God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology: Volume 1: God and the Works of God 9780567139429, 9780567661739, 9780567052476

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GOD WITHOUT MEASURE

Working Papers in Christian Theology

GOD WITHOUT MEASURE

Working Papers in Christian Theology Volume I: God and the Works of God

John Webster

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 © John Webster, 2016 John Webster 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. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. 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. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Webster, J. B. (John Bainbridge), 1955- author. [Essays. Selections] God without measure : working papers in Christian theology / by John Webster. pages cm ISBN 978-0-567-13942-9 (v. 1 : hardback) 1. Theology, Doctrinal. I. Title. BT15.W423 2015 230–dc23 2015019128 ISBN: HB: 978-0-56713-942-9 PB: 978-0-56768-251-2 ePDF: 978-0-56705-247-6 ePub: 978-0-56716-513-8 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

vii introduction

Chapter 1 Omnia . . . pertractantur in sacra doctrina sub ratione Dei. On the Matter of Christian Theology

3

Part I god in himself Chapter 2 Life in and of Himself

13

Chapter 3 Eternal Generation

29

Chapter 4 Christology, Theology, Economy. The Place of Christology in Systematic Theology

43

Chapter 5 One Who is Son

59 Part II god’s outer works

Chapter 6 Trinity and Creation

83

Chapter 7 ‘Love is also a lover of life’: Creatio ex nihilo and Creaturely Goodness

99

Chapter 8 Non ex aequo: God’s Relation to Creatures

115

vi

Contents

Chapter 9 On the Theology of Providence

127

Chapter 10 ‘It was the will of the Lord to bruise him’: Soteriology and the Doctrine of God

143

Chapter 11 Rector et iudex super omnia genera doctrinarum? The Place of the Doctrine of Justification

159

Chapter 12 ‘In the society of God’: Some Principles of Ecclesiology

177

Chapter 13 Purity and Plenitude: Reflections on Congar’s Tradition and Traditions

195

epilogue Chapter 14 What Makes Theology Theological?

213

Index of Names Subject Index

225 229

Acknowledgements Preparation of this volume for publication was undertaken by Tyler Wittman, without whose scrupulous attentions it would not have seen the light of day. At an earlier stage, Dr Darren Sumner also offered much helpful commentary on the material. The author and publishers acknowledge with gratitude permission to reproduce previously published material as follows: Chapter 2, ‘Life in and of Himself ’ = ‘Life in and of himself: Reflections on God’s Aseity’, in B. McCormack, ed., Engaging the Doctrine of God. Contemporary Protestant Perspectives (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), pp. 107–24. Chapter 4, ‘Christology, Theology, Economy. The Place of Christology in Systematic Theology’ = ‘The Place of Christology within Systematic Theology’, in F. A. Murphy, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); by permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter 5, ‘One Who is Son’, = ‘One Who Is Son: Theological Reflections on the Exordium To the Epistle to the Hebrews’, in R. J. Bauckham et al, ed., The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 69–94; reprinted by permission of the publisher; all rights reserved. Chapter 6, ‘Trinity and Creation’ = ‘Trinity and Creation’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 12 (2010), pp. 4–19. Chapter 7, ‘ “Love is also a lover of life”: creatio ex nihilo and Creaturely Goodness’ = ‘ “Love is also a lover of life”: creatio ex nihilo and creaturely goodness’, Modern Theology 29 (2013), pp. 156–71. Chapter  8, ‘Non ex aequo: God’s Relation to Creatures’ = ‘Non ex aequo: God’s relation to creatures’, in A. Moore, A. Clarke, ed., Within the Love of God. Essays in Dialogue with Paul Fiddes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 95–107; by permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter 9, ‘On the Theology of Providence’ = ‘On the Theology of Providence’, in F. A. Murphy, P. Ziegler, ed., The Providence of God (London: T&T Clark, 2009), pp. 158–75.

viii

Acknowledgements

Chapter  10, ‘ “It was the will of the Lord to bruise him”: Soteriology and the Doctrine of God’ = ‘ “It was the will of the Lord to bruise him”: soteriology and the doctrine of God’, in I. Davidson, M. Rae, ed., God of Salvation: Soteriology in Theological Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp.  15–34; reprinted by permission of the publishers. Chapter  11, ‘Rector et iudex super omnia genera doctrinarum? The Place of the Doctrine of Justification’ = ‘Rector et iudex super omnia genera doctrinarum? The place of the doctrine of justification’, in M. Weinrich, J. P. Burgess, ed., What is Justification About? Reformed Contributions to an Ecumenical Theme (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 35–56; reprinted by permission of the publisher; all rights reserved. Chapter 12, ‘ “In the society of God”: Some Principles of Ecclesiology’ = ‘ “In the Society of God”: Some Principles of Ecclesiology’, in P. Ward, ed., Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), pp. 200–22; reprinted by permission of the publisher; all rights reserved. Chapter 13,‘Purity and Plenitude: Reflections on Congar’s Tradition and Traditions’ = ‘Purity and Plenitude: Evangelical Reflections on Congar’s Tradition and Traditions’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005), pp.  399–413; ‘Pureté et plenitude: réflexions protestantes sur “La tradition et les Traditions” de Congar’, in G. Flynn, ed., Yves Congar. Théologien de l’Église (Paris: Cerf, 2007), pp. 43–63. Chapter  14, ‘What Makes Theology Theological?’ = ‘What Makes Theology Theological?’, Journal of Analytic Theology 3 (2015), pp. 17–28.

I ntroduction

Chapter 1 O m n ia .  .  . pe rt r ac ta n t u r i n s ac r a d o c t r i na su b r at i on e D e i . O n t h e M att e r o f C h r i s t ia n T h e o l o g y

The essays in this volume are working papers which explore a range of topics in Christian doctrine: God, creation, providence, Christ, salvation and the church. They have a common conception of the matter of Christian theology, and of the way in which that matter governs the order of a presentation of Christian truth, as well as the placement and proportion of its constituent elements.

I Christian theology is a work of regenerate intelligence, awakened and illuminated by divine instruction to consider a twofold object. This object is, first, God in himself in the unsurpassable perfection of his inner being and work as Father, Son and Spirit and in his outer operations, and, second and by derivation, all other things relative to him. Christian divinity is characterized both by the scope of its matter – it aims at a comprehensive treatment of God and creatures – and by the material order of that treatment, in which theology proper precedes and governs economy. All things have their origin in a single transcendent animating source; a system of theology is so to be arranged that the source, the process of derivation and the derivatives may in due order become objects of contemplative and practical attention. This conception of theology’s matter and arrangement may be amplified from three post-Reformation treatments of Christian doctrine. The first is a compact late sixteenth-­century account of theological prolegomena, Franciscus Junius’s De theologia vera (1594). Towards the end of the work, Junius proposes that coming to understand the nature of theology requires reflection upon its causes, both ‘the internal and essential causes of theology’1 which establish its essence, and its external causes – the efficient cause by which it is generated and the final cause

1. F. Junius, A Treatise on True Theology (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014), p. 177.

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by which it is directed to its end. The idiom of causality serves to indicate that the object and ends of theological intelligence are not established or moved by unformed creaturely intellect; they are, rather, first presented to theological intelligence ab extra, so that theological intelligence is not simply spontaneous but is a human work within the domain of creatureliness, grace and divine teaching. This reference to the objective is deepened in Junius’s definition of the material cause of theology. ‘The material cause of this theology consists of divine matters: of course God, and whatsoever topics have been arranged with respect to him, as was proper for instruction to be given concerning the nature, works, and law of God himself.’2 The ‘divine things’ which are the given matter of theology, that is, are of two sorts: ‘We want divine things . . . to be understood as those things that are really and truly divine. Or, if they pertain to the nature of the created world, they nevertheless are in some fashion ordered with respect to God.’3 Put differently, theology’s matter is either ‘ “God” in its direct case’, or that which ‘is an oblique case, “of God”, “for God”, “toward God”, or “by God” ’.4 And so – the echo of Aquinas is unmistakeable – ‘all things . . . are treated in this sacred theology with respect to God, as though of the proper object which is discussed in theology. Because either it is God himself that is the subject, or things that are ordered with respect to God, as to the universal principle and end of those things.’5 In sum: theology is a distinct and unified science by virtue of its single complex object: God and all things studied under the formality of being relative to God. The way in which such a definition of the matter of theology shapes the topics of Christian doctrine and the order in which they are presented may be observed in more detail in a text from just over a quarter century after Junius, the Synopsis purioris theologiae, based on a cycle of public disputations held at the Leiden faculty from 1620 to 1624.6 The sixth disputation is an extended presentation of the content of the Christian doctrine of God and its place in relation to the other elements of Christian doctrine. An opening move in the disputation sets its direction. God is the principal topic of Christian doctrine from which what is said about all other matters is drawn. In sacrosancta theologia, ‘God is treated not only as the principle upon which it is constructed and the source of our knowledge of it but also as the subject and the foremost primary locus of theology from which all others flow forth, by which they are held together, and to which they should be directed.’7 Teaching about God is not one of a series of theological topics, but primus ac primarius theologiae . . . locus a qui reliqui fluunt. 2.  Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, p. 177. 3.  Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, p. 178. 4.  Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, p. 178. 5.  Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, p. 178. 6.  Synopsis purioris theologiae/Synopsis of a purer theology, vol. 1: Disputations 1–23, D. te Velde, ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 7.  Synopsis purioris theologiae, Disputation 6, §1 (p. 151).

On the Matter of Christian Theology

5

As it proceeds to set out the content of the Christian doctrine of God, the disputation arranges the material in what may initially appear an unsatisfactory sequence: ‘the revelation of the one essence by means of various attributes; the enumeration of the divine persons; and the revelation of his deeds.’8 The sequence may appear unsatisfactory because it seems more natural to accord priority to God’s triune identity manifest in his works in time, and to answer the question quid sit Deus? only after fashioning an answer to the question quis sit Deus? by attending to God’s enactment of his life in relation to creatures. For the Synopsis, by contrast, the most natural course of Christian teaching is from immanent to transitive: the nature of God determined from his names and attributes; the divine persons and their relations; the outer works of God. In arranging the material in this way, there is, of course, no suggestion of the material priority of de Deo uno over de Deo trino: that the simple divine essence and the divine triunity are equiprimordial is beyond question. Further, that the subordination of economy to theology proper entails no inattention to God’s transitive works or to created things can readily be seen from the way in which the disputation’s treatment of God in se moves seamlessly from a presentation of the divine essence and attributes (§§20–30) and God’s internal acts (life, intellect and will, §§31–5) to talk of God’s ‘emanating potency, that is, the power that concerns and is practiced upon things that are outside of him’.9 This, in turn, is followed by material on the divine dominion (§38) and God’s ‘good affections’ (§39) such as gentleness, generosity and mercy (§40) which demonstrate his ‘ardent will towards us, and its power and effect in creatures’.10 Because – and only because – these divine affections, powers and effects are inseparable from the divine essence, they establish the economy. The irreversible succession of topics – from God’s simplicity to his creative, providential, reconciling and perfecting acts – preserves both the deduced or non-­primitive character of theology’s subordinate res and its proper dignity, by referring it to theology’s first object. Much the same may be observed in Johann Friedrich König’s Theologia positiva acroamatica (1664), a much-­used Lutheran textbook of dogmatics.11 As with the Synopsis, the material moves from the divine quiddity to the divine energies in order to indicate the scope and sequence of Christian teaching. A treatment of the divine essence is accomplished by surveying God’s attributes in two parts: consideration of the attributes absolute et in sese, and consideration of them respectum ad operationem. Only after contemplation of God’s absolute attributes (perfection, majesty, unity, simplicity) is theology able to come to an understanding of those attributes ‘quae ad ἐνέργειαν referuntur’,12 such as the divine intellect and 8.  Synopsis purioris theologiae, Disputation 6, §18 (p. 161). 9.  Synopsis purioris theologiae, Disputation 6, §36 (p. 175). 10.  Synopsis purioris theologiae, Disputation 6, §39 (p. 177). 11.  J. F. König, Theologia positiva acroamatica, A. Stegmann, ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). 12. König, Theologia positiva acroamatica I §§ 56–74 (pp. 54–8).

6

God Without Measure I

the divine will, along with God’s love, grace, mercy, patience, holiness and justice. Reflection on the divine properties is led to a double knowledge: of God’s wholly realized life, and of the principium agendi of his operations. Yet even here König pauses: he does not proceed directly to God’s outer works, but turns first to description of God relatively considered (that is, the divine processions, §§75–92) and only then moves to discuss the divine operations, schematized as, first, ad intra acts and, second and finally, the opera ad extra (§§142–57). Why insert all these layers between God in himself and God’s temporal acts? In order to characterize the agent of these acts, and so to come to understand and give due weight to both the acts themselves and their objects. God’s outer works are most fully understood as loving and purposive when set against the background of his utter sufficiency – against the fact that no external operation or relation can constitute or augment his life, which is already infinitely replete. Once this is grasped, the nature of creaturely being begins to disclose itself as pure benefit, intelligible only as God is known and loved in his inherent completeness. The essays which follow are worked examples of this conception of theology, two further extensions of which, one material and one formal, are to be noted. The material extension is that, like faith, theology is oriented chiefly to invisible things, ‘things that are unseen’ (2 Cor. 4.18). ‘[T]he first principles of this science’, Aquinas notes, are ‘the articles of faith, and faith is about God’;13 and faith is ‘the conviction of things not seen’ (Heb. 11.1). Commenting on that verse from Hebrews, John Owen notes that one of the chief differentiating features of the exercise of Christian faith and intellect is an inclination towards invisibilia. ‘The peculiar and specifical nature of faith whereby it is differenced from all other powers, acts and graces of the mind, lies in this, that it makes a life on things invisible. It is not only conversant about them, but mixeth itself with them, making them the spiritual nourishment of the soul . . . The glory of our religion is that it depends on, and is resolved into, invisible things. They are far more excellent and glorious than anything that sense can behold or reason discover’.14 If this is so, then the matter of revelation (revelata) is not simply identical with the form or medium of revelation (modus revelationis). Revelation is not an historical quantity tout court, even – especially – in the hypostatic union and the Son’s temporal exercise of his offices. There is, of course, historical form which theological reflection may not pass over; but that form has not only an unforgettable density but also a finality, and therefore an instrumental character, such that spiritual intelligence may not terminate there. Revelation beckons theological intelligence to consider the cause of revelation, and to receive it as an embassy of that which cannot be resolved into or exhausted by historical manifestation. Each act and word of the incarnate one has force only because he has come down. 13.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Thomas Gilby et al, ed. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–81; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Ia.1.7 resp. 14.  J. Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews [1684], in The Works of John Owen, vol. 24 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1862), p. 11.

On the Matter of Christian Theology

7

Theology is a science of history only insofar as it views history under the double determination of creation and redemption. The long process of naturalization of the various elements of the Christian religion – ecclesial, scriptural, moral – encourages us to envisage church, Scripture and holiness as only historical magnitudes, and to envisage theological inquiry as an instance of religious sociology or literary and historical studies. But, by virtue of its terminus a quo and its terminus ad quem, the object of theology belongs to a different ontological order: the order of baptism and regeneration, instituted by Christ at the Father’s behest and temporally actual by the Spirit’s awakening and animating power. The second extension concerns theological systematization. Arranging a system of Christian doctrine is a complex art, requiring well-­formed judgements about the content and proportions of each element of the system, as well as attention to their sequence and relations when gathered together as a whole. Though the essays are only fragments, they share a conception of the body of theology in which dogmatics considers God absolutely and relatively before moving to treat all the other elements. This formal disposition of doctrines corresponds to the material order in the expository sequence, and also, by reproducing in intelligence the movement of creatures from God to perfection, participates in that same movement. This arrangement is, in part, intended to ensure comprehensiveness and due proportion, and to avoid the elision of one or other element. It also reflects the placement of the various elements in relation to one another. Relations of derivation are of especial material significance: ecclesiology takes its rise in teaching about divine election, Christ and the Spirit, for example. But as well as setting the elements in the correct causal sequence, a scripturally-­sensitive system of Christian teaching will need to be alert to the coherence of the elements, as well as to the ways in which they interlace, exposition of one sometimes anticipating what comes later or recalling what has already been said. Further, some doctrines (the doctrines of the Trinity and creation, for example) not only occupy their proper place but are also distributed throughout the system, forming other doctrines by which they are in turn illuminated.

II Such an ordering of theology and economy, absolute and relative, does not command wide assent. This may be because the habit of thought which it instantiates – reduction of elements to their founding principles, scire per causas – is judged to be void of explanatory power, since causal relations have their rise in the schematizing and categorizing activity of the human intellect. God in se is simply beyond the horizon of human knowledge. Further, a wide variety of modern doctrinal projects are animated by convictions about the irreducibility of teaching about deus revelatus: God is who he is in his (outer) works, and those works arrest the attention of theological intelligence with such critical force that it is by them that the differentia of the Christian confession are to be identified. Persuasion of

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God Without Measure I

this may gain strength from other features: a certain historical and kerygmatic density in the presentation of God’s acts, along with a vivid sense of the temporally unfolding character of the relation between God and creatures; Christological maximalism; impatience with metaphysics, and determined opposition to any rapprochement between Christian teaching about God and ‘theism’ or ‘natural religion’. The coherence of God himself and God in his revelatory acts is, however, best articulated, not by making the economy id quo maius cogitari nequit, but by indicating the continuous identity of the acting subject in God’s inner and outer works. That, in turn, can best be accomplished by first contemplating the infinite depth of God in himself, out of which his temporal acts arise. The divine agent of revelatory acts is not fully understood if the phenomenality of those acts is treated as something primordial, a wholly sufficient presentation of the agent. God’s outer works bear a surplus within themselves; they refer back to the divine agent who exceeds them. Most of the essays which follow try in one way or another to address problems which may arise if the order of theology and economy is disturbed. One set of problems concerns the doctrine of God. Theologies which accord primacy to economy may come to treat God and created things as paired, parts which together make a whole and which are constituted by their mutual relations. This may become especially prominent if attention to God’s outer acts is thought to license talk of God as some sort of magnified historical agent acting on the same plane as other such agents; the gospels, and especially their passion narratives, are sometimes read in this fashion. But Christian teaching about divine simplicity and creation ex nihilo points in a different direction. God and creatures are incommensurable, and God’s presence and action in time does not entail that his relation to creatures is a real relation. In the course of a lengthy exposition of Psalm 130.4, John Owen comments that ‘God being absolutely perfect and absolutely self-­sufficient, was eternally glorious, and satisfied with and in his own holy excellencies and perfections, before and without the creation of all or anything by the putting forth of his almighty power . . . God could have omitted all this great work without the least impeachment of his glory. Not one holy property of his nature would have been diminished or abated in its eternal glory by that omission.’15 Again: God’s ‘doing things . . . cannot intend any addition or accruement thereby of any new real good unto himself ’.16 A later Reformed theologian stumbled upon the thought when he picked up Kierkegaard’s phrase about the ‘ “infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity’.17 Barth continued: ‘The relation between such a God and such a man, and between such a man and such a God, is . . . the

15.  J. Owen, A Practical Exposition Upon Psalm CXXX [1668], in The Works of John Owen, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), p. 482. 16. Owen, A Practical Exposition Upon Psalm CXXX, p. 482. 17. K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 10.

On the Matter of Christian Theology

9

theme of the Bible’;18 and it is a relation whose significance is ‘immeasurable’.19 Any such affirmation, of course, must be cleared of abstraction (Barth never intended it as abstract). But abstraction is checked, not by thinking of God as historical agent, but by a well-­formed doctrine of God’s immanent triune plenitude and bliss, to which creation adds nothing and from which it takes nothing away. A second set of problems which these essays raise concerns the way in which the economy is understood. The economy is the domain of the divine missions. But those missions remain opaque unless immediately referred to the divine being and the divine processions. Knowledge of the character and ends of God’s temporal works follows from knowledge of their origin in the eternal nature and personal properties of their agent. Moreover, the history of creation in which those missions take place may only be understood sub ratione Dei, out of its origin in God’s wisdom, will and power. Ignorato vel negato trinitatis mysterio tota salutis οἰκονομία ignoratur vel negatur.20 The history of creation is not a given; it has its being ex nihilo, and to study any one of its features it is necessary first to study the one by whom it comes to be. Barth again: ‘ “Everything transitory” is only a parable; that even the objects of the biblical world of apprehension belong to the passing; that they are meant to serve and not to rule, to signify and not to be, the Bible, at any rate, leaves us in no doubt. Last things, as such, are not last things, however great and significant they may be. He only speaks of last things who would speak of the end of all things, of their end understood plainly and fundamentally, of a reality so radically superior to all things, that the existence of all things would be utterly and entirely based upon it alone, and thus, in speaking of their end, he would in truth be speaking of nothing else than their beginning. And when he speaks of history-­ end and time-­end, he is only speaking of the end of history and the end of time. But once more of its end, understood thus fundamentally, thus plainly, of a reality so radically superior to all happening and all temporality, that in speaking of the finiteness of history and the finiteness of time, he is also speaking of that upon which all time and all happening is based. The end of history must for him be synonymous with the pre-­history, the limits of time of which he speaks must be the limits of all and every time and thus necessarily the origin of time.’21

III Two cautions should be registered. First, the primacy of theology proper should not be so inordinately emphasized that the proper glory of God’s works of nature and grace is diminished. Failure to 18.  Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, p. 10. 19.  Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, p. 10. 20.  J. Gerhard, Loci theologici [1625] (Berlin: Schlawitz, 1863), III.1.7. 21. K. Barth, The Resurrection of the Dead (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933), pp. 109f.

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God Without Measure I

give due consideration to God’s outer works and God’s creatures is failure to direct the mind to the full scope of the doctrine of God. The counter to this over-­extension of theology proper is not, however, a correspondingly inordinate enlargement of the economy, but closer specification of teaching about God in himself. As one who is entirely self-­sufficient, God is perfect goodness, and so it is fitting to his nature to act with benevolence, willing and creating other realities. This, too, is part of his intrinsic worth: ‘Worthy art thou, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for thou didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created.’ (Rev. 4.11). God is good, and so establishes that which is not himself. In his perfection, God orders and institutes the creaturely condition, placing it beyond contest and, by providence and redemption, causing it to attain its proper perfection. ‘The Lord reigns; he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength. Yea, the world is established; it shall never be moved; thy throne is established from of old; thou art from everlasting.’ (Ps. 93.1f.) Second, talk of God in se may demonstrate immoderate confidence in the reach of created intellect, and neglect the fact that in creaturely knowledge of God there is always layer upon layer of tradition, custom, construction, categorization, schematization, desire. One attraction of varieties of theological idealism is their acknowledgement that God is not available to human intelligence apart from intellectual forms, attitudes and practices which may occlude as much as mediate transcendent objects. Theological science best takes stock of this element of its condition by recalling its ectypal character, that is, its sheer difference from the archetypal knowledge which God has of himself and all things. In doing this, however, theology not merely acknowledges its limitations but also recalls its place in the domain of divine instruction. Idealism counters intellectual pretension by identifying the restrictions which are imposed on theology by the obscuring effects of the mind’s operations and the will’s uses of the mind’s matter. Talk of theological science as ectypal acknowledges the restrictions but places them within the sphere of God’s communicative and saving causality. The limitations of the intellect, rendered vicious by the fall, do not sever created intellect’s natural connection to God, or place it beyond the reach of providence, regeneration and revelation. Theological science is a graced enterprise: not perfected, but mortified and vivified, caught up in the Spirit’s work of sanctification, its deficiencies sufficiently repaired so that fulfilment of its vocation to know God can be a matter of prayerful confidence in divine instruction.

Part I G od in H imself

Chapter 2 L i f e i n a n d o f H i m se l f

I What Christian doctrine has to say about the attributes of God is shaped by the church’s confession of the Holy Trinity. When it inquires into divine aseity, therefore, theology is not asking ‘what must be true of a god?’, but a rather more unwieldy question: ‘Who is the God, the enactment of whose utter sufficiency as Father, Son and Holy Spirit issues in his creative, reconciling and perfecting works towards his creatures?’ A Christian theology of the divine attributes is a conceptual schema for indicating the identity of the God of the Christian confession. God’s identity is, further, to be considered both with respect to its unfathomable depth in itself and with respect to his enactment of a wholly gracious turn to creatures. That is, a theology of God’s attributes attempts to indicate his immanent and his relative perfection. Within such an account, the concept of aseity has two dimensions. First, it indicates the glory and plenitude of the life of the Holy Trinity in its self-­ existent and self-­moving originality, its underived fullness. In every respect, God is of himself God. Second, it indicates that God’s originality and fullness constitute the ground of his self-­communication. He is one who, out of nothing other than his own self-­sufficiency, brings creatures into being, sustains and reconciles them, and brings them to perfection in fellowship with himself. A theology of God’s aseity is an indication of the one who is and acts thus, who is the object of the church’s knowledge, love and fear, and whose praise is the church’s chief employment. The concept of aseity tries to indicate God’s identity; it is not a definition of God but a gesture towards God’s objective and self-­expressive being. The task of the concept is not to establish conditions for conceivability but rather to have rational dealings with the God who is, and is self-­communicative, anterior to rational work on our part. God is objective and expressive being, presenting himself to us and making himself perceptible, intelligible and nameable (this is part of the meaning of ‘revelation’). Consequently, in theology aseity is a positive or material concept, determined by the particular form of God’s self-­expressive perfection. Its content is grasped as regenerate intelligence, prompted by divine instruction, considers God absolutely and relatively, in his inner being and his outer works. Because of this, theology will not over-­invest in whatever generic sense may be attached to the

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God Without Measure I

concept of aseity (or of any of the other divine attributes). This, not because of intellectual sectarianism, a desire to segregate theological use in an absolute way from all other speech about deity – after all, aseity, like nearly all Christian theological concepts, is a borrowed term with a wider currency. Rather, theology is simply concerned to ensure that its talk of aseity concentrates on that which is proper to this one. All this is simply an application of the rule which is basic to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity: Deus non est in genere. Concepts developed in articulating the Christian doctrine of God, including the concept of aseity, are fitting insofar as they correspond to the particular being of the triune God in his self-­moved self-­ presentation. A further extension of this rule is that in theological usage aseity is not primarily a comparative or contrastive concept. That is, the content of the term cannot be determined simply by analysis of the difference between God and contingent creatures. Although the contrast between divine self-­existence and creaturely contingency is a corollary of the concept of God’s aseity, disorder threatens when that contrast is allowed to expand and fill the concept completely. The point is worth pausing over, especially because the modern career of notions of aseity and self-­existence has been quite deeply marked by comparative interpretations, particularly by theologians and philosophers with heavy investments in natural religion and its theological derivatives. That there can be a relatively uncontroversial appeal to the ‘contrastive’ aspects of divine aseity, and that such appeal has a long history in Christian theology, is beyond dispute. This way of filling out the content of aseity is used to best effect when deployed in an informal, non-­fundamental way, simply for the purposes of explication and elucidation, and not as a guide to the entire scope of the concept. Consider two passages from Augustine: See, heaven and earth exist, they cry aloud that they are made, for they suffer change and variation. But in anything which is not made and yet is, there is nothing which previously was not present. To be what was once not the case is to be subject to change and variation. They also cry aloud that they have not made themselves: ‘The manner of our existence shows that we are made. For before we came to be, we did not exist to be able to make ourselves.’ And the voice with which they speak is self-­evidence. You, Lord, who are beautiful, made them for they are beautiful. You are good, for they are good. You are, for they are. Yet they are not beautiful or good or possessed of being in the sense that you their Maker are. In comparison with you they are deficient in beauty and goodness and being.1

1.  Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), XI.4.6.

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God exists in the supreme sense, and the original sense, of the word. He is altogether unchangeable, and it is he who could say with full authority ‘I am who I am’.2

The changeless dignity and beauty of God’s uncreated being, because it ‘exists in the supreme sense’, are ultimately beyond comparison. They can also be glimpsed by contrast with what is ‘made’: ‘you are, for they are’. Yet there is no sense that God’s supreme, self-­existent being somehow requires this contrast with the creaturely, as a kind of backcloth without which its splendour could not be seen. God simply is, originally, authoritatively and incomparably, and no creature can say, as does God, ‘I am who I am’. Something of the same pattern of thought can be found in Anselm: You alone then, Lord, are what you are and you are who you are . . . And what began [to exist] from non-­existence, and can be thought not to exist, and returns to non-­existence unless it subsists through some other; and what has had a past existence but does not now exist, and a future existence but does not yet exist – such a thing does not exist in a strict and absolute sense. But you are what you are, for whatever you are at any time or in any way this you are wholly and forever.3 He alone has of himself all that he has, while other things have nothing of themselves. And other things, having nothing of themselves, have their only reality from him.4

Once again, the contrast of divine self-­existence and creaturely contingency is informal, simply a corollary of the fundamental affirmation about the being of God: ‘You alone . . . Lord are what you are and you are who you are’ (the echo of Exod. 3.14 is not to be missed). God’s aseity is not a mirror image of contingency; rather, in both Augustine and Anselm it is an aspect of the divine solus, the irreducible uniqueness and incommensurability of God. A compromise of this proper attention to the divine identity occurs whenever an abstract contrast between self-­existent and created being is allowed too commanding a role in determining the notion of aseity. When this takes place, aseity transmutes into a reverse concept to contingency. This is in large part because the derivation of the concept of aseity shifts. No longer arising in the context of explicating the perfect, self-­expressive being of God, it emerges instead out of a consideration of the nature of contingent reality. Moreover, the content of the notion of aseity begins to be altered accordingly. It is no longer a (doxological) 2.  On Christian Teaching (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), I.xxxii. 3.  Proslogion, in B. Davies, G. R. Evans, ed., Anselm of Canterbury. The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), XXII. 4.  On the Fall of the Devil, in Anselm of Canterbury. The Major Works, I.

