal for eternal, mortal for immortal life? What change, if any, is wrought at the eschaton? [The content of eternal life] is not, therefore, his liberation from his this-sidedness […] but positively the glorification […] [of his] finite and mortal being. He does not look and move towards the fact that this being of his in his time will one day be […] left behind, and in some degree replaced by a new, other-sided, infinite and immortal being after his time […] He does not hope for redemption from the this-sidedness, finitude and mortality of His existence. He hopes positively for the revelation of its redemption as completed in Jesus Christ.64

Once again, the difference between present and eschatological reality is interpreted in terms of hiddenness and manifestation: our true, redeemed reality in Christ is revealed at the eschaton. ‘Glorification’, we surmise, is the obverse of the concealment of true reality by sin.



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Glorification is coupled with unveiling in the following passage: Our past and limited life […] our real but only life, will then fully, definitively and manifestly participate in that καινότης ζωῆς (Rom. 6:4). It will then be eternal life in God and in fellowship with Him. […] It can only be a matter, therefore, of this past life in its limited time undergoing a transition and transformation (1 Cor. 15:51) and participating in the eternal life of God. This transition and transformation is the unveiling and glorifying of the life which in his time man has already had in Christ.65

The transformation Barth talks about here is to a fuller, definitive and manifest participation in God’s eternity. What is this, however, other than a securing of the reality of time in the face of its illusoriness – and, therefore, in the face of sin?66 In other words, the transition is nothing other than the overcoming of sin, or better, the full manifestation of the victory over sin already accomplished. Finally, Barth distinguishes between unnatural and natural death, claiming that ‘the “death” in death [is] abolished’ by ‘the appearance, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ’, such that ‘as [man] is freed for eternal life, he is also freed for natural death’.67 Again we can conclude that eternal life is nothing other than redeemed natural human time – which is time as it properly participates in God’s eternity, time lifted from its sinful disintegration into God’s eternity.

III/Resurrection ex nihilo? We showed in our discussion of creation and reconciliation in the first part of the previous section that Barth collapses the distinction between created and reconciled reality, equating them in the being and history of Jesus Christ. Then, in the second part treating reconciliation and redemption, we went on to illustrate that Barth, just as inexorably, collapses the distinction between created–reconciled reality and redeemed (eschatological) reality, to the extent that the latter is the manifestation of what is concealed by sin in the former. In other words, there is for Barth only one true reality, reality in Christ, which is enacted in historical reconciliation, made way for by creation, and made manifest in redemption. While it is still possible to distinguish, formally,

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between the acts of reconciliation, creation and redemption, they are inseparably united in the one true reality to which they contribute. Thus, there is no distinction between different (even related) realities – between temporal and eternal life, between old and new creation – except sin. God creates just one reality: Jesus Christ as he encompasses all other human and creaturely life, and thus creaturely temporality as it participates in divine eternity.68 But this is tantamount to saying that Jesus Christ is the creation ex nihilo. We can investigate this claim concretely by asking, more specifically, after the role of the resurrection in God’s relationship with creation – since the resurrection, we might surmise, is the sine qua non of Jesus’ being as not just temporal but also eternal, and thus of the determination and encompassment of all other reality in him. Our hypothesis can be stated as follows: the resurrection is the primordial act of God ex nihilo. Let us return to Barth’s account of Jesus’ Easter history – the forty days of his time on earth as the Resurrected. To recall, human (and creaturely) temporality is real because Jesus’ time exists at its centre as fulfilled time. As fulfilled, or eternal, Jesus’ time transcends the limitations of all other times, becoming contemporaneous with them, and surrounding them as their past and future. Jesus’ time as fulfilled time is, more strongly, the time which God took to himself in order to give time to creatures and establish his covenant with them. It is thus the presupposition of God’s relationship with that which is not God. But Jesus’ time is fulfilled time because of his Easter history: ‘The two times [his Easter and pre-Easter histories] are inseparably linked. They are together the time of the man Jesus […] His mystery first and then its revelation […] [T]his whole time is the time of the appearance and presence of God.’69 Materially, it is by the resurrection that Jesus transcends the limits of time and therefore encompasses it: He is ‘awakened’ or ‘raised’ or ‘brought up’ ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν […] Thus […] He Himself is the acting Subject who lifts the barrier of yesterday and moves into to-day […] [Pentecost, as the result of the resurrection,] is the bridging of the gulf between His past and their present; the assumption of their time into His.70

The pivotal role of the resurrection is confirmed and strengthened at the conclusion of ‘Given Time’, in which Barth links it inseparably to Christ’s lordship over time as the basis of the relation of God’s eternity to our time:



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For on this [His resurrection and lordship over time] depends the fact that we can relate man’s time to God’s eternity, and that God’s eternity can and must be seen and understood as His eternity for us, God Himself as the Creator and Giver of our time, and therefore our being in time as a reality.71

We cannot but be compelled to the conclusion that the resurrection is indeed the sine qua non of God’s turning ad extra towards that which is other than God, and more specifically the act of God ad extra on which all others are based. In short, we can legitimately, if tentatively, conclude that the resurrection is God’s most primordial act of creation.72 But creation ex nihilo? Does not resurrection presuppose death? Does it not mark a ‘transition and transformation’, as Barth put it? In Christ’s death and resurrection do we not have (inseparably) the passing of the old and the coming of the new? Might it not better be described, therefore, as creation ex morte? Indeed, this would be more in keeping with Barth’s collapse of created and redeemed reality into reconciled reality – which has evil (and death) always at its back. In particular, it would fit with his reading of the first creation narrative in terms of creation and rejection, suggesting moreover that even there Barth has allowed a traditional creation ex nihilo to slide towards a novel creation ex morte. In other words, it is not so much the case that he has collapsed creation ex nihilo and resurrection into one another as that he has assimilated even God’s first act of creation into the resurrection as creation ex morte: creation as salvation from chaos/sin/death. The one true reality established by the resurrection is the gift of life as it presupposes the death of sinners. There is no creation ex nihilo, strictly speaking; there is only creation ex morte.73

IV/The good of reconciliation While Barth’s collapse is in favour of reconciliation, I want to argue that, counterintuitively, it leaves him unable to appreciate the good of reconciliation in its distinction from the good of creation (rather than the other way round).74 This is because in the assimilation of creation to the resurrection, the character of creation in turn rubs off on the resurrection. Let me spell this out. First, as the primordial event of God’s turning to reality other than

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God, the resurrection in its most fundamental meaning precedes that which comes before it, from a temporal point of view retrospectively establishing its meaning. Second, the sin and death which the resurrection overcomes are most truly described as a distortion of resurrection reality, which is the true reality, just as evil and sin, even while qualified as the past of good creation, are most truly described as a distortion of it, thus presupposing that good creation. But it follows that the meaning of the resurrection is in no way constituted by the death it apparently presupposes: death (as distortion) is the afterthought. The ‘No’ is only a shadow of the ‘Yes’, parasitic upon it. In this account, there is no room for a good which emerges through, and on the other side of, sin: a goodness after failure, and defined only in relation to that failure. For the importance of goodness of this character, as distinguished from primordial creaturely goods, I appeal to a prevalent scriptural trope. Within the Old Testament we can cite, first, the reconciliation between Jacob and Esau (Gen. 33, esp. v.4). The embrace of Esau, with the forgiveness it implies, is a good Jacob could not have experienced without their previous estrangement. His fearful distress is overcome and overwhelmed by the gratuitous generosity of Esau, which utterly overshadows his elaborate preparations. The good he receives is foreshadowed by his blessing from an unnamed man at Peniel, which could only be obtained after a night of wrestling (Gen. 32.2232). Second, take the reunion of Joseph and his brothers (Gen. 45.1-15, esp. vv. 14-15). Again, without the hurt and estrangement, the reconciliation would not have the poignant character it does. In both cases, the reaction of weeping signifies hurt healed.75 Turning to the New Testament, we have the Johannine account of Peter’s threefold denial, paired with his exchange with the resurrected Christ, who asks him three times, ‘do you love me?’ (Jn. 18.15-18 and 21.15-19). The good of Peter’s post-resurrection relationship with Jesus is irrevocably constituted by the fact of his denial in their common history. The resurrection is not a wiping of the slate clean, but a renewal the other side of failure. Yet, it is Luke who captures the dynamic most undeniably in the group of parables including the lost sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son: ‘“Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.” Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninetynine righteous persons who need no repentance’ (Lk. 15.6-7). This is an



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untrammeled celebration of the goodness of reconciliation, as that which is distinct from, and even exceeds, the goodness of creation. The lost coin does not contain the comparison, but the joy is clearly premised upon the loss. And the prodigal son has a clear comparator in the elder son, but in this case one is not preferred over the other. The goodness of each is nevertheless recognized in its distinction from the other: a celebratory feast is appropriate only in the context of the returned lost son. To highlight the distinctiveness of these goods as goods after failure is not to imply that the sin which the good presupposes is itself turned into a good, nor that sin is justified in the light of the greater good it has enabled. It is true that one could not have such goods without sin, but it does not follow that a world with sin in it is to be preferred over one without it. Who knows what goods would have been possible in the absence of sin? All that can be said is that God brings new good out of sin, which is simply to affirm Paul’s statements in Romans 5.20 and 8.28: ‘but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more’; and ‘We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.’ My hypothesis, drawn from the engagement with Barth, is that in order to appreciate the distinctive character of the goodness of reconciliation, a genuine distinction needs to be maintained between the goodness of reconciliation and the goodness of creation, and thus in turn between creation and reconciliation.76 While I would want to affirm with Barth that eternal life is not immortal life (as the opposite of this mortal life), I would want to maintain that its distinctive character in respect of the primordial creation (the creation ex nihilo) is that of goodness after failure – a goodness we already get a glimpse of in the present at those points where our eschatological redemption in Christ becomes manifest. In conclusion, I suggest that the distinction between creation and new creation becomes manifest within our present reality in the distinction between primordial creaturely goodness and goodness after sin.

Notes 1 The critique voiced here has resonance with, but is also distinct from, a variety of other well-established critiques which argue for comparable ‘collapses’ in

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Eternal God, Eternal Life Barth. For example, see Richard H. Roberts, ‘Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Time: Its Nature and Implications’, in A Theology on Its Way: Essays on Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 1–58, in which Roberts argues for a collapse of natural human time into the self-enclosed envelope of revelation time. The present critique is less thoroughgoing in that it is aimed not at the entire Barthian structure, but at internal relations between theological loci within that structure. Compare also David F. Ford, Barth and God’s Story: Biblical Narrative and the Theological Method of Karl Barth in the ‘Church Dogmatics’ (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1981), in which Ford argues for a danger in Barth of collapsing literal into (christological) typological meaning (most evident in the case of Judas; see 91–3). The present critique is more thoroughgoing in that it finds the latter hermeneutical collapse to be at work in service of a consistent, largescale doctrinal collapse. I mention one further comparison here, which I will tease out in nn. 68 and 74 below: with R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), in which Soulen argues that Barth collapses covenant history into Christ, with supersessionist consequences. In what follows, I cite frequently from Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, eds, Church Dogmatics, 14 vols (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936–69), hereafter abbreviated as CD. Barth, CD IV/1, 158. Ibid., 313. One might argue, analogously, that by enfolding all reality into the history of Christ, Barth also effectively closes the gap anagogical reading potentially holds open between the history of Christ and the communion of saints. But this is a matter for our next section. Ford shows how this works itself out in Barth’s narrative exegesis, coming to the conclusion that ‘Barth’s tendency is to load the story of Jesus Christ with significance in such a way that it twists under the strain on its main character’ (‘Barth’s Interpretation of the Bible’, in S. W. Sykes, ed., Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 55–87 [85]). He is more tentative in his critique of Barth, however, rightly recognizing the attentiveness of Barth’s literary analysis, and his exegetical maintenance at many points of a genuine distinction between the literal and the typological (cf. Barth and God’s Story). More recently, Mike Higton has argued that the logic of Barth’s figural imagination is such as to free the creature to be itself (Mike Higton, ‘The Fulfilment of History in Barth, Frei, Auerbach and Dante’, in John C. McDowell and Mike Higton, eds, Conversing with Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004),



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120–41). My argument in the following does not directly conflict with this claim, since it concerns not the creature as such but the relation between the creature as created and the creature as reconciled. Barth, CD III/1, 42. Ibid., 45. Or one might say with McCormack, more carefully, by his identification of the logos asarkos with the logos incarnandus (Bruce McCormack, ‘Seek God Where He May Be Found: A Response to Edwin Chr. von Driel’, SJT 60:1 (2007), 62–79 [63]). The issue in the present context is merely whether God creates after the pattern of the divine Son considered in abstraction or considered in respect of his incarnate life. See Barth, CD III/1, 54, where he concludes that the logos asarkos ‘is an abstraction’. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 58. Barth, CD II/2, 127–45. Barth, CD III/1, 44. Ibid., 102–8 [108]. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 109–10. The work of the following days consists, by contrast, in ‘the furnishing of the cosmos’ (ibid., 156). Ibid., 122. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 142. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 1.17.33. Barth, CD III/1, 118–19. Ibid., 123–4. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 115. Barth, CD II/2, 103. Ibid., 95–8. Ibid., 94. This reading of Barth’s doctrine of election does not take sides in the fascinating dispute between McCormack and others over the question of the relation of

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Eternal God, Eternal Life priority between election and Trinity, since it concerns the creaturely rather than the divine consequences of election. For some pivotal moments within that debate, see Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Grace and Being: The Role of God’s Gracious Election in Karl Barth’s Theological Ontology’ in J. Webster, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which initially sparked it; McCormack, ‘Seek God Where He May Be Found’; and Edwin Chr. van Driel, ‘Karl Barth on the Eternal Election of Jesus Christ’, Scottish Journal of Theology 60:1 (2007), 45–61. Barth, CD II/2, 142. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 108. Barth, CD III/1, 15. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 35. Barth, CD II/2, 141. Barth, CD III/1, 136–9. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 110. Barth, CD III/2, 438. Ibid., 437–8. Ibid., 520 and 522 respectively. Ibid., § 47.1, 437–511. Ibid., 455. Ibid., 466–74. Ibid., 474–85. Ibid., 485–511 [485]. Ibid., 482. Ibid., 486. Ibid., 489–90. Ibid., 496. Ibid., 494. Ibid., 498. Ibid., 553; cf. 455–6. Ibid., e.g. 562 and 567–8. Ibid., 631–40. Ibid., 521.

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Ibid., 633. Ibid., 624. Ibid., 517. Ibid., 638. It will be instructive here to compare this conclusion with Soulen’s assessment that in Barth’s theology ‘covenant history [collapses] […] into the figure of Jesus Christ’ (The God of Israel, 94; cf. n. 1). Soulen implies no collapse into one another of creation, reconciliation and consummation, as I do here. Indeed, he lauds Barth for placing God’s covenant with Israel in the context of his consummation of creation, rather than subordinating it to God’s act of reconciliation (or redemption, in Soulen’s terms). His critique is that Barth then folds God’s covenant with Israel into the person of Christ as its climax and completion, making any ongoing history of God with Israel superfluous: Christ is the end of history (93–4). Building on Soulen’s analysis I would argue, however, that because the shape of the covenant in Christ is intrinsically one of reconciliation (characterized by his death and resurrection), the collapse of God’s covenantal purposes into Christ is effectively the collapse of creation and consummation into reconciliation. Barth, CD III/2, 455. Ibid., 470. Ibid., 553. Katherine Sonderegger, ‘Et Resurrexit Tertia Die: Jenson and Barth on Christ’s Resurrection’, in McDowell and Higton eds, Conversing with Barth, 191–213, recognizes the fundamentality of the resurrection for Barth’s Dogmatics: ‘Standing at the head of all divine ways and works is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead’ (200). But her reading does not press its fundamentality in the doctrinally controversial direction suggested here, perhaps (we might speculate) because she is comparing Barth with Robert Jenson, who outdoes (even) Barth in innovation by holding the resurrection to be a novum not just in God’s turning ad extra, but for God in Godself (207). Jenson does this within the context of a radical ‘eschatologicalization’ of Barth’s theology, making God’s future key to God’s identity, with the resurrection as the moment of the breaking in of God’s future. One might speculate further, therefore, that Barth avoids Jenson’s particular innovation precisely by holding onto the resurrection as the fulcrum of God’s relationship with creation at the intersection between time and eternity, with the collapse of old into new creation that this implies – rather than as the pivotal moment within the unfolding of God’s ‘temporal infinity’.

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73 The ‘ex’ here is clearly ambiguous. What it cannot mean is that death is the ‘material’ out of which God creates. It should be understood to signify something more like ‘following upon’. 74 In suggesting that it is the good specifically of reconciliation that needs rehabilitating, my argument would seem to have gone in the opposite direction to Soulen’s (in The God of Israel), which seeks to bring God’s consummating work from out of the shadow of God’s reconciling work, thereby enabling God’s election of Israel to be understood within the proper context of God’s consummation of creation (a goal that Barth, on Soulen’s account, takes important steps towards but falls short of fully attaining). However, I suggest that there is no necessary opposition here, since both reconciliation and consummation are brought into relief by their proper distinction from one another. Nevertheless, the present essay only gets as far as considering the proper distinction between creation and reconciliation, not tackling the further question of the distinction and relation between God’s reconciling and consummating purposes. The place of Israel within the economy of creation, reconciliation and consummation has also been left unaddressed. 75 Such a reading need not be undermined by suspicious reading of these interactions. Partial or flawed reconciliation can still embody a genuine dynamic of reconciliation; arguably, perfect reconciliation is not possible before the eschaton. 76 This suggestion has resonance with David H. Kelsey’s argument, in his Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, 2 vols (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), for an irreducible (threefold) distinction between the stories of creation, eschatological consummation and reconciliation. However, one might place Kelsey at the opposite end of the spectrum from Barth (on my reading) in terms of maintenance versus collapse of the distinction, and I do not commit myself here to this other extreme. My aim is more modestly to advocate a distinction between different kinds of good – not to maintain the need for distinct stories to accommodate these goods.

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Towards a Doctrine of Resurrection Katherine Sonderegger

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell; the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs – Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.1 Perhaps you can recite whole sections of this splendid poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins by heart; it is one of his most lyrical, most radiant works. Hopkins composed this work in a decidedly traditional form, the Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet, a fourteen-line poem divided into two large parts, one eight and the other six lines long. The rhyme scheme is complex, and again, traditional in its own way. And Hopkins, a heroically faithful man, saturated his sonnet with traditional imagery and traditional Biblical idiom – a youthful work tied to an ancient past. Yet, for all that, Hopkins’ sonnet is a decidedly modern, a revolutionary poem. Any student of literature will report the remarkable generative

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force of Hopkins’ verse for poetic modernism. For such a slight collection of poetry, drenched in religious devotion, delight and struggle, Hopkins’ work musters a surprising revolution in our midst. Yet a revolution it is. And in my view, most significantly, Hopkins stands as a modern revolutionary in Christian doctrine. Now I would be altogether astonished were Hopkins to agree with my assessment here! I believe that Hopkins, a life-long, obedient Jesuit, would aim for nothing more daring in Christian doctrine than a modest love for Duns Scotus – and that, it seems, for high Marian views as much as for Scotus’ famed doctrine of haecceitas – the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’, as Hopkins puts it. Yet, I believe that Hopkins in this short work of poetry expressed with particular power the modern impulse in the doctrine of creation, and in just this way is revolutionary over the traditional teaching of the Last Things. What I mean is this: Hopkins in this, and many of his other, widely admired, ‘nature poems’, takes up a noisy admiration for the LORD’s creation that is quietly and decidedly this-worldly. The world – its beauty and its toil, its glory and despoliation – comprise the whole of Hopkins’ attention. Our cosmos is a rounded whole, closed off and complete, and the full measure of Christian devotion and repentance is realized in the world as it lies before us, firm under our earthly feet. Note the way Hopkins, for example, treats the relation of God’s grandeur to the problem of human sin and corruption. The world, he says, is ‘charged with God’s grandeur’: everything in the cosmos receives and is electrified by this Heavenly Light; the world does not point beyond itself to God, but rather God bends down, ‘broods’ over this ‘bent world’, illuminating it from within by Celestial Fire. It is this bright world that is ‘smeared with toil, seared with trade’; the problem of sin and evil are decidedly this-worldly as well. The entire sonnet is self-enclosed in just this way. Good and evil, glory and sin, are set down alongside one another, two dimensions impossibly joined together in this one, good earth, made by the Good God. In Hopkins’ sonnet, we do not look beyond this earth to discover the resolution to this impossible juxtaposition, nor do we train our eyes toward Another City or a New Heaven and a New Earth, descending from Above, to console and resolve the problem of suffering. No, we are planted firmly on this earth, under this sky; our concern and our hope are exhausted by the world lying before us. And, in just this way, Hopkins is the revolutionary prophet of modernism.



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For I believe that the subject matter of this volume – the doctrines of Resurrection and Eternal Life – have receded well out of the mind’s eye of modern Christian people. In a subtle and wonderfully innovative book, John Thiel has recently argued that the medieval doctrine of Purgatory has dropped out of Catholic sensibility and piety in the modern era, thanks in part to the great cause of grace, enunciated at Vatican II, and to the warm embrace of a ‘non-competitive’ account of the Christian pursuit of holiness.2 Thiel does not say this, but I think we could detect it in the work as a whole: the Last Things, taken altogether, do not have much work to do in the modern religious heart; already our hearts are filled to overflowing with the burdens of this day, and of this, our sorrowing world. The problem of evil as set out in its modern form, from Leibniz forward, preoccupies present-day theology, and it is taken as the most serious and the most intractable obstacle to religious belief in the modern era. I do not pretend that this formal remark about the problem of evil in modernist theology could resolve or ‘answer’ the dark riddle of pain! Indeed the very notion of an ‘answer’ to such suffering only drives the lash deeper on those who must endure the unendurable. Some things, I say, must never be ‘explained’, as the very act of explanation threatens to ‘explain away’. But I do think it is a legacy, a solemn legacy, of modernism in theology that the self-enclosed universe to which we now give full attention, demands that any recognition or response to the presence of evil in this age must be set out altogether in the furniture and idiom of this world. The Last Things, the Beyond and the Other-worldly, no longer serve as candidates for theodicy. We live in this world, we moderns say, and our theology must be paid in the coin of this realm. That such a demand generates an insuperable, structural burden to the doctrine of creation and the Fall, has not weighed for much in present-day doctrine. Yet, the problem of sin and suffering cannot be properly measured or consoled without Other-worldliness. The doctrine of Last Things, I say, cannot be reduced or stripped away from any full response to the problem of suffering or the doctrine of the Fall; indeed I would say it is the ineliminable dimension of Christian hope, and the proper, full, and inescapable element of Christian faith, the great, good news of the Gospel. Now, some of you may find this entire analysis of modern theology puzzling. For is this not the era of the ‘eschatological revolution’ in theology?