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God Without Measure I

affirmation of God’s matchless and utterly replete being in and from himself, but simply that which must be said of deitas if contingent reality is to be secured by a ground of existence beyond itself. This takes place as the concept of aseity migrates away from the doctrine of the immanent Trinity and of the triune God’s economy of nature and grace, and instead finds its place in a consideration of the world. With this migration, aseity becomes a ‘paired’ concept, inseparably attached to and expounded in terms of the contingency of the world. In a curious irony, divine self-­existence becomes a derivative concept. Tracing the history of this deformation is an important and instructive task, not the least because lack of historical perspective has meant that more modern philosophical and theological construals of aseity have often been read back into patristic and mediaeval texts. There is no substantial recent history of the concept, and even a brief account is well beyond my scope here. But attention might be drawn to one or two examples. A deformed notion of aseity is already firmly in place very early in the eighteenth century in Samuel Clarke’s Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704). Clarke’s account of aseity is especially interesting because within it one can still find preserved the residue of an older, non-­comparative and non-­derivative conception (such as we saw in Augustine and Anselm) which fits with severe difficulty into the modern frame of his argument. ‘There has existed from eternity some one unchangeable and independent Being’, Clarke proposes.5 This – notably abstract and anonymous – being is required, otherwise we face the absurdity of ‘an infinite succession of changeable and dependent beings’.6 Consequently, aseity is attributed to this being, not, as it were, doxologically, from a stance in the presence of the divine self-­naming as ‘I am’, but functionally, as a property required of this being if contingent reality is adequately to be explained. The qualities of this being, because they are determined by its function, are, we should note, largely non-­agential and non-­personal. The self-­existent being is ‘a most simple being, absolutely eternal and infinite, original and independent.’7 God is simple cause, not (say) luminous and self-­presenting personal goodness and beauty; still less is God the bearer of the triune name. Yet in one crucial respect Clarke retains the older conception: the self-­existent being is in se, and not merely an element in a process of explaining the world’s origin. ‘To be self-­existent is . . . to exist by an absolute necessity originally in the nature of the thing itself.’8 That is, ‘this necessity must not be barely consequent upon our supposition of the existence of such a being (for then it would not be a necessity absolutely in itself, nor be the ground or foundation of the existence of anything, being on the contrary only a consequent of it) but it must antecedently force itself upon us whether we will or 5. S. Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, E. Vailati, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 10. 6.  Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, p. 10. 7.  Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, p. 14. 8.  Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, p. 12.

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no.’9 Yet this conception does not break free from the use which Clarke has assigned to it: the apologetic aim traps Clarke into a comparative approach. And because his account lacks any operative sense of the immanent divine life, concentrating instead upon the cosmological functions of the concept of God, it remains a-­ personal and functional. Clarke’s argument found, and continues to find, theological echoes. Schleiermacher did not consider aseity ‘a special attribute’,10 on the grounds that nothing more is said in it than has already been said in the notions of omnipotence and eternity. Aseity is, in fact, ‘a speculative formula which, in the dogmatic sphere, we can only convert into the rule that there is nothing in God for which a determining cause is to be posited outside God.’11 Thus far, of course, Schleiermacher simply repeats a traditional formulation; what is distinctive about his account is his reference back to the earlier discussion in The Christian Faith §4.4, according to which ‘the Whence of our receptive and active existence . . . is to be designated by the word “God” ’.12 This for Schleiermacher is ‘the really original signification of that word’.13 As with Clarke, the content of aseity and its function tug in different directions. Even in his lack of external determination, God has become inseparable from ‘our receptive and active existence’. And so ‘in the first instance God signifies for us simply that which is the co-­determinant in this feeling [of absolute dependence] and to which we trace our being in such a state; and any further content of the idea must be evolved out of this fundamental import assigned to it.’14 A similar derivation of aseity can be found much more recently in Tillich. Here the language of causality is particularly strong. ‘The question of the cause of a thing or event presupposes that it does not possess its own power of coming into being. Things and events have no aseity.’15 In effect, Tillich offers an anthropological reworking of what Clarke had expressed in cosmological terms. ‘Causality expresses by implication the inability of anything to rest on itself. Everything is driven beyond itself to its cause, and so on indefinitely. Causality powerfully expresses the abyss of nonbeing in everything.’16 Causality thus generates the anxiety of ‘not being in, of, and by oneself, of not having the “aseity” which theology traditionally attributes to God’.17 To speak of divine aseity is therefore to indicate

9.  Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, p. 13. 10. F. D. E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), p. 218. 11. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 219. 12. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 16. 13. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 16. 14. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 17. 15.  P. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 196. 16.  Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 196. 17.  Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 196.

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God Without Measure I

that God ‘is the power of being’,18 beyond the bifurcation of essential and existential being which characterizes the finite. In their various ways, Clarke, Schleiermacher and Tillich exemplify a basic disorder introduced into the concept of aseity when expounded in close relation to cosmology or anthropology: as the function of the concept shifts, its content is adapted accordingly. Aseity becomes less an affirmation of the underived beauty and goodness of God, and more a property which must be ascribed to deitas if it is properly to fulfil its function of supporting the contingent. The sheer originality of God’s aseity, the perfection and completeness of his existence in and from himself, is in some measure eclipsed, overtaken by a kind of ‘finite’ transcendence or aseity, comparatively rather than absolutely different. In the course of his extraordinarily perceptive treatment of the doctrine of God in his System of Christian Doctrine, the great nineteenth century dogmatician Izaak Dorner remarks that ‘[t]here belongs to the divine idea something determinate, which raises Deity above comparison or mere quantitative difference. The same is true of his absolute essence, his aseity.’19 When this is lost in a theological account of the matter, the Christian character of the relation of God and creatures is jeopardized, as it turns into the reciprocal presence of two realities, each of which is in some measure necessary for the other, so that God a se and the world ab alio together form a whole. Aseity becomes detached from the theological metaphysics of God’s immanent and economic love, and is reduced to bare self-­positing cause of created reality. Such is the pathology; the corrective is trinitarian.

II If theology is to move beyond a stripped-­down conception of aseity, it must do so by following the instruction offered in the actuality of God’s self-­existence, that is, it must take its lead from what is given to creatures to know of God’s life and act as autotheos. ‘We have to be taught first, by the decision made in his actual existence, that God is free in himself. This statement has to come first as the content of a knowledge whose object cannot be an idea, but only God himself in his self-­ evidencing free existence.’20 Aseity as a synthetic concept, correlative to and so in some way a function of creaturely contingency, can only be supplanted by something materially rich – by a notion of aseity beyond that of a merely comparative absolute, speculatively derived. In Christian dogmatics, such a materially rich notion of aseity cannot be articulated apart from the doctrine of the Trinity, for trinitarian teaching offers a conceptual paraphrase of the life of 18.  Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 236. 19. I. A. Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1880–82), vol. 1, p. 203. 20. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), p. 308.

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God, both in his inner depth and in his gracious turn to that which is not God. It is as Father, Son and Spirit that God is of himself, utterly free and full, in the self-­ originate and perfect movement of his life; grounded in himself, he gives himself, the self-­existent Lord of grace. God a se is the perfection of paternity, filiation and spiration in which he is indissolubly from, for and in himself, and out of which he bestows himself as the Lord, saviour and partner of his creature. This triune character is the distinguishing feature of the Christian confession of God’s aseity. As Calvin puts it: ‘God . . . designates himself by another special mark to distinguish himself more precisely from idols. For he so proclaims himself the sole God as to offer himself to be contemplated clearly in three persons. Unless we grasp these, only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God.’21 How might trinitarian teaching fill out the notion of aseity? First, in speaking of God’s aseity we have in mind both the ‘immanent’ and the ‘economic’ dimensions of the divine life. God is from himself, and from himself God gives himself. There is a certain priority to the first statement (‘God is from himself ’): the ‘immanent’ or absolute dimension of God’s self-­existence stands at the head of everything else that must be said. This is because only in this way can the concept of aseity be kept free of the degrading synthetic or comparative elements. First and foremost, aseity is a repetition of the divine ‘I am’; only by derivation is it a statement that God is the groundless ground of contingency. Nevertheless, the priority of the immanent would be badly misperceived if it were not related to the necessary further statement: ‘from himself God gives himself ’. Without this second statement, the first would risk abstraction from God’s relative acts. The perfection of God’s life as autotheos issues in his works as Father, Son and Spirit in creation, reconciliation and redemption. With this in mind, how might God’s immanent aseity be further described? God’s aseity is to be understood, not formally but materially. Aseity is not to be defined merely in negative terms, as the mere absence of origination from or dependence upon an external cause. If this is allowed to happen, then a subordinate characteristic of aseity (God’s ‘not being from another’) comes to eclipse its primary meaning (God’s ‘being in and from himself ’). ‘It was,’ Barth notes, ‘a retrogression when the idea of God’s aseitas was interpreted, or rather supplanted, by that of independentia or infinitas, and later by that of the unconditioned or absolute.’22 It is much more fruitful to understand aseity in terms of fullness of personal relations. Aseity is life: God’s life from and therefore in himself. This life is the relations of Father, Son and Spirit. Crucially, therefore, aseity is not a property to be affirmed de Deo uno anterior to God’s triune life, but indicates the wholly original character of the inner relations which are God’s life (failure to see the constitutive role of this in the conception of aseity is at the root of its modern 21.  J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, J. T. McNeill, ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), I.xiii.2. 22.  Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, p. 303.

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God Without Measure I

disarray). The self-­existence of the triune God is his existence in the personal, internal activities of God. These activities are personal relations, that is, modes of subsistence in which each particular person of the Trinity is identified in terms of relations to the other two persons. To spell this out fully would require an account of (for example) the act of the Father in begetting the Son, and the acts of the Father and the Son in spirating the Spirit. Expressed as relations, God’s life a se includes the Son’s relation to the Father as the one whom the Father begets (passive generation), and the relation of the Spirit to the Father and the Son (passive spiration). By these activities and relations, each of the persons of the Trinity is identified, that is, picked out as having a distinct, incommunicable personal property: paternity, filiation, spiration. Together, these acts and relations are God’s self-­existence. Aseity is not only the quality of being (in contrast to contingent reality) underived; it is the eternal lively plenitude of the Father who begets, the Son who is begotten, and the Spirit who proceeds from both. To speak of God’s aseity is thus to speak of the spontaneous, eternal and unmoved movement of his being-­in-relation as Father, Son and Spirit. This movement, without cause or condition, and depending on nothing other than itself, is God’s being from himself. In this perfect circle of paternity, filiation and spiration, God is who he is. The aseity of the triune God thus means a good deal more than absence of derivation. Indeed, if that privative construal of aseity is accented too forcefully, it can suppress the elements of generation and spiration which are basic to the proper Christian theological sense of the term, on the grounds that begetting and proceeding seem to introduce precisely the troublesome notion of derivation which aseity is intended to exclude from the conception of the divine. Classical trinitarian theology takes a different tack to exclude an inappropriate notion of derivation, and attendant ideas such as composition. It develops a distinction between the aseity common to all three persons by virtue of their sharing in the divine essence, and the aseity which is the personal property of the Father alone: although all the persons of the Trinity are a se according to essence, the Father alone is a se according to person. Phrased in rather more technical language: all three persons are ἀγένητος (uncreated) by virtue of their common divine essence; but only the Father is ἀγέννητος (unbegotten) because he alone is the principium of the Son and the Spirit. The consensus on the point is neatly encapsulated by John of Damascus: ‘The Father alone is ingenerate, no other substance having given him being. And the Son alone is generate, for he was begotten of the Father’s essence, without beginning and without time. And only the Holy Spirit proceedeth from the Father’s essence, not having been generated but simply proceeding.’23 The Father accordingly, is a se, not only according to essence (as God) but also as a property of his own person; but neither to the Son nor to the Spirit, who are 23.  John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, in P. Schaff and H. Wace, ed., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church [NPNF], Second series, vol. 9 [2.9] (28 vols., Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1886–1900; reprint, Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), I.8.

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begotten and proceed from the Father respectively, can aseity be attributed as personal property. At first glance, this set of distinctions appears to undermine a construal of divine aseity in terms of the personal relations which make up the triune life, precisely because it distinguishes between a ‘common’ aseity and an aseity proper to the Father. This might be judged to focus too much on the relations of origin within the Trinity, with the result that the reciprocally-­constituting character of the immanent relations of the godhead is threatened, resulting in some kind of subordinationism. If the Father’s ‘unbegottenness’ becomes definitive of the divine essence, then the personal properties ad intra of the Son and the Spirit (that is, filiation and spiration) may easily seem secondary, derivative from and not equiprimordial with paternity. And when that happens, aseity once again is associated with a common divine essence behind the relations of the divine life. This retreat into a monistic concept of aseity is not necessary, however, and can readily be corrected by appeal to the reciprocally determinative character of the divine persons. The Son, for example, is eternally begotten of the Father. As such, he is not, as Son, a se, since he does not share the Father’s property of being ἄναρχος. But this does not entail that the Son is in some manner subsequent to or inferior to the Father. The Son’s generation is eternal: not a ‘coming-­to-be’ as the Father’s creature, but a relation which is constitutive of the divine essence and of the identity of the Father as well as of the Son. John of Damascus again (here stating a commonplace of the tradition in interpreting John 14.28): ‘if we say that the Father is the origin of the Son and greater than the Son, we do not suggest any precedence in time or superiority in nature of the Father over the Son (for through his agency he made the ages), or superiority in any other respect save causation’.24 Causation and filiation, because both are eternal, do not relate as fullness of being and absence of being. Filiation is not a lack but a mode of God’s eternal perfection, intrinsic to the wholly realized self-­movement of God. Begetting – and likewise spiration – are the form of God’s aseity, not its result or term, still less its contradiction. To make affirmations along these lines requires, of course, that we do not draw too sharp a distinction between the unity of the divine essence and its triunity: the aseity of the Son and the Spirit which they possess as sharers in the one divine essence is not wholly separate from their distinctive personal properties as the one who is eternally begotten and the one who eternally proceeds. Further, it requires that we allow that the relations of the godhead are not secondary, and that they are mutually constitutive and conditioning. The Father is, according to his person, a se only as he stands in relation to the Son; his aseity is not anterior to the act and relation of begetting. This does not mean that the relation of Father and Son is reversible (the Son does not beget the Father); but the relation is reciprocal, because

24.  John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith I.8.

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God Without Measure I

both ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ are relative terms.25 Above all, we need to grasp that God’s aseity is his self-­existence in these relations. God is from himself as he enacts his life in the reciprocity of paternity, filiation and spiration. We may close this sketch of aseity as a characteristic of God’s inner-­trinitarian life with some comments on two closely associated concepts which have been used to state God’s self-­existence, namely God as causa sui, and God as ens necessarium. Both illustrate the need to ensure that concepts used in the course of explicating the Christian confession should be kept in the closest possible proximity to substantive theological doctrine, and not simply introduced already full of content derived from their deployment elsewhere. The concept of God as causa sui has a long history in patristic and mediaeval usage; the locus classicus is a comment of Jerome’s on Eph. 3.15: ‘Other things receive their substance by the mediation of God, but God – who always is and does not have his beginning from another source but is himself the origin of himself and the cause of his own substance – cannot be understood to have something which has existence from another source. Warmth, indeed, is something which belongs to fire, but something which has been warmed is something else. Fire cannot be understood without heat; other things which become warm from fire borrow its heat and, if the fire should withdraw, the heat gradually decreases and they return to their own nature and are by no means referred to as warm.’26 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the concept was revisited by the Roman Catholic dogmatician Herman Schell, who appealed to the language of God as causa sui to achieve much the same as Dorner sought to achieve by speaking of God’s ‘life’, namely to overcome what he judged to be a static conception of God as subsistent being, and so to draw attention to God’s eternal self-­activation.27 When pressed, the concept soon shows itself incoherent and dogmatically precarious. At a purely formal level, it seems to suggest that God in some way precedes himself as his own cause, and ‘it is absurd to suppose that something is explanatorily prior to itself’.28 The dogmatic difficulties are equally serious. Talk of God as his own cause cannot easily cohere with teaching about divine eternity or immutability, since it appears to introduce an actualist concept of God’s ‘coming-­ to-be’ as the result some causal process. Further, it imperils divine simplicity, 25. Further on this, see W. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991–94), vol. 1, p. 312. 26. R. E. Heine, ed., The Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 158. 27. See H. Schell, Katholische Dogmatik, vol. 1 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1889), pp. 238–41. 28.  J. Hoffman, G. S. Rosenkrantz, The Divine Attributes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 91; cf. R. Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 262: ‘Certainly given that at some time God is, his subsequent existence will indeed be due to his actions. But what has no cause, and so is inexplicable, is the non-­existence of a time before which God was not.’

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introducing distinctions between cause and that which is caused, or between potentiality and act, which, by attributing potentiality to God, undermine the all-­ important identity of essence and existence in God (reasons such as these led to Schell’s work being placed on the Index in 1898). By suggesting that God produces himself, it seems to require the possibility of God’s non-­existence as a kind of background to his being. In effect, a God who is his own cause lacks an integral element of perfection. If the concept of causa sui is to be used, therefore, the notion of cause must first be stripped of any associations with ‘becoming’ or ‘coming-­intoexistence’ – of anything that might corrode the eternal fullness of God’s being. Further, it must be used, not to conceive God on the basis of a general metaphysics of causality, but to indicate what Ringleben calls ‘the divine livingness’ and ‘the uniqueness and incomparability of the divine being itself ’.29 Similar difficulties attend the idea of God as necessary being. We have already noted that this way of speaking of aseity is commonly dominated by the idea of ‘necessity for . . .’. Necessity thereby becomes a determination of God, reduced to a merely functional relation to the creatures of whom he is the necessary ground. These problems can, certainly, be eased by deploying a more complex modality of necessity, according to which necessity is not simply ‘necessity for another’. The necessity predicated of God when he is spoken of as ens necessarium is necessitas absoluta. It is equivalent to absolute existence, existence without ground or determination, and so different from functional or contingent existence. Consequently, the necessity of God for the world is properly to be understood as necessitas consequentiae, that which simply follows from God’s will, and has no further reference to realities beyond that will. Strictly speaking, divine necessity is not a matter of necessitas coactionis, according to which God and the world would be mutually constitutive, thus reducing God to finitude. Yet even if ens necessarium can be construed in this way, as equivalent to pure self-­original existence, it remains a rather blank, empty concept. Like the parallel notion of ‘the absolute’, it invites filling out from elsewhere. Accordingly, as with the notion of God as causa sui, it has to be judged materially inadequate as an account of God’s life.

III God is a se in the eternal fullness of the loving relations of Father, Son and Spirit. From himself he has life in himself. But God is not only from himself in his inner life, but also in the external works which arise from and correspond to his inner life. With this, we can complete the material description of God’s aseity by expanding the second statement that ‘from himself God gives himself ’. A theology of aseity finds itself under a very specific constraint at this point: if it is diligently to follow the logic of the triune self-­movement, then it cannot 29.  J. Ringleben, ‘Sein, Handeln und Werden’, in Arbeit am Gottesbegriff. Reformatorische Grundlegung, Gotteslehre, Eschatologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), pp. 229f.

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remain content with a definition of divine self-­existence which refers exclusively to the being of God in se apart from his relation to creatures. If theology were to try to do this, it would in fact fail to grasp the real content of God’s aseity, even in its ‘internal’ dimension. The movement of God’s triune life has its perfection in and of itself, and is utterly sufficient to itself; but this perfect movement is not self-­ enclosed or self-­revolving. In its perfection, it is also a movement of self-­gift in which the complete love of Father, Son and Spirit communicates itself ad extra, creating and sustaining a further object of love. Of himself, God is gracious. ‘Since, then, God, who is good and more than good, did not find satisfaction in self-­ contemplation, but in his exceeding goodness wished certain things to come into existence which would enjoy his benefits and share in his goodness, he brought all things out of nothing into being and created them.’30 God is from himself not simply in absolute independence but in his ‘exceeding goodness’. To amplify this, consider two instructive examples from the history of interpretation of John 5.26: ‘As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.’ In his treatment of the Johannine text in the twenty-­second Tractate on the Gospel of John, Augustine suggests an understanding of God’s ‘life in himself ’ (that is, of what will later be signified by the term ‘aseity’) in both its intra-­trinitaran and its soteriological dimensions. His reflections stem from a vivid sense of the present fulfilment of the Son’s promise of life, recorded in the previous verse: ‘the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear him will live’ (John 5.25). ‘[T]his hour is now occurring, and this is assuredly occurring and is not at all ceasing,’ Augustine tells his congregation: ‘Men who were dead are rising, they are passing to life, they live at the voice of the Son of God, from him persevering in his faith.’31 Immediately, however, Augustine traces this saving reality of new life in Christ back to its foundation in the Son’s eternal relation to the Father. If there is indeed a present reality of resurrection life for believers, it can only be because ‘the Son has life; he has that by which the believers may live’.32 This, in turn, prompts the question which guides the rest of what Augustine has to say: ‘how does he have it?’33 That is: how does the Son have life, by virtue of which he can bestow life on believers? The answer runs: the Son has life ‘[a]s the Father has it’, that is, ‘in himself ’.34 Why is this point so significant for Augustine? Because the Son’s having life in semetipso, as a mode of divine aseity, at one and the same time distinguishes the Son absolutely from creatures and grounds the believers’ partaking of life.

30.  John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith II.2. 31.  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 11–27, The Fathers of the Church [FC], vol. 79 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 22.8.2. 32.  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 22.8.2. 33.  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 22.9.1. 34.  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 22.9.1.

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Accordingly, Augustine explicates God’s life in semetipso and so a se in terms of the eternal relations of Father and Son. The Father, he says, ‘ “has given to the Son also to have life in himself.” As he has, so he has given to have. Where does he have it? “In himself ”. Where has he given to have it? “In himself ”.’35 Here Augustine seeks to articulate an understanding of paternity and filiation in which the Father’s giving does not in any way entail the Son’s inferiority: what the Father gives the Son is what he, the Father, has – life in himself; and the mode of life which is the Son’s by the gift of the Father is characterized, not by its being ‘in another’, but, again, by its being in himself. ‘[T]he Son of God was not as if at first without life and [then] he received life. For, if he so received it, he would not have it in himself. For what does “in himself ” mean? That he himself is life itself.’36 This is why the relation of Father and Son is wholly unique, consisting as it does of a giving and receiving which is devoid of any subordination, so that of the Son to whom the Father gives life it can be said: ipsa vita ipse esset, he himself is life itself.37 ‘ “As the Father has life in himself, so he has given the Son also to have life in himself ”, so that he [the Son] does not live by participation, but lives without change and in every respect he, himself, is life.’38 Thus the logic of ‘life-­giving’ is strictly parallel to that of ‘begetting’: ‘what is said, “He has given to the Son” is such as if it were said, “He begot a Son”; for he gave only by begetting. As [the Father] gave that he might be, so he gave that he might be life, and so he gave that he might be life in himself.’39 This is rather distant from later notions of aseity as independence; it is aseity as the eternal and lively perfection of Father and Son. Yet to this immanent reality there corresponds the Son’s mission; the life which the Son receives and has in himself is that which he in turn bestows upon creatures. Augustine is, of course, sharply aware of the gulf between God and creatures. The apostle or the believer only has life in Christ, not in himself: life in semetipso is entirely incommunicable, and so the identity of ‘Son’ and ‘life’ cannot in any way be replicated in the creaturely realm. But if aseity differentiates the divine Son from creatures, it is also at the same time the ground of his saving gift. The Son has, and is, life; and ‘as he has, so he has given’.40 Indeed, the full scope of the Son’s being life in himself must be understood both immanently and economically. As the one who has life in semetipso, the Son ‘would not need life from another 35.  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 22.9.2. 36.  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 22.9.3. 37.  Augustine, Tractatus 22.9, in In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus CXXIV, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina [CCSL], vol. 36 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954). 38.  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 22.10.3. 39.  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 22.10.4. With this emphasis on ‘begetting’, Augustine safeguards the distinction between the aseity which is the personal property of the Father alone and the common divine aseity in which both Father and Son participate: the Son’s aseity is not identical with that of the personal aseity of the Father who begets him. 40.  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 22.10.3.

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source, but would be fullness of life by which others, believing, might live the life they live.’41 Augustine’s exegesis, then, directs us to two primary aspects of a theological conception of aseity: (1) aseity is materially to be understood out of the eternal relations which constitute God’s inner-­triune life; (2) aseity is as it were the eternal impetus of the Son’s life-­giving mission of salvation. Something of the same can be found in Calvin’s rather more terse remarks on the same verse in his 1553 commentary on John’s Gospel: ‘[Christ] shows the source of the efficacy of his voice – that he is the fountain of life and by his voice pours it forth on men. For life would not flow to us from his mouth unless its cause and source were in himself. For God is said to have life in himself, not only because he alone lives by his own inherent power, but because he contains the fullness of life in himself and quickens all things. And this is peculiar to God; as it is said, “With thee is the fountain of life” (Ps. 36.9). But because God’s majesty, which is far removed from us, would be like a secret and hidden spring, he has revealed himself in Christ. And so we have an open fountain at hand to draw from. The words mean that God did not want to have life hidden and as it were buried within himself, and therefore he transfused it into his Son that it might flow to us.’42 If Augustine is concerned to emphasize how the immanent trinitarian dimensions of the Son’s life in himself form the deep ground of his saving gift of life, Calvin appears to be concerned primarily with Christ who is of himself saviour and life-­giver. The immanent dimension is certainly rather more muted in what Calvin has to say, and he concentrates on Christ’s efficacia, Christ as fons vitae. Yet Calvin does root what he says on this matter in the immanent reality of Christ’s deity; only as one who is life can he give life. ‘[L]ife would not flow to us from his mouth unless its cause and source were in himself.’ Having life in se is ‘peculiar to God’, the one who is alone the fountain of life; for Calvin, therefore, the deity of the Son, his co-­equality with the Father who ‘contains the fullness of life in himself ’, is the presupposition of the Son’s saving acts. Without this immanent aseity, the Son’s work would be entirely lacking in the power to vivify. But Calvin is equally firm that the Son’s life in se is superabundant, overflowing. His imagery – fons, causa, origo – is telling, indicating what he clearly considers to be the chief practical aspect of aseity, namely that ‘God is said to have life in himself, not only because he alone lives by his own inherent power, but because he contains the fullness of life in himself and quickens all things’. The sole perfection of God a se is unquestioned, for God is the one who ‘alone lives by his own inherent power’. But the life with which God alone lives of himself is the fullness of life which quickens. The form of this life-­giving overflow of God’s life is the Son. ‘[B]ecause God’s majesty, which is far removed from us, would be like a secret and hidden spring, he has revealed himself in Christ, in whom we have an open fountain at hand to draw from.’ The divine will is not simply to possess life as 41.  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 22.10.4. 42.  J. Calvin, The Gospel According to St John 1–10 (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1959), p. 131.

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something ‘hidden and as it were buried within himself ’, but rather to transfuse that life ‘into his Son that it might flow to us’. Calvin is characteristically reticent about the trinitarian dimensions; he is less concerned than is Augustine to clarify that filiation (‘transfusing’ life into the Son) does not entail subordination. What Calvin offers is an account of the aseity of God from the economic perspective. Taken together, Augustine and Calvin suggest a number of characteristics for an adequate theology of divine aseity. Aseity is not only the absence of external causation, but the eternal life which God in and of himself is. It is, therefore (following the gospel’s usage) inseity as much as aseity. That life cannot be conceived apart from the mutual relations of Father and Son; its perfection includes the perfect mutuality of the Father’s giving of life to the Son who in his turn has life in himself. Nor can it be conceived apart from its overflowing plenitude in giving itself to creatures. God’s aseity, although it marks God’s utter difference from creatures, does not entail his isolation, for what God is and has of himself is life, and that life includes a self-­willed movement of love.

IV Both the pathology and the material exposition sketched here suggest that an account of aseity goes wrong when it is alienated from its proper trinitarian setting and deployed to perform different functions. When this alienation takes place, its content is reworked into something more basic (less positive); the biblical and theological texts in which its primary Christian sense is encapsulated are either pushed to the margins or reinterpreted in line with what is taken to be a more basic sense; above all, the location of the concept drifts from trinitarian to cosmological teaching. These are, it should be emphasized, not simply the errors of philosophers, for it is at least arguable that the development of a bare, non-­ trinitarian concept of aseity owes as much to abstract theological notions of God’s independentia as it does to philosophical apologetics for natural religion. In this matter, and others, theology has not always successfully resisted the forces which lead to the alienation of inquiry from Christian confession and praise. If Christian dogmatics wishes to offer a corrective, it can only be by recalling itself to its proper calling, which is the praise of God by crafting concepts to turn the mind to the divine splendour. But deeply important as they are, concepts are only serviceable as the instruments of spiritual apprehension. In an early sermon, Jonathan Edwards spoke thus: ‘It may be the natural man may have a great notional knowledge concerning God’s attributes – how he is the most excellent of all beings, and has infinite perfection; is the fountain of all excellency and loveliness; is immensely holy and merciful, and the like – yet he has not half so deep and lively an apprehension of God’s amiableness as he has of the beauty of some things earthly. Though he can talk as well and as rationally as most about the gloriousness of God, yet he loves him not half so well as some other things. And what is the reason? . . . It must be because there is a certain knowledge of God’s excellency that he has not . . . The knowledge of a thing is not in proportion to the extensiveness of

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our notions, or number of circumstances known, only; but it consists chiefly in the intensiveness of the idea.’43 Indeed so: like all the divine attributes, the notion of aseity remains a notion until it becomes a matter of ‘intensive’ apprehension. Not the least sign that all is well with dogmatics (and its practitioners) is awareness of the need to resist the enticements of natural divinity. Such resistance is a matter of reason disciplined by attention to the instruction of the Word and by prayer; and that is why the chief act of theological existence is the petition: ‘Give me understanding according to thy word!’ (Ps. 119.169)

43.  J. Edwards, ‘A Spiritual Understanding of Divine Things Denied to the Unregenerate’, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 14, Sermons and Discourses 1723–1729 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 75f.

Chapter 3 E t e r na l G e n e r at io n

I Christian teaching about the eternal generation of the Son is a conceptual expansion of the confession of one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made. The doctrine is one (rather crucial) element in the history of the church’s attempts to take stock of the revisions to the metaphysics of God required by the gospel, which are concerned chiefly with two matters. A first set of revisions concerns the kind of divine monarchy which is to be confessed in the wake of the saving and sanctifying economy of Christ and the Spirit, those outer works of God which the intelligence of faith is summoned to contemplate. The monarchy which the church holds ‘in honour’, Gregory Nazianzen says, ‘is not limited to one person . . . but one which is made of an equality of nature and a union of mind, and an identity of motion, and a convergence of its elements to unity . . . so that though numerically distinct there is no severance of essence.’1 God is so to be conceived that personal distinction and simplicity are acknowledged as equiprimordial, fully coherent and mutually, though asymmetrically, determinative. A second set of revisions concerns the things which need to be said about the origin of Jesus Christ in the eternal life of God if his creaturely history is indeed the presence of God and the gift of divine life. If the doctrine of the Son’s eternal generation illuminates principal features of classical Christian teaching, its fate at the hands of some contemporary theologians is also a register of current theological sensibilities in a couple of connected areas: (1) The relation of the being of God ad intra to God’s work in the economy. Teaching about eternal generation raises questions about the necessity, legitimacy and limits of retrojection from the creative, redemptive and perfecting acts of God to God’s eternal being. (2) The relation of the doctrine of the person of Christ to the doctrine of God. Put simply: is ‘For us and for our salvation’ the ground of Christological affirmations, or is soteriology a function of ‘begotten of the Father before all ages’? In both these areas, there is a good deal of consensus about 1. Gregory of Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration (NPNF 2.7), XXIX.2.

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admitting the constitutive importance of the opera Dei ad extra (above all, but not exclusively, God’s work in Christ) for theology proper. This goes along with a suggestion that resistance against an ‘economic’ orientation commonly results from a doctrine of God insufficiently governed by the historical form of God’s revelatory self-­enactment. Within the terms of this consensus, the doctrine of the Son’s eternal generation requires some revision since – whether in patristic form, or in the expositions of the Latin theology of the Middle Ages or of later Protestant orthodoxy – it seems to assume that the priority of pre-­temporal eternity is essential to securing the effectiveness of God’s work in time. This assumption is now widely questioned. The questioning, in turn, raises a topic which haunts contemporary theology, though it is rarely addressed in a direct way, namely the perfection of God the creator and its relation to the presence of God to temporal creatures. Some of the most inflamed controversies in contemporary dogmatics can be viewed as subsets of the topic of divine perfection: use of the idiom of ‘participation’ to describe the relations of God and creatures; debates about extrinsicism in the theology of grace; emphasis on the soteriological significance to be attributed to the humanity of Christ; disputes about the relation of the divine election to the being of God. Thinking through the eternal generation of the Son may help us at least to become aware of theological moves which might otherwise be made merely by instinct; and it may also direct us to conceptions of the material content of Christian dogmatics (and especially of the doctrines of God and Christ) which differ in important ways from some which enjoy current prominence. In what follows, exposition precedes disputation. The order of the tasks is to be noted: critical-­polemical considerations are subordinate to positive dogmatic description, and must not be allowed to distort the matter of doctrine. Critical engagement is often most effectively and charitably undertaken by better portrayal of the material content of dogmatics, especially when doctrinal portraiture has an eye to the placement of particular doctrines in the entire dogmatic corpus, and to the need to retain proportion, coherence and order. Good dogmatics is only incidentally elenctic, preferring rather to unleash doctrines and let them run, to allow them to explicate themselves with the assistance of a conceptual vocabulary and a measure of systematic organization. This does not mean that doctrinal criticism is simply the result of misunderstanding; some doctrines are well understood and wrong. But the doctrine of the Son’s eternal generation is a good instance of the way in which contemplative attention to the res of theological intelligence can deflect some kinds of critique.

II Eternal generation is the personal and eternal act of God the Father whereby he is the origin of the personal subsistence of God the Son, so communicating to the Son the one undivided divine essence. Along with the breathing of the Holy Spirit, generation is one of the divine processions by which the triune persons are identified and distinguished, and in which their mutual relations are enacted. As

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the act of the Father towards the Son, generation involves both the Father’s active relation to the Son (generatio activa) and the Son’s relation to the Father by whom he is generated (generatio passiva). Generation is thus a constitutive element of the relations between the first two triune persons: paternity and filiation are inseparable from eternal generation. Further, though the Son’s generation is entirely an internal relation within the Godhead, a work of God ad intra not ad extra, it is the principle upon which the Son’s temporal mission rests. In the divine missions the divine processions, and the specific personal characteristics which derive from them, are echoed in God’s relations with the world in the works of nature and grace. In the case of eternal generation, this linkage between procession and mission ties the person and work of the incarnate Son back into the perfect life of God in himself. In Johannine terms: the Father who has life in himself grants the Son also to have life in himself; and the Son gives life to whom he wills. On the basis of this general orientation, we can move to a more detailed determination of the topic. 1. Generation is the personal act of God the Father – that which the Father does qua Father, not as one who shares in the common divine essence. By this act (along with the act of spiration which he undertakes with the Son) the Father is identified in his hypostatic or personal character (character hypostaticus sive personalis). In particular the Father is identified as possessing the personal characteristic or ‘notion’ of being unbegotten (innascibilitas). Unlike the Son and the Spirit, the Father is a nemine, from no one. Some care is needed here: the Father’s unbegottenness should not be taken to imply any kind of subordination of the Son to the Father. What is being picked out by the term ‘innascibility’ is the identity of the Father in relation to the Son, not the Father’s elevation over the Son as a superior principle from which the Son is a derivative emanation. Nor does talk of the Father as ungenerate suggest that in the mode of subsistence which is proper to him he is separate from the Son whom he begets. The Father is Father as Father of the Son; modes of subsistence are modes of relation. Part of what is specified by talk of the Father as ungenerate is the kind of relation which exists eternally between Father and Son. 2. In moving to inquire into the kind of personal act which the Father undertakes in generating the Son, we quickly reach the limits of creaturely knowledge: we are in the realm of the ectypal. ‘[H]ere (if anywhere)’ says Turretin at the end of his presentation, ‘we must be wise with sobriety so that content with the fact . . . we should not anxiously busy our thoughts with defining or even searching into the mode (which is altogether incomprehensible), but leave it to God who alone most perfectly knows himself.’2 Patristic discussions are replete with similar reminders: ‘The begetting of God must be honoured by silence’;3 ‘the knowledge of the mystery 2. F. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, J. T. Dennison, Jr., ed., 3 vols. (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1992), III.xxix.xxxi (vol. 1, p. 302). 3. Gregory of Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration XXIX.8.

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of his generation is more than I can attain to – the mind fails, the voice is dumb’;4 ‘in this case we, whose faculties can deal only with visible and tangible things, are straining after the invisible, and striving to grasp the impalpable’;5 ‘it is not holy to venture such questions concerning the generation of the Son of God’.6 Adverting to the incomprehensibility of the Son’s generation from the Father is not a merely formal or conventional gesture; it is meant in earnest, and places brackets around everything that follows. Moreover, it makes clear that the doctrine of the eternal generation is not confident projective ontotheology; it becomes a matter for theological inquiry at a certain risk, and may be approached only after some very clear spiritual and intellectual protocols have been put in place. Chief among these is establishing strategies for dealing with the creaturely naturalness and animality of the metaphor of generation. From Origen onwards, the tradition has been clear that we will not get very far if we ‘regard God the Father in the begetting of his only begotten Son as being similar to any human being or other animal in the act of begetting’.7 The point here is only superficially about revulsion towards matter; it is more about the difference of God’s being than it is about creaturely deficiency or baseness. ‘God is not as man’, Athanasius says in this regard;8 we need, therefore, to ensure that language about God is not constrained by ‘the rule of human generation’ or by ‘the rule of human infirmity’.9 These disciplinary measures are, of course, only important if the language of generation is judged to be necessary, saying something which could not be said by more attractive alternatives which are to hand, such as intellectual procession or emanation. For all its unsuitability, for all the ineffability of its object, generation retains the personal character of the Father–Son relation, and thereby ensures that conceptual articulation of the faith echoes the scriptural economy of revelation in the evangelists. 3.  To what does talk of the Father’s act of generation direct spiritual-­theological intelligence? How does it help specify the relation between the first two persons of the Trinity, and thereby anchor the Son’s work of redemption in his eternal deity? (a)  Begetting is not ‘making’.10 The force of the term ‘generation’ depends upon keeping in mind a set of distinctions: between ‘uncreated’ and ‘created’, between ‘Father’ and ‘maker’, between ‘offspring’ and ‘work’.11 Above all, this is because

4.  Ambrose, On the Christian Faith (NPNF 2.10), I.x.64. 5. Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity (NPNF 2.9), III.18. 6.  Athanasius, Against the Arians (NPNF 2.4), II.36. 7. Origen, On First Principles, G. W. Butterworth, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), I.2.4. 8.  Athanasius, Against the Arians II.35. 9.  Ambrose, On the Christian Faith I.x.66, I.xi.71. 10. See K. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), p. 433. 11.  Athanasius, Against the Arians I.29.

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‘begetting’ must not be construed in terms of any ontological hiatus between begetter and begotten. This was, of course, a key argument deployed against the Arians whom Athanasius believed to be proposing that the relation between Father and Son is one of production, one between a maker and the product of his labour. When Aquinas opens his doctrine of the Trinity in the Summa theologiae, he also has the Arians in the back of his mind, though he spells out the metaphysics with greater formality than his patristic antecedents. Although ‘generation’ certainly appears to suggest ‘change from not existing to existing’ (mutatio de non esse in esse) in a material subject,12 this customary sense breaks down when applied to the life of God. In the case of the procession of the Son by the Father’s act of generation, we have to try to conceive of ‘a living thing whose life involves no development from potential to actual’.13 Moreover, in the generation of the Son we are not dealing with two existences, only one of which (the Father) is divine. ‘[B]oth the Word which comes forth spiritually and its source are contained in the perfection of the divine existence itself ’.14 Begotten, therefore not made. A corollary here – one not without importance for contemporary interest in the salvific import of Christ’s sharing of our human nature – is that by virtue of his generation the Son’s relation to the Father is wholly unique and incommunicable. As Son, he stands at the head of many brothers and sisters among whom he is the first-­born (Rom. 8.29); he is, indeed, the first-­born of all creation (Col. 1.15). But πρωτότοκος denotes his relation to creatures, not his relation to the Father. Turretin expends a measure of energy in securing this point, which he sees as basic to understanding Christ’s filial status. In the case of the Son, he argues, there can be no ‘gracious communication of existence and glory’; his ‘mode of filiation’ is ‘proper and singular to him’ and ‘can be no other than by generation’.15 It is the sheer difference of Christ’s sonship which is safeguarded by the concept of generation: ‘if Christ has many brethren (Rom. 8.29), he does not cease to be the only-­begotten by way of eminence (kat’ exochēn) because the general is evidently dissimilar and totally different in kind: not mystical, but natural; not by an expression of qualities, but by a communication of the essence itself ’.16 Explaining the origin of Christ’s sonship blocks any ‘ranking (connumeratio) with creatures’.17 Lest this be thought to undermine the Son’s incarnational fraternity with lost creatures, we should remember that for Turretin it is precisely the Son’s unique equality with the Father which empowers the covenant of redemption, by virtue of which the incarnate Son is appointed the second Adam and stands at the head of the elect.

12.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.27.2 resp. 13.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.27.2 resp. 14.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.27.2 ad 3. 15.  Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology III.xxix.xiv (vol. 1, p. 298). 16.  Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology III.xxix.xv (vol. 1, p. 298). 17.  Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology III.xxix.xx (vol. 1, p. 300).

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(b) One of the ways in which ‘begetting’ can be distinguished from ‘making’ is by the absence from it of the contingencies and limitations of creaturely generation. The Father’s act of begetting the Son is – to use a summary term for its distinctiveness – hyperphysical. Minimally, this means that, as Gregory Nazianzen puts it, ‘the Father is the Begetter . . . not in a corporeal manner’.18 But it also means that generation eludes classification as a temporal or spatial event: it is ἀχρονος and ἀχώριστος. Most especially, generation implies no passibility. ‘The Father begets impassibly.’19 ‘Corporeal generation involves passion,’ Gregory says; it is entangled in the nets of ‘time, desire, imagination, thought, hope, pain, risk, failure, success.’20 Why has all this to be stripped away from our understanding of the origin of the Son? Not because of some metaphysics of the divine uncorrected by the doctrine of the incarnation: impassibility is not indifference, but the infinitely deep, unrestrictedly realized divine life from which Christ emerges as the presence of God to us. Begetting is not passion because the Son is intrinsic to the fullness of God, very God of very God. Begetting is a mode of God’s perfection. (c)  By extension from this, the Father’s act of begetting is an eternal act, a begetting ante omnia saecula. The Son’s generation is eternal, because it is not ‘adventitious’,21 but intrinsic to God’s perfection. As such it is neither a completed act in the past, nor an act awaiting completion in the future. ‘Before all ages’ indicates that the Father’s act is temporally incommensurate. It is an unceasing becoming which is a mode (not the antithesis) of perfection, because it is the enactment of God’s own life. The required ontological shift – that of disassociating eternal begetting from movement from one state to another – is noted by Turretin. The works of the Trinity ad intra ‘are eternal and unceasing. Otherwise, if personal acts had an end, they would also have a beginning, and all mutation in God could not be denied. As therefore in work they are perfect, so in operation they are perpetual.’22 More abstractly: ‘The generation therefore may well be said to be terminated by a termination of perfection, not by a termination of duration.’23 In eternal generation we have to do with a becoming which ‘simply confirms the perfection of this being’.24 (d)  The Father’s act of generation is a work of his nature, and only in a rather carefully specified sense can it be called a work of his will. Creation is a work of the will of God, in that it is not intrinsic to God’s essence to be creator. Generation, on the other hand, is intrinsic to the personal properties and relations which constitute 18.  Third Theological Oration XXIX.2. 19.  Ambrose, On the Christian Faith I.x.67. 20.  Third Theological Oration XXIX.4. 21.  Athanasius, Against the Arians I.20. 22.  Institutes of Elenctic Theology III.xxix.vii (vol. 1, p. 293). 23.  Institutes of Elenctic Theology III.xxix.vii (vol. 1, p. 294). 24.  Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, p. 427.

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God’s essence; as Polanus puts it, the Father ‘begets naturâ, according to which he is as he is and cannot be otherwise’.25 There is, in other words, nothing behind the act of generation on the basis of which we might envisage a God who is not the Father who begets and the begotten Son. Begetting ‘by nature’ does not, however, indicate an act which is involuntary in every sense. As Gregory Nazianzen puts it, generation is not ‘like some natural overflow hard to be retained’.26 ‘Nature’ has to be construed as pure act, not inert matter. One way of stating this is to say that generation takes place ‘necessarily’;27 but ‘necessarily’ does not contradict ‘voluntarily’ but specifies the operation of the divine will as not ‘liberty of indifference’ but ‘spontaneity’, action in accordance with nature but not thereby lacking in freedom. (e) So far our specifications have drawn attention to the singularity of the Father’s act. We turn now to try to discern its particular character a little more closely. The Son’s begetting is such that he is God of God, light of light, true God of true God. Here we reach a core feature of the doctrine, namely the denial that the relation between Begetter and Begotten is one between two realities who thereby come to be opposed to each other in an external relation. ‘Begetting’ and ‘consubstantiality’ are inseparable. The point already emerges in Origen, concerned to affirm that the Son ‘does not become Son in an external way, through the adoption of the Spirit, but is Son by nature.’28 And it is exploited by Athanasius in anti-Arian polemic, distinguishing between the natural relation of Father and Son and the external relation of creator and creature.29 It finds its most sophisticated analysis in Aquinas. A great deal in his account of the divine processions hangs on his understanding of them as ‘inward’, ad intra.30 In the case of generation (Aquinas does not mention this in 1a.27, but it is clearly part of what he has in mind), we are not dealing with ‘the coming of effect from cause’, or with ‘a going forth to something outside’.31 This, for the (Christologically fundamental) reason that generation is within the one divine essence. The formal statement runs thus: ‘To come forth as something external and diverse from a principle is incompatible with being the first principle. But the spiritual coming forth of what is intimate and in no way diverse is included in the very idea of the first principle.’32 A bit more simply: ‘In divine generation the form

25.  A. Polanus, Syntagma III.4, cit. H. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978), p. 121. 26.  Third Theological Oration XXIX.2. 27.  Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology III.xxix.xxii (vol. 1, p. 301). 28.  On First Principles I.2.4. 29.  Against the Arians I.19–28. 30.  Summa theologiae Ia.27.1. 31.  Summa theologiae Ia.27.1. 32.  Summa theologiae Ia.27.1 ad 3.

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of begetter and begotten is the same numerically.’33 Generation entails no division or alienation; it is not a transitive action like making, which passes over to a reality external to the agent. Generation is therefore a matter of the ‘deepest intimacy’ between the Father as principle and the Son as issue.34 We may dispute whether Aquinas’s analogy of intellectual procession is wholly adequate (it only appears so, I think, when misunderstood as a theology of incarnation rather than a theology of generation). But it surely identifies something without which the gospel (and the gospels) are void, namely, ‘I and the Father are one’ (John 10.30). (f) No subordination of the Son is entailed by his generation by the Father. There is certainly active and passive in their relation: the Father begets, the Son does not, but has his personal subsistence by virtue of the Father’s act. But the passive generation attributed to the Son, his being generated, is no less an ontological perfection than the Father’s active generation. Once again, generation and consubstantiality support each other.35 At a relatively straightforward level, generation does not involve the Father’s temporal priority over the Son, because eternal generation is not temporal beginning. Begetting is ‘above all “when” ’ or ‘beyond the sphere of time’.36 The Son is from but not after the Father. But this opens into a larger point about the Son’s perfect deity. In being generated by the Father, Hilary tells us, the Son retains ‘the fullness of that Godhead from which and in which he was born as true and infinite and perfect God’.37 This extends a point made earlier, namely that the relation unbegotten:begotten is of a different order from the relation creator:creature, since begetting is not making. The extension consists in denying the identity of being unbegotten with the divine essence. Gregory Nazianzen pushes the point against opponents who claim that ‘if the Son is the same as the Father in respect of essence, then if the Father is unbegotten, the Son must be so likewise’.38 ‘Quite so’, he says, ‘if the essence of God consists in being unbegotten’. But it does not: ‘Unbegotten is not a synonym of God’.39 Unbegottenness is in fact the personal characteristic of the

33.  Summa theologiae Ia.33.2 ad 4. 34. G. Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 60. 35.  Wiles argued that Origen’s concern in asserting the Son’s eternal generation is divine immutability; only later does the doctrine turn to become a means of asserting the co-­ equality of the Son. This seems strained: immutability and co-­equality are surely closely related. See M. Wiles, ‘Eternal Generation’, in Working Papers in Doctrine (London: SCM, 1976), pp. 18–27. 36. Gregory of Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration XXIX.3; see also Ambrose, On the Christian Faith III.x.64, 66. 37.  On the Trinity III.17. 38.  Third Theological Oration XXIX.12. 39.  Third Theological Oration XXIX.12.

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Father, not a property of the common divine essence; and so the Son’s being begotten does not exclude him from deity. Using a slightly different idiom, Aquinas argues that to speak of the Father as principle (principium) is not to think of him as superordinate over the other two persons, for principle means ‘not priority but simply origin’.40 This means that it is proper to speak of the ungenerate Father as ‘a principle not from a principle’, and of the Son as ‘a principle from a principle’ by virtue of his generation, without disturbing the eternal co-­equality of Father and Son.41 In the terminology of postReformation divinity, the Son is still autotheos. He is this, not in respect of his person (which he has from the Father) but in respect of the common aseity which he has as a sharer in the one divine essence. The Father is a se in his person (as the principium of the triune life); the Son is a se only in his divine essence. ‘The Son is God from himself although not the Son from himself.’42 In terms of trinitarian doctrine, this affirmation that begottenness is a divine perfection offers protection against what Tom Weinandy has called ‘emanationist sequentialism’: origin and order in the triune life are not a matter of ‘priority, precedence and sequence’.43 There is a proper reciprocity between Father and Son, in which the Father’s personal character as Father is confirmed and glorified by the Son. Certainly, the Father is a nemine, from no one; but he is not solitary, for he is the eternal Father of the eternal Son, and so ‘the Father is glorified through the Son when men recognise that he is Father of a Son so divine.’44 In Christological terms, it reinforces the core conviction of Nicaea, that the ‘ek’ in ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God’ does not alienate the Son from the life of God, and that the Son’s coming down from heaven is truly the presence of the perfect God. (g) In sum: the Father’s begetting of the Son is an aspect of the eternal fullness of God’s triune life, its self-­originating, ceaseless and wholly realized movement here enacted in the personal relations of Father and Son. God is in himself a fountain of life – an image common to Athanasius and Calvin: ‘for what begetteth not from itself, is not a fountain’.45 Teaching about the Son’s eternal generation is undergirded by two principles, each requiring careful definition. The first is the determinative role played by the category of ‘origin’. ‘You inquire into the end, I into the beginning’, says Ambrose to his opponents in discussing divine generation; ‘now surely it is the end that

40.  Summa theologiae Ia.33.1 ad 3. 41.  Summa theologiae Ia.33.4. 42.  Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology III.xxviii.xl (vol. 1, p. 292). 43.  T. G. Weinandy, The Father’s Spirit of Sonship. Reconceiving the Trinity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), pp. 10, 15 n.28; whether Weinandy is right to charge both Eastern and Western Trinitarianism with the error is a different matter. 44. Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity III.17. 45.  Athanasius, Against the Arians I.19.

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depends on the beginning, not the beginning on the end’.46 The Son’s personal divine identity is given in his relation of origin to the Father by whom he is begotten. But this is not the triumph of protology in Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity, nor does it suggest that everything that needs to be said about the Son is exhausted by talk of his generation. For the one who proceeds is the same one who is sent; the Son who is begotten assumes a creaturely history. Talk of relations of origin does not absorb history back into eternity. It tries to explicate what kind of history may fittingly be predicated of the perfect God. The second principle, therefore, is that of divine perfection. From Origen onwards, whatever the tradition has to say about the Son’s generation respects the rule which he announces: ‘The substance of God exists in perfection’.47 But we should not underestimate the corrections to the concept of perfection introduced by trinitarian and Christological teaching about the Father’s begetting of the Son. Above all, the metaphysics of perfection cannot be allowed to thrust the Word and Wisdom of God into subordination, or to undermine the confession that the first person of the Trinity is, indeed, the Father of the Son and not simply an abstract unbegotten. Bearing these two principles in mind, we turn more briefly to some remarks on recent reception of the doctrine.

III An earlier generation of patristic scholarship reconstructed the history of the doctrine of eternal generation and found it a muddled affair, full of faulty and misleading argument and obscured by anti-Arian bias. A quarter century later, things have shifted. Scepticism about trinitarian and incarnational teaching on the part of doctrinal critics has been eclipsed by vigorous trinitarianism, often with a strongly economic orientation, and by an interest in the human history of Jesus as fundamental to understanding his person and work. Both developments tend to produce hesitations about whether the doctrine of eternal generation can do full justice to the temporal reality of the Son; this, because it appears to locate the Christological centre of gravity in the wrong place, that is, in eternity, and so fails to follow through the revisions to the metaphysics of deity required by confession of the incarnation. Some orientation can be provided by Pannenberg’s treatment of eternal generation in the first volume of his Systematic Theology, where he worries that the theology of the divine processions (and therefore of the Son’s generation) fails to grasp that in Scripture the real centre of interest is ‘the historical person of Jesus Christ’,48 above all his relation to the Father as the one by whom he is sent. The 46.  On the Christian Faith I.xi.72. 47.  On First Principles IV.4.1. 48.  W. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 306.

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Son’s deity is not secured in his eternal origin but in the historical reality of the human Jesus’s self-­differentiation from his Father. ‘Precisely by distinguishing himself from the Father, by subjecting himself to his will as his creature, by thus giving place to the Father’s claim to deity . . . [Jesus] showed himself to be the Son of God and one with the Father who sent him.’49 On this basis, the direction of thinking about the relation of Father and Son is not one in which the inner-­divine processions have priority, but one in which ‘the innertrinitarian relations between the Father and the Son are to be inferred from the mutual relations between the historical person of Jesus and the Father.’50 But is this sufficient? Two comments are in order. First, Pannenberg risks turning the cognitive priority of the order of revelation into an ontological priority. ‘The eternal Son is first . . . an aspect of the human person’,51 he writes – surely an excessive claim even for those unpersuaded by the Calvinistic extra? Second, Jesus’s ‘self-­distinction from the Father’ is too narrow a reality to be ‘constitutive for the eternal Son in his relation to the Father’.52 It says little of the Son’s unity with the Father, and the voluntaristic idiom is troubling.53 The question which Pannenberg presses is: What is the relation between eternal generation and the divine economy in which the Son comes down from heaven? A characteristically bold essay by Robert Jenson argues against the necessity of positing anterior, pre-­economic states of affairs. The ‘for us’ in ‘for us and for our salvation’ is not just economy but theology; we do not need more to tell us who God is. ‘If God’s only Son, true God from true God and all the rest of it, becomes and is incarnate for us, this says that creaturely circumstances are the occasion of an event in the life of God. If we attend to the maxim that in God doing and being are not different . . . then the fact that God’s Son is incarnate for us says that creaturely circumstances are involved in what it means for God to be God.’54 Because the creaturely term of salvation ‘belongs to [God’s] grasp of his own deity’, then the incarnation is not to be read as a ‘linear metaphysical narrative’, that is ‘before the virgin conceived, there was a not-­yet-incarnate divine Son who was, at that point, located in heaven and not on earth. Then later the theanthrōpos came into

49.  Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 310. 50.  Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 312. 51.  Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 310. 52.  Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 310. 53. Less acute versions of the same difficulties surface in Gunton’s reconstruction of eternal generation, where he argues that ‘the relation between Jesus and the Father who affirms his Sonship is also a relation between God and God . . . [a] taking place of God in time’ (C. Gunton, ‘And in One Lord Jesus Christ . . . Begotten, Not Made’, in C. Seitz, ed., Nicene Christianity. The Future for a New Ecumenism [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001], p. 41). But mission tends to absorb procession, with the result that Gunton can offer only a rather attenuated account of eternal generation. 54.  Jenson, ‘For Us . . . He Was Made Man’, in C. Seitz, ed., Nicene Christianity, p. 77.

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existence on earth.’55 Rather than attempting to think the unthinkable and put together two entities (an eternally begotten Son and a human being), we should ‘simply start with the fact of the incarnate Logos, of the man Jesus, who is the Son.’56 But: could it not be argued that we only really take cognizance of the man Jesus when we come to see his utter incommensurability? When we realize that his being the man he is is a very special and by no means immediately accessible reality? That ‘incarnate Logos’ and ‘the man Jesus’ are not simply coterminous? And is it not one of the functions of the doctrine of eternal generation to show that apprehension of Jesus’s human history will fumble until it sees that this human history is what it is only by virtue of its relation to the eternally-­generated Son who freely assumes it? Some of the same problematic features surface in Catherine LaCugna’s treatment of eternal generation in God For Us. The basic principle of her account is ‘the life of God does not belong to God alone’, a principle whose ‘external dimension’ is stated by the notion of divine begetting. ‘God the Begetter eternally is producing, bringing forth, loving the Begotten One. God who is always being begotten is proceeding from, receiving from, giving back to God who begets. The reciprocal movement between God who is begetting and God who is being begotten did not happen only once, at some point in the past . . . divine begetting and being begotten is an eternal and unceasing exchange of persons’.57 But – crucially – it is a temptation to think that this happens ‘ “inside” God’; in fact ‘the eternal begetting of the Son and the breathing forth of the Spirit take place in God’s economy’.58 In effect, this means that begetting and creating are scarcely distinct: ‘the centrifugal movement of divine love does not terminate “within” God but explodes outward: God gives rise to the world just as God gives rise to God.’59 The difficulty here is not just collapsing theology into economy, though that is in itself terminal. It is that an economy so conceived is not an economy, not an ordered exhibition of the works of God, because it has no ground, it is simply temporal surface. Barth was right to emphasize that a doctrine of eternal generation must avoid polarizing ‘before all time’ from ‘time’; but he also went on to emphasize that ‘the fact that time . . . is included in a divine “before all time” is not something that we can take for granted. It is grace, mystery, a basis that we must recognise in the fear of God.’ And that means that we have to venture ‘the statement about God as such . . . even at the risk of the misunderstanding that we might be speaking “not historically”.’60

55.  ‘For Us . . . He Was Made Man’, p. 77. 56.  ‘For Us . . . He Was Made Man’, p. 78. 57.  C. LaCugna, God For Us. The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), p. 354. 58.  God For Us, p. 354. 59.  God For Us, pp. 354f. 60.  Church Dogmatics I/1, p. 426.

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IV By way of conclusion, here are five corollaries of what has been said about eternal generation. 1.  Amongst the more important tasks of Christian dogmatics in the present is the articulation of an evangelically-­determined theology of God’s perfection. There are more options available than either materially-­unspecific perfect being theology, or neo-Hegelian presentations of God’s career in time. 2.  Contemporary trinitarian theology is often insecure in its grasp of the first person of the Trinity, and the insecurity affects not only the doctrine of God but soteriology and ecclesiology, where the first article cannot be retired without damage. 3.  The metaphysics of God a se and in se is of serious evangelical import, and cannot be set aside in the rush to move from de Deo uno to the relational God who engages with creation.61 4. Far from abstracting from the history of the economy, theological talk of relations of origin is a way of articulating the infinite depth within the being of God, that ocean whose tide is the missions of the Son and Spirit by which lost creatures are redeemed and perfected. 5.  The only historical Jesus there is is the one who has his being in union with the Son of God who is eternally begotten of the Father. Those who pore over the gospels searching for another Jesus (whether their motives be apologetic or critical) pierce their hearts with many pangs, for they study a matter which does not exist.

61. On this see R. Williams, ‘God’, in D. Ford, B. Quash, and J. M. Soskice, ed., Fields of Faith. Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-­first Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 75–89.

Chapter 4 C h r i st o l o g y , T h e o l o g y , E c o n om y . T h e P l ac e o f C h r i st o l o g y i n S ys t e mat ic T h e o l o g y

I To say that each element of Christian teaching bears some relation to Christology is to state an analytical judgement, to reiterate the inherent and permanent referent of the term ‘Christian’. Further reflection, however, prompts two questions: What kind of relation? and What kind of Christology? What kind of relation obtains between Christological teaching and other doctrinal topics? It may be considered a relation of derivation, such that Christology is the source – cognitive and ontological – from which are drawn all other Christian teachings, whose Christian identity and authenticity are to be ascertained by demonstrable origination from and determination by Christological doctrine. ‘Within theological thinking generally unconditional priority must be given to thinking which is attentive to the existence of the living person of Jesus Christ . . . so that per definitionem Christological thinking forms the unconditional basis for all other theological thinking . . . The only decisions which have any place are those which follow after, which are consistent with thinking which follows him, which arise in the course of Christological thinking and the related investigations, definitions and conclusions’ – so Barth.1 Another, less straightforwardly deductive conception of the relation between Christology and other doctrines – one which on occasions Barth also maintained – considers Christology, not as in and of itself the basis, centre or starting-­point of everything else, but rather as a principal part of Christian teaching having wide dispersal across the doctrinal corpus by virtue of the fact that it is an integral element of the doctrine of the Trinity. The formative status and specifying function of Christology in relation to other topics of Christian teaching, that is, arise from the governance of the entire body of Christian divinity by teaching about the triune God. On this account of the matter, it is not Christology per se but a doctrine of God’s triune being and his inner and outer works (including the godhead of the Son and his works in time) which occupies the pre-­eminent and commanding place in Christian teaching. 1. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), p. 175.

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Further: what kind of Christology? A complete Christology comprises two integral parts: teaching about the eternal Son or Word, his deity and the relations which he bears to the Father and the Spirit; and teaching about the Son’s temporal mission, especially in the assumption of flesh to redeem lost rational creatures. Where Christology is located in a comprehensive treatment of Christian doctrine, its size, and the relations which it bears to other doctrines, will be determined in part by decisions about the content of each of the two parts, their relative proportions and the priority of one part over the other, as well as by expectations or demands placed on each part. Any systematic presentation of Christian doctrine adopts a stance on the function and scope of Christology, implicitly or explicitly. The stance is visible both in the way in which the subject matter of Christian doctrine as a whole is conceived, and in the expository arrangement of its various components. In much modern (and notably, but not exclusively, Protestant) systematic theology these matters have acquired a special prominence, because discrete teaching about the person and work of Christ has often annexed the fundamental role which earlier theologies more naturally recognized in teaching about the Trinity, and so has come to serve as the hallmark of the genuineness, purity and distinctiveness of Christian doctrine. To anatomize the matter, we look first at the nature and subject matter of systematic theology, and then consider the place of Christology in relation to God’s inner life (‘theology’) and God’s work towards creatures (‘economy’).