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Is this not the time in which the ‘eschatological’ and the ‘apocalyptic’ have been discovered and re-discovered for Christian faith? Is it not the great work of Schweitzer and Weiss, of Barth and Overbeck, and all their kin, to awaken our ears to the Word that speaks from Beyond, to sharpen our eyes for the menacing ‘dividing line’ of death and finitude that marks off our world from God’s World, the Utter Novum and End? Should not Hopkins be considered one more faultless bourgeois Christian, one last Victorian, in his earnest thisworldliness, a poet whose world will soon be shattered and turned upside down by the eschatological revolution in theology? I would certainly be altogether blind to overlook the way eschatology – the very word! – has become the vital talisman of modern dogmatics. Indeed, it would be difficult to even catalogue modern exegetical studies or theological systems had we not ‘eschatology’ or ‘apocalyptic’ in our lexicon. All this is true, of course; but I think we might draw a different lesson from the evidence than is commonly done. There’s a long story to be told about all this, and I won’t pretend that I will do it any justice here. But it seems to me that a sturdy and unseen architectonic underlies the whole of this modernist re-discovery of the eschatological. And that is the framework of the apophatic, the negative way, the Grenzbegriff, or limit concept, which encases and supports that whole work of modern theology. For all our modernist talk of the Eschaton, we cannot and do not speak about it in a positive fashion; we do not ‘fill it out’, give it substantial form and heft, or allow it to work on and for us as ‘object of thought’. The Eschaton rather stands as the Irreducible Subject, the Transcendent and Living Thou, facing our world, breaking into it as the revolution from Beyond. The Last Things, in such an architectonic, cannot and should not be described or grasped or made vivid and concrete. If we live with the eschatological God, modern theology says, we enter into the unimaginable, the unutterable, and the inconceivable. It is to affirm, as Barth often said, the impossible: the life of the dead. Now, such a methodological stricture does not permit the Christian much room to imagine or long for the Last Things. We must rather encounter a Beyond who drives us more deeply into this world. ‘God is in Heaven and thou art on earth’, Barth solemnly intoned in his second preface to the Römerbrief; that, he announced, was the whole theme of his early theology.3 All this boundary talk has made serious Christians, I believe, spiritually unable to speak about the Last Things as objects, real objects, of the Christian



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hope. We have nothing concrete, visual, plastic and substantial to long for; our traffic as Christians is in this world and we are to do our work within it. A sign of this impoverishment, it seems to me, is the reduction of Last Things to the status of ‘puzzle cases’ among the philosophically minded in theology. How do we insure ‘sameness of body’? Or how do we give a coherent and logically possible account of human essential properties – finitude, say – among the resurrected, they who have ‘put on immortality’? How can the human form of experience, its reliance upon space and time, be conceived in an eternal realm, timeless and without extension? Such questions are cogent and deep; I do not mean to dismiss them! But as we recognize that a culture has become ossified when it serves merely as fodder for satire, so we recognize that a Christian doctrine has become empty and toothless when it offers merely conceptual puzzles that must be solved, riddles that must be dissolved. The doctrine of Last Things cannot do real work in the Christian life, its gears cannot engage, so long as the very colour of Heaven is not made vivid before our eyes. We must peer into Divine Things and long for them; we must greet the Promise, even from afar, and yearn to enter into It. The doctrine of Resurrection and Eternal Life must set forth a reality we deeply desire; we must know its shape – even if beyond our comprehension – in order to hope for it. Heavenly life must be good news, the very best, if it is to take its place alongside the drama of this world; it must hold out the distant harmony of the Lord’s victory song if we are to love it, and to learn its rhyme. The world, our world, must be broken open upwards and forward, beyond and toward the End, and we must look there for our final redemption. That is the proper grandeur of God, the whole Gospel. We must set out just what a Heavenly calling looks like. Our world, that is, must strike us as incomplete. We can state it as simply as that. For the Christian, the earth we dearly prize and fear must tell out in unmistakable tones its fragmentary and unfinished nature. A proper doctrine of creation must set out a world that implies – no, insists upon – a completion elsewhere; everything must say and show: we are incomplete. Now, there are many form of incompleteness, of course. Time can be incomplete because it is an unfinished infinite, a ‘negative infinity’, as the scholastics would say; or space might be thought incomplete, because it marks out another kind of infinity, perhaps a bounded one. Or we might consider the finitude of composite things incomplete metaphysically, because they depend upon

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the Simple or the Necessary or the One. Or we might call the world incomplete morally because the good that virtuous people do is left in our realm unrewarded, an incompleteness Immanuel Kant corrected by his vision of Eternal Life. All these elements belong to a proper, substantial doctrine of Last Things, but we cannot treat them all here. Only a sketch of the cosmic and metaphysical incompleteness can be offered here. The central element, the axis on which the whole will turn, is the conviction that the cosmos we inhabit is not a closed system. Like Gödel’s famous theorem, the axiom or explanation of this cosmos lies beyond the inner workings of our world. We must make use of principles that lie outside the structure of creaturely demonstration, and cannot be derived from it. In just this way, our world stands broken open, indeterminate and incomplete; ours is a world haunted by the unfinished. Now, it is hardly a discovery of today to say that such incompleteness is invisible to our kind. Although our ancestors were far more religious than we – naturally so, we might think – it has been the common experience of humankind that the world we inhabit, contrary to Christian teaching, is complete, ordered, and self-enclosed. I do not mean that every generation has ignored that the cosmos has a beginning; certainly, not that! Our ancestors in the faith, and in the world’s religions, have seen in the very elements of the cosmos the sign of its contingency: the world has spoken to many of its Transcendent Origin, and its radical dependence upon Another. But contingency need not suggest incompleteness: Thomas long ago knew that an eternal world – one that is ‘always there’ – is fully compatible with its simple contingency upon a Creator. And, of course, Hopkins, though a prophet of the world’s sufficiency, was clearly one of these confessors of the doctrine of creation. My point here rather is that our material existence within an ordered cosmos, its intelligibility and rationality, its calm perpetuity and self-renewal, its structural integrity and ecology, all convey to us a sense of wholeness and enclosure. It all speaks of a well-built house, entire and lasting. When we look out at our world, at the metaphysical furniture of our world, we see its sturdy autonomy and this-worldly independence. I speak epistemically here, but I intend it in a realist sense: we regard the world as filled with complete and self-determined material objects, because the creaturely realm, in its metaphysical composition, is self-generating, ordered and lawful, and sturdy, through and through. The causal powers accorded this-worldly beings – the



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‘secondary causes’ Thomas assigns to material creatures – are sufficient for their continuance, growth, and reliance upon other beings of their kind and in their sphere. This is the dignity of creation, lavished upon the creaturely realm by a Humble Sovereign, the Hidden LORD of the universe. But it is the hallmark of the modern era that the sturdy completeness of the world has now broken free of its created origin to stand starkly on its own. Modern atheism gives voice to what has been always the case, though explained in religious idiom: that our world is simply there, a pulsing, dynamic, self-generating complex, an environment (Naturzusammenhang), as Schleiermacher puts this, in which we human beings take our part, to suffer and to thrive.4 Present-day atheism simply denies the abstract categories scholastics drew upon to undermine the world’s seeming all-sufficiency: radical contingency, teleology and fittingness and motion or change. Such atheism simply resists the claim that these universal abstractions are irrational without Primal Origin, Motion or Necessity, and takes in its stride the seeming menace of infinite regress with a calm shrug of indifference. We westerners now live in an intellectual climate in which the revolution in modern theology appears to be complete: this is our world, the whole of it, and whatever we undergo or achieve will be done so here. Now, we should not be quick to dismiss this modern revolution as sinful or blind. Rather, a surprising turn awaits us. We should affirm, instead, that Hopkins’ insight is one element in a proper doctrine of creation: that the air and nature of self-sufficiency and amplitude that it pleased our LORD God to bestow upon this earth is not folly but rather gift, the ‘grandeur’ it has pleased our Hidden God to shower upon our world. Our cosmos is complete, in this sense, a perfect work. Yet God is not done with us. He has not left us alone or undisturbed in this dreaming self-sufficiency. The doctrine of creation is not the whole of Christian teaching, nor can it exhaust the Ways and Works of God ad extra. It pleases God to be known, to be recognized, to be worshipped; it pleases Almighty God to communicate His very Life to us in such a way that we sturdy creatures are broken open, stirred up and enflamed with longing for Celestial Fire. So, this is the second element in a theology of the creature, one proper to a full doctrine of Resurrection: that the Transcendent and Unique LORD will show forth our incompleteness and fill us with longing for Another Country, Another Earth. The LORD God will make us restless. Not worldlings

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but citizens of Heaven; not residents content with this earth but pilgrims, groaning for the Homeland! That is the rupture of earthly completion by the LORD’s voice. This second element we may call, in our Lord’s teaching, the Kingdom of God, the Realm that to earth from Heaven comes down. This is the Dynamic Fire that just is the LORD’s own Life, plunged down into our perfect earth, searing it from Beyond, sending the sparks upward, so that our blinded eyes can turn up toward the Heaven, and seek our life and our perfect rest there. Note first, then, that Resurrection and Eternal Life is God’s own Proper Work: it begins with Him, His own Life stirred up in us, and not with our own created nature and our own reflection upon it. The teachings of theology are not closed up in one doctrine. We do not properly generate all Christian doctrine from one point or one dogma. Theology has, to be sure, One SubjectMatter, One proper Object, and that is the Good God. But our teaching about Him, His Aseity and also His Ways us-ward, are diverse and rich, and conform to the fresh works the LORD God carries out in His cosmos. Like content; like form. We would be tempted to believe that all Christian doctrine could be complete, a generated system from a single axiom, were God not to break our thought open, upward and forward, so that Infinite and Free Life of God can be praised in our poor mouths. To set this out in proper, Biblical idiom: Resurrection and Eternal Life is the Hallowing of God’s Name. In Eternal Life, in the Heavenly habitations, God’s Name will be hallowed by creatures in their very nature. In the Age to Come, all creatures, animate and inanimate, will manifest their incompleteness, their radical fragmentariness and dependence upon God alone. What believers long to see with the eyes of faith, and to prove with various rational demonstrations, is the utter contingency of all nature upon the One Source of Life. This is what is impenetrable to our eyes of sight, for we see material and conceptual objects only in their autonomy, density, and containment. While a mechanism may point to an Artificer, the whole of nature, in its quiet serenity and fruitfulness, points to itself: Our Creator is that Humble! But in the Other World it is otherwise. There, beyond our earthly life, nature will show itself plainly and essentially to be a creature: all things will speak and hallow God’s Name. What I mean is this: in truth all creation depends radically upon Being Itself, the LORD’s own Goodness and Truth. But it seems that it pleases our Maker to allow this essential relatedness to go undetected by the mechanisms, sciences,



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and sense impressions of our kind. Indeed we can rationally countenance and defend an eternal world, always generative and self-enclosed, even in its reliance upon Another. But Eternal Life is the eschaton and telos of the creature in which the essential predicate, God-relation, will body forth in nature itself. We will no longer be able to accept the dreaming completeness of our age as the full reality, dignity, and definition of the creature. Rather, the ontology of nature will now disclose its essential, relative property: it will be impossible to encounter or understand an object, however material, without including, honouring and hallowing its sheer dependence upon God, and its incompleteness without Him. Note here that I do not set ‘essential’ over against ‘relative’, nor ‘realism’ over against ‘mind dependent’. Rather the very essence of what it is to be made by God, the very nature of finite, living, and inanimate matter, will now manifest its hunger for its LORD. This is how we might understand the Apostle Paul when he points to the Final Mystery, that we will put on a spiritual body. A spiritual body is the metaphysical condition of incompleteness. It is the final breaking open of the creature to its Creator and LORD. The Hiddenness of the LORD God to His creation will now be overcome by the disclosure of the proper, true, and complete reality of creation, its unfinished and insufficient character as the beings made for God. In those last days, the Prophet says, no one will need say ‘Know the LORD!’, for all will know Him, from the greatest to the least, and His Law will be written on our hearts (Jer. 31.31-34). The very constitution of finite and material beings, that which now lies buried and hidden in our dreaming self-sufficiency, will be not taught but rather incorporated in the varying bodies of the Heavenly Realm. This is how love of God and love of neighbour are like unto one another: in the End-times, we will gaze on the bodies of our neighbours, animate and inanimate and we will see in their nature the God who fashioned and completes them. God’s Name will be hallowed by creatures, that is, in a form of intellection. Not discursive reason but rather direct visio will lead us to the Lord of Life. The ‘enigma’ or ‘dark mirror’ that hangs over our world will be completed and elevated and corrected not by fullness, but rather by poverty and need: the complete will be superseded by the unfinished and the insufficient. That is the gracious exchange of eschatology over creation, completion for incompletion, to break open the satisfied world to a hunger for the Bread which Lasts.

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I have spoken of the Great Commandment that will be manifest and embodied in the End-times, and now it is time to speak not only of the love of God, but of the love of neighbour. Here too the spiritual body that will be given us will exhibit our final incompletion. For the LORD’s Name is hallowed by our manifesting our need of God; but His Kingdom comes in our flesh when our essential relation to our neighbour, too, is made plain. In Heaven it is otherwise, but here on earth, the Kingdom of God lies hidden in the detached self-enclosure of creaturely beings, one to another. I am not thinking here of Luther’s famed ‘incurvatus in se’ – there will be time for that in a moment – but rather upon a form of creaturely self-sufficiency that hides our metaphysical relatio to the other beings in this cosmos. We need only think of our classical treatments of ‘substance’ or, epistemically, of ‘essence’ to see that our traditional vision of the world is composed of things, free standing and definite, that must be drawn out of their finite autonomy to be engaged in relation with other things. Now I am not one to disparage ‘substance metaphysics’! Much good, essential work is done by the light of classical, Greek metaphysics, and theology in my book is much impoverished by our studied allergy to this tradition. My point, rather, is that the God who makes us restless in our complacent, finished world, also stirs up in us a hunger and thirst for the Kingdom, a Realm where creatures are already in relation to one another. Not distant but altogether apposite to the Gospel language of Kingdom is the Pauline idiom of ‘body’: we creatures, in truth, are organically, metaphysically intertwined and dependent; we need one another as lungs need air. But our science, much of our philosophy and most of our encounters with the world tell us that we are objects, distinct, enclosed realities in this cosmos and that the outline of our material body is the border between ourselves and what we call the outer world. There are, to be sure, rival metaphysical accounts of our cosmos that aim to replace such distinctive substances with events or with force-fields and their interstices, or bodies in a sea of causal networks and dependencies, or a tapestry of ‘internal relations’. I am not the first to have noticed, that is to say, that our metaphysical concepts do not tell the full story of creaturely reality! But it is the hallmark of our earthly life, I believe, that we can present these categories now only as rival accounts or theories. Not manifest to our eye or indeed to our sciences, is the essential or inherent relatedness of one thing to another. Indeed we most



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commonly resort to dialectical pairs or conceptual opposites to handle rival theories of this sort: Either ‘autonomy’ or ‘dependence’; either ‘substance’ or ‘event’; either ‘thing’ or ‘network’. We cannot conceptually set out a theory of the whole creation that manifests the full dignity of the substance in its essential order and dependence upon one another. But in the Other World it will not be so. The Kingdom will lie open to our gaze. Our spiritual bodies will manifest in their own constitution their unique reality, their haecceitas, and their essential tie to all other creatures. My isolation as a complete human being will finally and at the last be broken. My inner tie to my neighbour will be embodied in my everlasting, spiritual life. I will be related to those I know, those in my inner circle, whose friendship and care I sought to hold dear; but I will also body forth my relation to those I never knew – the citizen of my city I never met, the subject in another empire or clan, the human person who lived and died utterly apart from me, perhaps across many lands, but also many eras. All these will be a part of me, and I of them; one family, one realm of One God. My completeness in this life will be broken open to the radical need, dependence and relation of the Spiritual Life. And not just human beings! The kind of metaphysical incompleteness I believe we should teach in our doctrine of Last Things extends far beyond the interweaving of the human family. Indeed it is one of the marks of modern eschatology that we rarely can set forth a doctrine of Last Things that moves beyond the dilemmas of the human. But the LORD God set us into a world; better, into a Garden, an Eden. The solemn narration of creation in the opening of Holy Scripture gives each kind and each thing its place and dignity; its name and blessing. They are set in sequence and in motion, each giving and receiving benefit to the rest. All animals and human animals belong to that sequence and to that blessing; and indeed the whole is very good. The Book of Revelation ties this fullness of creation to the Last Things: white-robed martyrs and saints, yes; but also Angels and great Living Beasts and trees and streams of life and horsemen, with their steeds and ships, in the great sea and the great sea monsters. All these are in the Heavenly Realm, all servants of the One who sits upon the throne and the Lamb. In the End-times, the interconnection of all these beings will be set forth, exemplified. My spiritual body will consist of my identity which will comprise also, and not against, my unique reality, my relatedness to all things. I will be essentially

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related to other living creatures, winged birds and sea creatures, but also to the elements of the good earth, to the greater and lesser lights, to the plants bearing fruit, the tall grasses, the molten rock of the earth’s crust and the great Pleiades. I cannot think now and surely not experience now how I am part of all that is. I cannot discover the positive relation I bear to all reality. Now, I can revert only to pale images of this fullness: to causal notions, say, of the kind that Sally McFague envisions in the common creation Story; or to categories of possible experience, as Kant might re-fashion metaphysics; or to encounter and admiration, as I might think on the beauty of this world and its glory. But in the Greater Life, I will not simply know the interdependence of all things; I will live in the Kingdom, and my body will exhibit worlds upon worlds. Now, of course, we have not told the whole story of the Last Things when we reflect upon the modern pre-occupation with this-worldliness. The problem of self-enclosure and completeness hardly exhausts the dilemma of creaturely life and its destiny. Hopkins, you remember, led us from God’s grandeur, caught up in the world like shining foil, to the weary toil and smeared faces of the labourers on this earth, the problem of sin and suffering in this enclosed earth of ours. And here I think is disclosed the astonishing mystery of our cosmos: the seeming completeness of our metaphysical nature and environment contains within it an aching moral and spiritual incompleteness. I have spent much time focusing on the dreaming self-sufficiency of our world, but in truth that can never tell the full tale. For the human experience of our kind and our lot is of the frailty, insufficiency and impermanence of the good, the intimate, and the flourishing. In this place, we indeed speak of rebellion and folly. For the world that has been given us by the Good God is broken by sin; and we are broken, suffering shards within it. I have spent the majority of my time here thinking through the ways we might join the doctrine of creation to that of Last Things; but this is hardly the complete list of doctrines to be joined together! Much more central to our tradition is the joining of the doctrine of Redemption to eschatology and Resurrection: we traditionally think of Heaven and Hell, and the Days of Judgement and Resurrection as out workings and expressions of the doctrines of Sin and Redemption. Here, I think, is where Luther’s doctrine of Sin, of the self turned in on itself, comes to the fore. We are now encouraged to think on our world as inhabited by those beings whose self-enclosure and self-obsession stamps



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the earthly world as incomplete and incurable. We might style all this a form of ‘negative completeness’. We human beings know all too well how this form of sinful completeness expresses the fragmentary and the insufficient. We know from earliest years that some wounds will never heal. Some diseases will cripple and sear with pain; some deprivations of poverty, of hunger and neglect and homelessness, will leave scars that can only be endured. Some death is robbery. Some injustices, even the terrible, will simply stand. Some injuries by parents to children, or children to parents, will never be put right; some marriages will dissolve and tear apart in bitter acrimony; some cultures will break down under the irresolvable weight of their wars or prisons or indifference to need; some friendships are offended and injured beyond repair. In some springtime season we may all hope that every broken relationship will mend, given time, insight or cultural revolution. But for most of us, the lessons that earthly life exact, teach us that some ties, intimate or political or collegial, will simply enter into history broken, unreconciled, insoluble. We consider it mature to accept this, and there is no doubt that realism forces that concession from us all, this season or the next. But Christians live by hope! The broken fragments of the Messianic banquet will be gathered up and blessed: this is the great Promise of the Gospel. The Redemption in Christ that spreads forth from Golgotha to the End-times must also lift our eyes from this world to the next. This too is the Kingdom of God, the deliverance of all things. In the Last Days, sin and death will be overcome, and the broken made whole. This is the great Hope of eschatology and we must never cease to hold before our eyes the vision of Another World in which the lost is found, the evil put away, the dead made truly alive and the Good, the Blessed, triumph and heal. Those of us made earnest by the Social Gospel and its allergy to an alienating wish for Heaven, may fear that a longing for Heaven above will cut the nerve to Kingdom work below. But not so! It is the deepening longing for true satisfaction, for Heavenly Rest and Redemption, which opens, in truth, our hearts and minds to the longings and miseries of this age. We can bear them only in light of their final eradication and deliverance. We know our brokenness only as Christ, our Risen Lord, intercedes and heals as the Source of our own rising from the graves of sin. The Heavenly Kingdom is that Divine Refuge where the human relationships, corroded and defiled by sin, are made

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permanent, satisfying, rich and free. It is the everlasting banquet of marrow and fatness, of wine pressed clear. In Icons of Hope, Thiel has recently suggested that Heaven will be a place of everlasting forgiveness, a limitless season in which the fruits of sin – though not sin itself – will perdure in Heaven, prompting an endless cycle of seeking pardon and extending it, generation to generation.5 This vision, Thiel acknowledges, blurs the boundary between purgation and redemption, penance and salvation. And yet it is a vision, he insists, that takes both sin and our human participation in it with full seriousness, and shows the activity, the service, of Heaven that makes us citizens of this New Jerusalem. Now I must say that I see a clearer, brighter line marking out Paradise from Purgatory, if such there be, than does Thiel, and I believe the Redeemer drives all sin away from his Heavenly Realm – really, all sin and its effects. But I think we might honour Thiel’s daring and creative vision by suggesting that in Eternal Life, we, the sinners redeemed and made whole, will serve the LORD and one another by enjoying the full, fruitful, and unimpaired relationships that earthly life injured and left for dead, the ones we passed by on the other side. It may not be that our wounds are glorified, as is true of our Lord; it may well be that His Resurrected Body uniquely exemplifies Holy Scars just because He alone is Source and Cause of our redemption. It may well be that for us, disciples of our Lord, that we will finally be healed of all disease and scar and deprivation, just because our incompleteness will be a perfect state of transparency to God and to one another. But I believe we can hold and teach that in the Kingdom of Heaven, our spiritual bodies, joined now to all creatures, will experience and enact the full, complete satisfaction of true relation. This is the triumph of love, the realization of the Beloved Community, the fulfilment of the Great Commandment. All eternity will be the singing of this victory song, the unfolding of love, fully given and fully received. Not partial, not tentative or imperfect, not waiting for development or correction, but rather love in its wholeness, body and soul, shared, broken, blessed and given. As vision succeeds faith, as intellection, argument, so immediate love succeeds the failed and never started relation. That is a Rest in which we at long last are friends of one another, friends of God. That is a Heaven for which to long. Gerard Manley Hopkins gave us a lyrical revolution in this-worldliness. It sang a theme we, too, must sound, that our world is charged with God’s



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grandeur. But how much more is our LORD’s Heaven! It is the exceeding weight of glory and we can only long for it, hope for a completion that is our final incompletion, our Heavenly restlessness that can rest only in God, our Maker and Redeemer. Another poet from the British Isles, Edmund Spenser, says it best: So let us love, deare Love, lyke as we ought – Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.6

Notes 1 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’ (1877), https://www.poets.org/ poetsorg/poem/gods-grandeur. This poem is in the public domain. Accessed 12 April 2016. 2 John Thiel, Icons of Hope (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2014). 3 Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, translated by E. C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 2ff. 4 On this, see Andrew Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 5 Thiel, Icons of Hope, Chapter 5, 153f. 6 Edmund Spenser, ‘Easter’ (Amoretti, Sonnet 68 (1595)), http://www. accuracyproject.org/t-EasterPoems.html. This poem is in the public domain. Accessed 12 April 2016.

7

The Enmity of Death and Judgement unto Life Philip G. Ziegler

I/Justice and immortality – towards an evangelical framing of the question There is, in Kant’s moral philosophy, an important connection between the concept of immortality and the matter of final divine justice. As is well known, both the existence of God and human immortality are a priori postulates of practical reason, i.e. concepts to which reason is necessarily committed as the very conditions of possibility of there being a moral world at all. Human finitude and weakness seemingly frustrate ethical reason, confronting us with fragmentary and incomplete enactments of the moral law, as well as manifest disjunctions between moral rectitude and human happiness. Yet, if it is to be rational for us to pursue the highest good as the proper object of our will, then right conduct and happiness must finally align and a full and perfect enactment of the moral law must be possible. These demands are met by postulating as ‘subjective necessities’ both the existence of God as the all-powerful moral lawgiver and judge, as well as human immortality as the provision of ‘a duration befitting the complete fulfilment of the moral law’.1 In short, a happy conspiracy of the supreme power of moral order and the infinite extension of the time of our autonomous moral agency renders the moral world – and our lives within it – intelligible. Note that on Kant’s account, immortality is instrumentally ordered to justice: eternity is simply that quantity of time a human life requires to guarantee it can attain to the ultimate ends of moral life. Further, as a postulate of practical reason, the concept of immortality may signify nothing beyond

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that which moral reason itself specifically necessitates. It thus comprises nothing but infinite temporal duration as is ‘required for conformity with the moral law’ and ‘any further dissemination of its meaning’ would be ‘a mere figment or fiction’.2 It is thus liable to no legitimate amplification of meaning; it can suffer no broadening of reference; its characterization cannot be further enriched. Kant’s view of immortality is as conceptually astringent as it is fundamental to his project.3 The solution to the problem of the perfection of the autonomous moral will in the rational world the divine Legislator oversees is simply this: that, as a matter of practical necessity, we believe there will always be more time.4 Adjudged theologically, Kant’s moral religious vision is soteriologically anaemic: the self-saving subject is afforded neither aid nor grace, but only authorized to ‘believe in’ there being space to continue to struggle on ad infinitum. Here, we are not so much saved by the bell, as saved by the fact that the bell never rings to call time on our moral endeavours to realize the highest good and marry justice with happiness. In short, where it is held – as Kant does – that ‘the right way to advance is not from grace to virtue, but rather from virtue to grace’, rational belief in immortality serves only to hold open law’s labouring indefinitely.5 Immortality: the moralist’s wager on there yet being time to succeed. A Christian theology riveted to the gospel of Jesus Christ will see the matter otherwise. Constrained – but also warranted and impelled – by the reality of God’s self-revelation in Christ, evangelical dogmatics is given to approach and understand the reality of eternal life – together with the narrower question of human immortality which it encompasses – within a markedly different and much more robust soteriological framework. For Kant the fragile finitude of the moral will is the problem to which immortality (as indefinite extension) provides a rational solution. Theology acknowledges that both the problem and its solution are far more radical. As with Kant, there is again a crucial connection between eternal life and the matter of ultimate justice. But theology must conceive the nature, ordering and significance of that connection distinctively. Approached evangelically, eternal life stands as the crowning gift of the unimaginably gracious advent and realization of ultimate divine justice upon and for us, rather than being merely structurally instrumental to its human pursuit. Pace Kant, the determinative movement really is



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and can only be ‘from grace to virtue’. If this is so, then the primary theological task is to understand the nature and role of saving divine judgement as the necessary and (re-)creative ground and source of eternal life. As we will see, pursuit of this task quickly makes clear that the theological question of eternal life concerns not merely the quantity of human existence but much more fundamentally its comprehensive eschatological quality.6 Question 52 of the Heidelberg Catechism asks, ‘What comfort does the return of Christ “to judge the living and the dead” give you?’, and answers: That in all affliction and persecution I may await with head held high the Judge from heaven who has already submitted himself to the judgment of God for me and has removed all the curse from me; that he will cast all his enemies and mine into everlasting condemnation, but he shall take me, together with all his elect, to himself into heavenly joy and glory.7

In what follows, I consider the efforts of two contemporary Protestant theologians – Eberhard Jüngel and Jürgen Moltmann – to expose and exposit the connection between the advent of saving divine justice and the reality and promise of eternal life as set out here in the Catechism. Whereas Kant could only conceive of divine justice as the ultimate vanishing point of autonomous human moral striving, these theologians can and must conceive of divine justice in strict and materially decisive reference to the ‘Last Judgement’ and the event of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection as God’s saving acts. It is by thinking through the links between cross, resurrection, justification and final judgement that these writers try to attain to an understanding of eternal life adequate to the gospel. Their common aim in this is to offer responsible dogmatic commentary upon the testimony to Christ’s death and resurrection as that salutary act of God which ensures that ‘grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Rom. 5.21). The question of eternal life is thus rightly bound up with that of God’s righteousness and so with the final justification of God and the rectification of all things. In doing so they particularly emphasize the philanthropic dimension of divine judgement announced in the first half of the catechism’s answer. I will go on to argue briefly that for this philanthropic emphasis to be fully worked out, we must also attend directly to the other motif invoked by the catechism, namely, that of the divine victory over inimical powers – ‘God’s enemies and mine’ – of which Death itself is the final and ultimate

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(1 Cor. 15.26). A forensic emphasis upon saving divine judgement admits and demands this crucial cosmological supplement. For eternal life, if it is to emerge at all, can and must be understood to emerge miraculously from out of the inhumane cauldron of death’s enmity and sin’s bondage.8 We appreciate most fully both the radically gracious and mercifully humane character of eternal life, I suggest, when we acknowledge that life to be the fruit of God’s redemptive overthrow of humanity’s utter usurpation by sin and death. The last judgement is a judgement unto life – eternal life – not least because it is the terminal defeat of death’s annihilating enmity.

II/Divine judgement for life’s sake – Jüngel and Moltmann Moltmann and Jüngel approach the question of the last judgement with special interest in those features which mark it out as a specifically Christian dogma. What commonly concerns them is the soteriological integrity of the doctrine, i.e. the way in which it can be understood to cohere with fundamental evangelical teaching concerning salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone. In this endeavour, unsurprisingly, the Christological determination of God’s righteousness proves decisive, forging material links between justification and judgement that anchor and recast the meaning of the latter. The result is to call out the fundamentally salutary character of the last judgement as a servant of the new creation and the establishment of eternal life. Aspects of Moltmann’s thinking on this matter are already adumbrated as early as his The Theology of Hope. There, he identifies divine righteousness with the creative fidelity of God that establishes and sustains the historic, harmonious ordering of relationships ‘founded on promise and faithfulness’ which justify life and make possible ‘existence as such’.9 Faith in the gospel of Christ’s dying and rising entrusts our lives to this divine righteousness as the sole power able to set all things to rights with God and creatures and thus makes justifying righteousness ‘the summary expression for a universal, all-inclusive eschatology which expects from the future of righteousness a new being for all things’.10 God’s righteousness takes concrete form as the outworking of reconciliation towards a final redemption overreaching death



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and ‘quickening’ to new life; even now, the gift of righteousness brings with it an experience of the re-creative ‘power of the Giver’ in and over our lives.11 Particularly important for our purposes is Moltmann’s developed insistence that an evangelical account of God’s righteousness must be fundamentally eschatological. It is so because it grasps Christ’s enactment of divine saving righteousness for us in his passion and resurrection as an anticipation or prolepsis of the final enactment of righteousness, as the ‘sending forward of God’s future’, his ‘historical descent from the future to the present’, as it were; and in and by these events there begins God’s ‘eschatological subjugation’ of all things.12 As Moltmann explains, the forward movement of the Christian life from ‘the presence of salvation to the consummating future […] is comprehended and enclosed by the converse theological “descent” from the eschatological sole lordship of God to the provisional lordship of Christ’.13 In short, the justifying work of Christ is a real and effective prolepsis of God’s exercise of final judgement, ‘already realising today what is to be tomorrow’.14 For this reason, we are warranted in identifying the content of the last judgement with Christ’s rectifying work by cross and resurrection: that is this, differing only in mode and manner of our participation, but not at all in fundamental reality and meaning. It is this fundamental commitment that animates and informs two recent and overlapping essays in which Moltmann addresses himself directly to the question of the last judgement and eternal life.15 Rather provocatively, he suggests that ‘it is high time to Christianize our traditional images and perceptions of God’s final judgment’ and to ‘evangelise their meaning for the present day’.16 Negatively, this demands that we reject the concept of divine judgement as retribution as one properly alien to biblical faith despite being widely held and deeply integrated into Christian traditions. No such reduction of righteousness to punitive retribution is warranted or indeed theologically cogent as it forfeits the biblically specific semantics of divine justice and conjures up instead a damaging image of a capricious, hostile and wrathful God. Modern revisionist accounts of the judgement that do away with this picture of God but retain the logic of retribution turn God into a mere ‘symbol for the ultimate endorsement of our free will’, whether as its ‘executor or accomplice’.17 Notably, in all cases retributive justice is its own end, that idealized moment in which we all get what’s coming to us (suum cuique!).

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Positively, Moltmann suggests that a properly Christian account of the last judgement must begin by recollecting both the concrete identity of the Judge and the scriptural concept of creative divine righteousness. It is Christ, who bears the sins of the world so that ‘grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life’ (Rom. 5.21), to whom humanity goes for final judgement; it is his ‘judgement seat’ and his ‘day’ (2 Cor. 5.10, Phil. 1.6). And he will be manifest then as the One he is: not a ‘divine avenger’ or ‘final retaliator’, but rather the ‘crucified and risen victor over sin, death and hell’.18 As such, Christ will render the self-same divine righteousness which has already erupted proleptically in his death and resurrection, that righteousness which creates justice, reconciles all things to God, and rectifies the distorted field of sinful relations.19 This is a creative, salutary and healing righteousness – the work of the cross – which brings about liberation on all sides: justice and restoration for victims, transformation and rectification for perpetrators; genuine creaturely freedom for all.20 It is an act of love that ‘burns away everything which is contrary to God so that the person whom God has created will be saved’.21 This is judgement that one might actually implore and await with ‘head held high’. Whereas a final retributive justice would be an end in itself, Moltmann suggests that an evangelical account rightly construes the execution of divine judgement as a forward step in bringing about another end, namely the establishment of eternal life. As he explains: So the last judgment is not the end of God’s works, nor is it the last thing of all; it is not last, but penultimate, it is only a first step in a transition from transience to non-transience. What is final is only the new, eternal creation, which will be brought into being on the foundation of righteousness. Because the judgment serves this new creation of all things, its righteousness is not a righteousness related to the past, which merely establishes what is done and requites it. It is a creative righteousness related to this future, a righteousness which creates justice, heals and rectifies. The judgment is not at the service of sin and death, as if it were the great settling of an account. It serves the new creation […] through and beyond that judgment [is] God’s new world.22

Final divine judgement puts things to rights for the sake of an unhindered future for creaturely life. Identical in substance with the saving work of Christ, its essence is positive and generative: God judges to save and fulfil. And the eternal life to which it gives rise is shorn of all that would threaten, truncate



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and undermine true life with and for God, a life founded ultimately beyond the entire ‘dissolution of the world of evil’.23 It is, in short, the gift of life made true by God’s righteousness, life God has graciously honoured and dignified, a manifestly and irrevocably justified life. Jüngel operates with a markedly different eschatology than Moltmann, but it is one which similarly works to secure the identity of the content of the last judgement with the saving work of Christ’s cross and resurrection. This effort pivots around the theological category of ‘the new’.24 This idea – of the advent of that which in no way emerges from the old and for that very reason calls the old into question, of that which ever remains ‘unique, never to be surpassed, and never to become antiquated’25 – is core to the logic of Jüngel’s account of revelation. As the saving act of God, Jesus Christ is the new thing – definitive, final and graciously generative. The saving work of this ‘new Adam’ gives rise to a renewed humanity, a ‘new creature in Christ [that] no longer grows old’.26 New in this sense, Christ is the eschatos who disposes over time. As the crisis, judgement and saviour of time, Christ’s reality determines what will pass away and what ‘even if it is past, ought to have a future, an eternal future’. The salutary novelty of Christ and his justifying work show themselves precisely in the divine ‘creative power of renewal’ which he exercises and by which all things shall be made new.27 As Jüngel explains, The justifying judgment distinguishes and sets up two opposites: the being of the person as it is determined by that person’s past and as it is determined by that person’s future […] On the one hand there is power that determines the being of the person, the power of his or her guilt-laden past which is self-made, and which, by the death of Jesus Christ, had been forever condemned to perish and is therefore perishing. On the other hand there is the future, with all its eschatological possibilities, which has been granted to us by God and can thus never date. It has already been opened to the believer by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.28

This account of saving revelation makes the event of Christ’s historic cross and resurrection the decisive and unsurpassable determinant of the quality of creaturely life ultimately promised to faith. Creaturely life is secured for an eternal future, Jüngel says, in virtue of its gracious involvement in the eschatological character of Christ’s own ever-new life. Jüngel contends that our hopes for this future life are ‘guided entirely by that participation in God’s eternal

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life which has already been achieved in Christ and which is even now possible through the bounty of the Spirit’.29 Similarly, this same mode of eschatological argument bears directly upon the question of the last judgement. Once again – as with Moltmann’s invocation of prolepsis – we have here an argument of the form ‘this is that’ that effectively disciplines Christian understanding of the last judgement by tethering it tightly to the saving work of Christ’s dying and rising. For Jüngel, it is the logic of the revelation of ‘the new’ that secures this identity: we may admit that the last judgement may be ‘an unexpected act of surpassing excellence’, and yet it cannot be thought of as an act which either ‘relativises or thwarts’ the work of reconciliation already accomplished in Christ.30 In fact, Jüngel argues that the analogy between the present and future in this case should be conceived not as ‘already/not yet’, but rather more strongly as ‘even now – only then completely’. It is on this basis that he ventures his thesis that evangelical theology must construe the last judgement without hesitation or caveat ‘as an act of grace’.31 What does this characterization mean and what does it entail for understanding the relation between the final judgement and eternal life? In the first instance, it announces the fundamental importance of the identity of Jesus Christ as the Judge who ‘has been judged in our place’. Judgement day will be his day (Cor. 1.18, Phil. 1.6, 2 Cor. 5.10). This being so, the last judgement is not only compatible with Christ’s work of justifying ‘the sinner sola fide’, it is decisively linked with and ‘founded’ upon it.32 That the last judgement is conceived only ‘within the horizon of the Good News’ must direct our understanding. Salvation involves suffering the work of Christ’s loving death and resurrection, so Christian hope in the final judgement is ‘something quite different from hope in endless continuity’.33As a work of the ‘One who brings salvation’, final judgement will itself be a grace, for ‘to be judged by Christ is a blessing which befalls humanity’.34 The philanthropy of judgement follows from the identity of the Judge who is love, a love made manifest ‘in the unity of life and death in favour of life’35 for the sake of the wayward creation. Jüngel explicates the philanthropic reality of divine judgement as an event of dignifying truth and vivifying peace. It is, first, an event of dignifying truth because its ‘severe illumination’ of all things in the light of the gospel takes human life and history with the utmost seriousness, ascribing to it real value



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and so honouring humanity as the creature that divine love is concerned to bring into the truth.36 The elucidation of the lives we have actually led that is brought about by the final judgement cannot be thought to be ‘indifferent’ and ‘merciless’ because its light is that of the One who came into the world not to condemn but to save; it is therefore a glorifying light. ‘Humanity’, Jüngel says, ‘is glorified unto judgment.’37 Appeal to Christ’s identity once again proves to be key here: faith cannot conceive of Christ like the blindfolded – and, thus, indifferent and inhuman – judges that commonly figure justice in both the ancient and modern imagination.38 His office is not retributive, for Christ himself is the intimate advocate of those he judges. The truth delivered by the lumen gloriae – the truth of the verdict of the last judgement – is the effectual truth that sets sinners free. This leads directly to the second characterization of the judgement as an event of vivifying peace.39 God in Christ reveals himself to be the One ‘who establishes justice, who by suffering injustice banishes it from the world and brings peace’; the rectifying work of cross and resurrection realizes an ‘eschatological juridical order of peace’ – of shalom – which the last judgement will complete and establish.40 In this it becomes plain that ‘God’s righteousness is a power that penetrates into the fallen world in order to make over anew the world’s unrighteous relationships’.41 In Christ – as at the last – this righteous work of judgement sees God’s ‘holiness is burdened with our unholiness’ in order to save both victims and perpetrators from what has become of them in a traumatized world of sin.42 The last judgement consummates justification in a redemption which delivers sinners from the agonistic captivity to self-righteousness and self-condemnation which still besets us in the present. The ultimate horizon of Christ’s justifying judgement is the restoration – nay re-creation – of ‘those relationships in which alone human life can find its fulfilment’, what Jüngel calls the ultimate achievement of an unimpeachable condition humaine, a vital and unshakeable peace won out of the maelstrom of sin and death in virtue of the creative power of God’s love.43 For Jüngel, this vision of righteous peace is at the heart of the very meaning of eternal life: the intensity, fullness and durability of eschatological life are all functions of it being ‘peaceful existence’; for if, as he explains, ‘whatever exists in peace, does not suffer loss’ then we must think that ‘eternity is the peace of being’.44

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III/‘God’s enemies and mine’ – making an end of Death’s enmity I have endeavoured to this point to highlight in the work of Jüngel and Moltmann, the essential arguments that serve to account for the joyful confidence that the student of the Heidelberg Catechism has before the prospect of the final judgement. Both theologians follow the Catechism’s line by anchoring this joy primarily in the identity of Christ as the Judge who ‘has already submitted himself to the judgment of God for me and had removed all the curse from me’. On this basis, both then draw out the creative, restorative and liberating character of divine righteousness in a way that conceives of the last judgement as the consummation of the saving work of Christ’s cross and resurrection which, rather than being merely a retrospective cementing of the fates human beings have worked out for themselves, is actually another decisive step in the outworking of God’s gracious salvation. The upshot for both is a substantive understanding of the gift of eternal life as a consummate fruit of final divine judgement. Now, to conclude, I want to remark briefly on the importance of the ‘second plank’ of the Catechism’s hope, namely its vision of the final judgement as the divine victory over the inimical powers of Sin and Death, which it styles memorably as ‘God’s enemies and mine’. It is precisely the tight material connection between Christ’s death and resurrection and the last judgement that makes this second theme an inalienable part of any fully evangelical account of the latter. Among the soteriological idioms of the New Testament, perhaps the most radical is that of Pauline apocalyptic. In it, human beings are said to be captive to anti-God powers that have ‘rendered humanity incapable of repenting, seeking God’s forgiveness, and resolving in future to do what is right’.45 Chief among our slave masters of ‘this present age’ are Sin and Death, rogue cosmic agents inimical to God and God’s purposes and to whom, humanity has been, as Paul says ‘handed over’.46 Sin and Death ‘reign’ (Rom. 5.14, 17, 21). The situation is one of fundamental captivity and within that captivity also of baleful complicity as humans have become the ‘settled inhabitants’ of the world of Sin, ‘actively habituated to its way and means as subjects in the service of its false gods’.47 If one were minded, one might call this state of affairs ‘total depravity’.



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Envisaged thus, salvation can only come by way of a divine incursion from outwith – the invasion of divine grace – because what humanity needs is ontic and ontological rescue, ‘not merely repentance and forgiveness, but liberation from its captivity and, indeed, new creation’.48 God’s saving work in Christ is here the ransom, redemption, and liberation of human beings out from under the terminal enmity of death and sin in an exchange of lordships that constitutes the very ‘turning of the ages’. The saving work of the cross and resurrection is the world’s rectification by the Christ of God whom death could not hold (Acts 2.24). It comes to expression as rescue from ‘this evil age’ (Gal. 1.4), the ‘triumphant disarming of the powers of the age’ (Col. 2.15), a remaking of godless creatures (Rom. 5.6), the bringing into being anew of human partners who were as good as naught (Rom. 4.17), the making alive of those dead in Sin’s service (Eph. 2.5) – in short, it is the advent of a new creation (2 Cor. 5.17) by incorporation into the living lordship of the Crucified One. It is really only in this context that we can approach Paul’s eschatological vision of Christ’s triumphant subjugation of ‘all his enemies under his feet’ culminating in the destruction of death itself, the final and ultimate enemy (1 Cor. 15.25-26). That Paul sees the upshot of Christ’s sovereign eschatological judgement to be the final victory over death – ‘Death swallowed up in victory’ (1 Cor. 15.54) – is of a piece with this apocalyptic vision of Christ’s saving work as the prosecution of a ‘cosmic war between the powers of sin and death on the one side, and God’s powerful rectifying, life-giving grace on the other’.49 Eternal life is life won from death’s tyranny; so, the final work of divine judgement must be to bring to an end once and for all the usurpatious reign of death for the sake of God’s beloved creatures. As Moltmann summarizes the logic clearly if rather abstractly when he writes that, ‘the negation of the negative constitutes a position of the positive, which cannot be destroyed’.50 Though it is not their controlling concern, Jüngel and Moltmann both attend to this important motif in their expositions of the final judgement, and Paul’s apocalyptic grammar inevitably (and properly) shapes aspects of their understanding of God’s rectifying grace. So, for example, Moltmann points up Christ’s resurrection – in a somewhat Hegelian idiom – as the ‘negation of the negation of God’ by way of God’s own creative judgement, further characterizing it as an eschatological act which conquers the ‘deadliness of death’ and overreaches ‘all that is dead in death’. In Christ’s rising we meet the

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‘beginning and source of the abolition of the universal Good Friday, of that god-forsakenness of the world that comes to light in the deadliness of the death on the cross’.51 Elsewhere he can declare that in the end, ‘what will be annihilated is nothingness; what will be slain is death; what will be dissolved is the power of evil; what will be separated from all created beings is separation from God, sin.’52 Our ultimate salvation can be curtly summarized in this vein simply as ‘the annihilation of the destiny of death’.53 Remarks of this sort signal Moltmann’s sensitivity to the role played by the overthrow of the atheistic enmity of death in the saving work of divine judgement unto eternal life. The theme is even more sharply present in Jüngel’s theology. Evangelical faith obediently trusts that ‘the God who in participating in man’s death gains victory over death’ has done so for me.54 As Jüngel sees it, the antithesis between God and death structures the gospel itself. ‘God and death are opponents’, he writes, ‘they are enemies. The style in which God deals with death, and in which death also has to deal with God, is the history which faith tells about Jesus Christ.’55 As the nihilating power and consequence of sin, death is aggressively active, ‘repudiat[ing] life by hopelessly alienating men and God from one another’.56 Salvation is the business of dealing with death, as it were. For Jüngel, the death of Christ accomplishes the death of death: in the identity of the living God with the dead man Jesus, God meets death, taking its enmity and contradiction in himself in virtue of his own divine life.57 Death is thus overcome in and by the outworking of the eternal vitality of God’s love. When this victory is consummated ‘even then’ in the final judgement, human beings will be given to know that it is by grace they are ‘undying, or better […] plucked from out of death’.58 The final judgement is judgement unto eternal life because it means final deliverance from that annihilating power of death which is ‘God’s enemy and mine’. And we note that it is exactly the apocalyptic form of the saving work of cross and resurrection and its close identification with final judgement which makes it possible and then necessary to link the philanthropy of saving divine justice with the vision of God’s ultimate triumph over death’s inimical misanthropy.



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IV/At an end God’s final veridical judgement – ‘public, definitive and irrevocable’59 – will establish the ultimate conditions under which humanity and God may enjoy unhindered, undisrupted and undissipated eternal community, a state traditionally characterized as one of ‘plenary sanctification’ and ‘glorification’.60 The justifying work of cross and resurrection is indissolubly and determinatively linked to the substance and form of the last judgement, as two moments of this single eschatological work of the one Saviour, Jesus Christ. God’s way of judgement is a path on which the truth of our lives is illumined and decided by the only One competent to do so; it is a path on which everything we are that is born of death is repudiated in love and set aside forever; it is a path on which Christians may walk with ‘heads held high’ confident that ‘our true humanity will be realised in our being together with God’ forever because of Christ’s once and future triumph over death, a triumph won by the power of divine love in which he, the judge, is given into judgement for us.61 Faith, thus, rightly yearns for the final judgement as the ‘public, glorious, incontestable, and irrevocable justification of man through God’s grace’.62 Pace Kant, the only movement that finally matters is and can only be the one ‘from grace to virtue’, or better, from grace to eternal life. For even ‘the end is also an act of grace’.63

Notes 1 Immanuel Kant, ‘Critique of Practical Reason’, in Practical Philosophy, edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 140, 601, 246–7. 2 Immanuel Kant, ‘Critique of Practical Reason’, 241; then Chris Firestone and Nathan Jacobs, In Defence of Kant’s Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 31. 3 As Pamela Sue Anderson observes, by this mode of argument neither immortality nor God are made ‘cognizable’ in any way; and are certainly not hereby vindicated as objects of theoretical reason indirectly – Kant and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 61–3. 4 On the critical importance of the ‘doctrine of the postulates’ for Kant’s moral

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Eternal God, Eternal Life philosophy, see Jürgen Sprute, ‘Religionsphilosophische Aspekte der kantischen Ethik Die Funktion der Postulatenlehre’, Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie. 46:1 (2004), 295. A similar astringency and importance also marks Kant’s doctrine of God, which in the hostile characterization of John Milbank, ‘only lures the will to know more of its own empty assertion’ – ‘Invocations of Clio: A Response’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 33 (2005), 16. Cf. John Gray, The Immortality Commission (London: Penguin, 2012), 22–31 who discusses how this view profoundly shaped the life and work of the leading Victorian moralist, Henry Sidgwick. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in Religion and Rational Theology, edited and translated by A. Wood and G. di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 191. It is interesting to note how lines of eschatological thinking invested in the question of human agency and active moral reconciliation between persons, tend to be led in this Kantian direction toward affirming the instrumental necessity of something like the afterlife. See for example, Miroslav Volf, ‘Enter into Joy! Sin, Death and the Life of the World to Come’, in, J. Polkinghorne and M. Welker, eds, The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 264. ‘Heidelberg Catechism’, The Book of Confessions: Study Edition (Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 1996), 66. For a developed Thomistic vision of the nature of the emergence of eternal life which sees the matter rather differently again, see William Hoye, The Emergence of Eternal Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Moltmann, Theology of Hope, translated by J. W. Leitch (London: SCM Press, 1967), 203–4. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 205, 204. Ibid., 206. Moltmann, ‘Trends in Eschatology’ in The Future of Creation, translated by M. Kohl (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1979), 30–1. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 47. Jürgen Moltmann, ‘The Final Judgment: Sunrise of Christ’s Liberating Justice’, Anglican Theological Review 89:4 (2007), 565–76 and ‘Sun of Righteousness: The Gospel about Judgment and the New Creation of All Things’, in Sun of Righteousness, Arise! God’s Future for Humanity and the Earth, translated by M. Kohl (London: SCM Press, 2010), 127–48. There is also related discussion of these themes in Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian



16 17

18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

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Eschatology, translated by M. Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1996), esp. 47–95 and 235–7. For some discussion of our themes see Timothy Harvie, ‘Living the Future: The Kingdom of God in the Theologies of Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 10:2 (2008), 156–9. Moltmann, ‘The Final Judgment’, 569–70, and ‘Sun of Righteousness’, 135. Moltmann, ‘The Final Judgment’, 569. Moltmann cites as an instance of this both article 1037 of the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as a 1995 report by the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England which asserts ‘it is our conviction that the reality of hell (and indeed of heaven) is the ultimate affirmation of the reality of human freedom’ – Moltmann, ‘Sun of Righteousness’, 134. Moltmann, ‘Sun of Righteousness’, 136. See Moltmann, The Coming of God, 236. These remarks are also anticipated in Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, translated by M. Kohl (London: SCM Press, 2000), 335. For brief discussion of this in the work of other modern theologians, see Anthony Thistleton, The Last Things: A New Approach (London: SCM Press, 2012), 166–71. Moltmann, ‘Sun of Righteousness’, 137; ‘The Final Judgment’, 571. Cf. 1 Cor. 3.15. Moltmann, ‘Sun of Righteousness’, 138. A closely parallel passage is found in Moltmann, ‘The Final Judgment’, 572. Moltmann, ‘The Final Judgment’, 573. Eberhard Jüngel, ‘The Emergence of the New’, in Theological Essays II, translated by A. Neufeldt-Fast and J. Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 35–8. Jüngel, ‘The Emergence of the New’, 49. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 54–5. Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith, translated by J. Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 224–5. Eberhard Jüngel, ‘The Last Judgment as an Act of Grace’, Louvain Studies 15 (1990), 390. Jüngel, ‘The Last Judgment’, 390. Ibid., 391. Ibid., 394–5. For critical discussion of the adequacy of thinking along such lines, see Miroslav Volf, ‘Enter into Joy!’, 259–65. Eberhard Jüngel, Death, the Riddle and the Mystery, translated by I. and U. Nicol (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 120.