II Though the term ‘systematic theology’ is sometimes used to designate any constructive (rather than simply exegetical or historical) treatment of Christian doctrine, it is best reserved for accounts of Christian teaching which aim at comprehensiveness and coherence, setting forth the content of Christian belief in its entirety with attention to the congruity of its parts. Theological systematization attracts a range of criticisms: dominance by a governing principle abstracted from the range of Christian teaching; reduction of the internal variety of Christian beliefs; over-­reliance on deduction in the construction of doctrine; aspirations to finality which accord ill with the incompleteness and liability to revision of temporal knowledge of God. However, systematicity in theology properly derives not from pretentions to perfect understanding but from contemplation of the scope and internal relations of its object. A theological system is not so much a projection as an acknowledgement and reiteration of the order which obtains between the various elements of Christian belief. Well-­conducted, it will draw upon resources (intellectual and moral-­spiritual) to check the malign bent to total knowledge – most of all, awareness of the ineffability of its object and of the fact that the renovation of human knowledge of God remains unfinished. The character of a systematic theology is a function of a number of factors. (1) A determination of the object or matter (res) of Christian teaching, both as a whole

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and in its various divisions. This will include judgements about which are the principal parts of Christian teaching, about which parts are derivative and how they may be derived, and about which parts may most properly be expected to set the distinctive nature of the system. (2) A judgement about the cognitive principles or sources of Christian teaching and their relative values, and about the ways in which systematic theology gives expression to the matter which these sources communicate. Such sources may be internal (such as Scripture or dogma), or external and ancillary (such as philosophy, history or aspects of human culture held to be normative). (3) A conception of the end or purpose of systematic theology. This will include answers to such questions as: Is systematic theology a ‘positive’ science with a given, antecedently established matter of which it is an exposition, or is it critical, reconstructive enquiry? How should contemplative, speculative, didactic, apostolic and apologetic purposes be ranked in the construction of a system of Christian doctrine? (4) A set of judgements about the ecclesial and extra-­ecclesial settings of systematic theology, including judgements of circumstance, that is, determinations about which parts of Christian teaching should receive especial attention in a given set of conditions. (5) A conception of the virtues required of the systematic theologian. Such virtues may be intellectual (exegetical, historical and conceptual) skills and (if theology is considered to be itself an exercise of religion) moral-­spiritual powers. Decisions about the object, sources, ends, settings and practitioners of systematic theology exercise a formative influence on the rhetoric of a system of Christian doctrine, in particular upon the ways in which its genre and voice may echo the primary modes of expression of Christian faith while at the same time striving for conceptual regularity and argumentative clarity. Further, the overall character of a systematic theology will be inscribed in its organization. A system is composed of an orderly arrangement of parts according to a scheme. The design of a systematic theology requires attention to matters of overall sequence: Where are the different elements to be placed? Is the sequence or order of exposition to be a direct transcription of the material order or the order of knowing? Do the various elements simply relate to each other serially, or is there a more complex set of interrelations? Do certain topics require more ample consideration and others more cursory treatment? These formal questions about location, proportion and relative influence are of considerable weight in deciding the proper place of Christology in a system of Christian doctrine. They are, however, consequent upon material determination of the object of Christian faith and theology, which is God and the creatures of God. What is the place – location, role and rank – of Christology in systematic theological exposition of that object?

III Systematic theology has a single but not simple object: God and all things relative to God. ‘[A]ll things are dealt with in holy teaching in terms of God, either because

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they are God himself or because they are relative to him as their origin and end’.2 This one complex matter may therefore be divided into (1) God absolutely considered, that is, considered in himself in his inner life as Father, Son and Spirit (theology), and (2) God relatively considered, that is, considered in his outer works and in relation to his creatures (economy). Systematic theology is enquiry into God and into created realities under the formality of God. There is a material order in this one complex object according to which theology has preponderance over economy. This is because though it is entirely possible (indeed, necessary) to conceive of the triune God without creatures, it is not possible to conceive of creatures without God. God is from himself and in himself; he is self-­subsistent and self-­sufficient, and does not receive his being from any other, for he is the first principle and cause of all that is not himself. All other beings, however, are not from themselves; they receive being from him and are sustained by him as they enact the being which they have received. The material priority in systematic theology of God in himself is an acknowledgement of the unqualified priority of the creator over the creature; God is first in being, and so theology precedes economy. Yet three qualifications must be made. First, to speak of the primacy of theology over economy is to make a distinction, not a separation. The pre-­eminence of theology does not mean that economy is an accidental or inessential element of systematic theology. Quite the contrary: consideration of the economy is indispensable because there is not only God in himself but God who of his will and goodness reaches beyond his own being and gives life. A system of theology which failed to treat the economy would not correspond to its object’s full range. The material primacy of theology does not eliminate or depreciate all else relative to God; it indicates that theology treats the uncaused cause of all other things, and economy treats those things which are caused. Second, to say that primacy belongs to God’s inner works, not to his economic acts, does not entail that the latter offer no instruction about God’s inner being. The outer works of God are his works, not some remote operation which is not proper to him, and this continuity of acting subject means that God’s economic acts elucidate his inner being, even though they do not exhaust it. God’s triune life is not closed in upon itself; it is also communicative or externally relative, and so manifest in acts towards creatures. Third, the material primacy of theology is not necessarily mirrored in the order of knowing or in the order of exposition adopted in a theological system. The thought that God is the origin of all things – of created being, and of the world’s redemption – may arise in our minds as we are moved to reflect on our contingency or on the sheer gratuity of the Christian life. In the order of knowing, we may begin from contemplation of God’s outer works which prompt us to trace them to the worker of these works. In systematic theology, what matters is not that the cognitive order reduplicate the material order but that the cognitive order not be 2.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.1.7 resp.

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allowed to overwhelm the proper material order: first the worker, then the work. Similarly, the order of exposition is a matter of relative indifference. Provided that the material order remains undisturbed, expository arrangements may be invented or adapted according to the requirements of didactic circumstances. The matter treated in Christology straddles the two subject-­domains of systematic theology. Christology considers both the eternal Word, intrinsic to God’s inner being, and the Word’s temporal mission in creation, providence and supremely in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Because of this, Christology is a distributed doctrine, not restricted to one or other domain; and it is so because it treats one of the triune persons, each of whom is to be considered both immanently and relatively. If it is properly to reflect the scope and distribution of Christology in a system of Christian teaching, treatment of any particular Christological topic must keep in mind this double matter. No treatment of the doctrine of the incarnation, for example, may so concentrate upon the historical density of the Word made flesh that it neglects the way in which that history refers back to its antecedent ground in the eternal inner-­triune persons and relations. The Word which became flesh is the Word which was ‘in the beginning’ (John 1.14, 1); the Son who was for a little while made lower than the angels and partook of flesh and blood does so as one eternally begotten of the Father, bearing the very stamp of God’s nature (Heb. 2.9, 14; 1.5, 3). To understand the Word made flesh, theological intelligence must consider its terminus a quo; systematic Christology connects teaching about incarnation to the doctrine of the immanent Trinity. Equally, theological investigation of the eternal Word will be incomplete if it neglects the way in which this same Word, possessed of the infinite beatitude and completeness of God’s simple being, also has a terminus ad quem in his external, relative acts as maker, sustainer and reconciler of created life. Systematic Christology also considers the work of the Word in time. The adequacy of a systematic Christology is partly a matter of how these two termini are defined and set in relation. In treating the terminus a quo, systematic theology is not proposing some abstract, speculative reality unconnected to the history of the incarnation. It is simply following the rule of Christian faith that the invisible God is infinitely more real than any visible thing, the one by virtue of whom any visible thing has being and effect. The visible reality of the Word in time emerges from his participation in the entire sufficiency and repose of God. In himself the Word lacks nothing, and in his relation to creatures he receives no augmentation, for he is antecedently perfect. To this perfect fulfilment of the processions within the godhead, in which the Son is eternally begotten of the Father and one from whom the Spirit eternally proceeds, there corresponds the Son’s movement towards that which is not God. God’s infinite beatitude includes infinite love extended outwards; it is an inner bliss which is causal, limitlessly generous, that by virtue of which created history comes to be. Again, in treating Christology’s terminus ad quem, the outward movement of the Word has to be understood as arising from his anterior completeness. It is not the accumulation of properties which extend the Word’s identity. In the course of

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his movement from immanent origin to economic goal, the Word acquires nothing, remains immutable and simple, entirely resolved and composed. Whatever relations the Word bears to creatures are on his side non-­real (that is, non-­ constitutive). Yet, once more, God’s perfect goodness is confirmed in creative causality. God is the ‘absolutely supreme good’ in as much as he is ‘the first source of every perfection things desire’.3 By way of initial summary: (1) Christology is a division of the doctrine of the Trinity; (2) as a division of the doctrine of the Trinity, Christology is concerned with both theology and economy, theology first, economy by derivation; (3) Christology is not restricted to one particular locus of a system of Christian teaching, but is widely spread; (4) Christology is not in and of itself the starting-­ point or centre of Christian teaching, but one indispensable element of a complex whole. A brief exemplification of this arrangement may be found in Aquinas’s incomplete Compendium of Theology, a summary exposition of Christian teaching structured as a treatment of faith, hope and love. ‘The whole knowledge of faith involves . . . two things’, Aquinas states at the beginning, ‘namely the divinity of the Trinity and the humanity of Christ’.4 Aquinas treats these two topics according to what he takes to be their proper material sequence: the doctrine of the Trinity, followed by the doctrine of the incarnation. In investigating the divinity, attention to three topics is necessary: ‘first, the unity of essence; second, the Trinity of persons; and third, the effects of divinity’.5 Once again, the succession of the topics is significant. Only after giving a substantial amount of space to the oneness and the triunity of God (I.3–67) does Aquinas turn to consider the ‘effects’ or outer works of God in creation, providence and redemption. Moreover, the treatment of faith in the humanity of Christ and of the restoration of creatures through the incarnation does not begin until I.185, when Aquinas surveys the nature of sin, the nature of the incarnation, Christ’s conception and birth, the paschal mystery and his exaltation and future work of judgement. The delay in introducing Christological material is, however, merely apparent, and does not indicate that Aquinas considers the incarnate Christ and his work of reparation a negligible matter: a treatment of faith which did not proceed beyond the divine essence and triunity to the effects of God would be Christianly unthinkable. But these effects, including the incarnation of the Word, are just that: effects, only intelligible when their cause is grasped. Christ’s humanity and his enactment of his office as saviour cannot be understood per se, but only as it is ‘related to his divinity as an instrument’.6 The language of instrumentality, perhaps initially alarming, does not diminish the full reality of the Word’s becoming flesh. It simply indicates that this ‘becoming’ and all that follows from it is ‘assumption’, that assumption does not compromise the 3.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.6.2 resp. 4.  Aquinas, Compendium of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), I.2. 5.  Aquinas, Compendium of Theology I.2. 6.  Aquinas, Compendium of Theology I.213.

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integrity of the two natures, and that the assumed nature is to be understood not from its historical phenomenality, but from the divine person and act of the one who assumes it. ‘We . . . judge the disposition and quality of instruments by their purpose, though also by the dignity of the one using them. Therefore, it is appropriate to esteem the quality of the human nature assumed by the Word of God in accordance with these norms’.7 Once this is in place, exposition of Christ’s person and work follows naturally and completes the sequential treatment of the objects of faith. We turn to further elaboration of the place of Christology in the two domains of theology and economy.

IV The first domain of Christology is theology. After any formal or prolegomenal matters about the nature, tasks and cognitive principles of theology have been dealt with (not, of course, without reference to the substance of Christian teaching, including Christology), a system of Christian doctrine opens its material exposition with consideration of the Christian doctrine of God, and it is at this point that Christology receives its first extended treatment: in the course of the explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God enters as an object of reflection. Three tracts of material are treated in this Christological domain. First, consideration is given to the Son’s eternal deity: his consubstantiality with the Father and the Spirit as one who participates in the undivided divine essence, and the properties which are his according to that divine essence. Here systematic theology turns its contemplative gaze and analytical intelligence to the Son’s self-­ subsistent perfection, his infinity, simplicity, immutability and impassibility as one beyond composition or disintegration, in other words, his entire beatitude. At the same time, systematic theology directs its attention to the Son’s omnipotence and omniscience, and his unlimited goodness, wisdom and justice. This is followed in a second stretch of argument by consideration of the Son’s place in the processions which are God’s infinite aliveness, that is, the Son’s relation to the Father and the Spirit by origin, order and operation. Here systematic theology gives an account of the eternal generation of the Son – the reality that he is ‘begotten of the Father before all worlds, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made’, and so that the relation of the Son and the Father is wholly natural, consubstantial and non-­sequential rather than external, causal or temporal. In similar fashion, attention is given to the Son as one from whom with the Father the Spirit proceeds. Treatment of these matters is then concluded, third, by an explanation of the personal property which is his as Son, namely ‘filiation’, the property of being one begotten by the Father before all worlds. 7.  Aquinas, Compendium of Theology I.213 (translation altered).

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If it is to occupy its given place in the system of Christian teaching, a presentation of this threefold material needs to keep two thoughts in mind at every point. First: the Son is complete without creatures – not because he does not will to create creatures out of love, but precisely because he creates out of fullness of love rather than out of some indigence by which he is afflicted. Second, therefore, the interior, wholly resolved life of the eternal Son is also fraught with movement beyond itself, willing to direct itself outwards, and in so doing neither completes itself nor is at variance with itself, because the divine Son is supremely good and therefore creative. In systematic consideration of Christology in the domain of theology, therefore, an account of the missions or external acts of the Son of God will be preceded by an account of the divine procession which is their vital principle. The procession of the Son from the Father is an ‘immanent’ act, having no external basis or object, but as such it is the uncaused cause of the history of the incarnation. This is why such a systematic treatment risks distortion if it goes directly to the history of Jesus Christ. His identity as the divine-­human agent of that history, as well as the nature, purpose, power and effect of his acts, cannot be understood in isolation from his eternal relation of origin. The ground of his history, presupposed in each of its episodes and manifest, declared or confessed in some, is: ‘I have come’.8 Formally expressed: a divine mission includes within itself and refers to an eternal procession by which the identity of its agent is constituted. Thus the coming of the Son and his reception by creatures has its source and character in the fact that the Son is of one substance with the Father, by whom he is sent and from whom he comes into the world. This coming repeats in outward activity the relation of origin and the oneness of substance proper to Father and Son as eternal divine persons. The Son’s entry into audible, visible, tangible presence is the manifestation of ‘that which was from the beginning’ (1 John 1.1). From this, a number of observations about the place of Christology in a system of theology may be drawn. (1) Christology is intrinsic to the doctrine of God, and receives its first treatment in the course of exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity. What is said subsequently about the Son of God relatively considered rests wholly upon what is first said about his eternal deity absolutely considered. One of the finest English divines from the mid- to late-­seventeenth century, John Owen, phrases it thus: ‘The person of Christ is the next [nearest] foundation of all acceptable religion and worship’; but ‘the divine being itself is the first formal reason, foundation and object of all religion’.9 Again: ‘Were he not the essential image of the Father in his own divine person, he could not be the representative image unto us as incarnate’10 – and this, because ‘God himself is the first and only 8. On this, see S. J. Gathercole, The Pre-­existent Son. Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark and Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). 9.  J. Owen, Christologia, or A Declaration of the Glorious Mystery of the Person of Christ [1679], in The Works of John Owen, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), p. 44. 10. Owen, Christologia, p. 78.

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essential truth’.11 (2) The first material on the Son’s divine essence carries within itself reference to his economic activity. Commenting on Prov. 8.22f. (‘The Lord created me at the beginning of his work. . .’), Owen writes: ‘The eternal personal existence of the Son of God is supposed [presupposed] in these expressions . . . Without it, none of these things could be affirmed of him. But there is a regard in them, both unto his future incarnation, and the accomplishment of the counsels of God thereby’.12 (3) A systematic theology will be adequate to its object if it constructs its exposition in a way that makes visible this mutual reference of absolute and relative, procession and mission, inner and outer work. This may be achieved by argumentative devices of anticipation and recapitulation, to ensure both that the full extent of Christology is kept in mind as completely and consistently as possible, and that the loci are not isolated from one another. (4) Christological knowledge is knowledge by causes: the visible reality of Jesus Christ becomes an object of understanding only when its underlying invisible principle is kept in mind as that by virtue of which it has phenomenal form. This is because in all its human density that visible form is an effect, that from which theological intelligence moves backwards to trace its foundation and source in God’s being and will itself, and that towards which theological intelligence moves when it considers God’s being and will. Christology is therefore only derivatively (yet also necessarily) an historical science. As we shall see shortly, one effect upon Christology of the decline of knowledge by causes or first principles and the prestige of immanent historical explanation has been atrophy of the first domain of Christology and expansion of the second domain, such that the proportions and location of Christological material have undergone extensive alteration.

V The second domain of Christology is economy. Arising from and extending the ‘absolute’ consideration of the Son of God which is its formative principle, there is a ‘relative’ consideration of his mission in time and its telos in the renewal of creaturely existence. This second tract of Christological material is no less indispensable than the first; in its absence, systematic Christology would be a fragment. The necessity of theological study of the Son’s acts in time properly does not arise from suspicion that theology remains abstract or merely noumenal until its historical force is registered. Nor is it properly any supposed restriction of human knowledge and experience to the phenomenal realm which necessitates attention to the economy, as if that realm were more immediately accessible and could be more readily turned to account. Rather, the second Christological domain is a 11. Owen, Christologia, p. 79. 12. Owen, Christologia, p. 54.

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matter for attention because theological intelligence traces the outer movement of God’s communicative goodness – that is, God’s determination that at the Father’s behest the eternal Son should be the giver of life. ‘He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him’ (John 1.2f.); ‘as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself ’ (John 5.26); and so, ‘the Son gives life to whom he will’ (John 5.21). Stated in a slightly different register, the hinge between the inner works of God and his economic activity is the divine will. To ground the economy in the divine will is to say that God’s external works are not mere indifferent or accidental happenings, but purposive, the fruit of something akin to a decision (though without the deliberative, discursive sequence of a human decision). This divine purpose is eternal, antecedent, wholly spontaneous and unconditioned by any consequent, ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph. 1.5), arising solely from God and not a response to some reality alongside God (creatio ex nihilo is fundamental to the being and history of that which is blessed by the divine purpose). Further, the divine purpose is not the imposition of an alien will, but that by virtue of which creatures come to have life and to flourish. This is because God’s will is inseparable from his goodness and wisdom, and so is the gift of life. God’s outer works may be divided into two spheres: that of his work of nature, and that of his work of grace. The first sphere comprises creation and providence, the second the redemption and perfection of creatures. The agent of these works is the undivided Trinity, whose external acts are indivisible, though particular works may be especially appropriated to particular persons. This last point is of some consequence in retaining the correct proportions of Christology in a treatment of the economy. To say that the Son is the agent of redemption is not to concentrate the entirety of God’s outer work upon this one person. This is because the Son acts ad extra as one who shares in the one divine essence, and so is not a discrete agent. Moreover, attribution of some work to him is eminent but not exclusive attribution, for in each divine work in time the Father is its fount, the Son its medium and the Spirit its terminus. With these preliminaries in mind, what material is treated in the second Christological domain? The Son’s work is spread across the two spheres of nature and grace. He is the agent of creation (‘in him all things were created’, Col. 1.16) and of the providential maintenance and ordering of what has been made (‘in him all things hold together’, Col. 1.17). This being so, Christological material will have a considerable presence in a systematic account of the bringing into being and preservation of creatures; Christology is not exhausted by the history of redemption. In the sphere of grace, Christology presents an analysis of the full scope of the Son’s divine-­human mission. This begins with an account of the act of incarnation (the conception of Christ; the Word’s assumption of human nature and the union of the divine and human natures in Christ’s person); his earthly ministry as the herald and agent of the Kingdom of God; his passion and death in their saving effect; his exaltation in his resurrection, ascension and heavenly session; his continued operation through the Spirit in calling, sanctifying and governing the

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church and in ruling the course of the world; his future coming as judge and deliverer. Once again, Christology is widely extended, because its matter comprehends the person of the mediator and soteriology in its objective and subjective aspects, as well as ecclesiology and the Christian life. This complex of material may be arranged in various ways: as a relatively straightforward narrative sequence, or through conceptual structures such as the names and titles of the incarnate one (Jesus, Messiah, Christ, Lord, servant, and so forth), his offices (prophet, priest and king) or his states (humiliation and exaltation). In practice, most systematic treatments offer some sort of combination of all or most of these various schemes. In a well-­ordered systematic theology, the extensive material on the second domain of Christian teaching will arise naturally from and make appropriate backward reference to the material on the first domain; economy is most fully seen when illuminated by theology, which it in turn illuminates. Some modern systematic theologies have found it difficult to maintain this relation between the two domains, and the corollary placement of Christology. The difficulty arises because well-­established principles of modern theological reason, both formal and material, tend to favour a rather different set of arrangements. These principles may be set out schematically as follows (not all modern systematic theologies exhibit any or all of these features, or exhibit them in unmixed form). (1) The differentiating characteristic of the Christian religion is the reference of all its various elements to Jesus Christ. As Schleiermacher puts it, in Christianity ‘everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth’.13 (2) The Christology to which all other elements refer is one in which the personal history of Jesus is irreducible, possessing a certain absoluteness which prohibits its resolution into a cause of which it is an external instrument. (3) In a doctrine of the incarnation, preservation of the integrity of Jesus Christ as unified personal agent takes priority over scrupulous distinction of and ordering of his divine and human natures. (4) In a Christian doctrine of God, God’s being is act, and God’s act principally understood as external (or externally manifest) operation, in terms of its terminus ad quem. (5) In systematic theology, priority is therefore to be assigned to the outer works of God; theology is an extrapolation from economy. (6) The specification of the Christian doctrine of God – its protection from abstraction and from being laden with unbecoming attributes – is to be effected by Christological doctrine rather than by teaching about the immanent Trinity. Formation of Christology by some or all of these principles may result from various factors, theological and non-­theological. Chief among the theological factors is a commitment to a view of divine revelation as embodied divine self-­ manifestation: in effect, revelation is incarnation. One consequence of this strong identity between the divine Word and the historical form which it assumes is to close the space between God absolutely considered and God relatively considered. 13. F. D. E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 52.

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By virtue of the incarnational union of deity and humanity, there is consubstantiality between God’s immanent self and God’s revealed self, so that ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ are not simply coherent but identical. Theology cannot ‘get behind the back of Jesus to the eternal Son of God’.14 The non-­theological factors are more diverse and less easy to specify. They include such matters as: consent to the metaphysical restrictions imposed by Kant’s placing of the noumenal beyond the reach of the human intellect; the effects of historical naturalism on interpretation of New Testament Christology; a valorization of history as first reality; a concomitant loss of confidence in the explanation of temporal events, acts and agents by reduction to their causes. In their widely varied forms, such principles have made a deep impression on some major systematic Christologies in the last two centuries, though others have been resistant to them. Where they do exercise sway, the result is commonly an expansion of the domain of economy, a corresponding contraction of the domain of theology, and an intensification of expectations surrounding the person and acts of Jesus Christ considered as historical quantities. As the one who constitutes all proper Christian knowledge, he is that reality around which may be ordered an entire account of Christian teaching, of which he is the centre (the metaphor is widely-­used and informative). To illustrate the variety of responses to these factors, we may turn briefly to three examples from the history of Protestant systematic theology. 1.  We look first at a theologian largely (though not entirely) unaffected by these trends, Izaak Dorner, in his System of Christian Doctrine (1879–81), a work whose wealth of historical observation, analytical finesse and spiritual cogency is without equal in the school of ‘mediating theology’ with which he is usually associated. In treating Christology, Dorner sought to eschew any antithesis of theology and economy. He accomplished this partly by emphasis upon Christ’s pre-­existence, which he regarded as ‘the doctrine of the living, real possibility and necessity of the incarnation’, or ‘the living potentiality, the productive ground of the possibility of the incarnation . . . eternally in God’.15 This directed Dorner’s mind to the immanent Trinity, to which teaching about the person of Christ must always be ‘conjoined’.16 Yet what the doctrine of the immanent Trinity secures is not so much God’s perfection apart from the incarnation but rather the fact that there is in God ‘an eternal self-­disposition for incarnation’;17 the Word is principally one who is ‘to be incarnate’. Dorner made this move in part because it was for him a rule that ‘evangelical piety starts with the world of revelation, and therefore with the revealed Trinity, with historical redemption and justification . . . and does not start with the 14.  T. F. Torrance, ‘The Place of Christology in Biblical and Dogmatic Theology’, in Theology in Reconstruction (London: SCM Press, 1965), p. 130. 15. I. A. Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 3, p. 284. 16. Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 3, p. 284. 17. Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 3, p. 285.

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doctrine of the immanent Trinity’. 18 There is more than a hint here that the order of knowing (from economy to theology) is coming to be regarded also as the material order. Yet for all this, Dorner remained clear that systematic reflection ‘cannot halt’ at this point of departure, and must advance to consider the fact ‘that there corresponds to the peculiar and permanent being of God in Christ an eternal determination of the divine essence’,19 a ‘ground in God’20 for the incarnation such that God’s self-­communication in Christ is without divine self-­detriment or self-­ realization. This ground is ‘the will of perfect self-­communication’.21 2.  With Dorner’s slightly younger contemporary, Albrecht Ritschl, matters took on a very different air. In the Christology set out in the third volume of his deeply impressive Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (1874), Ritschl transposed Kant’s separation of noumenal and phenomenal into a severance of theology from economy. The Christological effect of this proved drastic: Christology restricts itself to the effects of Christ in their reception by and formation of the moral existence of community of faith; nothing is gained from speculation about the eternal Son as the cause of those effects and their reception and power to shape. It is the significance of Christ – not his being in himself or his origin in God – which constitutes the proper object of Christological reflection, and that significance is only intelligible to (almost, indeed, constituted by) ‘the consciousness of those who believe in him’.22 Here Ritschl explicitly differentiated himself from classical theology, which starts from an idea of original divine perfection and so fails to envisage ‘every part of the system from the standpoint of the redeemed community of Christ’.23 Ritschl’s work is an exemplary instance of how, when detached from its trinitarian source, Christology may quite quickly collapse into soteriology, and soteriology into analysis of religious fellowship in its experiential and ethical dimensions. Within such a system, the doctrine of God’s inner perfection can have very little Christological import: knowledge of God is exhausted in knowledge of his will to enact his love. In a remarkably voluntarist judgement, Ritschl maintained that ‘when God is conceived as love, through the relation of his will to his Son and the community of the Kingdom of God, he is not conceived as being anything apart from or prior to his self-­determination as love. He is either conceived as love, or simply not at all’.24 In terms of Christology, the consequence is that Christ’s deity is not his immanent essence but purely economically operative: ‘the godhead of Christ is not exhausted by maintaining 18. Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 3, p. 286. 19. Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 3, p. 286. 20. Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 3, p. 297. 21. Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 3, p. 293. 22.  A. Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation III: The Positive Development of the Doctrine (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1902), p. 1. 23. Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation III, p. 5. 24. Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation III, p. 282.

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the existence in Christ of the divine nature; the chief point is that in his exertions as man his godhead is manifest and savingly effective’.25 In short: Christ’s origin ‘transcends all inquiry’.26 3.  A final example is that of Barth, generally judged the most consistently Christocentric modern theologian. The unequalled intellectual grandeur of Barth’s achievement in the Church Dogmatics, along with its rhetorical, imaginative and spiritual force and its descriptive prowess, have combined to convey an impression of originality about his concentration on Christology, an impression which Barth himself did not discourage. However, his indebtedness to the great dogmaticians of the nineteenth century ought not to be understated (Barth himself did not understate it). What was original to Barth was not his Christological concentration so much as his combination of it with classical conciliar incarnational dogma and Reformed teaching about the hypostatic union, and his refusal to concur with the moralization of Christology into the soteriological background to religious-­ethical society. Barth’s concentration on Christology is more complex than admirers and critics often allow, and than some of his own programmatic statements about the place and function of Christology suggest (understanding the Church Dogmatics requires attention both to Barth’s uncompromising enunciations of principles and his often much more nuanced and fine-­grained exposition of detail). There are certainly many occasions when he announces the Christological determination of all dogmatic loci: revelation, the being of God in his freedom and his love, the election of humankind, human nature, sin, the Spirit, and more besides. Often the vigour of Barth’s statements derives from his resistance to what he considered the corrosive effects of natural theology. Moreover, the fourth volume of the Dogmatics, which treats the doctrine of reconciliation by an innovative interlaced account of the person and work of Christ, his natures, offices and states and their saving efficacy, is without doubt the point at which Barth’s powers are at full stretch. In the details of his exposition, however, Barth rarely reduces all other doctrines to derivatives or implicates of Christology. In part this is because he fears systematic master principles, even dogmatic ones, and seeks to preserve the freedom of the Word of God in dogmatic construction. In part, too, it is because he has a well-­ developed sense of the range of dogmatics, and an especially strong conviction that, in a dogmatics in which the covenant between God and humanity is of primary import, Christology in the economy must not overwhelm either the freedom of the eternal divine decision or the integrity of the human creature. In addition, Barth remains convinced that Christology and Trinity are inseparable and mutually implicating, and that teaching about the immanent Trinity is of great Christological import (this may be lost from view if Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation is detached from his doctrine of the Trinity in Church Dogmatics I).

25. Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation III, p. 393. 26. Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation III, p. 451.

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Jesus Christ is the name, form and act of God; yet where those in Ritschl’s school (including the theological existentialists with whom Barth engaged in skirmishes in the 1950s whilst writing Church Dogmatics IV) took this as permission to set theology proper to one side in favour of an exclusively economic orientation, Barth continued to think that teaching about the eternal Son is essential to identifying the acting subject of revelation and reconciliation. In the overall sweep of his exposition of Christian doctrine, Barth does not allow theology to atrophy, though he is consistently and powerfully attentive to the economy as the sphere of the Son’s presence and action.

VI No element in a system of theology is unrelated to Christology: to contemplate any of its parts is to have one’s mind drawn irresistibly to the name and figure of Jesus Christ. Why is this so? Barth judged that it was so because Christian theology ‘does not know and proclaim anything side by side with or apart from Jesus Christ, because it knows and proclaims all things only as his things . . . For it, there is no something other side by side with or apart from him. For it, there is nothing worthy of mention that is not as such his. Everything that it knows and proclaims as worthy of mention, it does so as his’.27 This is, perhaps, stated in an unqualified way; yet there is here something incontestably correct and wholesome, namely, that Jesus Christ is not merely the exponent or symbol of some reality available apart from him, for he is (the term is Hans Frei’s) ‘unsubstitutable’.28 Yet if this conviction – so ample and loving in its dedication to the Word incarnate – is not to occasion over-­intensification of one indispensable element of Christology and attenuation of the way in which that element directs attention to God’s inner life, systematic theology must specify with some scruple the sense in which God is the formal object of each Christian doctrine, Christology included. In assembling all its various matters into a scheme, systematic theology acknowledges that faith gives assent to many things; but it does so because by those many things faith is conducted to God as first truth. Theology takes things other than God into account as ‘the workings of God’.29 The breadth and spread of Christology derive from the fact that in it theology considers both God himself as first truth and God’s effects. Study of the incarnate Word may not pass too quickly over his phenomenal form; but nor may it terminate there, for it must allow this human history to direct us to the triune God.30 Yet, again, instruction about this formal object may be had by observation of its extensions or external working: we demonstrate ‘something 27.  Barth, K. Church Dogmatics IV/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), p. 21. 28. H. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ. The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), p. 49. 29.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae 1.1 resp. 30. See Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae 1.1 ad 1.