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34 Jüngel, ‘The Last Judgment’, 395–6 (emphasis added). Cf. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 217. 35 Jüngel, ‘The Last Judgment’, 404. 36 Ibid., 396–7, 399. 37 Ibid., 397. As he explains elsewhere, ‘it is as finite that man’s finite life is made eternal. Not by endless extension – there is no immortality of the soul – but through participation in the very life of God’, for resurrection and final judgement concern ‘the life man has actually lived. It is this life which will be delivered and honoured’ – Jüngel, Death, 120–1. Cf. Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, translated by D. Guder (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), 215, n.58. 38 Jüngel discusses these menacing images at the outset of the essay, ‘The Last Judgment’, 91–393; interestingly, Moltmann offers some similar discussion of ancient Egyptian conceptions, see ‘Sun of Righteousness’, 129–31. 39 On this generally, see Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Die Ewigkeit des ewigen Lebens’, in Ganz Werden: Theologische Erörterungen V (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 352–3. 40 Jüngel, ‘The Last Judgment’, 397–8. ‘It is the world of the judge to establish the order of peace by means of that justice which makes God’s grace into justice and thereby acquits the sinner’ (403). 41 Jüngel, Justification, 64–5. 42 Jüngel, ‘The Last Judgment’, 398, 400–1. 43 Jüngel, Death, 89–90. 44 Jüngel, ‘Die Ewigkeit des ewigen Lebens’, 352–3. 45 Beverly Gaventa, ‘“Neither Height Nor Depth” – Cosmos and Soteriology in Paul’s Letter to the Romans’, in J. B. Davis and D. Harink, eds, Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology. With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), 198. Galatians, the Corinthian Epistles and Romans – especially the central Chapters 5–8 – are prime sites of this material. 46 Romans 1.24-28. For a compelling reading of this passage, see Beverly Gaventa, ‘God Handed Them Over’, in Our Mother Saint Paul (Louisville, KY: WJK, 2007), 113–23. 47 Philip G. Ziegler, ‘“Christ Must Reign” Ernst Käsemann and Soteriology in an Apocalyptic Key’, in J. B. Davis and D. Harink, eds., Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology. With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), 209. 48 Beverly Gaventa, ‘“Neither Height Nor Depth” – Cosmos and Soteriology in Paul’s Letter to the Romans’, 199. 49 Martinus de Boer, The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians and Romans 5 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988), 179.



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50 Moltmann, ‘The Final Judgment’, 574. 51 Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 211. For instance, references to Käsemann’s scholarship on divine rectification, Pauline apocalyptic and the central place of Christ’s contest with and lordship over death are found at key junctures in the argument of that book, e.g. 206–7, as well as the later programmatic essay ‘Trends in Eschatology’, 23–31. 52 Moltmann, ‘The Final Judgment’, 574. 53 Moltmann, The Theology of Hope, 206. 54 Jüngel, Death, 115. Emphasis original. 55 Ibid., 81. 56 Ibid., 79. 57 Ibid., 116, 108, 112. 58 Wolf Krötke, ‘Hope in the Last Judgment and Human Dignity’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 2:3 (2000), 279. 59 Thistleton, The Last Things: A New Approach, 176. 60 Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, revised and edited by E. Bizer, translated by G. T. Thomson (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950). 61 Krötke, ‘Hope in the Last Judgment and Human Dignity’, 281. 62 Markus Barth, Justification, translated by A. M. Woodruff III (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 82. 63 Jüngel, Death, 90.

8

Eucharist and Immortality: Reformed Reflections on the Eschatological Dimension of the Sacrament Paul T. Nimmo

I/Introduction In early Christian discourse, there seems to have been little by way of heated debate concerning the efficacy of the sacrament of the eucharist.1 With no apparent awareness of broaching matters of theological controversy, the patristic theologian Ignatius of Antioch implores the readers of his Letter to the Ephesians to, Continue to gather together […] in grace, in one faith and one Jesus Christ […] in order that you may obey the bishop and the presbytery with an undisturbed mind, breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality, the antidote we take in order not to die but to live forever in Jesus Christ.2

And such unperturbed affirmation of the nature and power of the eucharist is similarly evident in the work of Irenaeus of Lyon, who, in the context of his work Against Heresies, observes that, as the bread, which is produced from the earth, when it receives the invocation of God, is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly; so also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection to eternity.3

In the context of the early church, the above quotations suggest, the elements of bread and wine were themselves considered to mediate incorruptibility and immortality to the physical bodies of Christians, bodies which were

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threatened by the death and decay that was the divinely ordained consequence of human sin. Intrinsic to such high sacramental realism was thus a profoundly eschatological perspective, and this in both senses of the word: the eucharist both as a looking ahead to the future resurrection and to eternal life to come, and as already here and now a present in-breaking of the benefits of the Kingdom of God, such as immortality and incorruptibility. The relative weighting of those eschatological senses – the ‘now-already’ and the ‘not yet’ – was certainly rendered variously in the work of different patristic writers,4 but that the eucharist was a profoundly eschatological feast, uniting the past sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the present celebration of the community and the future consummation of the Kingdom, was regularly exposited and never questioned. In the subsequent development of theology in the West, however, this eschatological dimension of the eucharist came ever more steadily to be eclipsed. It is not that any theologian denied the eschatological significance of the sacrament; but in the increasingly systematized theological reflections of the western church, it was seldom exposited or thematized.5 The centre of dogmatic attention in respect of the eucharist emerged in the realm of theological ontology, in particular with regard to the relationship in the sacrament between the presence of Jesus Christ and the eucharistic elements. The sense of the eucharist as an eschatological sacrament, related to the blessings and benefits of the kingdom of eternal life, found refuge primarily in certain liturgies of the church that continued explicitly to relate ecclesiastical celebration to heavenly consummation.6 With the advent of the Reformation, the theological focus of eucharistic debate continued along existing tracks in considering the relationship between the presence of Jesus Christ and the eucharistic elements, while also developing a new interest in the manner in which the eucharist might (and might not) be described as sacrificial. Yet, in its conversations, the eschatological aspects of the eucharist continued to be both uncontroversial and (thus) marginalized in inter-confessional polemics surrounding the theology of the sacraments. And worse yet than this, Geoffrey Wainwright suggests: ‘It can hardly be said that the Reformers as theologians did much to restore to the theological consciousness the notion of the supper as a sign of the feast of the kingdom. […] What is worse, as liturgists they helped to remove the notion



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from the service-books.’7 At the same time, however, the connection between the eucharist and immortality in particular continued to be if not central then at least discernibly present in Reformation writings, certainly – as shall be seen – in the work of the magisterial Reformed theologians. With the advent of modernity, eschatology as an independent area of study or even as a prominent dimension of theology as a whole was further neglected. With impressive developments in scientific progress, historical criticism and anthropic confidence, the ‘last things’ were regularly treated in Christian churches with apparent puzzlement, slight embarrassment or simply disdain. In terms of works of systematic theology, such hesitation manifested itself in various ways: the structural positioning of the eschata of salvation history as the eschata of systematic theology; the one-directional influence of other doctrines on the doctrine of eschatology; the alienation or even dissonance of matters eschatological from more central and less tendentious doctrines. Eschatology never disappeared; but it was often marginalized, and with it also the eschatological dimensions of the eucharist. Alasdair Heron observes that in the days when eschatology was ‘reduced to a kind of appendix’, it transpired that ‘[t]he Eucharist was […] located and interpreted in a horizon defined and determined on the one side by the pastness of Jesus’ own history and on the other by the present moment of eucharistic celebration’.8 Yet the history of biblical and theological inquiry over the past century or so – from Weiss, Wrede and Schweitzer to the recent blooming of apocalyptic theology – has removed any space for complacency. Though Barth’s early claim that ‘[i]f Christianity be not altogether thoroughgoing eschatology there remains in it no relationship whatsoever with Christ’9 may seem rather severe, the conviction that it expresses – namely, that eschatology is a fundamental and irreducible feature of the witness of Scripture and must receive appropriate attention in the Christian church – has been attended in manifold ways, not least in doctrine, and not least in the doctrine of the eucharist. And so Heron continues: ‘By opening up the third dimension of the future which is already inaugurated in Christ himself, the eschatological perspective of the New Testament sets the matter in a wider room.’10 A notable spur to such activity was given by way of a call in 1964 from the WCC Faith and Order Commission for study of the eucharist in eschatological perspective,11 a call perhaps partly inspired by the hope that ecumenical progress would

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result from avoiding the more tendentious issues and exploring a relatively neglected locus in the tradition. Against the backdrop of this intellectual history, this chapter offers an exploration of the relationship between the eucharist and immortality within the broader context of the relationship between the eucharist and eschatology, and conducts this exploration within the confines of the Reformed tradition in particular. The first section offers some reflections on Reformed approaches to the eucharist, focusing on the magisterial Reformation and outlining two distinct and significant positions, those of John Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger. The second section considers how the different eucharistic positions of Calvin and Bullinger have found echoes in the work of more recent Reformed theologians, such as Jürgen Moltmann and Arthur Cochrane, both of whom have attended to the eschatological dimension of the theology of the eucharist. In the third section, the two trajectories of eucharistic thought described and exemplified in the preceding sections are related to recent developments in ecumenical theology. Finally, by way of conclusion, an attempt is made to outline a constructive view relating eucharist and eschatology along the lines of the Reformed trajectory sketched out by Bullinger and Cochrane.

II/Early Reformed tradition and the eucharist Reformed doctrines of the eucharist can be said to share a number of common features, and for those less familiar with the tradition, some of these might be briefly rehearsed. In common with Lutheran and many free church traditions, the Reformed deny that grace is automatically conferred to participants in the sacrament simply by virtue of the rite being performed; instead, they emphasize the necessity of the Word preached and faith present in the valid and effective administration of the sacraments. Again, in common with other Reformation traditions, the Reformed deny the character of the eucharist as propitiatory sacrifice, reject the doctrine of transubstantiation and the adoration of the elements and insist upon communion in both kinds and in public worship. Yet, against the Lutheran view of the eucharist, the Reformed deny that Jesus Christ is locally present in the elements and instead insist on the continuing presence of the human body of Jesus Christ in heaven. On this



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difference – and the upstream Christological differences – the Lutheran and Reformed confessions divided. Even within the Reformed position thus circumscribed, however, there followed disagreement in respect of the doctrine of the eucharist. As rudimentary introductions to the theme recognize, for all the shared ground between their views, there is a significant difference between the understandings of the eucharist set forth by Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin. The excellent work of Brian Gerrish goes further still, distinguishing between three theological views of the eucharist in the Reformed tradition: between ‘symbolic memorialism’, roughly after Zwingli, ‘symbolic instrumentalism’, roughly after Calvin, and a third category, ‘symbolic parallelism’, roughly after Heinrich Bullinger.12 For the purposes of this chapter, two positions are of particular relevance for what they reveal about the differences within the Reformed tradition. In what follows, reflection upon the work of Calvin in his Institutes and of Bullinger in his Decades will serve to facilitate a more detailed consideration of eucharist and eschatology/immortality in the Reformed tradition. First, in the Institutes, Calvin posits that a sacrament is ‘a testimony of divine grace toward us, confirmed by an outward sign, with mutual attestation of our piety toward him’.13 Such a testimony is an example of divine accommodation to human weakness, and serves to represent, confirm, and seal the promise of grace, to offer instruction and assurance to the recipient, and to establish, sustain, and increase their faith. Though the sacraments are void without the instruction of the Word and the power of the Spirit, the sacraments are instruments employed by God, not only attesting but also effecting that which they represent. Indeed, even as the sacraments are said to have the same function as the Word,14 Calvin in one writing on the eucharist is explicit that they are a means of grace.15 The eucharist, then, for Calvin, is ‘a spiritual banquet, wherein Christ attests himself to be the life-giving bread, upon which our souls feed unto true and blessed immortality’.16 The sacrament seals and confirms the promise that the soul of the participant is fed by the body and blood of Christ just as the bread and wine sustain the physical life, and that the former feeding leads to the blessing of eternal life. This eucharistic communion with the body and blood of Christ takes place as ‘Christ offers and sets forth the reality there

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signified to all who sit at that spiritual banquet’.17 The physical body of Christ remains in heaven, but by the mysterious power of the Spirit the souls of the elect are lifted up to heaven to feed on his body, and so to become one with him and to partake of his benefits. The ‘flesh of Christ’, then, ‘is like a rich and inexhaustible fountain that pours into us the life springing forth from the Godhead into itself ’.18 The elements are intermediaries, setting forth the reality behind the signs: under their symbols, the elect feed truly upon Christ unto immortality, confess their faith before others, and are exhorted to good works. Bullinger, in his Decades, however, advances a different view: to him, as to Calvin, the sacraments are also given by God in light of human weakness, ‘to be witnesses and seals of the preaching of the gospel, to exercise and try faith, and […] to represent and set before our eyes the deep mysteries of God’.19 However, he distinguishes clearly between the sacramental signs and their underlying reality, even as the two are ‘coupled together in a faithful contemplation’, joined together ‘in likeness and signification’.20 In this way, the sacraments are testimonies of God’s grace and seals of God’s promises. However, they neither contain nor convey grace. In celebrating the sacraments, the church offers visible testimony of its unity with Christ and the unity of its members, and is called to renew its faith and obedience. The eucharist is defined as ‘the holy action […] wherein the Lord […] certifies unto us his promise and communion, and shows unto us his gifts […] gathers [us] into one body visibly […] and admonishes us of our duty’.21 In it, God renews God’s promise to the faithful, and the faithful renew the communion they have received in Christ. Bullinger thus writes on the one hand that ‘[the] body and blood [of the Son of God] is our meat and drink unto eternal life’ and, on the other hand, that this is ‘consecrated and sealed of the Lord himself by the sacrament of his body and blood’.22 Such activity is not unique to the sacrament: there is a ‘spiritual, divine, and quickening presence of our Lord Christ, both in the supper and also out of the supper’.23 Thus, God certainly performs what God promises; but the means of communion with Christ is at all points faith alone. The eucharist is the seal of an existing covenant membership, keeping the death of Christ and its benefits in mind. Finally, the eucharist makes the communion of believers with Christ and with each other visible, rendering a public confession of Christian faith and a common exhortation to good works.



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There is clearly much in common between the two positions: the absolute priority of the divine initiative; the clear emphasis upon the reception of grace and the assurance of grace; and the central importance of the communal, the didactic, the public and the exhortatory. There is also a deep awareness in light of the shared doctrines of election and faith that participation in the eucharist is not in any way necessary for salvation, even though such participation is encouraged as normative. Within an eschatological framework, there is little attention to the eucharist as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet to come in the kingdom of God; nevertheless, there is a pivotal awareness both of the centrality of the divine promise regarding the benefits of being in Christ in general and of the promise of immortality in particular, a promise signed and sealed in the eucharist. At the same time, there is also a deep distinction discernible in respect of the way in which the relationship between the sacramental sign and the spiritual reality is construed. This difference is clearly delineated in an extended quote from a letter Bullinger wrote to Calvin, in which he challenges Calvin’s conception of the sacraments as ‘instruments’: If by ‘instrument’ you mean ‘sign’, then fine. But if it is something more than sign, you seem to ascribe too much to the sacraments […] It is God who saves and receives us in grace. But this you ascribe to an instrument through which it is worked, some implement or flow-sluice or canal, the very sacraments, through which grace is infused into us […] But we do not believe this. God alone works our salvation […] God, and no created thing, confers and indeed confers through the Spirit and faith […] The sacraments neither offer nor confer, nor are they instruments of offering and conferring, but they signify, testify, and seal.24

Calvin does not in any way demur from the positive statements about the sacraments which Bullinger here advances. But he does wish to continue to write of the sacraments as ‘means’ and ‘instruments’. Paul Rorem makes the following helpful observation: Calvin considered the eucharist to be an instrument of God’s grace, whereby believers commune in the body and blood of Christ. Bullinger explicitly rejected such ‘instrumentalism’ and considered the Supper to be a testimony to or an analogy of God’s grace, whereby God testified to the believers, through the analogy of bread and wine nourishing and invigorating our bodies, concerning

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the salvation and nourishment won in Christ’s body and blood, received in faith.25

The comment from Bullinger cited above comes from correspondence between Calvin and Bullinger prior to their signing of the Consensus Tigurinus (‘Zürich Consensus’) of 1549, a common statement on the theology of the eucharist which sought to unite the Swiss churches of the Reformation. In a practical and political sense, it proved broadly successful, yet its theological coherence has perhaps to be adjudicated rather differently. In truth, the Consensus is a compromise document: in exchange for Calvin not insisting upon the sacramental language of ‘means’ and ‘instrument’, Bullinger yields somewhat uncomfortably to the language of ‘helps’ [adminicula] and ‘organs’ [organa].26 And, in the time that followed, Calvin’s various defences of the Consensus made liberal use of notions of mediation and instrumentality, while Bullinger’s various defences of the same made little use of notions of helps and organs and reverted to his accustomed language of seals and witnesses. There was, in truth, little by way of a genuine consensus.

III/Recent Reformed tradition and the eucharist The magisterial traditions of Calvin and Bullinger, together with their rather different understandings of sacramental efficacy, were pursued by different trajectories of the tradition over ensuing centuries.27 As indications of this, and of the consequences in terms of viewing the relationship between eucharist and eschatology, the work of the recent Reformed theologians Jürgen Moltmann and Arthur Cochrane serve as good examples. Moltmann has in his doctrinal work engaged seriously and explicitly with eschatology from the beginning. In The Church in the Power of the Spirit, he turns to the eucharist in particular. Here he observes that ‘the regular and constant fellowship at the table of the Lord is the eschatological sign of being on the way […] [the sacraments] are the signs of the church’s life, because they are the signs of the one who is their life […] signs of the messianic era’.28 Right from the beginning, then, there is a clear understanding of the eucharist as having reference not only to the past and the present but also to the future that is already and not yet: ‘In this meal, [Christ’s] past and his future are simultaneously made



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present. This present actualization frees the assembled congregation from the powers of the world which lead to sin and gives it the assurance of the divine future. The Lord’s supper is an eschatological sign of history.’29 Moltmann proceeds to describe the act of the community in the eucharist with attention to all three dimensions of time, writing that in the common meal, ‘the fellowship relates the messianic story of the passion, proclaims the representative death of Christ and announces its hope for his coming in glory to fulfil God’s rule in the world’.30 Central to this view are the biblical texts which portray the Kingdom of God as a banquet, such as Isaiah 25.6-8 and Matthew 22.2-10. And already there, Moltmann has gone beyond Calvin or Bullinger in prominently thematizing the eucharistic celebration as, on the one hand, prefigured by Jesus’ table-fellowship with sinners in his earthly ministry and, on the other, as anticipating the heavenly banquet to come to which all are invited.31 Connecting these moments, Moltmann writes that ‘Jesus’ feasts are joyful “wedding” feasts in the dawn of the divine rule as demonstrations of God’s undeserved, prevenient and astounding grace’.32 While thematically Moltmann has tapped an eschatological note rather muted in Calvin or Bullinger, there remains for him the question common to his predecessors in the tradition concerning the connection between the material eucharist and the underlying eschatology. He happily states in a manner that might be acceptable to Bullinger: As the joyful feast of the Christ […] it gives a foretaste of the coming kingdom, because the coming kingdom has become history in Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Because Christ’s cross and resurrection stand in the sign of the eschatological eucharist, the Christian eucharist stands in the sign of cross and resurrection.33

Yet, he also goes in Calvin’s direction far beyond this conceptuality: [The Lord’s supper] mediates communion with the crucified one in the presence of the risen one. On the basis of Christ’s giving himself up to death, it is itself the eschatological banquet of life […] It mediates the power of Christ’s passion, and redemption from sin and the powers through his death. It mediates the Spirit and the power of the resurrection. It confers the new covenant.34

Similarly, he writes, this time in full-blown eschatological mode: The breaking of the bread and the pouring out of the wine […] make the

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kingdom of God present in the form of Christ’s body broken ‘for us’ and Christ’s blood shed ‘for us’. They make the kingdom of God present in Christ’s person and his self-giving […] [T]he Lord’s supper […] itself none the less makes present the crucified and risen Lord.35

There is much here that would deserve careful unpacking. However, what is clear in light of the earlier analysis is the way in which Moltmann moves through the language of sign to the language of mediation, from attestation to instrumentality. The eucharist is not only sign, but also instrument, indeed eschatological instrument: ‘the feast is held in his presence and carries those who partake of it into the eschatological history of Christ, into the time between the cross and the kingdom which takes its quality from his presence’.36 This is a transposition of the instrumental language of Calvin in an eschatological direction, but has in the process left behind the language of witness and attestation found in Bullinger.37 A rather different theological understanding of the eucharist is evident in the work of Arthur Cochrane, most notably in his volume Eating and Drinking with Jesus. The main thesis that Cochrane advances is that the eucharist is ‘exemplary for all eating and drinking […] a demonstration of why, what, and how all […] may eat and drink’.38 The construal of the eucharist that results is thus characterized by its ethical trajectory: Cochrane denies that the eucharist is a sacrament or a ‘means of grace’, and insists instead that ‘Jesus Christ is the one Mediator of salvation, the one means of saving grace’.39 In the first instance, for Cochrane, the eating and drinking exemplified in the eucharist is an act of thanksgiving rooted in faith, giving thanks ‘not only for Christ’s death and resurrection and not only for his presence where two or three are gathered together in his name but for the hope of glory’.40 In this way, Cochrane also evidences attention to all three temporal dimensions of the eucharist. Second, he writes of the eucharist as an act of love, which ‘testifies that all eating and drinking is to be an act of love, of fellowship, of sharing one’s daily bread, and of serving the least of Christ’s brethren’.41 And, in a third move, Cochrane attends to the eucharist as an act of hope, which awaits the imminent return of Jesus. Here, Cochrane describes the eucharist as an ‘eschatological meal “until he comes”’42 and asserts that at the eschaton, ‘we will see and be what we now only believe, namely, that Jesus is the food of eternal life



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and that we have already passed from death unto life’.43 He concludes that the eucharist is a ‘sign’ and a ‘proclamation’.44 In respect of the question as to whether the body and blood of Jesus Christ are truly eaten in the eucharist, it is no surprise to find Cochrane lauding above all the insights of Huldrych Zwingli. Cochrane concludes: ‘Zwingli, alone among the Reformers, saw clearly that a sacrament is not a means of grace or even of faith; it is an ethical response to God’s one justifying and saving work in the death of Christ and to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.’45 In its denial of the instrumental efficacy of the eucharist, the position at which Cochrane arrives seems broadly consonant with that of Bullinger rather than that of Calvin and Moltmann.46 This remains the case even as Cochrane seeks to distance himself from the language of spiritual nourishment common to the eucharistic theology of both Calvin and Bullinger, with his statement that ‘Only with the greatest reserve may we say that faith is a spiritual eating and drinking of the flesh and blood of Jesus.’47 In their different ways, both Moltmann and Cochrane seek explicitly to do justice to the eschatological dimension of the eucharist. In both presentations, there are trajectories of thought which connect the table-fellowship of the earthly ministry of Jesus through the Last Supper to the eucharistic practice of the church in the present and ultimately to the eschatological banquet of the coming kingdom. Yet, it is interesting to observe that the trope of immortality or eternal life does not feature significantly in either work; for all that the writings of Calvin and Bullinger were less eschatologically oriented, there was regular and repeated reference in them to immortality as a gift of grace in Jesus Christ. And it is interesting to observe that the two Reformed trajectories of eucharistic thought are discernible again in these more recent works: one trajectory which speaks only of attestation and proclamation and one trajectory which speaks also of instrumentality and mediation.

IV/Reformed trajectories and the ecumenical movement The two trajectories of Reformed thought which were presented in original historical form in the first section and exemplified in more recent reprise

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in the second section have been rather differently advanced and received in terms of ecumenical dialogue between Reformed churches and organizations representing other denominations. Take, by way of a first example of this, the Leuenberg Concord of 1973, which brought eucharistic intercommunion between many Reformed and Lutheran churches in Europe. The text of the fifteenth article of the Concord reads: In the Lord’s Supper the risen Jesus Christ imparts himself in his body and blood, given up for all, through his word of promise with bread and wine […] In the word of the promise and in the sacraments, the Holy Spirit, and so God himself, makes the crucified and risen Jesus present to us.48

The texts ‘with bread and wine’ and ‘in the sacraments’ give rise to a broadly instrumental view felicitous to followers of Calvin and Moltmann (and, of course, Luther), but far less acceptable to those inclining more to the position of Bullinger or Cochrane.49 Alternatively, there is the Lima Document of 1982 on Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, subscribed by many members of the World Council of Churches, including many Reformed churches. Here, the text under ‘The Eucharist as Meal of the Kingdom’ reads: ‘The eucharist brings into the present age a new reality which transforms Christians into the image of Christ and therefore makes them his effective witnesses. The eucharist is precious food for missionaries, bread and wine for pilgrims on their apostolic journey.’50 Again, an instrumental view is foremost here, with the sacrament itself seeming to bring into the present age a new and transforming eschatological reality. On this point again, Calvin and Moltmann might agree; but it is far less clear that Bullinger or Cochrane would. Such eucharistic exuberance has not passed uncontested among the Reformed. In respect of the Leuenberg Concord, for example, Arthur Cochrane argues that, We cannot agree […] that ‘in the Lord’s Supper Jesus Christ imparts himself in his body and blood, given up for all, through his word of promise with bread and wine’ […] or that ‘in the sacraments, the Holy Spirit, and so God himself, makes the crucified and risen Jesus present to us’ […] apparently for Leuenberg Jesus is not really the one Mediator of grace and faith: he himself has to be mediated by Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.51



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Or again, this time in respect of the Lima document, Markus Barth poses the question: Does BEM not give the impression that God’s accomplished work […] would be ineffective if it were not actualised through baptism, eucharist, and ministry […]? Does not the one Mediator and his completed work thereby become dependent on ‘means of grace,’ on which the church thinks to have an administrative monopoly?52

Such dissent evidences that, in practice, any hope that attending to the eschatological dimension of the eucharist might further ecumenical agreement finds itself dashed, and dashed within a tradition, let alone between them. Not only may it fail to resolve any issues concerning the presence of Jesus Christ in the eucharist or the sacrificial nature of the sacrament.53 But it may also fail to resolve any question concerning the instrumentality or otherwise of the sacrament. The more things change, then, the more things stay the same. In the meantime, in the midst of any ecumenical ‘progress’, the careful and influential teaching of Bullinger and Cochrane (and others) becomes rather occluded and even disparaged. This is regrettable, because it implies that in the ecumenical movement, the only valid view of sacramental theology is an instrumental one. And that seems neither to reflect adequately the underdetermined witness of Scripture in respect of the eucharist nor to discourse adequately with the low-church constituency of the world-wide church.

V/Conclusion By way of conclusion, three interrelated themes, which address issues of immortality and eschatology, will be sketched out, within the context of a Reformed theology of the eucharist that is indebted to attestation rather than to instrumentality. It is possible, even probable, that such reflections will be unsatisfactory or incomplete to those of higher eucharistic sensibilities, and inflated or assumptive to those with lower eucharistic sensibilities. Nonetheless, they mark an attempt to construct one way forward within this particular tradition, thematizing not only the past and present but also the future dimensions of the eucharist. And, in this way, they may at least provide material for further discussion.

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The assurance of immortality Bullinger states in his opening remarks on the eucharist that ‘[t]hose whom the Lord has regenerated with the laver of regeneration, those does he also feed with his spiritual food, and nourish them unto eternal life’.54 But, of course, as has been indicated, the elements of the eucharist themselves are not that spiritual nourishment: they are but a vivid and dynamic attestation of the same. Yet, precisely as such, they afford the eucharist a strong didactic purpose which cannot be treated lightly. In the divine accommodation to human weakness, God commands this practice of the eucharist precisely so that in the power of the Spirit it might address anxiety, offer reassurance, and strengthen faith. The eucharist is not – cannot be – a medicine of immortality,55 for it is by faith in Jesus Christ gifted by the Holy Spirit that the Christian already participates in eternal life here and now, even as the fulfilment of the life beyond is still awaited.56 Assurance of this present participation rests in faith in the One who not only has come as a sacrifice for sin and sustains Christians in the present, but who will also come again to fulfil his purpose for humanity in judgement and in mercy.57 For this reason the eucharist is not only a sacrifice of thanksgiving, but also a sacrifice of petition that the crucified and risen Jesus Christ would come again in glory.

The anticipation of feasting The figure of the great and celebratory heavenly banquet features prominently in the pages of Scripture, not only in the Gospels but also far beyond. Both the open table fellowship in the course of the ministry of Jesus Christ and the epitome thereof in the Last Supper offer a definite sign of and witness to the future feast to be enjoyed with him in the fulfilment of the Kingdom, a foreshadowing of the heavenly banquet to come.58 In this anticipation in the present, one might catch a glimpse of the Kingdom of God as it came on earth in Jesus Christ in veiled form and will come again in consummate manner. Yet this can only be by the grace of unanticipated revelation. The kingdom may have broken through provisionally in Jesus’ ministry; it is less evident that it necessarily does so in the church’s ministry. It is instructive that theologians are sometimes prone to speculate on matters etsi Deus non daretur – i.e. as if



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God were not given – yet perhaps a more instructive theological insight would be to recognize simply that Deus non daretur: God is not given. Crucially relevant at this juncture are the implications for eucharistic practice. A consideration of the eschatological dimension of the eucharist allows for some deeply pressing questions to be raised – in line with Moltmann’s promptings59 – in respect of eucharistic practice, notably in the area of intercommunion, but also in the area of eucharistic restriction. Questions might be raised across denominations here on the use of excommunication as a means of church purity. Questions might also be raised among the Reformed in particular concerning the strict fencing of the table that continues in parts of the tradition, or the vexed question of the participation of children in the eucharist. Similarly, there are also implications for church architecture – both structural and transient – and liturgical procession and pattern. Over all these themes stands the desirability of recovering the early sense of the eucharist as a shared meal in explicit and intuitive ways.

The expression of community In receiving the eucharistic attestation of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the church attests itself to be the body of Christ: it witnesses to its common dependence upon Jesus Christ and its common enjoyment of Jesus Christ.60 But there are two further expressions of a corporate nature to consider here. First, the church must also witness to its common purpose and mission in the eucharist, and it is here that the eschatological dimension of the eucharist once again emerges powerfully. The church is not founded to look inward or to sustain itself, but to live eccentrically for and in and to the world, proclaiming in Word and action – and sometimes in silence or inaction – what Jesus Christ has done, is doing, and will do, and making disciples of all nations. And second, the church must also witness – in all its bizarre and lamentable division – to its underlying unity. The eucharist cannot constitute its unity or ‘make the church’: Word and Spirit make the church and make it one, not the celebration of any sacrament. But as an expression of the name of the one Lord, and by the power of that name, the church attests itself visibly as a spiritual unity. Finally, this vision of unity has even wider horizons of reference. The eucharistic gathering not only expresses the unity of the community of the

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church; it also anticipates the eschatological gathering of all peoples into the kingdom of God. And beyond even this, the ultimate referent of the eucharist is not to the people of the church, or even to humanity in general, but to the world – the creation of God – in itself and in its entirety. For there will come a day when not only the church and all peoples but the entirety of creation will, by the power of the Spirit, in the name of the Son, and to the glory of God the Father, have their hearts lifted by and to the One who was and is and is to come.

Notes 1 This chapter follows standard ecumenical practice in referring to the church’s activity of celebrating the Lord’s Supper as the ‘eucharist’. This practice should not be assumed a priori to indicate material agreement with the results of any particular ecumenical (or denominational) conversation concerning the same. 2 In The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, edited and translated by J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer, edited and revised by Michael W. Holmes (updated edition; Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 149–51. 3 In The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. I, The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903). Available online at: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ schaff/anf01.ix.vi.xix.html (accessed 18 November, 2015). 4 See Geoffrey Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology, 2nd edn (London: Epworth Press, 1978), 44–7. 5 This is not to say, of course, that the eschatological dimension of the eucharist was ignored or overlooked: Thomas Aquinas, for example, writes in the third part of the Summa Theologiae that ‘a sacrament is a sign that is both a reminder of the past, i.e. the passion of Christ; and an indication of that which is effected in us by Christ’s passion, i.e. grace; and a prognostic, that is, a foretelling of future glory’. There is a coincidence in the sacrament of what Thomas calls the rememorative, the demonstrative, and the prognostic – of past, present, and future. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1981), III.60.3 resp., following Alexander of Hales, Summa, p.4, q.1, m.1. 6 Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology, 47, 51. 7 Ibid., 56. While Wainwright is undoubtedly right in respect of the eclipse of this



8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15

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particular theme at the time of the Reformation, other eschatological tropes such as immortality remained far more visible in Reformation eucharistic theology, as will be observed in what follows. Alasdair Heron, Table and Tradition: Towards an Ecumenical Understanding of the Eucharist (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1983), 153. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, translated by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 314. Heron, Table and Tradition, 153. Cf. Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology, ix. B. A. Gerrish, famously, in ‘Sign and Reality: The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Confessions’, in The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 118–30. It may be, however, that a more fine-grained typology of Reformed doctrines of the eucharist would be heuristic at this point. The author of this chapter has developed a fivefold typology, which distinguishes, on the one hand, between two different ‘Zwinglian’ positions – one embracing a very basic notion of memorial and one embracing a more robust notion of anamnesis (provisionally labelled ‘simple memorialism’ and ‘exhibitive memorialism’) – and, on the other, between two different ‘Calvinist’ positions – one of which speaks readily of the ‘life-giving flesh’ of Christ, the other of which desists from such sacramental realism (provisionally labelled ‘exhibitive instrumentalism’ and ‘mystical instrumentalism’). Such additional contouring allows one more clearly not only to identify diachronically the doctrinal tendencies of different texts but also to recognize and categorize more accurately the Reformed practices of the eucharist today. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited by John T. McNeill, translated by Ford Lewis Battles (Library of Christian Classics; two volumes; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), IV.xiv.1. Calvin, Institutes, IV.xiv.17. John Calvin, ‘Exposition of the Heads of Agreement’, in Tracts and Letters, vol. 2, edited and translated by Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2009), 227, where the sacraments are described as ‘means and instruments of [God’s] secret grace’. Calvin, Institutes, IV.xvii.1. Ibid., IV.xvii.10. Ibid., IV.xvii.9. Henry Bullinger, The Decades, 5 vols, edited by Thomas Harding, translated by H. I. (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2009-2010), vol. V, sermon 6, 234.

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25 26

27

28 29 30 31

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33 34 35 36 37

Eternal God, Eternal Life Bullinger, Decades, V.6, 279. Ibid., V.9, 403, translation modernized. Ibid., V.7, 323. Ibid., V.9, 452. The text is found in Corpus Reformatorum 35: 695, and is quoted by Paul Rorem, ‘Calvin and Bullinger on the Lord’s Supper’, in Lutheran Quarterly 2 (1988): 155–84 (hereafter ‘Part I’) and 357–89 (hereafter ‘Part II’), here at ‘Part II’, 362. Rorem, ‘Part I’, p. 178. One could parse each clause of this consensus document, indicating where there is a theological inclination towards the position of Calvin and instrumentality, and where towards the position of Bullinger and non-instrumentality. See Consensus Tigurinus (1549), in Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, six volumes to date (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 2002–), I/2, 481–90. For a brief account of this, see Paul T. Nimmo, ‘Sacraments’, in Cambridge Companion to Reformed Theology, edited by Paul T. Nimmo and David A. S. Fergusson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 88–93. Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, translated by Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 243. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 247. Though it is interesting to observe that in the course of his exposition of the eucharist in this volume, Moltmann not once mentions immortality or eternal life. Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 248. Interestingly, then, even before he reaches the words of institution, Moltmann claims that ‘the Lord’s supper emerges of its own accord from the messianic history of Christ’ (Ibid., 249) even as he acknowledges that ‘[t]he breaking of the bread and the pouring out of the wine acquire a unique significance through the self-giving of the Messiah’ (Ibid., 250). Ibid., 252. Ibid., 252–3. Ibid., 250. Ibid., 255. This is also the position of Geoffrey Wainwright in Eucharist and Eschatology, where he writes: ‘to this future fulfilment the present eucharist stands in the positive relation of sign, being an effective promise, to those who receive it rightly, of participation in the full and final reality of which it is a taste’ [45];



38 39

40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47

48

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the eucharist is one of the signs ‘which announce before men, and inaugurate among them, that reality which is included in the eternal purpose of God and which is to come true for men […] it announces, and begins to effect, God’s good pleasure […] to enter into such a communion of life with mankind that He feeds men on His own being’ [58]; ‘the material bread and wine eaten and drunk […] mediates communion between man in his physical body and God who is spirit’ [59]. On this evidence, Wainwright would also sit closer to Calvin than to Bullinger. Arthur C. Cochrane, Eating and Drinking with Jesus: An Ethical and Biblical Inquiry (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), 38–9. Cochrane, Eating and Drinking with Jesus, 9–10, 53–4, 54. The proximate (and acknowledged) influences upon Cochrane are Markus Barth and Karl Barth, but apart from the rejection of the term ‘sacrament’, there is little that separates Cochrane, or indeed Markus and Karl Barth, from Bullinger on these matters. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 102. In a similar way to Moltmann, Cochrane finds the open table fellowship of Jesus in his earthly ministry to anticipate the messianic feasts of the kingdom to come, and consequently describes the former as being ‘secretly wedding feasts celebrating the marriage of the Lamb’ (Ibid., 105). Ibid., 115. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 127–8. It is interesting to observe, however, that Cochrane here repeats (without any further reflection) Barth’s negative judgement on the sacramental theology of the Second Helvetic Confession, which was written by Bullinger. This is a rather perplexing view in respect of both Cochrane and Barth, and is explored further in Paul T. Nimmo, ‘The Eucharist in the Theology of Heinrich Bullinger and Karl Barth’ (forthcoming). Cochrane, Eating and Drinking with Jesus, 65; see here also 142–8, where Cochrane advances his view that the spiritual eating of the body and drinking of the blood of Jesus Christ refers to the death of Jesus as a hostile action in respect of which all human beings stand guilty yet by virtue of which salvation is wrought. Leuenberg Concord (1973), articles 15 and 21. Available online at: http://www. leuenberg.net/sites/default/files/media/PDF/publications/konkordie-en.pdf (accessed 18 November, 2015). Indeed, it is interesting to note that the Arnoldshain Theses on the Lord’s

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Eternal God, Eternal Life Supper, something of a precursor document to the Leuenberg Concord, seem explicitly to rule out the sort of position advanced by Bullinger: ‘[It is not appropriate] to teach that two parallel but separate processes take place, one a physical and the other a spiritual form of eating’, in Arnoldshain Theses (1957), thesis 5(d). Available online at: http://ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/ BretscherArnoldshainThesesLordsSupper.pdf (accessed 18 November, 2015). Article 26 in the section on Eucharist, in Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982). Cochrane, Eating and Drinking with Jesus: An Ethical and Biblical Inquiry, 154–5. Markus Barth, Rediscovering the Lord’s Supper: Communion with Israel, with Christ, and Among the Guests (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), 105. These are two issues flagged in the ecumenical document for ongoing work on convergence – Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, article Eucharist 8 (commentary) and Eucharist 13 (commentary). Bullinger, Decades, V.9, 401. pace Ignatius and Irenaeus, with whom this chapter opened. Cf. John 6.54-58. As Wainwright observes, the Reformation was more interested in the judgement of present eucharistic participation than the future judgement of Jesus Christ to which the eucharist pointed, Eucharist and Eschatology, 88. Wainwright’s pattern of promise-fulfilment-consummation at this point seems to risk putting too much in to the hands of the church and perhaps fails sufficiently to distinguish between Christ’s table fellowship and the church’s table fellowship: see Eucharist and Eschatology, 46. See particularly Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 259–60. Thus far cf. Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology, 59.

9

‘The Incompleteness of the Completed’: Eternal God, Eternal Life and the Eternal Now Russell Re Manning

The title of this book and the project of which it is the culmination is ‘Eternal God, Eternal Life’. This title captures the two premises: first that thinking about eternal life follows from and is crucially dependent upon thinking about the eternal God; and second that thinking about eternal life has consequences for thinking about our present life. More specifically, first that eschatological doctrines of human (and non-human) immortality should be situated after properly theological doctrines of divine eternity; and second that ethical and political thinking about human (and non-human) existence in the here and now should be shaped by eschatological doctrines of immortality. I agree wholeheartedly with both these sentiments and wish to explore them a little further with reference to a perhaps unlikely source, Paul Tillich, whose contribution adds a third ‘eternal’: It is the eternal ‘now’ which provides for us a temporal ‘now’. We live so long as ‘it is still today’ – in the words of the letter to the Hebrews. Not everybody, and nobody all the time, is aware of this ‘eternal now’ in the temporal ‘now’. But sometimes it breaks powerfully into our consciousness and gives us the certainty of the eternal, of a dimension of time which cuts into time and gives us our time.1

Tillich’s distinctive approach to the question of eternity might be thought to provide expansive philosophical and theological comment upon Henry David Thoreau’s suggestive claim that ‘God himself culminates in the present moment’.2 My chapter has three sections, corresponding to three claims that I wish to set out and defend.

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I/Tillichian theological theology My first is a methodological point: the priority of theology is precisely what a Tillichian correlational approach entails, albeit with a slightly different complexion from those Barthian-inflected styles of theologizing that tend to be associated with such an insistence. Tillich’s theological method, rather unhelpfully, I think, labelled the ‘method of correlation’, is above all a theology of critique, in which everything is always to be subjected to the crisis of ultimate concern – the breakthrough of the unconditioned into the conditioned, to use his earlier preferred formula. As he sets out clearly in his 1925 draft of what was to be his first systematic theology, variously entitled Dogmatics, The Structure of Religious Knowing and Systematic Theology, theology begins offensively as what Dan Whistler, quoting Philip Goodchild, terms ‘a critical theory of piety’.3 Whistler foregrounds a hitherto underappreciated neo-Schellingian tradition of philosophical theology (simultaneously theological philosophy) as an alternative to the dominant tendency of twentieth-century thought to seek disciplinary purity (either philosophy or theology, but never anything truly interdisciplinary). Linking Schelling to Tillich to Goodchild, Whistler further cites Bradley Johnson, lamenting the take-over of theological thinking by self-professed theologians: Traditional theology […] begins and ends with the naming of its ultimate concern. In this way, it says both too much and too little […] There is, of course a critical difference between a theologian, the one who names, and a philosopher, whose attention is to the conditions of naming itself. Indeed […] perhaps only the latter, the non-theologian, can be truly attuned to the promise that crosses religious divides, that of a ‘new creation’ (or ‘enlightenment’) – the creation of a new existence.4

We might call this theology ‘radical theology’ – John D. Caputo does and he contrasts it with what he calls ‘confessional theology’ (I have tried to make a similar distinction between what I call ‘natural theology’ and ‘faithful theology’, though I concede that ‘faithful’ is not the most helpful term).5 What matters here, is that this ‘theology’ is theological in that it pushes against what Tillich calls the ‘concrete contents of ordinary faith’ which ‘must be subjected to criticism and transformation’ in order to make a space for a theology free from ‘the orthodoxies, assumptions, and doxa that clog up the airways of



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thought’ to allow what Tillich calls ‘ultimate concern’ (or what Goodchild names as ‘piety’) to come to expression.6 Another way of putting this, is to say – surprising though it may seem – that it is Tillich’s theology of culture that is his truly theological theology; a theology that responds both to the immediate crisis of the collapse of the liberal status quo of Kulturprotestantismus after the First World War and the more pervasive crisis of thought itself when faced with the unconditioned. The Tillichian task for theology – expressed in terms of the theology of culture as a rejection of ‘traditional’ or ‘church’ theology – is to be the critical, counter-critical and selfcritical judgement of a religion against itself in the name of ultimate concern. Theology of culture is, thus, a naming – how could it be any other? – and yet, it should know that in naming, to recall Bradley Johnson’s words, it says both too much and too little. As Whistler, quoting Tillich, puts it: This is a discourse that identifies itself as theological without trapping itself within the prison of traditional theological questions and concerns. It is concerned not just with names but with the possibility of naming (it is, therefore, critical in the strictly Kantian sense); yet, it also exceeds the merely philosophical insofar as its concern is that ground of discourse that is itself excessive (thereby ‘express[ing] the experience of abyss in philosophical concepts’).7

Critical theology – Tillichian theology as theology of culture – is truly theological theology in that it begins and ends with ‘the manifestation of what concerns us ultimately’ (Tillich’s definition of ‘revelation’ from Systematic Theology), even as it traces that manifestation apart from traditional theological talk of God.8 To say this is not, therefore, to reject Tillich’s explicit characterization of theology as ‘correlative’, but rather to affirm that this is, perhaps, what Tillich intended by his claim to Altizer that ‘the real Tillich is the radical Tillich’ – that theology is precisely the ‘revealing [of] an underlying asubjective-anobjective transcendental condition of experience’.9 As Tillich said of Schelling – whose theological philosophy provides the ‘deep logic’ of Tillich’s thought – but is equally applicable to Tillich himself: [He] turned toward ‘subjectivity’, not as something opposed to ‘objectivity’, but as that living experience in which both objectivity and subjectivity are rooted […] [He] tried to discover the creative realm of being which is prior to and beyond the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity […] [as] the Source whence springs my thinking and acting.10

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II/Eternal life after the death of God? I turn now to Tillich’s theology of the eternal God as precisely a theology of eternal life. Tillich’s doctrine of God is first and foremost one of the living God – ‘the creative realm of being (-itself)’ – and can be seen, I suggest as an extended response to the religio-cultural malaise, or melancholia of the era of the ‘death of God’. If modern theology is critical, that is to say, born in the crisis of the manifestation of ultimate concern in the anxiety of the threat of non-being, then modern atheism is melancholic in its mourning for a dying God. Julia Kristeva tellingly identifies melancholia as a radical atheism: I have assumed depressed persons to be atheistic – deprived of meaning, deprived of values. For them, to fear or to ignore the Beyond would be selfdeprecating. Nevertheless, and although atheistic, those in despair are mystics – adhering to the preobject, not believing in Thou, but mute and steadfast devotees of their own inexpressible container.11

If, as I have suggested elsewhere we might, we consider post-Kantian continental philosophy as the mournful thinking of the death of God – a death that as Nietzsche emphasizes never truly arrives – then ‘modern’ philosophy is haunted by the spectre of God, whose death though a past occurrence still lies in the future.12 To put this slightly differently, post-Nietzschean philosophical atheism is not so much a denial of the existence of God – indeed that that question has come to dominate discussions of atheism is I suggest indicative of the superficiality of much so-called atheism that seeks simply to deny ‘God’ without addressing itself to the true theological question of ultimate concern – as it is the denial of the ‘aliveness’ of God. Post-Nietzschean philosophical atheism, from Heidegger and Sartre to Derrida and more recent ‘new realists’, is concerned with ultimate concern; concerned enough to become depressed by its haunting presence. If you will, this line of philosophical thinking ‘after God’ does not so much characterize God as dead, but rather as ‘undead’. For Nietzsche, perhaps, God can never truly die precisely because God was never truly alive. Tillich was right to reject ‘death of God theology’ (even as he clearly helped to frame it) because for him the affirmation of the death of God (even if by this is meant merely the supranaturalistic God as highest being) does not result in the liberation of theology to its more radical concern with