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about a cause through its effect’.31 And so when systematic reflection is directed to God as first truth, the incarnation is not left behind, because to apprehend this first truth is also to apprehend that the eternal Word participates in God’s infinite communicative and creative goodness and is the exemplary cause of God’s works in time. When these material – trinitarian – principles govern the content and proportions of a systematic presentation of Christian teaching, the place, extent and formative role of Christology will be properly delimited and secured.

31.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.1.7 ad 1

Chapter 5 O n e W ho i s S o n

I ‘Theological interpretation’ reads the New Testament as apostolic Scripture. It receives the texts as acts of communication whose primary author is God the Holy Spirit, acting in, with and through the apostles. These apostolic communications are addressed to the fellowship of the saints; they summon their hearers to faith and obedience; and they have as their end the upbuilding and sanctification of the apostolic community. To read the New Testament as apostolic Scripture is to read a text which is caught up in the wake of the Spirit’s grace. ‘O the wisdom of the apostle!’ exclaims Chrysostom in his first homily on Hebrews; ‘[O]r rather, not [his] wisdom but the grace of the Spirit is the thing to be wondered at. For surely he uttered not these things of his own mind, nor in that way did he find his wisdom . . . but it was from the working of God.’1 This appeal to ‘the working of God’ as the clue to what Scripture is and says is the distinguishing mark of theological interpretation. Theological interpretation is not simply a matter of looking for a particular kind of content in the Bible (that which can be formalized into theological loci); nor is it a preference for (or repudiation of) one particular exegetical method. Rather, theological interpretation is characterized by a particular understanding of the origin and nature of the biblical texts, of the situation and calling of their interpreters, of the interpretative acts which most fittingly correspond to the nature of the Bible, and of the ends which such acts serve. In short: theological interpretation is grounded upon an ontology of Scripture – an account of what Scripture is – which is derived from the confession that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth who guides the church into all truth (John 16.13). The Spirit ministers Christ, and apostolic Scripture is the Spirit’s auxiliary. The property of ‘apostolicity’ is thus ontologically foundational to Scripture: it is what this assemblage of texts is. Apostolicity is not an evaluative term expressing the church’s judgement about Scripture’s value to the Christian community or

1.  Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews (NPNF 1.14), I.3.

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about the ends to which the church proposes to put Scripture. Nor is apostolicity a sort of supernatural additum, superimposed on the ‘natural’ or ‘historical’ properties of the biblical texts. Scripture is an historical entity, a set of textual products and all the attendant processes of production and use. But its natural and historical properties are not free-­standing, characteristics for the explanation of which appeal to natural agents is sufficient. Scripture exists in the history of calling and sending in which the word of the apostles serves the Word of the living one as through the Spirit he instructs the church. Scripture has its historical properties by virtue of its relation to the divine Word; its historical character is not in se. The historia scripturae – its existence as a natural historical entity – is grounded in the communicative activity through which the divine Word engenders, oversees and commissions human words for the service of his self-­proclamation. Scripture can no more be read in isolation from the divine Word than the history of Jesus can be grasped apart from or prior to its relation to the eternal divine Logos. Theological interpretation is an undertaking in the sphere of reality marked out by the speaking presence of Word and Spirit, a sphere in which God has ordained that there should be apostles who through Holy Scripture confirm to the church what they have heard (cf. Heb. 2.3). The Letter to the Hebrews exists in this sphere, the sphere of the apostles who participate in the history of revelation as its witnesses and ministers, and the sphere of the interpreters who participate in the history of revelation as its addressees and hearers. For the latter this means that interpreting Hebrews falls under the rule announced by Chrysostom in his second homily: ‘Everywhere indeed a reverential mind is requisite, but especially when we say or hear anything of God’.2 Chrysostom is not merely recommending a certain mood on the part of the interpreter; he is making a stipulation about the practices of exegetical reason. Reverence is rational, intellectually fitting to the object by which the mind is engaged, which is God himself in his self-­disclosure. Such reverence is required also of exegetical reason. What does exegetical reason do? It tries to build up a representation of the text by linguistic, grammatical and literary observation, and by a well-­informed and well-­judged sense of the provenance, aims and audiences of the text. But the aim of making such a representation is not that the text become an object but rather that we be drawn before the speaking subject. That is why the work of exegetical reason is to be characterized above all by what the Vulgate, in its rendering of Hebrews 2.1, calls abundantius observare, that exceeding attentiveness which is the only appropriate posture of the mind before God’s self-­witness. Accordingly, the primary questions for the theological interpreter of Hebrews and its exordium are: Who speaks in this apostolic testimony? What is said to us by the apostle? And what is required of us by the apostolic summons? To answer those questions, however, we must first orient ourselves to the character and function of the exordium.

2.  Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews II.1.

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Hebrews is a ‘word of exhortation’ (13.22) to a faltering Christian community threatened by drift from the message of divine salvation which had reached it through apostolic attestation (2.1, 4). It addresses a community in defect, imperilled by a mismatch between its Christian performance and the two realities which are the foundation of its existence: the reality of unsurpassable revelation, and the reality of a single, complete and entirely sufficient sacrifice for sins. The apostle exhorts by confronting his hearers with these given realities of their situation, so exposing a failure to grasp and act in accordance with what really is the case, and also providing them with the resources to renew their obedience. The final revelation has taken place. God has spoken in his Son, and in so doing has inaugurated a new era of fulfilment, in which the divine Word is present with unambiguous clarity, definition and completeness. Because of this, the community exists in a situation which is determined by the fact that it really is possible to ‘taste the goodness of the Word of God’ and so to partake of ‘the powers of the age to come’ (6.5). Yet the Word scarcely finds a creaturely coordinate in the community; though the community has once heard, it has become ‘dull of hearing’ (5.11) and ‘unskilled in the word of righteousness’ (5.13). Like Israel in the wilderness, the community’s existence is objectively shaped by the fact that ‘the good news came’ (4.2); but, again as with Israel, there is the pressing danger that the Word does not profit its hearers because they fail ‘to incorporate it by faith’ (4.2) – to allow the objective to condition and vivify the subjective. In this situation – one might call it the evil dissonance between consummate revelation and ‘disobedience’ (4.11) – the Word becomes the community’s judge: living, active, powerful, piercing, critical (4.12). But not only this: the final sacrifice has taken place, and its sheer singularity has inaugurated perfection. This sacrifice is once for all (7.27; 9.12, 26, 28; 10.10); it is a divine work and therefore wholly particular and utterly comprehensive. The community exists in the wake of this achievement, and so in a situation in which ‘confidence’ of access ‘by a new and living way’ (10.19f.) has been secured by ‘a great high priest over the house of God’ (10.21). And yet there is, again, a lack of accord between these eschatological grounds for confidence and the community’s ‘wavering’ (10.23). Though it ‘knows the truth’, the community’s life is shadowed by the prospect of deliberate sin, and so by the threat that the divine benefit may become ‘a fury of fire’ (10.27). In this situation – of declivity in hearing the Word, of shrinking from rather than drawing near to the sanctuary – the task of the apostle’s paraklesis is twofold: to instruct and to exhort. The peril of ‘falling away from the living God’ (3.12) is averted by exposition of the truth and by encouragement to action in accordance with the truth. ‘Neglect’ (2.3) – deadly nonchalance – is countered by doctrine commanding fresh attention and quickening to renewed steadfastness. And doctrine, salvation, priesthood, sacrifice, the powers of the age to come, all converge on one singular reality, Jesus, the Son of God and high priest of our confession. God has spoken to us in a Son; we have such a high priest; he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself (9.26). Living after the beginning of the end, the community finds itself in a space or order of

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reality where there is a new covenant, a new people, new possibilities of fellowship, new imperatives. And it is to this novum that the apostle directs his hearers’ attention, appealing to them to ‘bear with his word of exhortation’ (13.22). In sum: Hebrews is an exercise in pastoral eschatology, an exposition of truth directed to the correction of practice. Its exordium is to be read in this light. Hebrews 1.1-4 is a single and rather elaborate periodic sentence, stately in construction, deliberate in its use of rhetorical emphasis, and organized by a pattern of contrasts. It is, further, an extraordinarily well-­packed Christological-­ soteriological statement, one which furnished a locus classicus for anti-Arian polemic.3 Yet it would not be quite right to speak of the exordium as a kind of dogmatic prologue to the letter.4 I say this, not in order to subscribe to the fancy that the church’s dogmatic Christology imposes misleading categories onto the text (a classic modern rehearsal of this argument is Caird’s attempt to clear the exordium of reference to pre-­existence; the Kantianism of his attempt is all the more troubling for being silent5). It is more that, if the exordium is to be thought of as dogmatics, it is as pastoral or moral dogmatics, seeking to guide the community in the light of the eschatological salvation by which it has been encountered once for all. The ‘dogmatic’ material of the exordium is not free-­ standing, but functions to advertise in a compact way the revelatory and soteriological determinants of the situation into which the community has been introduced, but whose implications the community is in its practice resisting.6 Chrysostom sees the point very clearly: the apostle, he observes, ‘arouses his 3. On this, see R. Greer, The Captain of Our Salvation. A Study in the Patristic Exegesis of Hebrews (Tübingen: Mohr, 1973); F. M. Young, ‘Christological Ideas in the Greek Commentaries on the Epistle to the Hebrews’, Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 20 (1969), pp. 150–63. 4. E. Grässer notes: ‘Der kleine Abschnitt 1,1–4 reizt mit seinen zentralen theologischen Aussagen über die Offenbarung, die Schöpfung, die Heilsgeschichte usw. sehr dazu, ihn sogleich als Steinbruch für systematische Entwürfe auszubieten. Doch ist er so fest mit dem ganzen Hebräerbrief verkoppelt and hart also noch so sehr eine sachgemässen Exegese von dorther, dass es nicht gut getan wäre, auf die näheliegende Versuchung Systematisierung einzugehen’ (‘Hebräer 1,1–4. Ein exegetischer Versuch’, in Text und Situation. Gesammelte Aufsätze zum Neuen Testament [Gütersloh: Mohn, 1973], p. 227). 5. G. B. Caird, ‘Son By Appointment’, in W. Weinrich, ed., The New Testament Age. Essays in Honor of Bo Reicke vol. 2 (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1984), pp. 73–81; there is a derivative version of the argument in L. D. Hurst, ‘The Christology of Hebrews 1 and 2’, in L. D. Hurst, N. T. Wright, ed., The Glory of Christ in the New Testament. Studies in Christology in Memory of George Bradford Caird (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 151–64. 6. E. Käsemann is correct to say that ‘the Christology of the first portion of the letter serves paraenetic purposes’, but pushes his point too far by continuing: ‘the first portion of the letter does not intend to offer doctrinal statements’ (The Wandering People of God. An Investigation of the Letter to the Hebrews [Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984], p. 181). It is more a matter of determining what kind of doctrinal statements are offered in Hebrews.

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hearers at the very opening of his discourse’ by showing them that ‘they had been made partakers of greater, even very exceeding grace’.7 To say this is not to privilege the economic and functional over the ontological. Without the latter, the exhortation is simply without force. Only because the revelation and the sacrifice are metaphysically determinative of the community’s life does it make sense to exhort its members to resist their own drift. The metaphysical elements of the exordium cannot be quietly dropped as mere ornamentation, because the ‘very exceeding grace’ which is the apostle’s ground of appeal is the church’s ontological – and therefore moral and pastoral – condition. To exhort the community is to call for action towards this condition. With this, we turn to the details of the exordium.

II The exordium begins the exercise in pastoral eschatology by setting forth a series of contrasts which culminate rhetorically and theologically in the middle of verse 2, with ἐν υἱῷ, the contrast being designed to magnify the ‘matchless excellence’8 of the Son, in and as whom divine revelation has its consummation. The purpose of the exordium is thus, as Calvin notes, ‘to commend the doctrine of Christ’ so that the hearers may ‘rest in it alone’.9 The contrasts between the old and the new modes, epochs, recipients and mediators of revelation, further, offer an introduction to the paraenetic strategy of Hebrews as a whole, which is to exhort by contrasting the former covenant, its priesthood and sacrifices with the decisively new situation into which the community has been introduced by the blood of Jesus. From the beginning, Hebrews strikes a note of eschatological difference. Yet the contrasts which form the backbone of the apostle’s exhortation are, as Grässer notes, comparative rather than contradictory.10 The argument is a minori ad maius.11 The exordium is therefore not a straightforward eschatological disqualification of the old but rather in brief compass it offers a salvation-­historical argument in which ‘the new corresponds to the old, but surpasses it, and does so absolutely, by providing the perfection of the true, spiritual order.’12 The contrasts place and relativize the old by marking it out as the sphere of promise which has been 7.  Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews I.1. 8.  C. Spicq, L’Epitre aux Hébreux. Tome II – Commentaire (Paris: Gabalda, 1953), p. 1. 9.  J. Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews and the First and Second Epistles of Peter (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 5. 10. Grässer, ‘Hebräer 1,1–4’, p. 211. 11. Grässer, ‘Hebräer 1,1–4’, p. 207. 12. H. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989), p. 36. Barth finds in Heb. 1.1 the decisive New Testament statement of the nature, significance and preliminary or relative status of the Old Testament: Church Dogmatics I/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), p. 84.

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overtaken by fulfilment, as the sphere in which what the church now sees was greeted from afar (11.13). Yet there is more: this continuity-­within-contrast is grounded in God. What gives shape, direction, coherence and climax to the ‘great drama of the history of revelation’13 is God as its enduring subject. The simple, absolute noun θεὸς14, unadorned by epithet or appositional phrase, not only holds together the participial statement and the main clause; it announces the fundamental reality in which all else in the exhortation has its ground.15 As Calvin puts it: ‘With the laying of this foundation the agreement between the Law and the Gospel is established, because God, who is always like himself, and whose Word is unchanging, and whose truth is unshakeable, spoke in both together.’16 God as the single speaking subject in the history of revelation is the ‘pledge and ground’17 of revelation’s historical unity. It is because of God, therefore, that the church cannot overlook ‘the fathers’, that is, Israel. The history of divine revelation, at whose latter end stands the church, includes the existence of Israel as the sphere of prospect and promise. This means, therefore, that the church’s continuity with Israel is not simply at the level of the history of religions; it is, rather, a theological state of affairs which must be elucidated out of the fact that at different points in the sequential history of revelation both Israel and the church are addressees of God’s speech. ‘God, having spoken, spoke.’18 The earlier and the later speaking, grounded in the fact that God is indeed ‘always like himself ’, are not disconnected acts but episodes in the unified history of promise and fulfilment enacted by the one God. Nevertheless, the relativization is real: an end is set to the old by the inauguration of the new and better covenant, in the light of which the first covenant is ‘growing old’ and ‘ready to vanish away’ (8.13). If we follow the trajectory marked by the progress of the divine speech, the move from minor to maior must be made, and as it is made, the minor comes to be seen as incomplete. God’s revelation in the past was diffuse, multiple, piecemeal, varied in both occasion and mode, and so indeterminate, lacking in finality: thus those long alliterative adverbs πολυμερῶς and πολυτρόπως with which the exordium opens. This revelation took place ‘of old’, that is, in an epoch of anticipation which, by virtue of the eschatological self-­utterance of God in his Son, is now closed. It was accomplished through the service of ‘the prophets’, that is, through all those by whom the presence and will of God was brought to bear upon the life of his people. As such it was undoubtedly God’s word, but an indirect word, a word testifying to and serving 13. Spicq, L’Epitre aux Hébreux, p. 2. 14.  All citations of the Greek are from E. Nestle, E. Nestle, B. Aland, et al., The Greek New Testament, 27th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1993). 15.  ‘Der Ausgangspunkt der Rede ist der Blick auf Gott’ (O. Michel, Der Brief an die Hebräer [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1966], p. 92). 16.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. 5. 17.  B. F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 5. 18.  Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, p. 4.

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the haec dicit dominus but not itself directly and immediately God’s word. God spoke ‘in’ (ἐν) the prophets in the instrumental sense of ‘through’. And the recipients of this indirect word were, accordingly, not those who exist in the age to come but their ancestors in the time of expectation who looked for but did not receive what was promised (11.39). In view of this relativity and imperfection, the church is faced by a command to proceed. The people of the old covenant, Calvin comments, ‘did not reckon with the possibility that God had postponed a fuller teaching to another time’, and so failed to ‘hurry on to the goal’.19 But what are the grounds of this command to press on to the new? With what legitimacy does the maior make a greater claim upon the church’s allegiance than the minor? The move from Israel to the church is not to be made on the basis of comparison of the immanent characteristics of two religious traditions; nor is it a matter of some inner-­religious evolution in which the true religion finally comes to light. Once again: the relation of Israel and the church is not a matter of the history of religion but of the history of revelation. The only ground on which the church may claim to fulfil and move beyond the old covenant is the fact that in the Son it has been given to the church to hear the ‘last closing word’.20 His intervention, his utterance of the final word, is alone that which makes the transition from old to new. In these last days God has spoken to us in one who is Son. The church is the assembly which exists ‘in these last days’, that is, in ‘messianic time’.21 This is because the church lives in the aftermath of the final and decisive utterance of God, an utterance which brings into being ‘an era characterised by plenitude of divine revelation.’22 What is of most interest in the phrase ‘in these last days’ is not the presence of a temporal eschatology (rather than a spatial dualism of realms of reality), but something more basic to the exhortation as a whole: the end of the ages is the church’s true condition. This is reinforced by the use of the demonstrative pronoun τούτων – these last days – emphasizing that this really is the time in which the church exists.23 We should not overlook the strikingly total character of what is said. Speaking of the age in which the church exists as the ‘last days’ is not to set forth a claim to be considered and contested; nor is it to articulate one possible interpretation of the church’s condition to be coordinated with others. It is to lay claim to eschatological knowledge, knowledge which outbids all other descriptions of the church’s condition by setting the church in a temporal economy periodized and elucidated by divine speech. From this speech, the church is required to derive its historical self-­understanding, that is, its sense of its location in time. In doing this, of course, the church is not merely adopting a view of history, 19.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. 6. 20.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. 6. 21.  Michel, Der Brief an die Hebräer, p. 94. 22. Spicq, L’Epitre aux Hébreux, p. 4. 23.  The last days form ‘cette période finale où nous sommes’ (Spicq, L’Epitre aux Hébreux, p. 4).

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but rather testifying to the ground of its moral, social and intellectual difference. And the church is, moreover, pledging itself to action in accordance with this difference. It is this latter which is crucial for the epistle’s admonition. Because and only because it has been given to the church to exist in these last days, the community’s ‘weariness and faintheartedness’ (12.3) can be overcome. Without the claim to eschatological existence, the paraenesis would be groundless and without mercy. This messianic or final time is brought into being by a singular and unsurpassable divine act: God spoke. Here the apostle gathers up the entirety of the Son’s existence under the concept of speaking. As Michel puts it: ‘His coming to earth and his exaltation, his word and his way are God’s speaking to us.’24 The agency, we should note, is God’s: eschatological existence is not a discovery, still less an invention, but a disclosure. The action is speech. There is no sense in Hebrews that revelation is a suffused, general presence of God, a dimension of natural existence. Coming to its recipients ab extra, revelation is speech and act. This speech-­act is the declaration of the mind, will and purpose of God, and therefore the establishment of fellowship. Precisely because God has spoken, creaturely existence is not self-­sufficient, but existence in relation to God, communicative existence and therefore communion. This communicative action of God’s is singular. As God’s eschatological disclosure of himself it does not share in the diversity of form which characterizes the word spoken to the fathers in the past; and it is not, like the word delivered to Israel through the prophets, an interim word, a word on the way to something else. It can neither be supplemented nor superseded. It is an act of speech which brings the former era to fulfilment by establishing a new. Finally, this word is spoken ‘to us’. In the same way that the last days are ‘these’ last days, a history in which we have been caught up, so too the divine speaking has the church as its particular object. Here ἡμῖν is an eschatological reality, the social coordinate of God’s final self-­disclosure. The community does not precede the divine speech; revelation is not simply one determinant of a form of social existence which has its life and continuity apart from the fact of God’s final address. God’s speech is that which calls and constitutes the community. This is not to isolate the church from the fathers to whom God also spoke: eschatology and salvation-­history are not to be set in opposition. But because the hearing community, the ‘us’, is the community of these last days, then its members cannot be wholly defined as ‘descendants’ of the fathers, following in the same line and existing in the same condition. In all the very real continuity of the church with the cloud of witnesses, the sign under which the church stands is: ‘God had foreseen something better for us’ (11.40). This, indeed, is critical for the apostle’s exhortation, supplying the ground on which his appeal is made: ‘we must pay the closer attention to what we have heard’ (2.1). With this we reach the culminating affirmation of the exordium, towards which everything so far has been moving, and from which everything subsequent 24.  Michel, Der Brief an die Hebräer, p. 95.

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will follow by way of expansion and explication: God spoke to us in a Son. Why is this so? First, the Son is different in nature, wholly unique and therefore the one in whom final revelation is accomplished. The Son is not simply the fulfilment or conclusion of what has been long anticipated; his excellence is surpassing, incommensurable with what has gone before. The noun υἱός is anarthrous; this, of course, not in order to suggest an indefinite article, as if Jesus were one member of a class of sons – the contrast of υἱός with, on the one hand, ‘the prophets’, and, on the other hand, the ‘many sons’ of 2.10, is plain. Rather, the construction fixes attention upon the Son’s nature: God spoke in ‘one who is Son’. The anarthrous ἐν υἱῷ has ‘qualitative’ force,25 indicating the unique identity of the agent of God’s final revelation. To be ‘Son’ is not a general possibility shared by others. It is to have a particular nature which is neither common nor communicable, and to stand in a wholly unrepeatable relation to the Father. Later Christian tradition will come to conceptualize this by speaking of the Son as a hypostasis or mode of subsistence within the godhead, and of the Son’s relation to the Father as one of filiation. Such terms are abstractions; but they penetrate to and draw out the real force of the phrase here, which is to locate the being of the Son in God, and so to reinforce his uniqueness. Indeed, ἐν υἱῷ might be paraphrased not wholly inappropriately as ‘in the Son’, for there is only one instance of divine Sonship. ‘Son’ is a function of ὁ θεὸς. This is the Achilles heel of Käsemann’s argument in his remarkable early book The Wandering People of God. Käsemann interprets υἱός out of πρωτότοκος (1.6) and ἀρχηγὸς (2.10; 12.2) so that ‘as Christ is the Son, he is such principally in relation to the sons’.26 Indeed, it is the function of the Son as ‘pioneer’ which for Käsemann is the clue to both the Christology and the exhortation of the epistle. There is an important insight here, namely that the Christology of Hebrews does indeed serve ‘paraenetic purposes’.27 But it is vitiated by failure to see that both the relation of the Son to the many sons as first-­born, and also his function as pioneer, require that his Sonship be determined first and foremost by his relation to the Father. Käsemann detaches divine Sonship from its objective anchor in the inner-­divine relations; in effect, the soteriological pro me eclipses a sense that Sonship is an immanent, rather than simply an economic, reality. One result of this is that Käsemann moralizes the paraenesis, by allowing ἀρχηγὸς to become the primary soteriological motif, insufficiently rooted in the finality of the Son’s work of revelation and sacrifice. The result is an exemplarism which mischaracterizes the apostle’s paraenetic design. The Son relates to the sons as their pioneer and perfecter only because he is eternally and by nature the bearer of a more excellent name. 25.  W. L. Lane, Hebrews 1–8, Word Biblical Commentary 47A (Dallas: Word, 1991), p. 11. 26. Käsemann, The Wandering People of God, p. 117. 27. Käsemann, The Wandering People of God, p. 181.

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In the Son, God speaks. In the case of the prophets, ἐν had the instrumental sense; here its sense is more local. One might, perhaps, say ‘in and as’, to try to catch the sense that God’s act of revelation can properly be attributed not only to θεὸς but also to υἱός, who is, by consequence, not simply its instrumental cause. Everything in the exordium – and, indeed, in the exhortation which follows – hangs on the fact that the Son’s superiority is not comparative but absolute. It is only on the ground of the fact that his revelation and sacrifice are the acts of this one that the apostle makes his appeal. ‘To us’, Calvin says, ‘[God] has given his own Son as ambassador.’28 There is perhaps an echo there in Calvin of the parable of the wicked tenants, and if so it registers something very basic to this phrase in Hebrews, namely: the coming of the Son ushers in a final (though not wholly unanticipated) stage in God’s revelatory dealings, one administered not by servants but by a Son; this Son is God speaking in person, and may legitimately command respect and attention of a different order from those who have come before. If we are properly to grasp what is involved in the claim that God speaks ἐν υἱῷ, we must trace its reverberations for the being of God. Because God’s speaking ἐν υἱῷ is God speaking in person, it requires us somehow to conceive of a repetition or differentiation within the being of God himself (this is a point which came naturally to the fathers and which recent students of Christian modifications of Jewish monotheism have gestured towards). There are no proto-­trinitarian hints in the exordium, nor any firm characterization of the distinction between Father and Son (this waits until 1.5). Yet to spell out the respective agencies of θεὸς and υἱός does demand some kind of distinctions within God’s eternal being which enacts itself in their common, though differentiated, revelatory work. Far from being speculative disfiguring of the text, such distinctions serve to secure what the practical eschatology of Hebrews intends, namely the surpassing authority of the Son, in whom God has spoken and by whom the church has been placed in a situation which commands unwavering allegiance. Moreover, making sense of the status of υἱός surely requires us to affirm what is indicated by the concept of Christ’s pre-­existence, namely that he is internal to the identity and therefore the being of God. Caird’s well-­known and somewhat waspish argument in ‘Son By Appointment’ presses hard in the opposite direction. His grounds are partly exegetical: ‘Son’ is ‘always a title for the man Jesus’;29 the weight carried by the notion of ‘appointment’ (5.4–6); and – like Käsemann – the Christological primacy of Jesus’s role as pioneer and his ‘obedience to a purpose of redemption in which he was cast in the crucial role’.30 But there is another aspect of Caird’s argument, namely, an (unexamined) assumption that pre-­existence imperils full humanity. In response to the claim that ‘the author of Hebrews thought of Christ as from first to last a heavenly being’, Caird announces: ‘Against all such crypto-­docetism it cannot be too strongly affirmed that for the author of 28.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. 5. 29.  Caird, ‘Son By Appointment’, p. 74. 30.  Caird, ‘Son By Appointment’, p. 78.

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Hebrews the earthly life of Jesus was paramount and provided for the indispensable foundation for any other claims that might be made on his behalf. The earthly Jesus does not come “trailing clouds of glory” from his preincarnate status, nor is there a single one of his dignities which he is said to hold in virtue of his heavenly origin. He had to become superior to the angels and to inherit the loftier name.’31 The exegetical claims here are not strong: Caird can, for example, make little sense of the Son’s activity in creation and providence. But, more than this, his basic contention that only an ‘essentially human Jesus’32 can achieve the fulfilment of human destiny is mistaken on two counts: it exalts the Son’s role as pioneer at cost to his role as final revealer and purifier, and it fails to make the corrections to the doctrine of God on the basis of which pre-­existence can be fully consistent with vere homo. In this, at least, the Christology of the councils proves a surer guide to Hebrews and its exhortation. ἐν υἱῷ, therefore, with its mutually defining theocentricity and Christocentricity, introduces the elements of finality and comprehensiveness which ground the apostle’s exhortation. Consideration of the prophetic revelation, we saw, issues a command to proceed, to hurry on to the goal; similarly, the goal having been reached, there is a command to halt. ‘If God has now spoken his last word, it is right to advance this far, just as we must halt our steps when we arrive at him’ – so Calvin.33 Hebrews does not think of the situation of the church as a process of ongoing negotiation. It is highly determinate; and what threatens it is not premature closure but, as Calvin again puts it, ‘the transgression of the limit which the apostle fixed.’34 The life of the church is in one sense retrospective – to a final revelation and a finished sacrifice. Its task, therefore, is not to seek or create some fresh wisdom but ‘to pay the closer attention to what we have heard’ (2.1). Because ‘the closing Word’35 has been spoken, the church stands before the summons: ‘Listen to him’ (cf. Matt. 17.5).

III From here to its close the exordium moves to make eight assertions about the Son. Set out in a rough economic sequence from pre-­temporal eternity to glorification, they function as expansions and reiterations of what is contained in his ‘more excellent name’.

31.  Caird, ‘Son By Appointment’, p. 76. 32.  Caird, ‘Son By Appointment’, p. 81. 33.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. 6. 34.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. 6. 35.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. 6.