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immanence but rather risks losing the vital core of theology itself, namely that God lives. For all his language of the ‘God above God’ or the ‘God beyond God’ – inspirational or anxiety-inducing as we might find that – Tillich’s primary theological concern is with ultimate concern: God in Godself as the living ground of meaning and being, God as the aliveness of being-itself. One should not here be put off by Tillich’s apparently abstract or impersonal language: there is nothing more alive for Tillich than God; indeed his rejection of supranaturalistic images of God is intended precisely to safeguard the divine as eternal life. Here we must plunge into the basic tension in Tillich’s doctrine of God – a contrast that Daniel J. Peterson frames, drawing on Altizer as a distinction between ‘radical and ‘religious’ theologies of God.13 For Altizer, the radical theologian views God ‘as a process that unfolds in the course of history’ whereas the religious theologian clings on to an ‘otherworldy, vertical transcendence’ – characterized pejoratively by Altizer as ‘the mere husk of transcendence that God, by descending as Spirit into flesh, has left behind’.14 On this account, Tillich’s doctrine of God seems resoundingly ‘religious’: whilst he does indeed reject the supranaturalistic God who exists as a being somewhere ‘out there’, Tillich nonetheless affirms the divine as an ‘eternal process’ that completes itself above or beyond time. Being-itself is ‘outside of time’, indeed time and space are the result of God’s own eternal self-overcoming. For Tillich, God’s eternal life is a ‘process aimed at its own reconciliation’ and whilst this entails that God’s dynamism ‘breaks through the barrier between time and eternity’, finite being seems to result as an unintended (certainly an unwilled) consequence of God’s own inner life. Tillich’s God, Peterson summarizes, ‘‘lives’ for Himself ’. And yet, at the same time, Tillich’s account of the dynamism of the divine life unsettles this ‘orthodox’ insistence on absolute transcendence: ‘For Tillich, there is unrest at the heart of divine reality. Nonbeing limits the outgoing and creative urge of being, and although the polarity resolves itself eternally, God “lives” insofar as the tension exists. This tension, in turn, produces life along with everything else in the universe.’15 Invoking a Plotinian image via Meister Eckhart and Jakob Boehme, Tillich can affirm that the living God ‘boils over’ generating finite being as a result of a dialectical process at the heart of being-itself. On the one hand, Tillich

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is clear: ‘God is his own fate’ and ‘he possesses “aseity”’; on the other hand, the dialectic of the eternal life of being-itself seems to ‘unfold temporally’. Peterson is interested in securing the latter to ensure the radicality of Tillich in a kenotic assertion that our courage to be (the radical empowering of our being ‘in the face of injustice, adversity, meaninglessness, and, finally death’) is rooted in the ‘self-emptying of God who occasions the courage to be as a consequence of His own self-sacrificial negation’.16 For Peterson to affirm ‘this […] radical, self-divesting ground of existential courage’ it is necessary to lift away Tillich’s ‘controlled orthodoxy’ – a move Peterson makes through invoking Tillich’s endorsement of the Infra Lutheranum (as opposed to the Extra Calvinisticum) to claim on the basis of the ‘mutual indwelling of the two natures’ in Christ that ‘history participates in God and God participates in history’.17 My interest here is slightly different, although I would back Tillich’s unpacking of an implication of the Christological distinction within Protestantism with regards to the vexed issue of natural theology. He writes that: ‘This difference means that on Lutheran ground the vision of the presence of the infinite in everything is theologically affirmed, that nature mysticism is possible and real, whereas on Calvinistic ground such an attitude is suspect of pantheism and the divine transcendence is understood in a way which for a Lutheran is suspect of deism.’18 But I digress and before we get swept up into the eddying torrents of the debate about the legitimacy or otherwise of natural theology, let me return to the more serene waters of Tillich’s doctrine of God; more specifically, his reinterpretation of the Trinity in dialectical terms.19 Drawing heavily on Schelling, of course, Tillich writes that ‘God’s life is life as spirit and the Trinitarian principles are moments within the process of the divine life’.20 Remember that for Tillich, God is being-itself, so these three moments in the divine life corresponding to the Trinitarian persons of Father, Son and Spirit identify the dynamics in ‘the deep fabric of being’. The first principle, equivalent to the Father, refers to the depth and power of being. It is, Peterson explains, “the root of [God’s] majesty, the unapproachable intensity of his being, the inexhaustible ground of being in which everything has its origin”. The second principle, equivalent to the logos, “opens up the divine ground, its infinity and its darkness.” It gives the “fullness” [sic] of the first principle meaningful



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structure and form. Without it, Tillich says, “the first principle would be chaos, burning fire, but it would not be the creative ground.”21

He continues: The third principle marks the unity of the first and second principles (power and form, respectively) in their creative expression and actualization. This leaves the role of the third principle ambiguous. “It is,” Tillich remarks, “the Spirit in whom God ‘goes out from’ himself,” but how far does its procession extend? Does it reconcile the first and second principles within the divine life eternally or does it necessarily result in the production of finite being?22

Tillich, it seems, embraces this ambiguity. On the one hand, he ‘restricts’ (if that’s the right word) the divine life to eternity, placing God above and beyond the flux of time such that the divine process is completed ‘in-itself ’, thereby protecting divine aseity. On the other hand, his vehement rejection of ‘vertical transcendence’ seems to break open the dynamics of the eternal life of God through and into the finite world. Tillich’s talk of God as the ground – and ‘depth’ – of being seems to relocate God; not only above and beyond but also underneath and within. Mark Lewis Taylor describes this as Tillich’s distinctive ‘stretching’ of transcendence. He writes: Tillich is convinced […] that no amount of talk about God’s caring for finite existence was effective or healing so long as God was conceived as “a Supreme Being” occupying the highest realm of a hierarchically structured cosmos. His own faith, as well as the intellectual challenges to classic belief in God posed by Immanuel Kant and the masters of suspicion like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, led him to risk tracing out God’s transcendence so deep in the fabric of existence (at times, even in the abyss) that the meaning of “transcendence” was stretched beyond recognition.23

That may be so, but I am not sure that we really have to choose one or the other; why not take the truly Tillichian route and affirm both/and. The very title of this project might encourage us so to do: ‘Eternal God, Eternal Life’. Perhaps here both the radical and the traditional (or ‘religious’ in Altizer’s terms) coincide? What could be more radical than to affirm, as Tillich does, that ‘God does not need to destroy his created world, which is good in its essential structure, in order to manifest himself in it’?24 Or should that be, what could be more orthodox?

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God, for Tillich, as being-itself is the ‘ground of being’ – all theologians know that much about Tillich. But further, I suggest that just as we can say that for Tillich God as ‘meaning itself ’ is equally the ‘ground of meaning’ so too (although this is not a formula that Tillich himself uses) it seems clear that for Tillich God, as being-itself and meaning-itself is likewise ‘life-itself ’, hence the ‘ground of life’. One thing at least is clear: the symbol of the ‘living God’ is non-negotiable for Tillich: Life is the process in which potential being becomes actual being. It is the actualization of the structural elements of being in their unity and in their tension. These elements move divergently and convergently in every lifeprocess. Life ceases in the moment of separation without union or of union without separation. Both complete identity and complete separation negate life. If we call God the ‘living God,’ we deny that he is a pure identity of being as being; we also deny that there is a definite separation of being from being in him. We assert that he is the eternal process in which separation is posited and is overcome by reunion. In this sense, God lives.25

Thus, the eternal God is eternal life with the clear consequence that creaturely eternal life as participation in the divine eternal life is equally a process. As Thomas A. James notes, ‘there is more than a hint of panentheism here’ (remember Tillich’s remarks on the consequences of an embrace of the Infra Lutheranum).26 Against contemporary speculative realism that affirms – quite explicitly in the case of Ray Brassier – that death and not life is fundamental to existence, Tillich’s theological vitalism affirms that ‘to be is to be alive, and to become actual in the divine life’.27 As James relates, for Brassier, ‘we are already dead’: the ‘lifeless eschatology’ of modern cosmology suggesting that ‘life is a contingent perturbation of the inorganic, that the negentropy that defines life over against the entropic is vanishing fluctuation’.28 This, Brassier explicitly characterizes as a ‘theologization’ of the bleakness of modern scientific cosmology – a theologization that he, with Quentin Meillassoux, affirms is blocked to our view by our modern/Kantian insistence on ‘correlationism’ (by which is meant our (faithful) commitment to the doctrine that access to objects as they are in themselves is barred and we only have access to objects as ‘correlates’ of particular perspectives held by knowing subjects).29 It is, I find, striking the extent to which Tillich’s ‘theological vitalism’ (the ‘vita-theology’ that is the complement to his unabashed ‘onto-theology’) can



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engage – apologetically – with this latest iteration of the haunted atheology of modern philosophy melancholically seeking to think after the death of God by theologizing the nihil.30 As James puts it: Significantly, the crescendo of volume three of Systematic Theology is the final section on “Eternal Life.” It is here that the life process that is the subject matter of the volume reaches fulfillment, and it is also here where the panentheistic implications of Tillich’s doctrine of God come to full flower. For Tillich, life is ambiguous insofar as the fulfillment of its aims is always mixed with their frustration or distortion. The spiritual presence heals the split between essence and existence, or we might say it overcomes the estrangement of existence from essence, but the presence of spirit is always incomplete or not fully actualized. The complete actualization of the spiritual presence would be the full essentialization of existence, in which the elements of estrangement that cling to life are as it were ‘burnt’ away. But the full essentialization of existence is also the overcoming of the separation of creatures from God. Eternal life as the fulfillment of life’s essential aims is life in the living God. As life, it is a neverending, eternally dynamic process, but as life in God, it is life that is completed by its incorporation in the divine life that is eternally complete.31

In other words, far from an essentialization away from life to an unambiguous total consummation, Tillich’s eschatology is an embrace of the ultimate ambiguities of life in and as eternal life in God. After all, to cleanse life of its ambiguity would be to annihilate. In James’ words: ‘The process is completed in God because God is herself the eternal completion of the process, and yet the process does not cease in God to be precisely a process. So, we have the satisfaction of completion without, presumably, the nonliving stasis that completion seems to imply.’32 James wishes to push Tillich in more radical directions more effectively to correlate to the atheological atheism of speculative realism, pushing the idea of God’s grounding relation to life (meaning and being) into a ‘theological nihilism’ in which Tillich’s God both grounds and un-grounds life (meaning and being), such that ‘God is the final menace to [life], meaning [and being] – the abysmal real that issues meaning only to revoke it in the end’.33 To make such a move, is to take Tillich’s theology of life to an extreme consequence when confronted by the recognition of the precious rarity of life within history. I am not sure I want to go there myself, but I can certainly see that it is

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consistent with a certain understanding of the Tillichian correlative enterprise of theology. For me, rather, what strikes as significant here is the way in which Tillich already includes nonbeing (and/or the chaos that is opposed to God) within and not outside of God. Eternal life as God’s life is always an ambiguous process – completed in eternity yes, but never in stasis. Just as within existence to live is to be dying (Brassier is right in one sense that precisely as alive we are already dead), so it is with essentialized life. God is not dead; God cannot die precisely because God is alive and, as such already always dying. Further, eschatologically what Tillich promises is life eternal – i.e. ‘the eternal process in which separation is posited and overcome by reunion’.34

III/The politics of immortality: the socialist decision My third section is a short reflection on the second of our project’s premises, namely that thinking about eternal life eschatologically has consequences for our present life – and that one aspect of that might be our present political life. As is well known, Tillich was forced to leave Germany in 1933 in part as a consequence of the publication of his greatest work of political theology, The Socialist Decision.35 A work of ‘the early Tillich’ this book was published when Tillich was forty-seven years old. The Socialist Decision is, thus, the work of a mature thinker who had not only experienced the horrors of the First World War first hand, but had also had many years to reflect on the failure of the theologies of crisis to articulate a compelling vision for a political theology in the Weimar period, with the result, as he saw it, of the takeover by National Socialist ideology. The reason, Tillich affirmed for the failure of political theology (other than its Schmittian inversion) was the failure to draw a clear lines of consequence from theology proper to politics proper. The Socialist Decision and the religious socialism that it commends was Tillich’s attempt to respond to that compartmentalization of theology from politics. That it itself failed was the great tragedy of Tillich’s life. It not only forced him into exile but also undermined all (or at least most) of his optimism about the possibilities for the discernment of the breakthrough of the unconditioned in the conditioned within contemporary history.36 As a result, Tillich largely abandoned his theology of history with his move to the United States and his direct political



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involvement diminished significantly – without ever ceasing (as his wartime Voice of America radio addresses and his tireless commitment to postwar reconstruction, even as he was blacklisted by the American authorities – ever suspicious of any hint of ‘socialism’ – testify). His political commitment never went away, however, and arguably Tillich’s political theology is re-worked precisely as his systematic theology. As we’ve seen in his eschatology Tillich calls for an embrace of life in all its ambiguities – an approach thoroughly apiece with his earlier political theological call for ‘decision’. More pertinently here, I suggest is that Tillich’s eschatological doctrine of eternal life, dependent as it is on his theological doctrine of the eternal God, is directly to be seen in his political theology of the socialist decision. The key theoretical resources here are those of ‘principle’ and ‘decision’. The word ‘principle’ (das Prinzip) is crucial to Tillich’s political theology. He defines it as ‘the real power that supports a historical phenomenon, giving it the possibility to actualize itself anew and yet in continuity with the past’. It is ‘the innerpower of history-bearing groups’. And finally, ‘a principle is the power of a historical reality, grasped in concepts’.37 The resonance with Tillich’s definition of life is unmistakable. Recall, that for Tillich life is ‘the process in which potential being becomes actual being. It is the actualization of the structural elements of being in their unity and in their tension.’38 What Tillich identifies politically is that political theories ‘live’ and have their power precisely thanks to their ability to speak to the (ultimate) concerns of life. Politics is not so much war by other means but rather the conceptualization of ways of living within history. To live, Tillich affirms is to be in a dialectic of being and non-being (and new being); to live together, Tillich suggests is to be in a dialectic of being together and not being together. To live is to be orientated to past and future; so to live together is to be orientated to origin and telos: a whence and a whither.39 Key to this, for Tillich, is the notion of ‘decision’. Principles require decisions to be actualized. We have, Tillich avers, to decide for particular principles – in fact, a particular principle – the socialist principle – that enacts our basic ambiguity of life with the eschatological hope for justice. Tillich identifies three principles – romantic, bourgeois, and socialist – each with their own ‘defining dynamic, distinctive history-bearing groups and inner contradictions’.40 The socialist principle takes on and abides in ‘a tension with

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a forward aim’, expectantly ‘straining toward the unconditionally new’. Neither utopian nor pragmatic, the socialist principle combines the romantic principle and the bourgeois principle by recognizing a fundamental internal conflict within socialism as derived from the bourgeois society, characterized by the symbol of expectation.41 As Mark Lewis Taylor puts it: This symbol springs from the tension of being both in a state of suffering and with desire to end the suffering. The proletariat wields the symbol both as affirmation and negation of the Bourgeois Principle. It is affirmation, in that the proletariat, leaning into the future, expects the new. Like the Bourgeois Principle, then, it is a movement from origin toward the future, ‘the whither’ (Wozu). It is negation, too – because it moves against the Bourgeois Principle seeking a future that is different. It is a future that frees the proletariat from its dispossession and atomization, and from its ‘thing-ification’ by bourgeois society.42

Proletarian expectation is the lifeblood of the socialist principle – ambiguous and incomplete, as we might expect – but none the less potent for that. Caught in the tension between the whence and the whither proletarian expectation for the future is simultaneously a reconstruction of origins. In Taylor’s terms, ‘[e]xpectant tension in the proletariat is the socialist principle’s incipient drive, at the level of material suffering and persevering desire, toward the “unconditionally new,” and a “new order of things”’.43 For Tillich, the straining inner power of the socialist principle is precisely that of the tense and ambiguous expectation for new being, for new life. Here Tillich talks of justice, in an image that would inspire Martin Luther King, Jr, as having an ‘overarching character’ – not an arch that stands over history, external and heteronomous, but as that which rises from origin to the future within history.44 Again the link to life – to eternal life – is remarkable in the way that Tillich defines justice. For Tillich, ‘justice is not an ideal abstract standing over existence; it is the fulfillment of primal being, the fulfillment of that which was intended by the origin’.45 Taylor describes this ideal of justice as having a ‘riverine’ quality, since ‘from the origin of being, it runs like a deep river through all life, especially showing itself in the proletariat’s pressing for “classless society.” Again, this is neither a transcendent principle above and against life, nor merely life itself; it is a tension of the pressure of the new within life.’46



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IV/Conclusion In this chapter, I have set out to engage the theme of this project – Eternal God, Eternal Life – by applying its core assumptions to an engagement with the theology of Paul Tillich. Against expectations, perhaps, Tillich’s correlative theology of culture can be recast as an exercise in theological theology, driven by the ‘critical piety’ of the unconditioned, subjecting all religious symbols – including its own – to the tensive criteria of that which concerns us ultimately. The ambiguity of the theological enterprise – theologians must precisely become non-theologians to practise their craft requires theologians to become theologians of culture, denying in effect the very foundational religious move of ‘setting apart’ or ‘making room’. Tillich’s basic theological approach is one of criticism, or a refusal of ‘the concrete contents of ordinary faith’ in favour of the dynamic faith of the doubter. It is in Tillich’s doctrine of God that this theological surpassing of theism (and not just the static, stagnant ‘theism’ of the so-called ‘God of the philosophers’, but the theism of theology itself) as a critical attitude is perhaps most apparent. Tillich’s (in)famous move to the ‘God above God’ is not a form of hyper-theism of the via negativa seeking to preserve the pristine purity of the divine even from the muddying clutches of language or concepts – or even existence; instead it is as much a turn toward ‘inward’ and ‘downward’ as it is toward excess. Tillich’s God is less, not more, supernatural; indeed, Tillich’s God is, in some senses ‘brought down to earth’ precisely as earth is swept up into the divine life. Finally, it is life that is the key concept for Tillich’s theology – for his doctrine of God just as much as it is for his eschatology. We would be wrong here to resist the radicality of Tillich’s position: far from an abstract impersonal deism (the ‘frosty monster’ of the Unconditioned), Tillich’s God lives and lives to the full. We might not need to embrace the conclusion that the fullness of God’s life entails God’s death or explicit panentheism (although the lines from Tillich to contemporary radical and process theologians through the Death of God generation are clear), but it would, perhaps, be too rash to shy away from the recognition that Tillich seems to affirm the ultimacy of ambiguity. Eternal life, precisely as the life of the eternal God does not (need not) cancel out the ambiguities that give life its dynamism (and its tension).

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Finally, Tillich’s radical theology of the living God can be seen as the animating key to his political theology (as indeed in his ethics and his aesthetics too), motivating his call for the socialist decision. For Tillich, a decision for socialism is at the same time a theological decision; an embrace of the ambiguities of life. Just as the promise of eternal life for Tillich means participation in the completed yet eternally dynamic divine life (the non-essentialist essentialization of Tillich’s eschatology in Systematic Theology, volume 3), so the present demand is to choose for the ambiguity of life expressed by the socialist principle in its embrace of both whence and whither. The final words of The Socialist Decision encapsulate both the political and eschatological urgency of Tillich’s theology as the struggle for life itself: Socialism can be victorious only in reliance on its own principle, in which powers of origin and prophetic expectation are combined. But expectation must play the major role. Only through expectation is human existence raised to the level of true humanity. Only under its leadership can human being and human society find their fulfilment. The hegemony of the myth of origin means the domination of violence and death. Only expectation can triumph over the death now threatening Western civilization through the resurgence of the myth of origin. And expectation is the symbol of socialism.47

Towards the end of his life, acutely aware that every theologian ‘must accept his finitude’, Tillich somewhat grudgingly published the third volume of his Systematic Theology – the volume that culminates in the section entitled, ‘Eternal Life and Divine Life’.48 In the preface to that work he reflected briefly on the role of a system in theology, conceding that his own ‘is fragmentary and often inadequate and questionable’ but proud of its dynamism as ‘a point of arrival but a point of departure as well’.49 In words that effectively summarize the content of that volume, and indeed his whole theological, eschatological and political theology of ‘Eternal God, Eternal Life, and the Eternal Now’, Tillich embraced what he called ‘the incompleteness of the completed’.50

Notes 1 Paul Tillich, ‘The Eternal Now’ in The Eternal Now (London: SCM Press, 1963), 90. Tillich is referring to Hebrews 3.13.



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2 Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 97. 3 Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion. The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002), 7; cited by Daniel Whistler, ‘The Critical Project in Schelling, Tillich, and Goodchild’, in Russell Re Manning, ed., Retrieving the Radical Tillich: His Legacy and Contemporary Importance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 209–31; 218. 4 Bradley A. Johnson, ‘Making All Things New: Kant and Rancière on the Unintentional Intentional Practice of Aesthetics’, in Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, eds, After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (Newcastle: CSP, 2010), 377–8; cited by Whistler, ‘Critical Project’, 211. 5 John D. Caputo, ‘Theopoetics as Radical Theology’ in Roland Faber and Jeremy Fackenthal, eds, Theopoetic Folds. Philosophizing Multifariousness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 125–41; Russell Re Manning, ‘A Perspective on Natural Theology from Continental Philosophy’ in Russell Re Manning (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 262–75. 6 Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (London: Fontana, 1952), 172–3; Whistler ‘Critical Project’, 209. 7 Whistler, ‘Critical Project’, 211, quoting Paul Tillich, ‘On the Boundary’ in Paul Tillich, The Boundaries of Our Being (London: Fontana, 1973), 297. 8 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 110. 9 Thomas J. J. Altizer, Living the Death of God. A Theological Memoir (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 10; Whistler, ‘Critical Project’, 214. See also Altizer’s more recent appreciation of Tillich, ‘A Homage to Paulus’ in Re Manning, Radical Tillich, 23–9. 10 Paul Tillich, ‘Existential Philosophy: its Historical Meaning’ (1948), in Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 107; 92. 11 Julia Kristeva, ‘Psychoanalysis – A Counterdepressant’ in Julia Kristeva, Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia [1987], translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 1–31; 14. 12 Russell Re Manning, ‘Radical Apologetics: Paul Tillich and Radical Philosophical Atheism’, in Re Manning, Radical Tillich, 233–47. 13 Daniel J. Peterson, ‘Paul Tillich and the Death of God. Breaking the Confines of Heaven and Rethinking the Courage to Be’, in Re Manning, Radical Tillich, 31–46.

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14 Peterson, ‘Paul Tillich’, 32, referring to Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Godhead and the Nothing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). 15 Peterson, ‘Paul Tillich’, 32. 16 Ibid., 33. 17 Ibid., 40. 18 Paul Tillich, My Search for Absolutes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 26. 19 For those nonetheless drawn to that particular whirlpool, see respectively Re Manning, ‘Protestant Perspectives on Natural Theology’ and Andrew Moore, ‘Theological Critiques of Natural Theology’ in Re Manning, Natural Theology, 197–212; 227–46. 20 Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 250. 21 Peterson, ‘Paul Tillich’, 37, quoting Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 250; 251. 22 Ibid., 37, quoting Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 251. 23 Mark Lewis Taylor, ‘Introduction: The Theological Development and Contribution of Paul Tillich’ in Mark Lewis Taylor, ed., Paul Tillich. Theologian of the Boundaries (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 23. 24 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 115. 25 Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 241–2. 26 Thomas A. James, ‘Can There Be a Theology of Disenchantment? Speculative Realism, Correlationism, and Unbinding the nihil in Tillich’ in Re Manning, Radical Tillich, 179–92; 183. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 180, referring to Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 29 For more on Meillassoux’s account of ‘correlationism’, see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, translated by Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008). 30 See Re Manning, ‘Radical Apologetics’. 31 James, ‘Theology of Disenchantment’, 184–5, referring to Tillich, Systematic Theology III, 399–423. 32 Ibid., 185. 33 Ibid., 191. 34 Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 242. 35 Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision [1933], translated by Franklin Sherman (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 36 An interesting instance of this is the revisions Tillich made to the key concept of



37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48

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his early political theology, Kairos. In 1922, Tillich published his original German article ‘Kairos’, in Die Tat: Monatschrift für die Zukunft deutscher Kultur 14 (1922), 330–50. He revised the piece for inclusion in translation into English in The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 32–54. As John Powell Clayton shows the term is ‘radically redefined’ in the 1948 translation, noting specifically that even the sense of two otherwise very similar passages is changed. He shows how Tillich’s direct translation of the phrase ‘We are convinced that today a Kairos, an epochal moment of history, is visible’ (1948, 48) receives a very different gloss: ‘In 1922, today was regarded as Kairos in the sense of being a moment in which new meaning was already breaking through from within the structures of human existence; in 1948, however, today was regarded as Kairos in the sense of being a time of emptiness in which one can only wait in hope for new meaning, at some unidentified future moment, to break into human existence from without.’ John Powell Clayton, ‘Tillich and the Art of Theology’, in James Luther Adams, Wilhelm Pauck and Roger Lincoln Shinn, eds, The Thought of Paul Tillich (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), 278–89; 282. Tillich, Socialist Decision, 9–10. Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 241–2. This is largely the burden of the opening section of The Socialist Decision. Mark Lewis Taylor, ‘Socialism’s Multitude: Tillich’s The Socialist Decision and Resisting the U.S. Imperial’, in Re Manning, Radical Tillich, 133–57; 140. Tillich, Socialist Decision, 97–112. Taylor, ‘Socialism’s Multitude’, 146. Ibid. See, for example, the so-called ‘How Long, Not Long’ speech delivered outside the State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, on 25 March 1965, after the successful completion of the march from Selma, Alabama, with its climactic assertion: ‘How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ Available online at: https://kinginstitute.stanford. edu/our-god-marching (accessed 16 April 2016). Tillich, Socialist Decision, 140. Taylor, ‘Socialism’s Multitude’, 147. Tillich, Socialist Decision, 162. Tillich’s dissatisfaction with the volume is well known, as indicated by the revisions he made to the subsequent German edition (not a direct translation) and his oft-cited remark to Mircea Eliade that he wished to rewrite his Systematic Theology in light of his encounter with other religions. See Mircea

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Eliade, ‘Paul Tillich and the History of Religions’, in Jerald C. Brauer, ed., The Future of Religions (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 33–5. 49 Tillich, Systematic Theology III, v. 50 Ibid.

10

Technological Immortalization and Original Mortality: Karl Barth on the Celebration of Finitude Robert Song

I One of the most significant developments in the life sciences in recent decades has been research into the biology of ageing, or bio-gerontology. Characteristically, despite some popular representations, this has not been undertaken with the overt or ultimate ambition of permanently reversing the ageing process or securing a kind of quasi-immortality, but rather more unassumingly to understand better the causes of the diseases and debilities associated with ageing. For many researchers engaged in it, exploration of the biological and environmental causes of ageing at the molecular and cellular levels represents an unproblematic contribution to mainstream medical science, and does not evoke moral questions of a different order from those raised by fundamental or applied work in many other areas of biomedical research. For them the target is not so much extending longevity in itself as treating the maladies to which longevity gives rise, inasmuch as an increased lifespan is of diminished value if in effect it amounts to poorer health for a longer time. Of course, if improved health enables people to enjoy longer lives, so much the better, but the fundamental orientation remains therapeutic in outlook.1 For others, however, more distant horizons beckon. For them this research holds out the prospect of radical life-extension technologies, and the incremental improvements in lifespan which have resulted from current advances

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in medical science are merely paving the way on a retail scale for a wholesale onslaught on the giants that afflict human biological existence: not merely the sickness that attends old age, but the process of growing old as well; not merely senescence, but even death itself. ‘The Holy Grail of enhancement’, as the bioethicist John Harris has written, ‘is immortality.’2 Standard accounts of the ethics of ageing research inevitably default to the usual repertoire of bioethical considerations, with much appeal to likely consequences. Thus, if on the one side the benefits are assessed in terms of increased longevity without corresponding senescence, disability or decline, on the other, the most common arguments against aiming at major step changes in lifespan refer to the potential future impact – the possibility of unknown side effects, including the risk of prolonged disability, and the consequences for the individuals involved, among them the dangers of loneliness, boredom and various related psychological pathologies – as well as to questions of distributive justice and the diversion of scarce resources to this research rather than to the needs of those across the world whose lifespans for numerous economic, social, environmental and medical reasons are already much shorter than Western norms. These are of course all pertinent issues, and ought to figure in any moral reckoning of the more expansive biogerontological aspirations. But it is equally clear that the range of questions extends into realms beyond those with which most mainstream bioethics is comfortable. When the talk turns to the possibility of avoiding senescence and postponing death indefinitely, it is clear that we are dealing with matters which will not easily be captured by the tools of conventional moral analysis. We who discuss these questions are unavoidably so personally and existentially engaged that to resort to, say, the mere calculation of consequences begins to resemble moral evasion rather than moral responsibility. That human beings are inextricably beings-towards-death is of not merely incidental interest to moral theologians enquiring about technologically induced immortality. One sharp way of putting the theological question might be as follows: temporarily leaving aside those other moral concerns – not, let us be clear, because of their unimportance – could we properly describe the quest for biological immortality as such as an authentic witness to the coming reign of God, whether this be seen as the restoration of creation or as the eschatological transformation of creation? From a theological point of



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view, might it be that those who are only interested in addressing age-related maladies are being too modest, and should set their sights higher? Perhaps the churches should encourage the setting up of a science-based Immortality Project with an international programme of co-ordinated research initiatives, and call on the research councils and other funding bodies to join together to invest in it? After all, immortality would seem prima facie to be at least as valuable a research objective as large hadron colliders or deep space exploration. And – who knows? – it might at long last make the church more deeply relevant to the world’s desires and aspirations. The case for this need not be left to those theologians advocating immanentist progressivisms of broadly Hegelian inspiration. An argument for it might be constructed on the basis of a more classical theological understanding of creatureliness. That human beings are creatures and therefore in some sense finite does not imply that they should be regarded as necessarily mortal, the claim might go; after all, it has been widely held in the tradition that Adam and Eve were originally immortal, death being the result of sin and not of creaturely finitude, and in Christ we are destined for eternal life without losing our creatureliness. Moreover it is part of the church’s mission to witness not only in word but also in deed to the new eschatological age, and the signs through which the church expresses this witness could rightly be regarded as not mere signs, but as by grace embodying some of the reality to which they point – just as works of healing make salvation present to the sufferer, not just subjectively but in objective reality. Surely, one might argue, we should be using our God-given, scientific talents to benefit humankind by working towards immortality, thereby enabling us to point to the reality of the life eternal? If the Christian witness is to a time when death shall be no more, what better way could there be of the church symbolically demonstrating this than working to postpone death indefinitely? On the face of it the claim seems laughable. For a start, even ‘immortal’ human beings won’t actually live forever: freedom from biological senescence is no protection against other, non-ageing-related causes of death. Humans will still be mortal, still capable of dying. Even if their minds were somehow uploaded into some non-carbon-based digital repository or cosmic cloud these will still face their eventual annihilation in the slow heat death of the universe. Besides this, theologically, immortality has never been fundamentally about

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living a life of infinite duration, but rather about eternal life. And eternal life is not primarily understood in temporal terms – nor for that matter in a-temporal terms – but is constituted at its heart by the knowledge of God: ‘this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’ (Jn 17.3). One may therefore properly ask why living longer should be regarded as a sign of eternity; indeed to push the point, it is not even clear why living forever, immortally, should be seen as a sign of eternity. Eternal life is categorically the wrong kind of thing to be achieved by human endeavour: it is fundamentally a gift of grace, and in theological terms trying to ape it by our own technological efforts is just another way of trying to reach the horizon by walking a little faster. Nevertheless, we might wonder whether there are not elements in classical Christian theology which lend themselves a little too easily to a tacit collusion with the mentality that generates technological immortalism. To explore this, I want to consider, not in the first place the doctrine of the resurrection, which might most naturally be thought to be susceptible to such an interpretation, but rather the traditional understanding of original immortality: that is, the idea that human beings are created immortal, but only became mortal as a consequence or punishment of sin. For does not the idea that human mortality is contingent upon human sin insinuate the subterranean thought that immortality is somehow our due? By associating all that we are naturally inclined to find unpalatable about life with the consequences of sin, does it not fuel the unconscious belief in our immortality, which we are only too prone to believe anyway? Does it really help to train us to come to terms with our creatureliness, or to find good in the fact that we are not divine after all? Does it really give us the freedom that comes from accepting that we are the creatures that we are, and that we are not that which we are not? Once we have learned that we are not divine, are we not chafing against our skin again? Is not the idea of original immortality redolent of the dog returning to its own vomit? If theology is to make a response to technological immortalism at its root, there must be something in its witness which is fundamentally committed to helping us to learn to embrace our creatureliness, to learn to love our finitude as our good. One of the central tasks of Christian anthropology must be to seek to make intelligible human vulnerability as the work of God’s love, while also



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seeing redemption as the fulfilment of human creatureliness, not the denial of it. We might note in passing that a parallel demand is laid on the immortalists as well, even if they may be less inclined to notice it: for them also, if the world is to be understood as something finally intelligible in its ultimate ontological constitution, and not as a vast inertial mass at which we pitch our resigned or bittersweet efforts at meaning, then somehow our temporality and mortality have to be understood as fundamentally, ontologically good. In this essay, I want to approach these questions through a consideration of Karl Barth’s discussion of time, finitude and mortality, particularly as found in §47 of the Church Dogmatics, ‘Man in His Time’.3 Barth was one of a generation of twentieth-century theologians who rejected the traditional doctrine of original immortality,4 but he is particularly interesting for our purposes not only because of the length at which he wrote on the subject5 and the depth of his respect for the tradition, but also because his understanding of original human mortality gives us a key for interpreting the nature of the resurrection as well. And from this we may generate the beginnings of a theological response to technologically derived immortality.

II In line with his fundamental dogmatic principle that all theological knowledge should be grounded in God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ and his refusal to accept as theologically criterial any insights drawn from empirical observation, general science or philosophical speculation, Barth starts his section on human temporality with extended christological reflection. Jesus, he observes, has his own lifetime, between his birth and death; though he is lord of all time, this is never other than as one who has his own unique history in time. But unlike all other human beings he has a further history, that of the forty days between his resurrection and ascension. The significance of this subsequent history is that ‘in this time the man Jesus was manifested among them in the mode of God’ (448, emphasis original), thereby revealing that he had always been present in his deity, even if that had been veiled. His time, therefore, is ‘not only the time of a man, but the time of God, eternal time’ (464). As the eternal God in person, the being of Jesus was not just found in

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a historical life that is now past, but it is living and present even now in the power of the Spirit. Neither is it limited to the present; the being of Jesus is also past, not only in his pre-Easter life but beyond that in the Old Testament which prefigured this, in the creation which is the external basis of the covenant, and in the counsel of God before all time. Nor is it only present and past; it is also in the future, as the future of one who was and is and is also to come. As the historical time, which is also the time of the eternal God, Jesus’ time is the time to which all other times are relativized, the time which embraces all previous time and all subsequent time. What does Jesus’ lordship of time mean for human time? While anthropology must be drawn from Christology, it cannot be deduced from it directly. Only in the case of Jesus did the eternal enter time: only the man Jesus is lord of time, and there can be no repetition. For all other human beings, Barth argues, time has a particular phenomenological structure. It is either past and gone; or it is future and not yet arrived; or in the present – just when its nature ought to be most apparent and secure to us – we find it to be an ungraspable and perpetually vanishing step from the past to the future. In other words, despite its permeating human existence, time is never actual and real for us. Paradoxically, we can never escape time, but nor do we ever possess it. This is an intolerable situation, which we invariably attempt to evade through stratagems of denial, whether by mythologizing progress into the future, or solidifying the past, or eternalizing the present, or by sheer wilful forgetfulness. And it points up the contrast between our experience of time and the time of Jesus, the Lord of time. For it shows that our experience of time is that of sinful human beings, who have been alienated from their Creator and so live in contradiction with their God-given nature. This ‘monstrous situation’ (512) is one which God refuses to endorse: in the man Jesus a divine protest is made against this distorted reality, so that it is now objectively no longer possible for human beings to accept the abnormal as normal. In Jesus time is decisively established not as evanescent or as ‘the abyss of our non-being’ (521), but as real. This opens the way to an entirely different understanding of time for human beings. Thus in relation to the present, it is not primarily we who are now, but God who is now; and because in Christ this God takes time for us and so gives time to us, we truly have time in the present. So every Now has



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become an opportunity to respond to God; to want more than this would be to wish to be God. With regard to the past, times gone are no longer simply perished, leaving only traces in the present; because God was then, the past was real – and if it once was real, how can it be real no longer? The past is now the subject of God’s judgement and mercy, so we need neither run from it nor live in it. And the future need no longer be haunted by the prospect of the void, which we evade either by unreflective nonchalance or reflective resignation or terror: because God will be, there is ‘no “not yet” which might possibly be a threatening “never” ’ (545). It is against this background of Jesus as Lord of time, registering God’s decisive rejection of the sinful human perversion of time and his establishment of its true reality, that Barth turns towards the questions with which we started. For human life is not just a matter of past, present and future; it also exists in a delimited time between birth and death. And this raises a problem, since human life yearns for a temporal duration which exceeds those boundaries, and protests against the limiting of time. Indeed, Barth claims it is actually part of the confusion caused by the fall if we are able to resign ourselves to the limitations of our temporality without any murmur against it: ‘human life is ignorant of its own true nature when it accepts the fall as its original and authentic destiny, and therefore when it is not troubled by the demand for duration’ (555). Human life is a reality that reaches beyond itself ultimately because it has been created by God, for relationship with God and with other human beings; it cannot remain satisfied with a purely immanent existence. Given that this demand for perpetuation is not unwarranted, how then can it be good that the time of human life is bounded (or ‘allotted’ (befristet), to use the term preferred by Barth’s translators)? Barth leads the argument through a series of steps. First, we should distinguish between God’s time which is eternal and unbounded, and human time which is bounded (and eternity, we should note, means neither timelessness nor an everlasting extension of time, but rather ‘the simultaneity and co-inherence of past, present and future’ (526), the holding together at once of all times in the being of God). Taking for granted that it does not enjoy God’s eternity, for then it would then have no limits it desired to transcend, the only option for the creature is to long for an idealized creaturely existence, that is perduring time without

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beginning or end. However it would be a mistake to think that this will ensure satisfaction; for what human beings actually want is not everlasting time, but deep fulfilment, and without such fulfilment additional time is finally of no benefit. Duration can only provide opportunities for human fulfilment; it can never guarantee that they will in fact be satisfied. Indeed human beings would actually find themselves worse rather than better off in an unbounded life: they would be condemned to an infinite series of unsatisfied longings, always seeking and never finding, always thirsting and never finding drink. ‘Could there be any better picture of life in hell than enduring life in enduring time? Do we not have to say that life on this condition […] would be a life of misery which it would be folly to describe as a good creation and gift of God?’ (562). Finitude and a definite span to human existence cannot therefore be seen as a threat. ‘The picture of the narrow gorge and its enclosing walls has to cease to be valid […] All our chafing against the limitations of our life must be irrelevant and superfluous […] The rock walls must have become the protecting walls of a living room or workshop’ (563). One might ask whether this homely image is really any more than an invitation to exchange the metaphors by which we interpret our lives. Is it not merely an injunction to think about life in a different way, as a glass half-full rather than half-empty? Is it not merely another version of those workaday sentiments designed to reconcile us to our inevitable passing: ‘death is part of the great cycle of life’, ‘everything dies, learn humility’, ‘it’s good to make room for others, just as others made room for you’, and so on? Or, in Wallace Stevens’ more elevated tones, ‘death is the mother of beauty’?6 Does this argument amount to any more than another easeful bromide, another pragmatic counsel of modesty, about not crying for the moon, about accepting that everything has its time, that God is God and mortals are mortals? If God were an abstract God, Barth argues, like those gods of the ancients or of the metaphysicians who have no time for us but live in ‘calm, eternal clarity’ in infinite separation from struggling mortals (515),7 then such a suspicion would be justified. But an abstract god of that sort is not the God whose eternity is near us and whose hiddenness is manifest in Jesus Christ, who is eternal not merely in himself, but for us (551–3). Human life is limited by a good God, who in Christ has shown his goodness to us, so that we may enter into relationship with him. Time makes possible God’s covenant with



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humankind and, corresponding to this, it makes possible human fellow relationships. A being in unending time would be ‘centrifugal’ (565): it would cease to be a concrete subject of a concrete history. ‘The final longing for an unlimited life in unallotted time necessarily falls away once we realise that the limit and set span of our existence is the condition which must be fulfilled in order that He, the eternal God, may be our Counterpart and our Neighbour as described, and that we may be His counterparts and His neighbours’ (565). That time is allotted time is, therefore, the necessary correlative of its being given time: both are necessary for time to be the time in which human beings are freed to live as creatures with God and with one another. A disquieting thought still remains, however. Even if we bring ourselves to agree that the delimitation of human lifespan might be a good, even if we accept that it is the condition of possibility of a covenant relationship with God, we are still faced with the prospect of death. Can we really accept that death, from which we flee, which renders our modality as one of anxiety and care, which stands for negation of our being, is the creation of a good God? It is not phenomenologically or experientially obvious that death is a good: ‘if death is not essentially a curse and a misery, then its intrinsic and essential quality is for us at any rate unfathomably and inaccessibly concealed beneath the unnatural and even anti-natural guise in which it now comes to us’ (598). In response to this, Barth turns to the central and overwhelming New Testament emphasis that death is the sign of God’s judgement: ‘sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned’ (Rom. 5.12). Death, as it actually encounters us (that is, as death), is not a fate that is intrinsic to our human nature, but an ordinance of God. Death, as we experience and fear it, is not a positive ordinance of God, but God’s response to our sin and the mark of his judgement. Moreover we are right to be truly afraid, for in death we do not just meet our end and the advent of our non-being. Rather in death, we meet God himself, the God who is greater and more to be feared than death: our fear of death ‘is the wellgrounded fear that we must have of God’ (608). However, does it not follow that if death is a curse, then an unlimited span of life must have been the created intention for humankind? The doctrine of original immortality, based on passages such as Romans 5.12 and the command to Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good

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and evil, ‘for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’ (Gen. 2.17), seems the natural implication of death as a punishment for sin. And so, for the most part has the Christian tradition understood it. Yet it runs contrary to Barth’s entire line of argument about human time as allotted time, and allotted time as the necessary correlative of time that is given in order that humanity might live in covenant relationship with God. Barth’s answer is as follows. While it is quite understandable that we identify the temporal end of human life with the radical threat of negation, these two are not in fact the same. Death as the end of life is not to be identified with the death that is the punishment for sin, the ‘second death’ of Revelation 20.14, even if it is in our experience invariably overshadowed by the threat of judgement. In defence of this he brings to bear three considerations. First, in the case of Jesus, the two forms of death did coincide, but precisely because he died not for his own sin but for that of others, he shows that the relation between the two is contingent. For Jesus death as the punishment for sin was not necessary, but freely chosen. ‘In His human person there is manifested a human existence whose finitude is not intrinsically identical with bondage to that other death’ (629). And because he has taken on himself the reality of the judgement on sin, for us our temporal death takes on the character of a mere sign of God’s judgement and is not tied to the negation of our being by necessity. Of course, we are sinful and fear death as the end of our life even as a sign: the sign has not been removed. Nevertheless, that our existence is bounded at its end does not of itself carry the implication we are under the threat of God’s judgement. The second argument is also Christological. On the principle that what is revealed in Christ is ‘no more and no less than our own natural condition as willed and planned by God and pleasing to Him’ (519), that Christology is a clue to protological anthropology, we have to realize that in sharing human life under the conditions of finitude, in order to suffer the death of a sinner he had to be able to die. ‘Infinitude and immortality would have disqualified Him from doing this for us’ (630). The significance of Jesus’s death is not that he died, which he would have done anyway, but that he died this death, the death of one condemned by God. And if Christ in taking on our flesh took on our mortality, so we, too, must be by nature created mortal. Third, soteriologically, we must be finite if Christ’s death is not to have been in vain. For if our existence is infinitely long, it could only mean that ‘we



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should be able to sin infinitely and even quantitatively multiply our guilt on an infinite scale. We have to be finite, to be able to die, for the eph’hapax of the redemption accomplished in Christ to take effect for us’ (631). If we kept sinning for an infinitely extended life, as we would since the old Adam ‘can unfortunately sin’ (631), we would never actually be reconciled to God. Finitude, and with it mortality, is not intrinsically evil. Humankind as such, therefore, ‘has no beyond’; nor does it need one, for God is its beyond (632). Death as such is not to be feared, since the sting of death is not that it marks the end of life, but that it signifies the encounter with God, whose judgement we should rightly fear. But life itself is properly limited, since that frees human beings to live as creatures before God.

III There have been theologians in the tradition who have defended the natural mortality of Adam, arguing that death is a consequence of finitude rather than sin. Pelagius, for example, resorted to this in order to evade the argument for original sin from the death of infants. Since on his account infants are sinless, and yet are still subject to death, death must be intrinsic to unfallen human nature.8 Socinians and sundry others of a rationalist spirit in the Radical Reformation period reached similar conclusions on rather different grounds.9 Friedrich Schleiermacher, marking a more decisive shift on the subject that had gathered momentum in the eighteenth century, was also sceptical that death could have been the result of sin. Rejecting a doctrine of a literal fall, he argued that the connection of sin and natural evil can only be indirect, on the grounds that death and pain are found ‘where no sin exists’, for example in the non-human animal kingdom.10 He rescues some of the traditional language by claiming that at least subjectively suffering and death can be regarded as a penalty of sin; for if our God-consciousness were perfect, we would not regard them as evil when they are in truth merely ‘hindrances’ or ‘maladjustments’, and it is only as a result of sin that we interpret them as evil.11 But objectively speaking, there is no direct connection between sin and death. Pelagius, Socinus, Schleiermacher and nineteenth-century liberalism are not Barth’s natural theological allies, it scarcely needs to be said. Indeed it

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would be hard to list theologians he more instinctively opposed. By contrast, the mainstream patristic, mediaeval and Reformation tradition developed a shared understanding that death was the penalty of sin. This drew on a number of Scriptural verses, notably the Edenic prohibition on eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, ‘for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’ (Gen. 2.17); the divine pronouncement in response to the first sin that ‘you are dust, and to dust you shall return’ (Gen. 3.19); the exclusion from Eden lest Adam ‘might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’ (Gen. 3.22); and Paul’s declaration that ‘sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin’ (Rom. 5.12; cf. 1 Cor. 15.21).12 Yet, from the start, it was recognized that the doctrine of original immortality created a problem; for might it not mean that human beings were naturally divine? As Theophilus of Antioch noted, ‘For God to make human beings immortal would have been to make them divine.’13 But equally, to create human beings as mortal would have been to make God the author of death, contravening Wisdom 1.13 (‘God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living’). In response to this, Theophilus adopts a middling resolution, that human beings were capable of both mortality and immortality, their destiny finally being decided by their exercise of free will.14 Athanasius also takes a mediating position: by nature human beings are mortal, since they are made of nothing; but they are also made in the image of God and if they maintain that image through constant contemplation, then their nature is robbed of its power and they remain incorrupt and, in that respect, would be as God.15 In the West, Augustine also points to a doctrine of natural immortality, that human beings had it in their power to live for ever in paradise without bodily corruption, so long as they desired what God commanded:16 death is the penalty for sin.17 But perhaps the most precise articulation of the tradition is found in Thomas Aquinas. In response to the questions whether human beings in the state of grace would have been immortal18 and whether death was the penalty for our first parents’ lapse,19 Aquinas argues that death is both natural on account of a condition attaching to matter, but also penal as a result of the loss of the divine favour which preserved humanity from death. For the human body, being composed of contraries, is in virtue of its matter naturally liable to decay. However, in the original state the soul, which is the form of the



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body, was equipped by God with a supernatural force capable of preserving the body from all decay, as long as it remained submissive to God itself. However, without the soul’s submission to God, it no longer possessed the grace by which it subordinates the body and so the body was rendered susceptible to decay and death: the withdrawal of this grace was the punishment which resulted in the body returning to its corruptible state. On this account it is not intrinsic to the human body that it is liable to death, just as it is not intrinsic to the nature of a saw that the material of which it is composed is liable to rust.20 But even though the human soul is itself immortal, and so it would be appropriate for the human body also to be immortal, the grace that made this possible was forfeited with the primal sin. Given the strength of this tradition, and its apparent Biblical grounding, why did Barth opt for a doctrine of natural mortalism and the severance of death from sin? It is clear that it was not an aberration. For example, in his account in Church Dogmatics III/3 of the permanent, standing reminders of the hidden divine governance of history, alongside the historical significance of Scripture, the historical presence of the Church, and the historical survival of the Jewish people, he also names the temporal limitation of human life as a universal sign of the divine conditioning of human existence.21 And it stands as the basis of § 56 in Church Dogmatics III/4, ‘Freedom in Limitation’, the final section of his ethics of creation, where he discusses the unique opportunity that is offered by limitation in time and the concepts of vocation and human significance that result from it. One obvious candidate for an explanation would be that it represents one stage in a longer-term theological trajectory towards accommodating the growing cultural weight of the natural sciences.22 The empirical fact of the finitude of all living things is not news, of course: ‘the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other’ (Eccl. 3.19). But the gradual displacement of historical or quasi-historical readings of the Genesis narratives by scientific accounts of the age of the earth and of human origins unavoidably might be thought to invite a certain reworking of, or at least clarification of the import of, doctrinal claims about human mortality. On the face of it the idea that death came into the world through the sin of one man requires a measure of rather careful articulation if one has come to believe that human beings are the result of a seamless evolutionary process in which

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living creatures, including the immediate ancestors of homo sapiens, were born and died long before any creatures meaningfully capable of sin existed. However, it would be a profound misreading of Barth’s intentions to think that he is guided by a need to accommodate some new set of historical or scientific insights. He is not primarily motivated by a desire to make theology more amenable to the laws of thermodynamics or the claims of Darwinian evolution, or even to everyday experience, but is rather seeking to drive the argument on fundamental theological, and specifically christological and soteriological grounds, not trying to make theological virtue out of empirical necessity. The fact that human beings under the judgement of God are shown to be damned and lost is, he writes, ‘too massive a truth to be accepted merely on the basis of the correct observation that every innocent fly must perish when it reaches the evening of its day’.23 Human beings are not just innocent flies, he continues, and the fact that we are mortal like flies is in itself no proof that it is right and proper for us to be mortal. In this he follows a widespread theological consensus dating right back to at least the patristic period that the essential significance of Adam is typological, and that the question of Adam’s historical existence is of incidental interest at best. When theologians discuss the question of original mortality or immortality, they are asking questions about human created and redeemed nature that need not be even in principle verifiable by science.24 Certainly in Barth’s case we should not look to an explanation of this kind.