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God appointed him the heir of all things The inheriting spoken of here is not the transference of property from a testator, but, rather, the permanent state and exercise of dominion: as heir the Son is Lord, entitled to rule all things. Most interpreters read this as a simple eschatological statement, often encouraged to do so by the chiastic structure of vv. 2b-3 in which ‘heir’ as the first characterization of the Son is matched by the heavenly session as the point at which the Son comes into his inheritance as Lord. Yet the assertion is as much protological as it is eschatological. Although it certainly looks ahead to the coming dominion of the Son, it roots that dominion in the eternal relation of the Son to God as one who appoints him to exercise universal rule. In this way, the initial clause about the Son’s appointment as heir serves to anticipate and enclose the Christological affirmations which follow, indicating both the ground and the goal of the tiny recital of God’s acts in the Son – creation, providence and reconciliation. Much, therefore, hangs on what we make of the Son’s ‘appointment’. Is this to be read in a roughly adoptionist way, indicative of Jesus’s ennoblement to the rank of ruler of all things? At the very least, this is both exegetically and theologically counter-­intuitive; arguments in its favour are usually driven by the fear that only in this way can the full humanity of Jesus be retained. In light of the exalted status of ‘Son’ in the first half of verse 2, however, the appointment refers us back to an eternal, inner-­divine relation of θεὸς and υἱός. The Son’s appointment is not an event in time between God and a creature; it is the enactment of the relations of paternity and filiation which, along with spiration, are the manner in which God eternally is. Appointment, therefore, refers to the pre-­temporal decision in which God the Father purposes that the Son should be the one in whom he creates, upholds and redeems the creation, and so expresses his rule over all things. This appointment is eternal, before all time. But this is not all: it is also an appointment which directs the way of the Son to temporal existence, because it is appointment not simply to a state but to a movement. The Son’s appointment is a being-­towards existence and action in time. That existence and action in time are not the means whereby the Son comes to acquire his inheritance and so enhance his dignity; rather, they are the historical activity corresponding to his antecedent status as dominus deus. His perfection as Son and heir includes this movement, this career, because it is also an externally enacted perfection. ‘Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever’ and ‘he sat down’ are equally basic to understanding the Son’s status as heir of all things. And it is indeed all things over which he is Lord; as heir he enjoys comprehensive, unrestricted dominion, for God has put everything in subjection under his feet (2.8). ‘All things’ marks the strictest demarcation between the Son and the sons. Even as the one who brings many sons to glory, as the pioneer, as the sanctifier of his brothers, as the one who is in the midst of the congregation, sharing in flesh and blood and partaking of the same nature – even as all this, he is different to the utmost. And yet, even in this utter difference, he is indeed the one who glorifies and sanctifies others, partaking of their nature that he might share his inheritance

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with them. As heir he bestows blessings. Antiochene exegetes like Chrysostom and Theodoret, and also Calvin, were therefore correct to emphasize the soteriological dimensions of the Son’s status as heir (which they attribute to his human nature), since he is the one who restores to his fellow-­creatures the blessings from which we have alienated ourselves by sin. ‘The name “heir” is attributed to Christ as manifest in the flesh’, writes Calvin, ‘for in being made man and putting on the same nature as us, he took on himself the heirship, in order to restore to us what we had lost in Adam. In the beginning God established man as his son to be heir of all good things; but the first man by his sin alienated from God both himself and his posterity, and deprived them both of the blessing of God and of all good things. We begin to enjoy the good things of God by right only when Christ, who is the heir of all things, admits us to his fellowship. He is the heir so that he may make us wealthy by his riches.’36 There are, of course, conditions for this soteriological extension of the Son’s heirship: his humanity must be related to his deity without division and without separation, and his relation to us must be grounded in his eternal relation to the Father’s will. Yet the importance of the Son’s role as heir is as much paraenetic as it is dogmatic: only paraenetic because dogmatic, and only because truly dogmatic then effectively paraenetic. Through him God created the world If ‘appoint’ refers to the eternal relation of Father and Son which is the basis of the Son’s status as heir and enricher, with the final clause of v. 2 we move to protology proper, and in particular to the relation of Father and Son in the common external work which the scholastics called the opus naturae. In reading the text here, it is especially important to allow our minds to be directed by the theological logic of what is said, and not to be over-­sensitive to history-­of-religions concepts. What matters is not the putative background of what is said in (for example) Wisdom Christology, but the identity of the one by whom this divine action is undertaken. We are not referred to something behind the Son but to this one himself and to what the apostle has already stated about him. He – not whatever raw materials on which his worshippers may have drawn in making their confession – is the matter of the text. What then is confessed of him? His relation to the totality of created things as their maker is such that he possesses a virtus creatrix which is, as Theodoret puts it, ‘indicative of divinity’.37 Since at least Origen, of course, ‘through’ here has been taken to indicate the subordinate, because instrumental, status of the Son in the divine act of creation: ‘if all things were made . . . through the Logos, then they were

36.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. 7. 37.  Theodoret of Cyrus, Commentary on the Letters of St Paul, vol. 2 (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001), p. 139.

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not made by the Logos, but by a stronger and greater than he’.38 But even if the Son is the instrumental rather than the efficient cause of creation, he acts here as ‘God of God’. His instrumentality is not an indicator of inferiority but of the perfect accord of will and activity between Father and Son. As creator of all things, the Son is God doing God’s will. Father:Son is not power:instrument or superior:inferior but purpose:enactment. ‘Of the Son he says “Thou, Lord, didst found the earth in the beginning and the heavens are the work of thy hands” ’ (1.10). This is why the Son is distinguished from οἱ αἰῶνες, all creatures, the earth and the heavens. Theodoret, again, finds here a statement of the Son’s transcendent eternity, since ‘the ages’ are ‘those things which have their nature by birth.’39 This may be a bit more than the text can bear, the force of οἱ αἰῶνες being spatial-­ material rather than temporal (though the thought does emerge in 1.11f.). But nevertheless it secures something important to the cumulative account of the Son which is building up in the exordium, namely that the Son is beyond comparison with creatures because he is intrinsic to God’s eternal identity. To attribute ‘making’ to the Son is to say that he is originator, not originated. He is not made, and only so maker of all things.40 He is the effulgence of God’s glory Almost as soon as it begins, the recital of the economic acts of the Son is interrupted for a moment by two declarations of the deep foundation on which it rests. The Son is the effulgence of the glory of God, and bears the stamp of God’s very nature. The metaphors carry considerable metaphysical freight from which we do well not to shy. Calvin is certainly correct to resist speculation (‘We ought . . . to put these titles of Christ to our own use, inasmuch as they bear a relation to us’41); but his caution leads him into the mistake of pitting immanent and economic against each other. The apostle’s intention, he writes, ‘was not to describe the likeness of the Father to the Son within the godhead, but . . . to build up our faith fruitfully, so that

38. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of John, in A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, ed., AnteNicene Fathers [ANF], 10 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1867–73; reprint, Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), vol. 9, II.6. 39.  Theodoret, Commentary on the Letters of St Paul, vol. 2, p. 139. 40.  Caird is clearly troubled by the Christological protology here, which he explains (away) by saying that Jesus ‘has indeed his part in creation and providence, but as the goal to which the whole process is directed’; this, because Hebrews has ‘a theology in which the final cause operates as efficient cause also’ (Caird, ‘Son By Appointment’, p.  78). But – as Caird himself says – it is a basic rule of exegesis that practitioners should not ‘impose their preconceptions upon the texts which they profess to expound’ (‘Son By Appointment’, p. 73). 41.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. 8.

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we may learn that God is revealed to us in no other way than in Christ’.42 But this is a fatal contrast: the paraenesis turns precisely on the likeness of Father and Son in the eternal life of God. Consider, first, the metaphor of the Son as the radiance of God’s glory. Put in formal dogmatic terms, the metaphor attests a double reality of filiation and of manifestation: of how the Son has his being in relation to the Father, and of how the Son radiates the presence of God’s majesty. As ἀπαύγασμα, the Son is the self-­ diffusive presence of the one who is himself unapproachable splendour. God’s glory is God himself in the perfect majesty and beauty of his being. This glory is resplendent. Because God himself is light, he pours forth light. God is glorious and therefore radiant. The enactment and form of this divine radiance is God the Son: he is the particular luminous reality in and as which the glory of God presents itself in its brightness. In this respect, ἀπαύγασμα bears an active sense, the radiating of light from a source. The metaphor thus indicates the unbroken continuity of being between God’s glory and its effulgence; light and its splendour are one. The Son is not a body illuminated by a light outside himself, which light he then reflects; rather, his being and act are the actuality of the divine radiance, not simply its mirror.43 The fathers had a sure instinct when they found here a germinal understanding of the commonality of being between the Father and the Son who is ‘light from light’. ‘He is of him’, as Chrysostom puts it44; or again Basil: “‘the brightness” is always thought of with “the glory,” “the image” with the archetype, and the Son always and everywhere together with the Father; nor does even the close connexion of the names, much less the nature of the things, admit of separation.’45 Yet within this consubstantiality of glory and splendour, there is an order, or better, a perfect movement and procession. The order is not one of superiority and inferiority, and the procession is not a temporal becoming. We have to do with an eternal relation between glory and splendour in which the Son is (ὢν) the effulgence of God. Here is Origen, nudging the metaphor in the direction of relations between persons: ‘This is an eternal and everlasting begetting, as brightness is begotten from light’.46 Light and its radiance are not simply identical; they can be distinguished as, on the one hand, glory, and, on the other hand, effulgence. The radiant φῶς which is ἐκ Φωτός is distinguishable from the glorious φῶς which is its source. The radiance can be traced back to the glory from which 42.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. 8. C. Koester picks up this passage from Calvin in the course of suggesting that we should ‘ask questions about revelation rather than ontology’ (Hebrews, Anchor Bible 36 [New York: Doubleday, 2001], p. 189). 43.  A. Vanhoye, Situation du Christ. Epitre aux Hébreux 1 et 2 (Paris: Cerf, 1969), p. 73: ‘la lumière et son rayonnement sont de nature identique’. 44.  Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews II.2. 45.  Basil, On the Holy Spirit (NPNF 2.8), VII.16. 46.  On First Principles I.2.4.

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it streams forth; yet equally, the glory is to its very depths radiant. Glory and radiance are not one simple thing; or, perhaps, their simplicity is the simplicity of a proceeding of radiance from glory. In this proceeding, glory is first (though not in time), and radiance is second (though not thereby inferior). The passive termination – the -μα of ἀπαύγασμα – is to be taken seriously: pure originality is proper to the Father alone. Effulgence and glory differ; but their difference is not one between discrete beings but between moments (persons?) in a movement, the eternal movement of paternity and filiation. ἀπαύγασμα also speaks of manifestation. As the effulgence of divine glory, the Son is God’s act of self-­communication. ‘[I]t is through its brightness that the nature of the light itself is known and experienced.’47 Why is this so important for the apostle’s exhortation? Because the situation which he addresses is one which is determined by the fact that in the Son God’s splendour is radiantly present. In the Son there has already taken place the final contradiction of ignorance, idolatry and evasion. God is light, and in the Son the radiance of his being has already overtaken darkness. And the faltering community to which the apostle addresses himself therefore lives in the sphere which the Son has illuminated; it is no longer free to live as if this manifestation had not taken place. Further: the near edge of this manifestation, the face of it by which the community is struck, is identical with the flesh and blood of Jesus. Manifestation, the effulgence of God’s glory, mean: ‘We see Jesus’ (2.9). This human being, partaking of the same nature as his ‘brothers’, is the splendor gloriae divini. He is the human visibility of God. And yet not immediately, not without qualification. The one who shares in flesh and blood is light. The metaphor serves to put the materiality of Jesus in a new perspective by evoking, as Spicq puts it, ‘the spirituality of the divine nature of the Son, for there is nothing more immaterial than light.’48 Because the Son has his flesh spiritualiter, his flesh is not as such revelation. Incarnation does not mean revelation as matter. Jesus is the human visibility of God; but it is no less true that Jesus is the human visibility of God. Only in this relation, only insofar as his flesh and blood minister the divine radiance, is he manifestation. Hebrews knows of no Jesus apart from the movement of self-­ bestowing divine splendour. Eschatological revelation means that we have not come to what may be touched, but to Jesus (12.18, 24). He bears the very stamp of God’s nature Patristic commentators commonly took this second metaphor of imprinting to be emphasizing the personal differentiation of Father and Son, balancing the accent on consubstantiality brought by the first metaphor of effulgence: ‘imprint’ suggests identity-­in-difference. Over against the Sabellians, this secures the fact that the Son is a hypostatic reality. As God’s express image, the Son, says Chrysostom, is ‘in 47. Origen, On First Principles I.2.7. 48. Spicq, L’Epitre aux Hébreux, p. 8.

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subsistence by himself ’.49 The dogmatics is beyond reproach, but the exegesis is surely flawed. The metaphor of imprinting does not take us in a different direction from that of effulgence, but reinforces it by speaking of the Son as the exact representation of the divine essence. The point of the metaphor is the correspondence or perfect ontological accord in the relation of Father and Son. In their relation there is no deterioration or deformation, but rather a repetition, an exact likeness at the level of the divine ὑπόστασις (substance or essence) in which the distinguishing properties of deity can be clearly picked out. ‘The substance of the Father is in some way engraven on Christ.’50 And this is so immanently and economically, both in the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father and in its economic correlate, the God-­man Jesus Christ. With these two metaphors, then, we brush up against the metaphysics of what is involved in the community’s confession that God speaks in one who is Son: his speech in and as this one is the turning to the world of his very being. That, in the end, is why this divine speech is of such eschatological force; and that is why the salvation which it announces is great beyond comparison. He upholds all things by his powerful word The one in whom God speaks, in whom his glory shines and upon whom God’s imprint is graven, is also the bearer of all creaturely reality. As the exordium returns to its recital of God’s works ad extra, and in particular to the sustaining activity of the Son, we should notice the location of its teaching about providence. It has its place in a larger sequence of teaching about, first, the immanent lively relations of Father and Son, and then, second, about the Son’s agency as creator, saviour and Lord. Providence is shaped by theology proper, by Christology and by soteriology. It is not an aspect of a theistic cosmology or a theory of history, but a corollary of the Father’s dealings with creatures in the Son. As a consequence, it is pastorally directed, a constituent of the apostle’s address of his hearers’ hazardous situation in which their faith may prove abortive and not reach its proper term (4.1-11). The Son’s ‘bearing’ of all things is therefore part of the same merciful work as revelation and sacrifice, for in bringing creatures to their perfection he helps and protects them. Because the Son bears all things, the community need not stall from anxiety but can with good confidence confess: ‘The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid; what can man do to me?’ (13.6; Ps. 27.1; 118.6). This, of course, does not collapse the properly cosmic scope of providence into the domestic sphere of Christian experience. Bearing all things, the Son’s governance is comprehensive. The one who bears all things is their maker. And his relation to all that he makes is not merely originary, as a kind of initial impulse; it is enduring and purposive. Having brought the creation to be, he enables it to 49.  Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews II.1; see here Greer, The Captain of Our Salvation, pp. 224–306. 50.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. 8.

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continue to be, making it the object of his continual care. ‘Bearing’ here (φέρων) has a double sense of ‘bearing up’ and ‘bearing along’, upholding and perfecting. In bearing up all things, the Son preserves them in their proper state as creatures who have been given the gift of life, preventing their disintegration from within or their destruction from without. In bearing along all things, the Son ‘directs and guides’51 them to their end. He is not merely a passive support of all things (Atlas!) but one who rules creaturely occurrence and so completes the creator’s purpose. The Son therefore exercises ‘present and continuous support and carrying forward to their end of all created things.’52 How? By his ‘powerful word’ (the genitive τῆς δυνάμεως has adjectival force). The Son’s word is the enactment of his will, which is divinely potent and effective. In saying that the Son’s governance of all things takes place through his word, the exordium stresses the immediacy and irresistibility of what the Son does. What he declares, is and remains. His word is not a proffer of meaning but an accomplishment. His governance does not first have to establish its rule over countervailing forces; it is effortless, calm, fully sufficient. There is, says Chrysostom, an ‘easiness’ to the Son’s providential work.53 This powerful word is a reiteration and extension of the creative word which bestowed structure upon creation (11.3). The Son is thus not merely one who causes all things but who also accompanies and carries them to completion. The ῥῆμα θεοῦ (11.3) which frames all reality is the ῥῆμα τῆς δυνάμεως αὐτοῦ. His power, notice; he, the Son, is the agent of the world’s maintenance; through him it is borne along to its term. He made purification for sins The work of providence does not suffice to perfect the world. This is because, among all the things made and upheld by the Son, there is the human creature. To this creature God’s relation is one of personal, moral fellowship. But the world is retarded in attaining its perfection by the fact that this fellowship is polluted; what is needed, therefore, if the world is to reach its consummation, is not only conservation and governance but cleansing. And so: he made purification for sins. There is an intensification here, what Spicq calls a certain ‘density’54 as the exordium moves from the cosmic to the historically particular. Yet we should not overlook the strict continuity of active subject: the one who effected cleansing is none other than the heir of all things, their creator and preserver, the effulgence and exact imprint of God. Patristic exegetes commonly attributed the work of purification to the human nature of the incarnate Son; they have been followed by hyper-Antiochene biblical scholars anxious to safeguard the integral humanity of 51.  Theodoret, Commentary on the Letters of St Paul, vol. 2, p. 140. 52.  Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, p. 13. 53.  Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews II.2. 54. Spicq, L’Epitre aux Hébreux, p. 10.

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Jesus (though often for reasons less noble than those of their antique forbears). That the Son’s humanity is intrinsic to the realization of atonement is undoubtedly basic to Hebrews’ soteriology. Purification rests on an act of fellowship in which the one who sanctifies shares the nature of those who are sanctified. In this act, he is not ashamed to unite himself to them in their shame, to exist in the midst of the congregation. But this act of fellowship has as its indispensable basis the deity of the Son; his fellowship with the polluted saves in a final way because it is a divine work. The condition of the Son’s saving fellowship with sinners is his utter difference. This is of critical importance to the theology of Christ’s priesthood, whose unlikeness to that of the Levitical order is basic to the exhortation. He is not ‘chosen from among men’ (5.1); he is a priest not by genealogy but ‘by the power of an indestructible life’ (7.10); and so his priesthood is permanent (7.24) and his offering final and sufficient. And consequently, ‘he is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him’ (7.25). In short: the humanity of the purifier rests on his deity as its antecedent condition. There is an order here, though not one of time or rank but rather of a movement in which the eternal will of God is enacted in time by the Son who shares in flesh and blood. As Heb. 10.10 puts it, ‘sanctification’ – purification from sin – requires both the divine will and the offering of the body of Jesus. Purification is achieved by ‘the suffering of death’ (2.9) on the part of this divine-­human priest, who offered his own blood to ‘purify the conscience’ (9.14). His act of purification is both completed and absolute: he made purification; ‘by a single offering he has purified for all time those who are sanctified’ (10.14). The Vulgate’s present participle purgationem peccatorum faciens misses both the grammar and the doctrine of the Greek ποιησάμενος. That single act is absolute, because it deals with sins in their totality; the purging is neither potential nor partial but a completed and complete affair. In terms of paraenesis, this is why the work of the Son achieves an eschatological purification, projecting its recipients into a new situation. By it, ‘a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God’ (7.19). Far from encouraging indolence, however, this places the community under the most severe obligation: ‘Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering’ (10.23). To fail to do this – to treat the purification achieved by Christ the high priest as simple absolution, without mandate – is to fall into fearful judgement. ‘How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace?’ (10.29). He sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high This, the syntactical and rhetorical climax of the exordium, is also the culminating moment of the drama in which the Son’s prophetic and priestly work is completed by the inaugural act of his royal office: ‘he sat down’. But in what sense may we speak of ‘inauguration’? Is the Son’s heavenly session simply a repetition of his changeless divine status exaltationis? Or is it his entry into a status and office only acquired at the end of his humiliation and saving work? As with the Son’s

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‘appointment’ in verse 2 and his ‘becoming superior’ and ‘obtaining a name’ in verse 4, so here: to what degree are sonship, and the lordship of the Son, implicated in time? Hebrews is untroubled by the contrast we commonly sense between the eternity of Christ’s sonship and the element of ‘newness’ in the event of the heavenly session. ‘Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever’ (1.8) and ‘he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high’ (l.3) are not competing elements in sonship. Rather than setting them against each other (perhaps as divergent and awkwardly juxtaposed Christological traditions55), we need to see both as integral to the living perfection of the Son. The Son is perfect, bears the stamp of God’s nature, and so shares in the wholly realized fullness of God’s being. Enthronement, therefore, cannot mean acquiring an honour or jurisdiction not previously possessed; indeed, the kingly rule of the Son is not some accidental status or role external to his being, but rather is what he is: he is king, and his kingship is therefore also manifest in his enthronement at the end of his saving work. But the Son’s perfection is the perfection of his life, and therefore includes movement, the repetition in time of his eternal being. ‘He sat down’ is that moment at which the Son’s eternal rule is reiterated at the climax of its economic enactment. As Son and God, he is at once origin, movement and goal. The enthroned Son occupies the position of divine privilege, honour and power. He is ‘at the right hand of the Majesty on high’, the periphrasis drawing attention to the ineffable sublimity of God, with whom and as whom the Son is identified. The Son is exalted, and so transcends all that is not God. ‘Jesus, the Son of God’ has ‘passed through the heavens’ (4.14); he is ‘exalted above the heavens’ (7.26). From there he exercises the government and judgement of God. This serves both to encourage and to chasten the community: to stand beneath his rule is to be absolutely protected and no less absolutely commanded. Enthronement also indicates the completion of the Son’s priestly work – hence the sequence: when he had purged our sins, he sat down. And hence, too, the contrast with the Levitical priesthood. ‘[E]very priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God’ (10.11f.). Standing signals a work unfinished and unfinishable; sitting down signals a perfect and sufficient work. That is why (according to 10.13) one of the things which the Son does as the enthroned Lord is . . . wait. This waiting is not enforced inactivity, or patience in face of delayed completion, but a resting in his achievement which now takes its course and subdues everything to itself. Omnipotence waits as its irresistible will is realized. Further, the Son’s being seated does not mean removal and immobility; it is presence and activity as well as waiting. Because (and only because) he has passed through the heavens, the Son is universally present to superintend all creaturely occurrence and so ‘able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him’ (7.25). 55. See, for example, J. D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making. An Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (London: SCM, 1980), pp. 51–6.

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He has obtained a more excellent name Finally, this exalted one has become as much superior to angels as his name excels theirs. In this closing verse of the exordium, which neatly effects the transition to the demonstration of the Son’s superiority to angels in the catena which forms the rest of the first chapter, we have the logic and rhetoric of excess. The effect of the accumulated comparatives (κρείττων, διαφορώτερον) is to say ‘incomparable’: the comparison bursts all bounds. As with the rest of the exordium, the Son’s superiority is not steadily incremental but different in kind. His superiority over angels is not simply such that he is the highest in dignity amongst the heavenly courtiers. He is the enthroned object of their worship (cf. 1.6). This is not undermined by the fact that he has become superior and has obtained by inheritance the more excellent name. ‘Become’ and ‘obtain’ are not to be taken to mean the realization or acquisition of some wholly new, additional reality. Rather, once again they betoken a perfect movement in the being of God. This movement is not a coming-­to-be; it is what might be called ‘extended perfection’, a movement which even in its mobility is full and which demonstrates its fullness as it enacts itself. ‘Become’ and ‘obtain’ therefore connote not a transition from lack to plenitude but rather the form of God’s perfect life. At the end of this movement, and in an emphatic position as the final word of the exordium, stands a name; but it is a name which we do not know. Son? This seems natural in view of the next verse where God addresses the Son (though υἱός there is as much title as name). Is it, then, the tetragrammaton? This would accord with what has already been said in the exordium about the Son’s deity. Perhaps there is a deliberate withholding of the name. Spicq draws an intriguing parallel with Rev. 19.12, where the figure seated on the white horse (later called ‘the Word of God’, Rev. 19.13) ‘has a name inscribed which no-­one knows but himself ’.56 This continues the reticence seen in the use of the periphrasis in verse 3 (‘the Majesty on high’). And it is not without theological weight. For as one whose name is unknown, the Son is transcendentally excellent, not specifiable, infinitely regressive, bearer of the name beyond names. And all this because he is the Son of God.

IV By way of brief conclusion . . . Theodoret spoke of ‘the brightness of the insight into divine things on the part of the apostle with which he adorned the opening’.57 Overtaken as we are by such apostolic witness, we surely find that one way of proceeding has been irrevocably barred from us. We are no longer entitled to take

56.  L’Epitre aux Hébreux, p. 12. 57.  Theodoret, Commentary on the Letters of St Paul, vol. 2, p. 136.

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up a position vis-à-­vis what is said, to handle it as a possible but not inescapably necessary object of our acknowledgement. Still less are we free to peer behind it and give ourselves a satisfactory account of its background and genesis, or to transcend it by conceptual translation. Here an apostle speaks, and what is said transcends and encloses us. It also transcends and encloses our exegetical and dogmatic labours, which will remain disordered until directed by the confession that in these last days God has spoken to us by one who is Son. The historical, literary and speculative virtues of exegetes and dogmaticians are therefore subordinate to spiritual graces: faithfulness to the apostolic gospel, attentiveness, perseverance, charity in debate and humility under correction, openness to the gifts of God, a desire to serve the church. In dedicating his commentary on Hebrews to the King of Poland, Calvin wrote thus: ‘I do not say that I have succeeded in the exposition which I have undertaken, but I feel confident that when you have read it you will at least approve my fidelity and diligence. As I do not claim the praise of great knowledge or of erudition, so I am not ashamed to profess what has been given to me by the Lord for the purpose of understanding the Scripture (since this is simply to glory in him). If I have any talents for assisting the church of Christ in this direction, I have endeavoured to give clear proof for it in this study of mine.’58 That for exegetes and dogmaticians is how matters should be.59

58.  Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, p. x. 59.  My thanks to Chris Richardson for comments on the paper.

Part II G od’s O uter W orks

Chapter 6 T r i n i t y a n d C r e at io n

I cognitio divinarum personarum fuit necessaria nobis . . . ad recte sentiendum de creatione rerum1 The task of the Christian doctrine of creation is rational contemplation of the Holy Trinity in the outward work of love by which God established and ordered creaturely reality, a work issuing from the infinite uncreated and wholly realized movement of God’s life in himself. The matter of the doctrine arranges itself as four topics; the identity of the creator; the character of his act of creation; the several natures and ends of creatures; the relation of creatures to God. Here I restrict myself largely to the first, and most decisive, topic, though with glancing reference to the second. Three principles guide what follows. The first two will be enlarged upon in the course of the exposition, and at this point need be stated only cursorily. First, the Christian doctrine of creation makes little sense except against the background of a well-­ordered understanding of the distinction between uncreated and created being. We commonly pass over this distinction too lightly, sometimes because we allow our attention to be absorbed by one of its corollaries, creatio ex nihilo, sometimes because we recoil from the devaluation of created being which degenerate versions of the distinction may suggest. But, properly made, the distinction is elemental, governing what may be said about all four divisions of the doctrine – God, the act of creation, created natures and ends, and creatures’ relation to God. Second, in that the doctrine of creation concerns an external work of God, it refers back to prior teaching about the movement of God’s inner life. Reflection on creation therefore requires clarity about some primary topics in trinitarian theology: the relation of essence and persons, the distinction between immanent and transitive divine acts, the indivisibility of the opera ad extra. A third principle requires a little more extensive explanation. A Christian doctrine of creation is doubly inhibited: by the ineffability of its object, and by the 1.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.32.1 ad 3.

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limits of fallen finite intelligence. The doctrine is chiefly concerned, not so much with causal explanation of what is as with contemplation of the fact that what is might not have been and yet is, and of the infinite bliss of God who lies on the other side of that ‘might not have been’. The doctrine’s core, in other words, is not cosmology but theology proper – God’s ‘invisible nature’ (Rom. 1.20), which, even when manifest in the visibilia of created reality, exceeds comprehensive intelligence (a point obscured when teaching about creation is annexed by natural theology). Knowledge of the creator and of creation is creaturely knowledge; in knowing the creator and his act, and ourselves as creatures, we do not transcend our creaturely condition, but repeat it: ‘no point of contemplation can be found outside Himself ’, Hilary reminds his readers.2 More particularly, in this matter, creaturely knowledge is directed to an agent wholly surpassing us, to an act from whose occurrence we were absent: ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?’ (Job 38.4). Moreover – as God’s question to Job discloses – what restricts us is not simply the finiteness of created intelligence but its fallenness and ‘futility’ (Rom. 1.21), its darkening of counsel by words without wisdom (Job 38.2). Knowledge of the creator and of ourselves as creatures is a casualty of the fall: we will not honour the creator (Rom. 1.21), we will not acknowledge ourselves to be his creatures. Fallen intelligence tends away from God, in forgetfulness and impatience (Ps. 106.13). To know its creator, reason must be healed by repentance and the suffering of divine instruction, by which love of God is made to grow. The rule which governs teaching about the Trinity, and therefore about creation as one of its extensions, is: love alone restores knowledge. Love, furthermore, is the end of theological contemplation of the creator and his work. The goal of the redeemed mind’s exercise in this matter is ‘that [God] may himself be sought, and himself be loved.’3 Or, as a later Augustinian put it, the task of trinitarian theology is ‘to manifest what is expressly revealed in the Scripture concerning God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; so as that we may duly believe in him, yield obedience unto him, enjoy communion with him, walk in his love and fear, and so come at length to be blessed with him for evermore.’4 What Christian theology says about creation is a function of what it says about God, and what it says about God is a function of what it hears from God. This is why a Christian doctrine of creation is an exercise in dogmatics. Like all dogmatics, it partakes in the movement of created reason as with the illumination of divine revelation it is conducted out of darkness into the light and life of God. Any worth which a dogmatics of creation possesses derives from participation in this movement, above all as dogmatics follows the indications of the prophets and apostles. Barth was right to insist that the doctrine of creation is part of the credo, not a pre-­dogmatic exercise; the isolation of creation from the rest of the dogmatic 2. Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity (NPNF 2.9), II.6. 3.  Augustine, De trinitate (NPNF 1.3), II.1. 4.  J. Owen, A Brief Declaration and Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity [1669], in The Works of John Owen, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), p. 406.

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corpus has deleterious consequences. Yet reticence is needed, for, on the one hand, dogmatics is ectypal, not archetypal, theology, and has cause to shun easy confidence; and, on the other hand, faithful reason is not coincident with any one intellectual discipline. In the matter of the triune creator, dogmatics frequently stumbles, and often stands in need of others – especially philosophical theologians – to recall it to its proper matter and task.5 And yet we ought not to greet this state of affairs with relief as an opportunity to disencumber ourselves of an embarrassing and stubborn discipline. It is simply that what matters is not disciplinary demarcations but modes of inquiry and ends.

II ipsa essentia non aliud sit quam ipsa trinitas6 1. It is unwise to proceed directly to speak of creation as a trinitarian act; an approach should be made by way of some elements of trinitarian theology, impatience with or neglect of which generate misunderstanding and misuse of the Christian doctrine of God. To understand the outer causality of the triune persons we must understand their natures, and so their unity in the one divine essence. Particularly in considering creation it is important that the order of dogmatic exposition respect the material order of Christian teaching about the Trinity in relation to creatures: first the divine essence, then the distinction of persons, and (only) then the procession of creatures from God. Instinctively our minds are apt to run in a countervailing direction, preferring to begin with God’s external works – perhaps because we are persuaded that Scripture itself directs us to the historical-­phenomenological order of the divine acts towards the world, perhaps because we conflate being and time, the divine economy and temporal experience. Inhibiting these instincts is no light matter, and has to be achieved discursively, over the course of an orderly display of trinitarian teaching. At the outset, it should simply be noted that progress with each point of the doctrine of the Trinity requires us to resist habit, no more so than the assumption that 5. It is doubtless the case that some of the most penetrating recent work on the metaphysics of the doctrine of creation – most of all the radical difference of creator and creature – has been from the hands of philosophical theologians (Braine, Burrell, Sokolowski), who often demonstrate dogmatic understanding superior to that of many dogmaticians. This is not to endorse David Braine’s proposal about the ‘indispensable negative role of metaphysics in any theology’ (D. Braine, The Reality of Time and the Existence of God. The Project of Proving God’s Existence [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988], p.  350), but simply to say that dogmatics has no monopoly on theological understanding. 6.  Augustine, Ep. 120.3.17, in Epistulae CI-CXXIX, CCSL 31B (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009).