IV I want to suggest four reasons why, far from being an anomalous feature of Barth’s thought, his views on both original mortality and temporal limitation are intrinsic to his theology. The first is that it is a necessary complement to his attempt to remove all traces of classical philosophical anthropology from theology, in particular its doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Barth discusses this in the immediately preceding paragraph (§ 46) of CD III/2, ‘Man as Soul and Body’.25 He is more than happy to accept that human beings have souls, that the soul is differentiated from the body and may not be reduced to it, and that the soul in some sense precedes the body; but he categorically denies that there is some inherently immortal part of human beings.



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To understand the constitution of human beings, we have to understand the humanity of Jesus Christ. The first thing we learn from the New Testament is that Jesus is not divided into soul and body, but is one unified human being, embodied soul and ensouled body.26 Moreover he is ‘both soul and body in an ordered oneness and wholeness’;27 body and soul in Jesus are inseparable, but they are ordered as higher and lower. In the New Testament, this ordered unity is ultimately related to Jesus’ unique relationship to the Holy Spirit: not that this makes him the Son of God, but that being the Son of God he has the Spirit lastingly and totally. By contrast, all other human beings live by and have their existence from the Spirit, though this movement of God is of only transitory and partial benefit to them.28 Human beings are not God, but they are not without God: to say that they have the Spirit is to say they have their being with and from God. They are ‘grounded, constituted and maintained by God’ as the soul of their body.29 We should not say that human beings are ‘spirit’, but that they have ‘spirit’: the operation of the Spirit is the active presence of God to human beings, constituting them as human subjects but not as such being the human subject.30 Thus, the soul may not be identified with the Spirit, but is a creaturely reality grounded by the Spirit. But the soul also cannot exist by and for itself: unlike the divine Spirit, which needs no body, soul always presupposes a body whose soul it is, the necessary outer to its inner, the spatial complement to its temporality.31 There can, therefore, be no talk of a union of body and soul, but only of ‘embodied soul and besouled body’.32 He is happy to accommodate the insights gained from observations about habits of speech about the inseparability of body and soul. Thus, ‘we say with equal emphasis and equal right: “I think” and “I see”, “I know” and “I have toothache”, “I hate” and “I am operated on”, “I have sinned” and “I am old”.’33 But these only have weight once one has first accepted the unity of the human being as grounded in the Spirit. Barth, therefore, aims to reject the entire Christian anthropological tradition, patristic, scholastic and orthodox Protestant, which he regards as united in the belief that human nature consists in the connection of two separate substances, body and soul. But it is important to note what lies behind his refusal. His concern is not merely philosophical, as if sorting out the grammar of two rather confused concepts. The real issue is soteriological:

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The central affirmation in this whole anthropology is that of the immortality of this rational thing, the human soul; and immortality is a property which does not come to it by the special grace of God, but dwells within it by nature, so that it can be proved not only by Holy Scripture but on general rational grounds.34

The reason for separating out body and soul as distinct substances has been that this allows them different trajectories across salvation history, particularly after biological death. But Barth wishes to reject categorically the idea that there is an ‘I’ which can be separated philosophically from the body and given an immortal career on the grounds of some rational discernment of its essential and self-posited nature outside of grace. Indeed, it is presumably this concern which leads him to lump Aristotelian conceptions of soul and body under this overall characterization of the tradition as committed to two separable substances. His brief survey of the tradition at this point does not distinguish the hylomorphic conception of the soul which Aquinas draws from Aristotle, according to which the soul is the form of the body, not a separable substance, from more abstractly dualist accounts which he describes as ‘Greek’.35 For his core anxiety is not hylomorphism, which could after all be portrayed as one way of asserting the unity of body and soul, albeit within the terms of Aristotelian metaphysics, but rather Aquinas’s concurrent affirmation of the soul as something which can live on after separation from the body at death until it is reunited with the body at the resurrection. Barth’s rejection of traditional Christian anthropology, even if it is based on rather too quick a series of generalizations, is, therefore, based on his rejection of the idea of the immortality of the soul. Of course, this raises the question why he is anxious about the immortality of the soul, which leads us to the second reason for thinking his emphasis on original mortality is intrinsic to his theology, namely that abandoning a doctrine of natural immortality removes an opening to a doctrine of natural human divinity. The idea of natural immortality consorts all too easily with the possibility of humankind setting up for itself a supply depot for sustaining an autonomous life without God, denying the creatureliness of the creature and forgetting that the primary context for understanding human beings is not as self-positing or self-interpreting, but as partners in covenant relationship with God. One of the persistent themes throughout Barth’s career was that of the refusal to identify human beings with any innate capacity, which could in



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effect become the ‘affirmation of human personality’. To take one example, his opposition in the Nature and Grace debate of 1934 to Emil Brunner’s assertion of a ‘point of contact’, whereby even fallen human beings possess certain persisting spiritual capacities which open up for them the possibility of receiving revelation, is premised on his insistence that God alone creates the conditions of possibility for encounter between God and humankind. Any other alternative, however putatively formal it may be, is tantamount to a denial of the doctrine of sola gratia, and represents one or another means of swimming a few strokes towards one’s salvation.36 Analogously, the doctrine of natural immortality provides the material grounding for a conception of human beings as naturally divine, capable as Theophilus feared of sustaining themselves in existence outside of the context of dependence on God’s covenant grace. Third, apologetically, the rejection of natural immortality takes seriously the charge that religion is merely projection. To label this concern as ‘apologetic’ is not to suggest that Barth advances a neutral philosophical ground which could serve as an apologetic basis for dogmatic claims, or that this served as one of his motivations for adopting a doctrine of natural mortality, but rather simply to note that at this point his dogmatics has a valid apologetic function. In particular, the rejection of natural immortality addresses and perhaps defers claims that religious beliefs function as disguised forms of egotism or projected self-interest. For example, it cuts to the root of the unconscious simmering resentment which derives from an infantile sense that immortality is somehow owed to us: by rendering human mortality not a temporary aberration from our due immortality, lost with the fall but restored in Christ, it engages closely and provides a partial response to the accusation – whether Feuerbachian or Freudian – that this is how we would wish it to be. Of course, one might respond that even if original immortality does not fulfil that role of wish-fulfilment, then the doctrine of resurrection surely does. And this leads to the fourth reason for thinking that original mortality is congruent with Barth’s fundamental theological convictions, namely that God is the limit of our lives. The emphasis here is that God is the limit of our lives, not an abstraction about human finitude. Barth’s affirmation of natural mortality is not a philosophical deduction, working out the thought that finitude is incompatible with immortality. His fundamental category is not

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the abstract idea of finitude, but the concrete reality of creatureliness, that we are creatures of this Creator, and therefore fundamentally in relation to this Creator. As he writes: The whole picture changes, however, if we are not concerned abstractly and generally with the limitation of our life, but with the God who limits it; if we are not concerned abstractly and generally with our allotted time, but with the reality of the God who allots it. In both cases, of course, we are concerned with the same thing. But the same thing becomes now quite different.37

It is God who limits our lives, who was there before we were and will be there after we have been. Human hope is in God, and not in some more or less optimistic projection of our individual or corporate lives. Natural mortality pushes to its ultimate limit our trust in God, the letting go of our lives into God. Death, we might say, brings to its climax the process of learning that our lives are hidden in Christ: with Simeon, once our eyes have seen God’s salvation, we are freed to depart in peace. Human vulnerability does not need to be reduced to bromides about needing to accept our limits, but is situated in relation to our dependence on God. Once this is heard, but only once it is heard, we are in a position to hear the message of the resurrection. The resurrection, rather than being something we could reasonably have hoped for, as the repetition and reestablishment of our pre-fall status due to us since it is in our proper nature to be immortal, is recast as a fundamental and unexpected novum. Undeserved, unnecessary, unnatural, and yet entirely consistent with God’s nature, the resurrection is the wholly fitting correlate not of our human nature but of God’s faithfulness.38 Barth is notoriously coy about the nature of conscious post-mortem existence, yet this is not because any of his theological commitments actively preclude it, but because he is aware of all the ways in which a belief in resurrection can be misused. ‘Death is our frontier,’ he writes, ‘[b]ut our God is the frontier even of our death’.39 And because our God is not an abstract god who might or might not turn out to be gracious, but is the same God as the one who raised Jesus from the dead, there is nothing that lies on the other side of that frontier which is to be feared. Far from being at odds with his fundamental theological concerns, therefore, Barth’s affirmation of original mortality lies at their heart. Exactly because God is God and we are not, because God’s graciousness does not



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depend on any answering capacity in humankind or on any natural ability on the part of human beings to render themselves deathless, because we can place no hope in any constructed wish-fulfilment but only in the God who is the limit of our lives, so we are freed to accept that our mortality is not an unnatural and fallen aberration, but fully proper to our created being. And it is only once we have learned this that we may begin to bend our ears to the rumour of the resurrection.

V As it happens, it may turn out that Barth’s theological instincts are not finally so distant from the mainstream tradition’s own concerns. For none of the classical proponents of original immortality maintain that human immortality before the fall was self-derived or natural. Athanasius affirms that human beings are created from nothing and are therefore of their own nature mortal.40 While Augustine might appear to suggest that immortality was within human grasp (thus Adam ‘lived without any want, and […] had it in his power so to live for ever [ita semper vivere habens in potestate]’), he immediately precedes this thought with an assertion of the derivation of human goodness from God’s (Adam ‘lived in the enjoyment of God, from Whose goodness came his own goodness’).41 And for Aquinas not only is there is no natural vigour existing in the body to make it imperishable, as a result of which the soul is needed to preserve the body, the power of preserving the body is itself not natural to the soul, but is a gift of grace.42 While each of these theologians point to some kind of original immortality, the case could be made that for each of them the emphasis on the primacy of gracious divine action narrows the gap between them and Barth. And if this is so, the force of Barth’s position may not be so much to assert something they denied, as to underline and extend the concern that has lain present from the very start, that for God to have made human beings immortal would have been to make them divine. To turn back to the questions raised by technological immortalism. None of these considerations about original mortality and immortality will tell us which bodily interventions should or should not be pursued, nor how we may distinguish disease from old age. Yet they do begin to shed light on

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the underlying mentality with which we approach the issues of engineering our immortalization. For they make intelligible the thought that human finitude and mortality are not intrinsically alien to our creaturely being. Mere extension of life is of itself of no value: as we have seen, what human beings actually want is not everlasting time, but deep fulfilment, and without such fulfilment additional time is finally meaningless. But this is finally only theologically sustainable in relation to our fundamental dependence on and orientation to God. This is eternal life: not perduring time or immortality as such, but to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. But also, this is eternal life: not as such oriented to the temporal future, but inextricably linked to the temporal present, a present made real and available to us because it is real and fulfilled in Christ. Yet precisely because the God we now know in Christ is the God whose covenant has been shown to be irrevocable, the most apt fulfilment of that present knowledge lies in the hope of resurrection. Our flesh and our hearts may fail, but God is the strength of our heart and our portion – forever. How then does the Church witness to the presence of eternal life? Not by setting up an Immortalization Commission,43 for which resurrection could never portend more than resuscitation, leaving us to face the same unfulfilled existence on the other side of biological death, the prospect of yet more enduring life in enduring time. Rather, quite simply, by not fearing death, and by engaging in the practices of the presence of God that render the fear of death redundant. And those practices will always be refractions of the Christ through whom God has time for us and whose perfect love no fear can abide.

Notes 1 Thus Robin Holliday, in a programmatic editorial: ‘The overall aim of all this research should be to increase the healthspan, rather than the lifespan. There will of course be some effect on the lifespan, as shown by the ever increasing proportion of individuals who become centenarians, but the maximum human lifespan of around 120 years has not changed in recent decades’ (‘Ageing Research in the Next Century’, Biogerontology 1: 2 (June 2000), 97–101, [100]. 2 John Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 59.



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3 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, translated by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936–1969), here CD III/2, 437–640. All page numbers in the text refer to this part-volume. For a recent account of Barth’s early views on life and death up to 1930, with extensive literature review, see Yo Fukushima, Aus dem Tode das Leben: Eine Untersuchung zu Karl Barths Todes- und Lebensverständnis (Zürich: Theologische Verlag Zurich, 2009). 4 Among Protestants, cf. for example Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt, translated by Olive Wyon (London: Lutterworth Press, 1939), 462–77; and Eberhard Jüngel, Death: The Riddle and the Mystery, translated by Iain and Ute Nicol (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1975). 5 ‘No Christian theologian has written about the finite conditions of human existence more often or at greater length than Karl Barth […] Much of the rhetoric in the Church Dogmatics is dedicated to converting us from feeling chafed by our human condition to celebrating our finitude’ (Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (London: SPCK, 1997), 23–4). 6 Wallace Stevens, ‘Sunday Morning’ (1923). See https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/ poem/sunday-morning. This poem is in the public domain. 7 Quoting Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Hyperion’s Song of Fate’. 8 The doctrine of Adam’s mortality was anathematized in Canon 1 of the 418 Synod of Carthage as part of its condemnation of Pelagian heresy. 9 George Hunston Williams, The Radical Reformation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1957), 750–2. 10 Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 2nd ed. [1830], translated by D. M. Baillie et al., edited by H. R. MacKintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh T & T Clark, 1928), § 76.2, 319. 11 Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 319. 12 The traditional reading of the Genesis passages has been disputed in recent scholarship: thus James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (London: SCM, 1992) who reads the Garden of Eden story not as one of the first sin and the arrival of death, but of the lost chance of immortality; and cf. R. W. L. Moberly, The Theology of the Book of Genesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 70–87. 13 Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum II.27. 14 Ibid. 15 Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, 3–5. 16 Augustine, City of God xiv.26; cf. Epistolae 118, 3.14. 17 Augustine, De Gen. ad litt. 2.32, Retract I.21, 26.

208 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Eternal God, Eternal Life Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.97.1, cf. I.95.1, II.i.81.5 ad 2. Ibid., II.ii.1, 64.1. Ibid., II.1.85., 5, 6. Barth, CD III/3, 226–36. Cf. Kerr, Immortal Longings, 35. Barth, CD III/2, 631. Though cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, who prefers the traditional account of original mortality and attempts a quasi-empirical account of death as the consequence of sin; however his response (drawing on Paul Tillich and Victor von Weizsäcker) remains seriously underdeveloped (Anthropology in Theological Perspective, translated by Matthew J. O’Connell (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 140–2. Barth’s disagreement with the dogmatic tradition is signalled in the preface of the part volume, where he indicates that he will deviate from it even more firmly than he did in his account of predestination in II/2; he is particularly skeptical of the doctrine of the soul, which he thinks has wrongly dominated theological anthropology. Barth, CD III/2, 327. Ibid., 332. Ibid., 333–4. Ibid., 344. Geoffrey W. Bromiley notes that since Barth rejects a trichotomous anthropology, it would have been better for the English translation to capitalize ‘Spirit’ consistently. See The Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 1979), 132. Barth, CD III/2, 364. Ibid., 373. Ibid., 327. Ibid., 394. Ibid., 380. Ibid. Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, Natural Theology, translated by Peter Fraenkel (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946). Barth, CD III/2, 564. Here we might recall the pedagogical value of the development of the ancient Israelite belief in relation to life after death, which is usually thought to proceed from (i) hope for perpetuation of the family line and of the nation, but without hope for an afterlife, to (ii) reflection on the experience of yhwh’s faithfulness, which opens up the possibility that this might also be known beyond the grave, to (iii) a belief in resurrection. The resurrection is premised not on imported



39 40

41 42 43

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religious ideas, nor on philosophical claims about the immortality of the soul, but on a theological understanding of God’s covenant commitment to Israel. See e.g. N. T. Wright (The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003), 85–128), who argues that the belief in the resurrection was a development not just of (ii), which might have given rise to a belief in a vague blessed life after death, but also of Israel’s national hope (i.e. (i)). Barth, CD III/2, 611. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, 3.3; see Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 179–80. Russell argues that the entire Greek patristic tradition agreed, against Platonic teachings that immortality was the uncovering of one’s true self, that immortality was not an innate capacity but a gift of God. Augustine, City of God, translated by R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), XIV, 26, [628]. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.97.1 ad 3. For the early Soviet efforts to create a deathless new humanity, of which the embalmed, incorruptible Lenin was to be the exemplar, see John Gray’s highly instructive discussion in The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death (London: Penguin, 2011), 104–204.

Index of Biblical Books Old Testament Genesis 1  95–7, 100 Genesis 2  61 1 Kings 8  52 Job 53 Psalm 16  25, 29, 39 Psalm 23  33 Psalm 40  56 Psalm 41  56 Psalm 63  39 Psalm 69  56 Psalm 84  39 Psalm 103  77 Isaiah 25  157 Isaiah 65  100 New Testament Matthew 22  157 Luke 15  27, 108 Luke 20  73, 79 John 1  17, 48, 52–4, 97, 108 John 6  168 John 8  21 John 17  190 Acts 2  141 Romans 1  146 Romans 15  60 Romans 5  109, 195 Romans 8  109

1 Corinthians 3  145 1 Corinthians 5  39 1 Corinthians 6  39, 72 1 Corinthians 7  39 1 Corinthians 8  39 1 Corinthians 12–14  39 1 Corinthians 15  14, 25, 32, 35, 105, 134, 141, 198 2 Corinthians 4  103 2 Corinthians 5  40, 136, 138, 141 2 Corinthians 12  40 Galatians 1  141 Galatians 3  56 Ephesians 1  21 Ephesians 2  141 Ephesians 3  42 Colossians 2  141 Colossians 3  103 1 Timothy 6  74, 84 2 Timothy 1  85 Hebrews 1  72 Hebrews 2  73 Hebrews 3  182 1 Peter 1  21 2 Peter 3  20, 100 1 John 3  25, 32, 33, 34 Revelation 20  196 Revelation 21  91, 100 Revelation 22  72

Index

ageing 188 angels 71ff. body 77, 81 corruptibility 83 creatures 76–8 governance 72 immortality 72–3, 78–9, 81–2, 84 sin 82 worship 72 Apocalyptic 118 Pauline 140–1 Aquinas, Thomas 4–6, 29–33, 76–84, 198, 202, 205 Summa theologiae 76–84 Athanasius 205 Atheism 121, 172, 177 Augustine 3, 25–8, 96, 198, 205 Barth, Karl 1ff., 31, 89–109, 187ff., 200, 203–5 Berkhof, Louis 5 Bio-gerontology 187 body 37ff, 124 of angels 73, 81 in Cartesian Dualism 41 creaturely 58 decay 198–9 Extended Mind Thesis 47 Paul’s writings on 39–40 physical organism, the 43 soma 39–40 and soul 201–2, 205 spiritual 58–62, 123 Boethius 2–6, 8, 17–18 brain 46–7 Bullinger, Heinrich 152–62 Calvin, John 26, 72, 153–60 Christ body of 40, 51–7, 59–61 128, 152–4

as the creation ex nihilo 99, 106 Christology 12, 56, 192, 196 death 196 humanity 201 incarnation 12, 15–18, 47–59, 65 logos 16–18, 49, 51–4, 93–4, 97–8, 174 as judge 138 mortality 196 as reality 102 saving work 141 victory over death 141 Christian Doctrine 80, 116, 119, 122 Church 16, 40, 42–3, 53–5, 65, 80, 149–52, 154, 159–64, 189, 199, 206 Cochrane, Arthur 158–61 Creation 9, 12–13, 54–5, 58–60, 77, 89ff. creatio ex nihilo 105–7 of angels 82–3 of humans and angels 85 incompleteness 122–3 new 60, 89ff., 134, 141 relatedness of creatures 124–5 and the resurrection 89 death 61, 72–5, 78–9, 104–8, 131ff., 188–9, 195–9, 202–6 of God 172–4 and sin 108, 127, 140–1, 197 Doctrine 117, 119–21, 126 dualism mind/body 38–9, 41–2, 45–6 Eden 72, 82, 125, 198 eschatology 60, 117–19, 125–7, 137, 151–3, 156–7, 177–9 eternal life 6, 25ff., 122–3, 132–43, 162, 169ff., 190, 206 Divine 2, 6, 11–15, 18, 104–5, 122, 175–6

214 Index and Eucharist 150 and goodness 26, 31 and humanity 32–4 in nature 61 eternity 1ff., 37ff. Eucharist and community 163 eschatological dimension 159 and immortality 149ff. and the Kingdom of God 162 as sign 155, 162 God and time 9–10, 13, 63, 91–2, 96, 173, 175 death 172 Divine beatitude 33 Divine economy 11–12 Divine essence 38, 50, 76 Divine eternity 2–4, 6–7, 9–11, 17, 32, 34, 37–8, 62, 106, 169 Divine justice 130–3 as ‘eternal process’ 173 Father 72, 75 goodness 25ff. grace 141 immortality 74–5 immutability 32, 73, 75 love 31 perfection 30–1 simplicity 74 works 121 Griffiths, Paul 74, 80–4 Heidelberg Catechism 133, 140 Holy Spirit activity of 48 and incarnation 55, 57, 59–62, 201 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 115ff. humanity 14–18, 134, 137–43 goodness of 27–8 Ignatius of Antioch 149 immortality 119, 130, 187–91, 202–3 of angels 71ff. and beatitude 33–4 and divine justice 131 and Eucharist 149ff. immutability 4–6, 50–1

Irenaeus of Lyon 149 judgement 95, 104, 131ff., 193, 195–7 Jüngel, Eberhard 57, 137, 139, 142 justification 56, 61, 133–4, 139 Kant, Emmanuel 130–3, 171–2, 175–6 Kingdom of God 64, 103, 122, 124–5, 127, 150, 155–8, 162, 164 and Eucharist 162 love 124 Luther, Martin 54–5, 65, 124, 126, 160 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 45–7, 54, 59 Moltmann, Jürgen 134–8, 141–2, 156–60 mortality 190 natural theology 37, 170, 174 Pelagius 197 Plato 3 Timaeus 78 Plotinus 3, 14 Pseudo–Dionysius the Areopagite 78–9 Reformed Tradition 152–3, 156, 160 resurrection 18, 48, 57–62, 72, 89ff., 115ff., 133, 135–43, 190–1, 204–6 ex nihilo 105 of the body 60–2 and the Trinity 62–3 Revelation 15–16, 37, 103, 132, 137, 191, 203 and experience 37 salvation 13, 18, 39, 52, 55, 94–5, 107, 128, 134–5, 138, 140–2, 155, 189, 202 sanctification 56, 143 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 5, 52, 121, 197 science 187–9 Socinus 197 Spenser, Edmund 129 Strawson, Peter Frederick 44–5 Syssoma/Syssomatic/Syssomatism 42–3, 51, 55–8 Theodicy 117

Index Thiel, John 117, 128 Tillich, Paul 169–82 time 14–18, 191–4 and eternity 37, 49 and the human body 59, 65

incomplete 119 Trinity 37, 49–50, 62–3, 174 World 38, 46, 52, 58–9, 116, 120–1, 126–7

215