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to begin from talk of God’s life in himself is to obscure, not to illuminate, the divine economy.7 The material sequence essence–persons–external processions, along with the corollary distinction between immanent and transitive divine acts, recognizes that uncreated being and created being are fundamentally unlike. In recognizing this, and in grounding the opera ad extra in the perfect inner life of God, theology resists the temptation to, as it were, seize on God’s economic activity as in and of itself some sort of unshakeable foundation, something at once more historically available and evangelically dense. God’s being is indeed being in act; but by ‘act’ here we do not restrict ourselves to those acts whereby God establishes, preserves, redeems and perfects creatures, but also – primarily – refer to the infinite underivative movement of God in himself, which is the founding condition for the economy. We do not understand the economy unless we take time to consider God who is, though creatures might not have been. 2.  A theology of the triune creator thus begins by attending to the special character of God’s unity as it is confessed by Christian faith; in particular, it tries to give some sort of account of the indivisibility and irreducibility of the three persons of the godhead. Already at this point basic decisions about the legitimacy and limits of appropriation in the theology of God’s external works begin to be taken. As we consider the relation of the common divine essence and the three divine persons, we ought not to allow ourselves to be mesmerized by the contiguous but nevertheless rather different distinction between Deus unus and Deus trinus, especially when the latter distinction is taken (as it is by some contemporary trinitarians) to indicate the irreconcilability of generic (mono)theism and a doctrine of God emphasizing personal differentiation. As it is usually deployed, the distinction between the one God and the triune God already opposes what the concept of God’s indivisibility seeks to hold together, namely ‘essentialism’ and ‘personalism’.8 Avoiding the opposition requires that we do not settle either on a 7. In his superlative study The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Gilles Emery notes that ‘By respecting the absolute transcendence of God’s being, knowledge and love, Thomas founds the participation of creatures in the divine life, and ensures the total liberty of the action which God exercises in the world on behalf of creatures . . . What may look superficially like an approach which is detached from the economy of creation and salvation, turns out in reality to be a teaching which contains a deep-­seated window into the foundations of the economy. For Thomas, creation and salvation are illuminated from within the doctrine of God himself. One does not take God’s action seriously by allowing his relations to the world to condition him, but, rather, one discovers the source of the economy by contemplating the immanent and transcendent being of God.’ (pp. 42f.) 8.  Two historical accounts display the issue well: G. Emery, ‘Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in St. Thomas Aquinas?’, in Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti: Sapientia, 2003), pp. 165–208; A. de Halleux, ‘Personnalisme ou Essentialisme Trinitaire chez les Pères Cappadociens’, Revue Theologique de Louvain 17 (1986), pp. 129–55, 265–92.

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conception of the one divine essence in isolation from the three persons, or on a conception of the three persons in isolation from the one divine essence; and it further requires that we avoid thinking of unity and threeness as serially related, and that we do not confuse essential and relative predication. These stipulations, easy to state, prove remarkably taxing to follow. Applied to God, ‘one’ and ‘three’ are mutually interpretative and reinforcing. God’s unity is not unity tout court but triunity; God’s threeness is the threeness of the persons of the one indivisible divine essence. Threeness is not something additional to oneness; oneness is not a combination of three or divisible into three. But already such routine definitions alert us to a difficulty we may be prone to overlook, especially if inclined readily to assign economic acts to one or other of the divine persons, namely that, such is the lack of proportion between uncreated and created being, a conception of divine triunity – a unity of three persons having a common essence – is unavailable to us. We must therefore always keep pushing beyond a finite conception of unity, in order to carry the distinction between God and creatures through into the activity of conceiving God, and so to unsettle well-­seated intuitions. The triune God is one simple indivisible essence in an irreducible threefold personal modification. That is, God’s unity is characterized by modes of being in each of which the entire divine essence subsists in a particular way; this simultaneous, eternal existence in these three modes is the one divine essence. Accordingly, the persons of the godhead are not distinguished from the divine essence realiter; there are not three eternals, or three incomprehensibles, or three uncreated, or three almighties, or three gods. This is not to reduce the persons back into some anterior unity (that is, this does not ‘confound the persons’), but simply to state that the persons are inseparable from the essence, and the essence inseparable from its threefold personal modification. Pater et filius et spiritus sanctus unus deus est:9 the singular verb is decisive. This begins to point towards a notion of the simplicity of the triune God as one essence in a threefold modal or personal differentiation. This is God’s life, and so this is the basis on which we may go on to speak of the indivisibility of the outer works of God. More, however, needs to be said by way of explication of modal or personal differentiation. 3.  ‘[A] divine person is nothing but the divine essence, upon the account of an especial property, subsisting in an especial manner.’10 Divine persons, that is, are not fractions of the divine essence, or some reality additional to that essence; they are irreducible modes of that essence. Each person has the fullness of the divine essence by nature (not by acquisition, for neither generation nor spiration is a ‘coming-­tobe’), and each person is marked out in two ways. First, each person is distinguished 9.  Augustine, De trinitate I.12, in De trinitate libri XV, CCSL 50A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968). 10.  J. Owen, A Brief Declaration and Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, p. 407.

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by relations to the other persons: active generation, passive generation, active spiration, passive spiration. Second, each person possesses characteristics proper to that specific mode of the essence: paternity, filiation and emanation (or procession). These relations and personal ‘notions’ determine the hypostatic character of each person. By them, each person may be identified, though ‘identified’ is not the happiest term, since it may suggest divisibility and discreteness. The hypostatic characters of the persons are relations (it is meaningless to attribute paternity to the Father apart from the Son, and so on). Relation is primordial in defining the kind of indivisible unity which is God’s life. The point is reinforced by drawing attention to the incommunicability of the personal ‘notions’: if they were communicable, they would be separable from the persons, and it would be possible to reduce the persons to something other than their concrete modes of being. Further, marked out in this way as the bearers of an incommunicable hypostatic character, each person is not identical with, but rather a mode of, the divine essence. That is, no one person is coterminous with the godhead in its entirety, because no person possesses the hypostatic character of the other two. Put differently: each person possesses all that is the divine essence, but not all that is in the three persons of the essence. Taken together, this adds force to the suggestion that the persons are distinguished from the godhead modally, not ‘really’, in the very precise sense of ‘not three beings’, not aliud, aliud, aliud but alius, alius, alius. But ‘mode’ does not signify transient form, differentiated merely economically or in creaturely apprehension, something which could be folded back into an undifferentiated simple essence. Mode is modus entis: not secondary to the ens but the ens in a particular mode. Personal modification and divine simplicity are not inversely but directly proportional. The more we learn to speak of this particular simplicity, the more we will come to understand the persons; the more we speak of this particular kind of modal differentiation, the more we will know of the divine essence. That which is common to the persons and that which is proper to them are not to be arranged as primary:derivative. The divine essence is not anterior to triunity as its substrate; God’s non-­compositeness is identical with his triune life. To recapitulate: the starting-­point for a Christian doctrine of creation, as for any Christian doctrine, is God in himself (theology, says Bonaventure, ‘begins at the very beginning, which is the first principle’11). Only out of the sheer antecedent perfection of God’s life in se can we feel the force of the concept of creation. God in himself is the indivisible one, the irreducible three. This coinherence of simplicity and personal modification eludes us, however. We may only lay out its elements in a discursive manner, separating rationaliter what is realiter a single truth about God, and correcting the inadequacies of a topical anatomy by ensuring that in what we say of one topic we do not neglect to refer to the other topic. We need, that is, a coinherent exposition of the one-­in-three, in which each passage of argument is always completed by the et tamen of the Quicunque vult in order to retain as best 11.  Breviloquium, in Works of St. Bonaventure, vol. 9 (St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute, 2005), I.1.2.

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we can the equilibrium of trinitarian doctrine. This, we shall come to see, is especially important in giving an account of the outer works of the Trinity, including creation. 4.  As we edge a little closer to the triune work of creation, we may expect no relaxation of the rule that the Holy Trinity is perfect blessedness in himself in the absence of creatures. Indeed, it is especially in the matter of creation that the rule must be applied with utmost strictness; any loss of rigour will ruin whatever we go on to say of creation and creatures. One way of observing the rule is to draw the distinction between immanent activities and transitive acts.12 The immanent activities of God are the personal works of Father, Son and Spirit which make up the relations of the divine life; God’s transitive acts are the opera exeuntia, those outgoing works whose term lies beyond the godhead. God’s life in himself is the perfect, still and eternal movement in which the Father generates the Son and together with the Son breathes the Spirit. Generation and spiration – the two ‘emanations’ or processions in which we may discern the personal modes of the one God – are the manner in which God is limitlessly abundant life, reciprocity and ‘ineffable mutual delight’.13 Of these internal works, a number of things may be said, all of which are (ectypal) indications of the unfathomable depth and originality of the triune God from which there flows his presence to creatures as their maker, reconciler and perfecter. (a) God’s ad intra works are intrinsic, their term remaining within the subject of the action (this, over against – for example – Arian ideas that the Father’s generation of the Son is a transitive act, a work like creation, terminating in an object outside God, whereas generation and creation are properly speaking entirely different kinds of divine acts). (b) God’s ad intra works are constitutive, not accidental, activities. They are not ‘voluntary’ in the sense of enacting a decision behind which there lies an agent who might have willed to act otherwise: there is no Father ‘behind’ the generation of the Son, no Father and Son ‘behind’ the breathing of the Spirit (relations of origin are eternal, not sequential). In this sense, therefore, God’s immanent activities are ‘necessary’, not by external compulsion but by absolute or natural necessity: these activities are what it is for God to be God.14 (c) God’s ad intra activities are unceasing, not temporal or transient. They are not an act of self-­constitution or self-­causation (talk of God as causa sui makes no sense); they effect no alteration or modification of the godhead; they are not productive activities which might be 12.  The rudiments of the distinction can be found in Aristotle, Metaphysics 1059a23–b2; see also Aquinas’s distinction between external and inward procession (Summa theologiae Ia.27.1). Following W. G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2003), p. 241, I prefer ‘activity’ over ‘act’ to denote the immanent work of God, since activity ‘denotes something continuous and unceasing’; this also discourages us from thinking that ‘act’ has a univocal application across both the opera ad intra and the opera ad extra. 13.  J. Owen, Christologia, in The Works of John Owen, vol. 1, p. 18. 14. See Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.41.2.

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conceived as finished. (d) God’s ad intra activities require us to speak of distinctions between the persons of the godhead. These distinctions are various. The persons are distinguished by origin (the Son is generated by the Father, but not the Father by the Son; the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son, but not they from him); they are distinguished by the order of the relations of origin which make it possible to speak of the first, second and third persons of the Trinity (though not thereby to suggest temporal priority and posteriority or descending degrees of glory); they are, accordingly, distinguished by the order and mode of their immanent operations, which repeat the order and mode of their personal existence: the Father acts a nullo, the Son acts a Patre, the Spirit ab utroque – though not, of course, at cost to the common aseity in which each person is and acts. Relative or personal predication is permissible and necessary in talking of God’s immanent activities: opera Dei ad intra sunt divisa. And yet relative predication ought not to overrule essential predication. Some things are said of God according to relation, some according to substance.15 This distinction is easy to ignore, especially when impatience with a rather spare concept of relative predication presses us to replace it with a much more psychologically dense notion of ‘personality’. But its retention will prove especially important in considering the indivisibility of God’s external works, and so in formulating how creation is a triune act. 5.  Why, then, is it important that the Christian doctrine of creation contemplate the inner acts in which God is ‘in himself . . . love and blessedness already’?16 A Christian doctrine of God needs to respect ‘the Christian distinction’, that is, the difference between God and creatures which is beyond both reciprocity and dialectic. This metaphysical commitment is generated from a sense of the entire sufficiency of the creator’s life in se.17 The difference between creator and creature 15.  Augustine, De trinitate V.5.6. 16. I. A. Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 2, p. 11. 17.  This formulation is indebted to Robert Sokolowski, in, for example, The God of Faith and Reason (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982); idem, Eucharistic Presence. A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington: Catholic University Press of America, 1994); idem, Presence and Absence. A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); idem,‘Creation and Christian Understanding’, in D. Burrell, B. McGinn, ed., God and Creation. An Ecumenical Symposium (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), pp. 179–92. The formulation has been extended by D. Burrell in, for example, Knowing the Unknowable God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); idem, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993); idem, ‘Aquinas’ Appropriation of Liber de causis to Articulate the Creator as Cause-­of-Being’, in F. Kerr, ed., Contemplating Aquinas. On the Varieties of Interpretation (London: SCM Press, 2003), pp.  75–83; idem, ‘Act of Creation with its Theological Consequences’, in T. G. Weinandy, D. A. Keating, J. P. Yocum, ed., Aquinas on Doctrine. A Critical Introduction (London: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 27–44; idem, ‘Creation, Metaphysics and Ethics’, Faith and Philosophy 18 (2001), pp.  204–21; idem, Faith and Freedom. An Interfaith Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

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is infinite, not just ‘very great’: ‘creator’ does not merely refer to the supreme causal power by which the world is explained, for God would then be simply a ‘principle superior to the world’,18 or ‘the biggest thing around’.19 Such conceptions falter by making God one term in a relation, and so only comparatively, not absolutely, different. Part of the force of talk of God as esse subsistens is to resist this complementarity between God and all that is not God. Sokolowski comments that ‘It is meaningful to say that the one pure act of esse subsistens could “be” all alone . . . The contrast to esse subsistens is not differentiation, but nothing other at all. That there is, in fact, anything other than the one pure act of esse subsistens is due not to the necessity of being coupled or paired . . . but to the unnecessitated choice exercised by the creator.’20 God the creator is not simply the most excellent of beings, because the distinction between uncreated and created being is not a distinction within created being but one between different orders of being; God is not one item in a totality, even the most eminently powerful item in the set of all things. The creator is not contained within τὰ πάντα; he is ‘before’ (πρὸ) them (Col. 1.17). This being so, the creator can be conceived neither by thinking of him as in some fashion continuous with the world, nor by conceiving of a purely dialectical relation between uncreated and created being; both continuity and discontinuity turn the divine difference from creation into a relative or comparative property and so make creation intrinsic to God’s fullness. Yet the triune God could be without the world; no perfection of God would be lost, no triune bliss compromised, were the world not to exist; no enhancement of God is achieved by the world’s existence. Thinking along these lines entails bringing together a formal conception of infinity as non-­composite, utterly underivative ‘difference’ and a materially dense theology of the Trinity’s perfect beatitude, using the former to explicate how the latter relates in a ‘non-­real’ way to what is not itself. ‘Revelation needs a concept of a being which is underivative, but whose underivativeness is not just de facto but intrinsic, arising from a difference in the way in which this being possesses existence, a difference capable of setting it apart from all creatures and rendering it incapable of having a cause: it has to exist “of itself ” without causing its own existence. Revelation needs to understand this being as having an existence in no way limited by a nature as if by something quasi-­abstract and prior, i.e. as infinity of being. That is, this being has to be not only transcendent in identity (it is distinct and causally independent and prior) but also “transcendent in nature”, so that there is an “infinite” gulf of nature between it and creatures.’21 Two corollaries may be mentioned: First, such is the plenitude of life enjoyed by Father, Son and Spirit that God does not create out of need, making good some deficiency. The world cannot complete God; creation is not theogony, because 18. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), p. 12. 19.  Burrell, Faith and Freedom, p. 5. 20. Sokolowski, Presence and Absence, p. 179. 21.  Braine, The Reality of Time and the Existence of God, p. 348.

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created being is derivative not subsistent being. God’s perfect triune life is not mere formless abstraction standing in need of realization by positing another as its counterpart. Second, God’s triune self-­sufficiency means that his relation to created being is gratuitous. This marks the radical difference between, on the one hand, the immanent activities of generation and spiration, and, on the other hand, the transitive act of creation. ‘While God was always Father, he was not always Creator or Maker.’22 And there are other ramifications: that creation is an ‘ethical’ not a ‘physical’ act, that is, not one in which God’s being overflows in a way which undermines God’s self-­possession; that creatio ex nihilo is an unreservedly radical conception; that God’s impassibility in relation to creation, far from being indifference, is an affirmation that the world has value in itself, not as a necessary counterpart to an otherwise deficient being . . . but these must be set to one side.

III processiones divinarum personarum sunt causa creationis.23 Teaching about the Trinity’s immanent perfection enables us to grasp what the divine act of creation is: emanatio totius esse, ‘the introduction of being entirely’.24 How is this an act of the undivided Trinity? To answer that question, we turn to consider God’s external acts, always keeping in mind that it is only after laying the groundwork of a theology of the essence, persons and immanent activities of the godhead that we can proceed in an assured way to treat the opera exeuntia, for God does not first become active in relation to creatures; and it is precisely the antecedent and eternally rich activity of God’s inner being which secures the blessing of creation. 1.  ‘Your creation has its being from the fullness of your goodness. In consequence a good which confers no benefit on you, and which not being from you yourself is not on your level, can nevertheless have its existence caused by you and so will not lack being.’25 God is in himself replete, unoriginate love, the reciprocal fellowship and delight of the three and the utter repose and satisfaction of their love. God requires nothing other than himself. Yet his unoriginate love also originates. Why this should be so, we are incapable of telling, for, though with much concentration we can begin to grasp that it is fitting that God should so act, created intelligence remains stunned by the fact that God has indeed done so. What stuns us – what our intelligence cannot get behind or reduce any further – is the outward movement of God’s love, God’s love under its special aspect of absolute creativity. God’s 22.  T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), p. 87; see also his The Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), pp. 137–41, 203–34. 23.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.6 ad 1. 24.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.1. 25.  Augustine, Confessions XIII.2.2.

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creative love is not the recognition, alteration or ennoblement of an antecedent object beside itself, but the bringing of an object into being, ex nihilo generosity by which life is given. By divine love, the ‘infinite distance’ which ‘cannot be crossed’26 – the distance between being and nothing – has been crossed. The love of God, therefore, has its term primarily in itself but secondarily in the existence of what is other than God, determined by that love for fellowship with him. Creation is, again, not necessary for God. God’s creative love is not ‘a love which is needy and in want’ and so ‘loves in such a way that it is subjected to the things it loves’; God loves not ‘out of the compulsion of his needs’ but ‘out of the abundance of his generosity’.27 Creation is ‘new’ at each moment, wholly contingent upon God’s triune perfection; in its novelty and superfluity creation is therefore, as Aquinas puts it, a ‘blessing’ which issues in praise of the one without need: novitas etiam mundi maxime demonstrat Deum esse, et creaturis non indigere.28 This ‘novelty’ entails both an ever greater disproportion between God and the creation which he loves and the non-­reciprocity of the creator-­creature relation, which is not real on the side of the creator. Yet it is precisely this which is the ground of the creatures’ worth. The dignity of creatures does not consist in furnishing God with an object without which his love would be undirected; it consists simply in creatures being themselves, having a proper creaturely integrity, order and movement in prospect of an end. God does not await the existence of creation to fill out his being, and because of this creation is free, relieved by God’s entire beatitude in himself from having to supply the creator’s poverty.29 Creation, once again, is ‘benefit’, God’s ‘Yes’; in creating the world ‘God rejoices in another which as such has not shared in the divine being . . . he knows and approves this other within the limits of its distinct being.’30 The act of creation is a voluntary (not, again, a ‘physical’) act – a point at which some uses of the language of ‘emanation’ stumble. Delicacy is required: the notion of the divine will has to be stripped of connotations of arbitrariness, so that we do not think of creation as a mere spasmodic exercise of God’s power not anchored in the divine ethos. But ‘will’ need not mean this; properly speaking, it signifies determination to act according to nature, and so to act with supreme generosity in accord with and on the basis of God’s eternal love of himself in the procession of Son and Spirit from the Father.

26.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.2 obj. 4, ad 4. 27.  Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, in The Works of Saint Augustine, vol. I/13, On Genesis (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2002), I.13. 28.  De potentia in Quaestiones Disputatae II (Turin: Marietti, 1965), IV.2 ad 5; see R. te Velde, Aquinas on God. The ‘Divine Science’ of the Summa Theologiae (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 126. 29. On this, see R. Williams, ‘On Being Creatures’, in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 63–78. 30. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1, p. 331.

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2.  What can be said in more detail about the agency of the triune God in the loving work of creation? We begin from some general remarks on the opera ad extra. The outer works of the Trinity are characterized by a specific kind of unity corresponding to the unity of God’s immanent being, that is, an indivisible and irreducible triunity: not finite simplicity or finite plurality but the ineffable three-­ in-oneness of the infinite God. This carries with it a prohibition: divine works in respect of creatures may not be assigned severally to Father, Son and Spirit as to quasi-­independent agents. In the economy the Trinity acts indivisibly, and the works of the Trinity are to be attributed ‘absolutely’ to the one divine essence. Ignoring this rule indicates misunderstanding of prior rules which stipulate that each person of the Trinity is a modus essentis, and that the persons of the godhead are consubstantial. Because the persons do not differ secundum substantiam,31 it is insufficient to speak of the ‘mutual roles’32 enacted by the persons in the economy; inseparable or coinherent action is not simply conjoint operation or the differential action of tres causae sociae.33 Yet the prohibition does not render appropriation illegitimate, evacuating the external works of any personal distinction; rather, it serves to specify both the reach and the limits of appropriation. As Gilles Emery puts it, the ‘indivisibility’ axiom cannot function as ‘the single lever’ in giving an account of the economy.34 What matters is that ‘indivisibility’ and ‘irreducibility’ are so ordered that what is said of external trinitarian operation is in accord with what has already been said of immanent essence and processions (Aquinas’s axiom here runs: modus operandi uniuscujusque rei sequitur modum essendi ipsius35). Common activity is not indistinguishable activity. In appropriating specific external acts to a particular divine person, it is necessary to bear in mind that no divine person can be defined apart from the shared divine essence, since as a modus essentis each procession includes the divine nature. Observation of the hypostatic character of the person does not afford a comprehensive definition of that person. The external actions of the persons are inseparable, there being no radically distributed or composite operation (nor, in one sense, co-­operation). But far from ignoring the rich store of personal appropriations which may be found in the scriptural phenomenology, the axiom opera ad extra sunt indivisa functions to indicate what personal appropriation in fact is, namely eminent or distinct attribution of a common operation to a particular person of the undivided essence.

31.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.32.1 ad 1. 32. R. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, The Works of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 25. 33. H. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), p. 422. 34. Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, p. 348. 35.  Summa theologiae Ia.89.1; see also 1a.50.5, 1a.75.2.

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Indivisibility does not disqualify personal differentiation or restrict it simply to the opera internae. It indicates that economic differentiation is modal, not real, and reinforces the importance of prepositional rather than substantive differentiation (‘from’ the Father, ‘through’ the Son, ‘in’ the Spirit). Modal differentiation does not deny personal agency, however; it simply specifies how the divine persons act. ‘[T] he several persons’, Owen notes, ‘are undivided in their operations, acting all by the same will, the same wisdom, the same power. Every person, therefore, is the author of every work of God, because each person is God, and the divine nature is the same undivided principle of all divine operations; and this ariseth from the unity of the person in the same essence.’36 Each person, note, not no person. Accordingly, appropriation is required to illuminate the external works: indivisible operation does not annul the proprietas of each person. Appropriation is not random assignation. It is governed by what may be known of the immanent personal distinctions of the godhead, that is, by the notae internae and the corresponding mutual activities of Father, Son and Spirit. Nor is appropriation undertaken merely rationaliter, building up a conceptual representation of the economy which may not accord with God’s being. Rather, of each divine work we need to say (a) that it is absolutely the work of the undivided godhead; (b) that each person of the godhead performs that work in a distinct way, following the manner and order of that person’s hypostatic existence; and (c) that particular works may be assigned eminently to one person, without rescinding absolute attribution to the undivided Trinity and without denying that the other two persons also participate in that work in the distinct modes proper to them. The definition of the person to whom a work is eminently assigned includes that person’s relations to the other persons and to the single divine essence; appropriation is not individuation. And eminent assignation is not exclusive assignation. Owen again: ‘by what act soever we hold communion with any person, there is an influence from every person to the putting forth of that act.’37 We learn how to construe scriptural appropriations at the same time that we grow in understanding of its teaching about divine simplicity. 3. God’s external works, attributed absolutely to the one divine essence, also display ‘such a distribution as points at distinct rises and fountains (though not of being in themselves, yet) of dispensations unto us.’38 What kind of distribution may be discerned in the act of creation? (a) God the Father is the maker of heaven and earth; to him, the act of creation may be eminently assigned. The Father acts externally by virtue of the common 36.  J. Owen, Pneumatologia, or a Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit [1674], in The Works of John Owen, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965), p. 93. 37.  J. Owen, Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost [1657], in The Works of John Owen, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965), p. 18. 38. Owen, Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, p. 15.

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divine essence, shared with Son and Spirit, which is the principle of all external divine action. And the Father acts in accordance with his particular mode of being. And so, as fons deitatis, the one by whom the Son is generated and from whom, with the Son, the Spirit proceeds, the Father is also the beginning of the divine works in relation to creatures. There is, of course, the greatest possible difference between the Father being the fons of the Son and the Spirit, and his being the Father of creatures: generation, spiration and creation are not three instances of the Father’s ‘productivity’.39 It is only because the Father is before all time the fount of the deity that he acts as the originating cause of creatures; eternal fatherhood is antecedent. ‘Father’ and ‘creator’ are not convertible designations, but nor are they wholly to be segregated: the Father ‘makes’, in eminent fashion. His action of making is undertaken in relation to the Son and the Spirit, because the Father is in relation to them. But legitimate concerns that attributing monarchy to the Father might suspend the proper acts of the second and third persons ought not to betray us into saying too little about the Father’s creative work – a point commonly missed in contemporary enthusiasm for Irenaeus’s metaphor of the Son and the Spirit as the ‘two hands’ of God, sometimes pressed in such a way that eminent attribution of creative activity to the Father is eclipsed and the Father becomes merely the remote background to the economic acts of the Son and the Spirit (the assumption behind this is, of course, that the relation of the Son and the Spirit to the Father as their origin is not definitive of their respective persons). (b)  The Lord Jesus Christ, the only-­begotten Son, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, is the one by whom all things were made. Notice the creedal sequence: the Lord Jesus Christ–the Son–eternal generation– consubstantiality–creation. Jesus, Lord and Messiah, is traced to his origin in the eternal relation of Father and Son, his participation in the divine essence is affirmed, and on that basis he is acclaimed as pantokrator. The retrojection may appear troubling: ought we not to prefer to bring the Son’s participation in the work of creation into the closest possible relation to the incarnation, in order to avoid the abstraction of a second person behind created time, and in order to emphasize that the ratio principiandi of created being is the Word made flesh?40 But the divine originality of creation and redemption alike depends on what lies between ‘one the Lord Jesus Christ’ and ‘by whom all things were made’: τὸν υἱὸν 39.  This difference is seriously muddled in D. Cunningham’s account of God’s ‘producing’ in These Three Are One. The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 55–88, and in K. Ward’s account of Trinity and creation in Religion and Creation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 316–46. 40.  The most sophisticated argument along these lines is found in Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, pp.  20–35; Barth’s treatment of the same issue in Church Dogmatics III/1, pp.  51–5 is unsatisfactory, largely because of its underlying assumption that talk of  ‘the “second person” of the Trinity as such is an abstraction’ (p. 54).

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τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν Μονογενῆ, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων, Φῶς ἐκ Φωτός, Θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ, γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί. Only after that does it make sense to affirm that he the one δι’ οὗ τὰ πάντα ἐγένετο. The maker of heaven and earth is not other than the incarnate redeemer; the act of creation is not in itself a terminus ad quem but the terminus a quo of the history of the covenant. But the founding condition of creation and its history is the Son or Word who as very God shares in the undivided divine essence. Wherein lies the distinct creative agency assigned to the eternal Word? He is not an intermediary agent of creation who keeps the Father from contaminating contact with creatures: the Father is maker of heaven and earth. Nor is the Son a mere instrument through whom the Father works: Father and Son act by the same principle, the simple divine essence. Rather, the Son is ‘the first-­born of creation’ (Col. 1.15): ‘in him’ and ‘through him’ all things were created (Col. 1.16). That is, the Word is the exemplary and efficient cause of creation. Exemplary cause, because the Word which the Father pronounces in the generation of the Son is a ‘seminal word’ – not only the perfect counterpart to the Father but also the divine Wisdom, the form of the creation and so its beginning, that from which it arises by example. As the Father’s Word and Wisdom he is the reason for and the pattern of the production of creatures. Efficient cause, because he is both creation’s form and archetype and also the agent ‘through’ whom is created that which is other than God. And in all this the Son acts in the mode proper to him, that is, according to the hypostatic character which is his in the immanent processions of the godhead and which ‘surfaces’ in his work ad extra. (c)  The Holy Spirit is Lord and giver of life, creation’s perfecting cause. Creation is distinctly assigned to the Spirit in that he is the divine person by whom created things are brought to their proper end. By the Spirit’s motion, creatures fulfil their natures, and their particular mode of being – their esse-­ad – reaches its term. Originated by the Father and given form by the Word, created things are stirred by the Spirit and impelled towards their good, namely the life which is theirs in the particular mode of God’s gift. The Spirit is Lord, sharing the common divine essence. His work as Spiritus creator may not be extracted from or identified in isolation from the undivided economic work of the godhead. Moreover, as with the personal being of the Spirit, so with his works ad extra: he acts as he proceeds. ‘In’ the Spirit has immediate reference to ‘from’ the Father and ‘through’ the Son. Talk of the work of creation which is the Spirit’s is neither absolute nor eminent but distinct appropriation. The content of this distinct appropriation is the giving of life. The Spirit so moves creatures (in common with the Father’s originating and the Son’s forming acts) that they come to have and exercise a movement of their own, to be animated, alive. The entelechy of creatures is the Spirit’s gift – a point of great spiritual loveliness, yet one not easy for us to perceive unless we are prepared to abandon an intuitive sense that only we ourselves can supply the interior motion by which our being is realized. The intuition is deeply flawed, imagining that our integrity can be

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secured only if we place ourselves beyond the reach of love’s causal influence. Divine love frees us from this evil self-­responsibility. ‘God the Father wrought the creature . . . through his Love, the Holy Ghost.’41 By the breath of the Spirit, who is himself breathed by the Father and the Son, creatures are not slain but come to be alive. This why ‘in every great work of God, the concluding, completing, perfecting acts are ascribed unto the Holy Ghost.’42 To sum up: First, creation is a common work of the undivided Trinity; there are not three creators. But there are ‘three who create’.43 Second: ‘the causality concerning the creation of all things answers to the respective meaning of the coming forth each person implies.’44 Third: creation is therefore the work of the irreducible three, ‘not . . . as though one person succeeded unto another in their operation, or as though where one ceased and gave over a work, the other took it up and carried it on; for every divine work, and every part of every divine work, is the work of God, that is, of the whole Trinity, inseparably and undividedly: but on those divine works which outwardly are of God there is an especial impression of the order of the operation of each person, with respect unto their natural and necessary subsistence, as also with regard unto their internal characteristical properties, whereby we are distinctly taught to know them and adore them.’45

41.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.6. 42. Owen, Pneumatologia, p. 94. 43. Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, p. 354. 44.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.6. 45. Owen, Pneumatologia, pp. 94f.

Chapter 7 ‘L ov e i s a l s o a l ov e r o f l i f e ’ : c r e at i o e x n i h i lo a n d C r e at u r e ly G o o d n e s s

I Christian teaching about the creation of the world out of nothing is a cardinal doctrine: on this hinge turn all the elements of the second topic of Christian theology, which treats all things with reference to God their beginning and end, the first topic being God’s immanent life. In his work of creation, God inaugurates an order of being other than himself, and this work is presupposed in all subsequent assertions about that order of being, for to create is to bring something into existence, and ‘God’s first effect in things is existence itself, which all other effects presuppose, and on which they are founded.’1 This first effect of God is a radical beginning and precisely as such the establishment of an enduring relation. Other articles of Christian teaching about God’s transitive works treat the historical course of the relation so established, but do so on the presupposition that the creaturely term of the relation has been brought into being ex nihilo, and that only as a reality instituted in this manner may its nature and history be understood. Teaching about creation ‘opens the logical and theological space for other Christian beliefs and mysteries.’2 Because of this, Christian teaching about the creation of the world out of nothing is also a distributed doctrine, cropping up throughout theology’s treatment of the economy with varying degrees of explicitness. Our understanding of creation is amplified and deepened by this frequent recurrence, for its full scope and meaning become apparent in relation to what is said about other divine works of nature, such as preservation and governance, and, most of all, in relation to what is said in the works of grace which culminate in the missions of the Son of God and the Holy Spirit. It is in the works of grace, in which the end of God’s act of creation is secured, that the natures of God’s creatures and of his own benevolence

1.  Aquinas, Compendium of Theology I.68. 2. R. Sokolowski, ‘Creation and Christian Understanding’, in D. Burrell, B. McGinn, ed., God and Creation. An Ecumenical Symposium (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), p. 179.

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are most fully displayed. Christian beliefs about the character of the creator and of his creative act are shaped by what can be learned from considering providence and reconciliation, in which the work of creation has its terminus ad quem (a point given its most extensive modern exposition in Barth’s ordering of creation to covenant). Equally, however, beliefs about providence and reconciliation only make full sense when we attend to their terminus a quo, that is, when we bear in mind that the protagonists in the economy are the creator and his creatures, and that all being and occurrence that is not God is to its very depths ex nihilo. The Christian doctrine of creation treats four principal topics: the identity of the creator, the divine act of creating, the several natures and ends of created things, and the relation of creator and creatures. These topics are materially ordered: teaching about the identity of the creator governs what is said about his creative act, about what he creates, and about the relation he bears to his creatures. In early Christian developments of the doctrine of creation out of nothing, much turned on the perception that God’s radical perfection requires extensive revisions both of how the act of creation is to be understood (it can have no material cause) and of the natures of the beings created by this act. Of course, the order of inquiry does not necessarily conform to the material order: reflection on the doctrine of creation may take its rise with any one of the topics. But reflection will not reach its term unless the entire range and the order of the matter are brought to mind. Disarray results from the hypertrophy or atrophy of one or other element (as, for example, in theologies which reduce the doctrine of creation to teaching about created things, without adequate consideration of the creator and his work). Further, misperception or misapplication of one or other element will deform the whole, whose force depends in part upon the integrity of its constituents. It would be possible to trace how modern theologies of creation have often suffered a series of such misperceptions and misapplications, on the part of proponents as well as despisers. Here I address one such misperception: the anxiety that the pure non-­ reciprocal gratuity of God’s creation of all things out of nothing debases the creature, for a being so radically constituted by another as to be nothing apart from that other is a being evacuated of intrinsic worth. The anxiety is misplaced, sometimes destructively so. Showing why this is the case involves dispute about the elements of the doctrine of creation, that is, exposure of points at which habits of thought are contradicted by faith in God the creator. This is not, it should be noted, a peculiarly modern task, forced upon theology by hostile circumstances. The doctrine of creation has proved a permanently contrary article of Christian teaching, requiring the release of thought from inhibiting assumptions about God and created things (Lactantius’s account in the Divine Institutes or Thomas’s in the Summa Contra Gentiles are classical exercises in extracting the Christian doctrine of creation from inherited misapprehensions). For all that, polemics or elenctics are subsidiary undertakings. The primary theological task in this matter is the dedication of intelligence to devout indication and description of Christian verities, whose goodness, once known and loved, dispels anxiety and draws both intellect and affections to satisfaction.

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II Before treating the matter of creaturely worth directly, we may identify in summary fashion the elements of the doctrine of creation out of nothing. 1.  Coming to understand Christian teaching about creation out of nothing is an instance of the special pedagogy by which all the elements of the Christian confession are made objects of intelligent love. The principal parts of this pedagogy are prophecy and reconciliation. ‘It is a great and very rare thing for a man, after he has contemplated the whole creation, corporeal and incorporeal, and has discerned its mutability, to pass beyond it, and, by the continued soaring of his mind, to attain to the unchangeable substance of God, and, in that height of contemplation, to learn from God himself that none but he has made all that is not of the divine essence.’3 Why is it that God must be the teacher in this matter? Partly because creation concerns an absolute ‘beginning’, the summoning into being of what is not, and in the nature of the case such a summons cannot be an object of experience. Partly, again, because creation out of nothing is entirely sui generis. It is not an instance of making, nor of any causality we might know; and so we may not ‘inquire by what hands, by what machines, by what levers, by what contrivance [God] made this work of such magnitude’.4 Again, to think about creation out of nothing is not to ponder an event in the history of the world, but to come to see that the world, including ourselves as intelligent beings, is not the given reality which we customarily take it to be, but is something that once was not and might not have been at all. We can have this thought, however, only after a conversion of mind which is not within our capacity but rests upon divine instruction. Finally, teaching about creation is teaching about the creator, and teaching about the creator is delivered to creatures ‘under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit’.5 Not without reason, both Ambrose and Basil begin their Hexamera by reflecting on Moses the prophet ‘who imparts to us what he has learnt from God’.6 Knowledge of God the creator and his act of creation, and of the constitutive significance of God and his act for created things, arises not by the spontaneous exercise of intelligence but by the operation of ‘the Holy Spirit, handing down the discipline of truth’.7 This being so, consideration of the topic of creation out of nothing carries with it the requirement that we be in the process of becoming certain kinds of persons. This is because being caught up in the Spirit’s pedagogy is an aspect of sanctification. Much might be said here: of the need for cleansing 3.  Augustine, City of God (NPNF 1.2), XI.2. 4. Lactantius, Divine Institutes (ANF 7), II.9; he is criticising Cicero. 5.  Ambrose, Hexameron, in Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, FC 42 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1961), I.1.2. 6.  Basil, Hexameron (NPNF 2.8), I.1. 7. Lombard, Sentences (Toronto: PIMS, 2008), bk. II, dist. 1, pt. 1, ch. 3.

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prior to divine instruction; of docility and patience; of resistance to curiosity; of acceptance of limits. A good deal of what needs to be said might be gathered under the rubric of ‘religion’ in its deep sense of being bound to God, the one to whom ‘we ought to be bound . . . as to our unfailing principle’.8 We might also speak of friendship with God as a condition for knowledge of him as creator and of ourselves as his creatures. In our corrupt state, such friendship is lost to us, for we despise both our creaturely condition and our creator, and need to be reconciled. Corruption inhibits knowledge. But God the teacher is God the reconciler and overcomes our corruption, establishing the new creaturely nature, objectively in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and applicatively in the regenerative work of the Spirit. Possessed of this new nature, creatures are being ‘renewed in knowledge’ (Col. 3.10), including knowledge of creator and creature. The end of consideration of this work of God is faith in God. The core of Christian teaching about creation out of nothing is not cosmology or philosophy of nature or anthropology, but the Holy Trinity’s perfection and benevolence. At the beginning of his treatment of creation in the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas takes time to spell out how meditation on the transitive works of God enables us ‘to admire and reflect upon his wisdom’,9 ‘leads to admiration of God’s sublime power, and consequently inspires in men’s hearts reverence for God’,10 and ‘incites the souls of men to the love of God’s goodness’.11 In such admiration, reverence and love of God, the divine pedagogy about creation reaches its term. 2.  The primary subject matter of theological treatment of creation out of nothing is God himself; it inquires first, not into the world’s beginning but into ‘who gave it this beginning, and who was the creator’.12 Here I prescind from discussing the trinitarian dimensions of creation as the work of the three persons of the godhead,13 in order to concentrate upon creation as the operation of the undivided divine essence, about which a number of lines of reflection need to be followed. (a)  Talk of God as creator of heaven and earth presupposes the distinction of God’s immanent from his transitive operations, that is, the distinction of those works which remain in God and whose term is God’s perfect life from those works which have an external object. The importance of this distinction is not simply that it states the difference between the inner-­divine processions (generation and spiration) as actio from the external work of creation as factio.14 It is also that, by 8.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.81.1 resp. 9.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), II.2.2. 10.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.2.3. 11.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.2.4. 12.  Basil, Hexameron I.2. 13. On this topic, see Chapter 5. 14. For the distinction of actio from factio, see Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.1.4.

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so ordering God’s works, it sets before the mind the principle that because God the creator is perfect in himself, he has no need of creation, acquiring no augmentation from its existence, and being deprived of no good by its absence. The non-­necessary character of God’s opera ad extra is fundamental to understanding all the elements of the doctrine of creation out of nothing: the creator and his act of creation, the nature of creatures, and the relation which obtains between creator and created things. The careful specification of this non-­necessity is, moreover, of capital importance for treating anxieties about the debasement of creatures. (b)  As creator, God is ‘the principle and cause of being to other things’.15 God is perfect, and his being has no cause, because to be perfect is to be unoriginate, irreducible to some other causal reality. But as this one, God is the ‘first efficient cause’16 of all things. God works transitively, and does so first by bringing all things into being as omnibus causa essendi. This is the first and most general statement about God as creator. (c)  To be the cause of being of all things is proper to God alone. This, because the creator is the first cause who is himself without cause. ‘It belongs only to God to be the creator. For creating belongs to the cause that does not presuppose another, more universal cause . . . But this belongs only to God. Therefore, only he is the creator.’17 As creator, God is not the most exalted instance of creativity; in its absolute character as that which effects existence tout court, his creating is incommunicable. There can therefore be no instrumental causes in creating, for any such instrument would itself be caused and therefore incapable of being the first cause of being of other things. Nulla creatura possit creare;18 God alone is creator. (d) God has power to create as ‘an acting and a moving being’.19 Or better: God is this power, which is his substance and not some accidental property. Further, God is creator ‘through his very self ’:20 his creative power is not some capacity which he has in reserve, some underlying principle of his action. The creator is not simply an immense causal agent, a capitalized Cause or Author; as ‘first’ cause God is not merely possessed of supreme power with greater range than a finite cause. His power is not what he has but what he is. (e) God is cause of all things by his will, not by natural necessity. His work of creation is not the natural overflow of his self-­diffusive being, but intentional, 15.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.6.1. 16.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.6.2. 17.  Aquinas, Compendium of Theology I.70. 18.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.5 ad 3; see also Ia.65.3. 19.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.7.5. 20.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.8.6.

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personal action. Creation is spontaneous divine action, not the automatic operation of a ‘principle of plenitude’.21 And because of this, once again, creation need not have been. (f) In creating, God acts in accordance with his goodness. Here ‘goodness’ is meant not primarily in its moral as its metaphysical sense: God’s goodness is his entirely realized nature. Of this goodness of his, there can be no supplementation. In creating, therefore, God is not bringing his goodness to realization, for this would make the creator’s goodness depend upon the creature. God’s goodness is not the result but the cause of his creating. But divine goodness is, indeed, the source of the being of other things. Divine goodness includes as one of its ends the existence of created goodness, of a further reality which in its own order is good. Divine goodness is creative of likenesses of itself; divine being bestows being. Here metaphysical goodness shades into moral goodness, in that God’s work of creation manifests that, precisely because his perfect goodness cannot be expended, he does not begrudge other things their being, but, on the contrary, gives being to other things. ‘God is good – or rather the source of goodness – and the good has no envy for anything. Thus, because he envies nothing its existence, he made everything from nothing through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ.’22 3. How may the act of creation out of nothing be characterized? (a)  The act of creation is ineffable, having no analogues in our experience of causation or agency. Not only does this mean that much of what is said about it consists of negations which draw attention to its sui generis character; it also means that, in dealing with objections to Christian teaching about creation, theology should not be surprised to encounter objections which take for granted certain simplifications which arise when its basic terms are assumed to be univocal. Creation out of nothing is ineffable, not simply because of the grandeur of the agent or the magnitude of the act, but because of its incommensurability as ‘the introduction of being entirely’.23 (b)  The divine act of creation is instantaneous, an operation of ‘incomprehensible swiftness’ devoid of succession.24 The words ‘in the beginning’, Basil tells his readers, 21.  A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 54; for a critique of Lovejoy, see J. F. Wippel, ‘Thomas Aquinas on God’s Freedom to Create or Not’, in Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), pp. 218–39. 22.  Athanasius, De Incarnatione, in Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione, R. W. Thomson, ed., trans., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), §3. 23.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.1 resp. 24. Robert Grosseteste, On the Six Days of Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) I.xi.1.

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indicate ‘the rapid and imperceptible moment of creation’ which is ‘indivisible and instantaneous . . . [A]t the will of God the world arose in less than an instant.’25 This is said, partly to indicate that the act of creation is not an event in time but that by virtue of which events in time come to be; this act is not a measurable sequence in the world but the world’s originating principle. Partly, too, it is said to emphasize that God’s work in creation is effortless, without strenuous movement from intention to completion and the relief afforded by cessation from strain. In creating, God ‘both works and rests simultaneously’.26 Creation is thus more like an inner act of willing than an external act of craftsmanship. ‘God made all these powers [the physical universe, the nations and heavenly beings] with such ease that no words can explain it. The mere act of God’s will was enough to make them all. An act of the will does not make us tired. Neither did creating so many and such mighty powers weary God . . . Do you not see that not only for creating the things on earth but also for the creation of the powers in heaven the mere act of his will was enough?’27 (c)  The act of creation involves no movement or change in God. Peter Lombard’s discussion of this point shows him acutely aware that verbs such as ‘create’, ‘make’ or ‘do’ are predicated of God according to a different ‘reckoning’ from that by which they are predicated of creatures, for ‘when we say that he makes something, we do not understand that there is any movement in him operating, nor any passion in working, just as there is accustomed to befall us, but we signify that there is some new effect of his sempiternal will, that is, something newly exists by his eternal will.’28 Creatures make by moving and changing, but when God creates ‘in him nothing new happens, but something new . . . comes to be without any motion or mutation of his own.’29 In the same way that effort has to be stripped out of the conception of the ‘act’ of creation, so, too, do ideas of motion. (d)  The act of creation indicates the supereminence of the creator. God is not simply an immensely resourceful particular agent, but ‘the universal cause of being’.30 Acts of making by a particular agent presuppose something not produced by that agent upon which the agent is at work. Creation is no such act because it is the crossing of what Aquinas calls the ‘infinite distance . . . between being and nothing’.31

25.  Basil, Hexameron I.6. 26.  Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis IV.24. 27.  Chrysostom, On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, FC 72 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), II.30. 28. Lombard, Sentences bk. II, dist. 1, pt. 1, ch. 3. 29. Lombard, Sentences bk. II, dist. 1, pt. 1, ch. 3. 30.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.16.3. 31.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.2 obj. 4 and ad 4.

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(e)  All this leads to the principal affirmation: God’s act of creating is ex nihilo. Creation out of nothing is an extension of teaching about divine perfection: all that is required for the act of creation is God himself, the supreme essence acting ‘alone and through itself ’.32 Because God is such, there is no material cause of creation: no raw element, no antecedent patient entity, nothing which God presupposes, on which he is at work or which he must master. The temptation is to turn the grammatical substantive ‘nothing’ into a metaphysical substance. But ‘nothing’ is not some sort of inchoate stuff to which the act of creation gives form; nor is it potentiality, what Bonhoeffer in a careless thought called ‘obedient nothing . . . that waits on God.’33 Nothing is pure negation, nihil negativum. Again, like nihil, ex can also mesmerize, leading us to think that it refers to the relation of something made to that from which it was made. But ex ‘signifies a sequence not a material cause’.34 ‘Sequence’ here does not refer to a change from non-­being to being which happens to some constant; rather, the sequence is: there was nothing at all . . . now there is something. Creation ex nihilo is not an act of conversion or modification, but one of absolute origination. It is an act of what Kretzmann calls ‘doubly universal production’: distributively universal (God is the cause of being for all things) and intrinsically universal (for all things God is out of no pre-­existing subject the cause of being).35 God is utter plenitude and sufficiency and so the cause of the entire substance of all things. 4.  What does creation out of nothing indicate about the nature of created things? Initially, it proposes a negative: the totality of created things is not eternal, necessary or underived. But this initial negative is preparatory for a positive theological statement that created things have their being in relation to God. Created things do indeed have being. They are not nothing, but participate in the good of being. There is that which is not God, and that which is not God is. But the being of created things is had by the divine gift, or per participationem.36 The viability of the idea of ‘participation’ depends upon its not being deployed in such a way as to threaten the distinction between uncreated and created being which is basic to the concept of creation.37 Participation does not imply, for example, that the act of creation is simply a natural process of emanation, diffusion or dispersal of divine substance. ‘Creatures . . . are not born of God [non de Deo nata] but made by God out of nothing.’38 Rather, 32.  Anselm, Monologion in Anselm of Canterbury. The Major Works, VII. 33. D. Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall. A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), p. 34. 34.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.1 ad 3. 35. N. Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Creation. Aquinas’s Natural Theology in Summa Contra Gentiles II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 70–100. 36.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.44.1, ad 1. 37. On this, see R. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1995); idem., Aquinas on God, pp. 123–46. 38.  Augustine, Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 1.2, in On Genesis.

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participation is theologically to be understood in terms of the operation of creative benevolence, and so in terms of the differentiated sharing of creator and creature in the good of being, each in their proper order and mode. By the work of divine love, finite things come to share in the universal good of being, but only in a finite manner, and only as they stand in relation to the creator God, the source of being. This relation constitutes creatures. Every element of creaturely being and action is what it is in ‘the very dependency of the created act of being upon the principle from which it is produced.’39 There is, therefore, a depth to created things. To consider them, we have to understand not only their finite causes but the first cause, tracing them back to their source, which is God. Creatures have being as principiata, as effects of God their principium. The movement by which we understand how creatures participate in being is this: ‘we trace everything that possesses something by sharing, as to its source and cause, to what possesses that thing essentially . . . But . . . God is his very existing. And so existing belongs to him by his essence, and existing belongs to other things by participation. For the essence of everything else is not its existing, since there can be only one existing that is absolutely and intrinsically subsisting . . . Therefore, God necessarily causes existing in everything that exists.’40 5.  What does creation out of nothing indicate about the relation of God and creatures? Creation is an operation of generosity on the part of one who in his inner-­trinitarian life is wholly realized, satisfied and at rest. God gains nothing and loses nothing by the existence or non-­existence of creatures, having ‘no need for the things he created’ since he is ‘perfectly happy within himself.’41 Without this – seemingly austere but in reality entirely delightful – affirmation, the entire conceptual and spiritual structure of teaching about creation out of nothing collapses. It may be explicated by speaking of the relation of creator and creature as a mixed relation, real (constitutive) on the side of the creature but not on the side of the creator. Such entire inequality ought not to be considered a denial of the creator’s relation to created things: God loves, and in providence and reconciliation acts towards, that which he causes to be. Rather, a double assertion is being made. First, the creator is radically incomposite. As the cause of finite being, God is not one term or agent in a set of interactions, not a ‘coeval, co-­finite being’,42 but unqualifiedly simple and in himself replete. Second, to deny that God bears a ‘real’ relation to created things is to characterize the kind of relation which he has to creatures, one in which God ‘himself is his own beatitude . . . being all-­sufficient to himself and needing not the things he made.’43

39.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.18.2. 40.  Aquinas, Compendium of Theology I.68. 41.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.73.2 resp. 42. D. Braine, The Reality of Time and the Existence of God, p. 352. 43.  Aquinas, On the Power of God [De potentia] (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1933), IV.2 ad 5.

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With this, we begin to touch on the anxiety that the relation of created things to the creator is such that they have no honour.

III Classical Christian doctrines of creation out of nothing furnished the theological and metaphysical principles for a positive evaluation of created things, an evaluation given material intensification by faith’s contemplation of the mysteries of providence and redemption. That absolute creatureliness should be such a good is no longer self-­evident to us. In his System of Christian Doctrine – which contains what is surely one of the most discerning treatments of the Christian doctrine of creation of the last two centuries – the great mediating dogmatician Izaak Dorner set out an account of God the triune creator as ‘the fount of all existence and life’, one having ‘power, in unison with his love which ever tends towards reality, to impart to his ideal creations substantive existence, and make them stand forth in independent being.’44 But the tradition from which Dorner spoke was already well in retreat, its terms having largely lost their suppleness and explanatory power, and its spiritual appeal having waned. What has happened? In the preface to the Proslogion, Anselm spoke of God as ‘the supreme good needing no other’, the one whom ‘all things have need of for their being and well-­ being’. Such an understanding of the divine nature, extended by teaching about creatio ex nihilo, seems to drain created things of value. It does so, first, because it appears to consign creatures to a state of permanent indigence, wholly contingent upon God for origination and continuance; second, because the creator’s perfection is entirely untouched by their existence or non-­existence; third, because no relation exists between creator and creature save one of radical inequality in which the creature gives, and the creator receives, nothing. In effect, creatio ex nihilo brings with it a metaphysic of privation: to be a creature is to be humiliated, devoid of integrity or power of self-­movement or self-­subsistence, and so lacking intrinsic worth. To be ex nihilo is to be (almost, apart from the gratuitous act of divine causation) nihil. The objection is at once speculative and practical. In attempting to unravel it, theology has both dogmatic-­historical and spiritual-­ascetic tasks. The requisite dogmatic-­historical work consists in making Christian specifications of the identity of God the creator, his creative act and his creatures, deploying these to shed light on the historical course of the objection. Theology asks: at what points in the history of theological, metaphysical and moral-­political thought have exponents or critics of Christian doctrine in some measure missed the rhythm of teaching about creation out of nothing, lost heart about its fruitfulness or wholesomeness, and felt themselves therefore at liberty or obliged to compromise the matter of Christian doctrine? In what ways and with what results has an 44. I. A. Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 2, p. 39.

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evangelical metaphysics of creation been harassed or replaced by one owing no allegiance to the gospel? More particularly: in what ways do mutations in understandings of the natural and human orders and of the fitting enactment of human life, derive from and reinforce distorted understandings of the creator? ‘[E]rrors about creatures’, Aquinas remarks, ‘sometimes lead one astray from the truth of faith, so far as the errors are inconsistent with true knowledge of God.’45 Illuminating such ‘errors’ is the dogmatic-­historical task of theology. The second, spiritual-­ascetic, task consists in theology’s occupancy and promotion of a spiritual climate in which the force of the objection can be diminished and the persuasiveness of gospel teaching commended. Intelligence follows love, and love is nourished by habits of life by which goods are sought out and made matters of delight. When love is faint, it must be kindled, and one of the tasks of theology – not its only task, but by no means its least – is to assist in the kindling of love and love’s intelligence. It can only do this, however, when it is itself a work of religion, of faith instructed by and adhering to this God who works thus. In a theological culture in which such instruction and adherence are lived realities, anxiety or resentment about the creaturely condition may find relief. Apprehensiveness that creation ex nihilo entails creaturely ignominy is both a cultural-­historical condition and a spiritual malaise; theology cannot separate these. The cultural-­historical factors demand exquisite inquiry, examining, for example, shifts in conceptions of motion inaugurated in the early modern period, initially in the philosophy of nature and derivatively in conceptions of human being and action. The shifts would include a narrowing of divine causality to efficient causality; decline of appeal to final causality in the explanation of nature, or the reorientation of final causality to human, not divine, purposes; a sense that natural motion is self-­contained, not requiring talk of God’s creative and providential operations to render it intelligible; in short, the retraction of the concept of a divine source for natural and human movement.46 Alongside this, attention would need to be directed to loss of confidence in the explanatory power and innocence of appeal to first principles in making the natural and human world intelligible.47 Appeal to principia rests in part upon a sense that the world is a principiatum – not just a given state of affairs but that which is what it is by virtue of its relation to its source – and in part upon trust that this source is benign plenitude. When this double assent is absent, the principium becomes that to which 45.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.3.1. 46. See here J. A. Weisheipl, Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 1985); R. Sorabji, Matter, Space, and Motion. Theories in Antiquity and their Sequel (London: Duckworth, 1988); S. Oliver, Philosophy, God and Motion (London: Routledge, 2005). 47. On this, see A. MacIntyre, First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1990), and especially the remarkable set of analytical exercises in K. L. Schmitz, The Texture of Being. Essays in First Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), esp. pp. 21–73.

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the principiatum can be reduced, broken down and so evacuated of substance. Of such destructive reduction, creatio ex nihilo may be judged the primary instance. Corresponding to shifts in causality and in the explanatory value of first principles is a loss of a sense of the interiority of things, that is, of the need for intelligence to penetrate through the surfaces of things in order to perceive that by which they are constituted. In the case of human creatures, interiority – a basic concomitant of creatureliness – is edged out by reflexivity in which human consciousness is, as Michael Buckley puts it, both its own source and its own term.48 These are crude characterizations, no more than an agenda for analytical work. The analysis would try to discover how there has arisen a condition in which the axiom aut gloria Dei aut gloria homini has gathered such cultural authority, one in which God and creatures are natural antagonists, ‘two units in a symmetrical or asymmetrical relationship, each poised in such contradiction that one must sink if the other is to rise.’49 Theology will, however, go further. Errors about creatures are symptomatic of spiritual disorder, the entry of some evil into the creature’s relation to God. Thinking about the world and ourselves in relation to God as source and sustainer is always a way of disposing ourselves in relation to God; nolens volens it always takes up an attitude. This is not to reduce thought to passion (a vulgar polemical trick), but rather to say that thought may not be detached from religion and religious failure manifest as mistrust, resentment, impatience, pride, love of some untruth. We may not exclude the possibility of caecitas mentis, mental blindness; we may need the healing and illumination of intelligence if we are to know and love our created condition. As theology displays how it can be that creation out of nothing is not a matter of the creature’s dispossession but rather the conferral of good, it begins from its principal part, the doctrine of God, determinations of the creator’s identity and act constituting the ground on which all else rests. Creation is a work of wholly adequate love. Part of this love’s adequacy is its voluntary character: it is fully spontaneous and self-­original, nothing more than God’s will being required for creatures to come to be. But creative divine volition is not caprice but purpose, direction of entire capacity to another’s good; and it is purposive love, most of all because this other does not antecede the gift of its own being but receives the gift of life from God. Love gives life, and love gives life. In willing to create, God wills the realization of life which is not his own: ‘Love is also a lover of life’.50 Only God can do this; only God can bring about a life which is derived yet possessed of intrinsic substance and worth. Because God is not one being and agent alongside others, and because he is in himself entirely realized and possesses perfect bliss, he has nothing to gain from creating. Precisely in the absence of divine self-­interest, the creature gains everything; because of (not 48.  M. J. Buckley, Denying and Disclosing God. The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 84. 49.  Buckley, Denying and Disclosing God, p. 94. 50. Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 2, p. 15.

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in spite of) the non-­reciprocal character of the relation of creator and creature, the creature has integrity. ‘[T]he creatureliness of the creature (the received condition) is not a nullity, but is rather the ingress of the creature into being; so that, on the basis of that ingress, can be seen the absolute nihil that was the creature’s meontological predecessor. The creature is ex nihilo, that is, it stands outside of absolute privation by virtue of the creative generosity. The creative generosity is the ground of the absolute inequality between creator and creature, that very inequality that has raised the threat to the creature’s integrity. But that same creative generosity is also the ground for the very being of the creature.’51 Benevolent love establishes and safeguards the integrity of the beings which it creates. Created integrity includes created act. God creates agentia ordinem habentia, ‘subordinated active things’.52 How do we free ourselves of the habit – spiritual as much as intellectual – of opposing (at least in our own case) subordination and proper agency? By reflecting on the character of God’s creative action. In establishing another thing in being, God bestows finality, a tendency or active bent and movement towards the completion of that thing’s nature. This bent and movement is an effect of God’s initial donation of being, and is held and stirred by God’s maintaining and governing presence to the creature. God is ‘in all things in the fashion of an agent cause.’53 It is just at this point that scrupulous consideration (contemplation) of the divine creative action may not be relaxed. There is an over-­ extension of the concept of God as cause of being and action (and a consequent over-­extension of the creature’s causal dependence upon God) according to which ‘no creature has an active role in the production of natural effects’.54 To this, Aquinas advances four objections, each arising from attentiveness to the divine attributes, and, in particular, from a belief that anxieties about debasement of creatures may stem from insufficient consideration of what might be called the perfecting effect of God’s perfection. First, such is the divine wisdom that in its products there is nothing useless, no sheerly passive and redundant creature. ‘[I]t is contrary to the rational character of wisdom for there to be anything useless in the activities of the possessor of wisdom. But, if created things could in no way operate to produce their effects, and if God alone worked all operations immediately, these other things would be employed in a useless way by him, for the production of these effects.’55 Second, in communicating his likeness to creatures, the creator communicates not only being but a proportionate agency: ‘if [God] has communicated his likeness, as far as actual being is concerned, to other things, by virtue of the fact that he has brought things into being, it follows that he has communicated to them his likeness, as far as 51. K. L. Schmitz, The Gift: Creation, The Aquinas Lecture, 1982 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1982), p. 74. 52.  Aquinas, Compendium of Theology I.103. 53.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III.68.11. 54.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III.69.1. 55.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III.69.13.

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acting is concerned, so that created things may also have their own actions.’56 Third – this is the most telling argument – perfect power communicates perfection, including perfection of action: ‘the perfection of the effect demonstrates the perfection of the cause, for a greater power brings about a more perfect effect. But God is the most perfect agent. Therefore, things created by him obtain perfection from him. So, to detract from the perfection of creatures is to detract from the perfection of divine power. But, if no creature has any active role in the production of any effect, much is detracted from the perfection of the creature. Indeed, it is part of the fullness of perfection to be able to communicate to another being the perfection which one possesses. Therefore, this position detracts from the divine power.’57 Perfect power does not absorb, exclude or overwhelm and dispossess other dependent powers and agents, but precisely the opposite: omnipotent power creates and perfects creaturely capacity and movement. Exclusive power is less than perfect, and falls short of divinity. Fourth, as the highest good God makes ‘what is best’;58 the creatures of such a God therefore share in the self-­communicative, active goodness of their creator. ‘God so communicates his goodness to created beings that one thing which receives it can transfer it to another. Therefore, to take away their proper actions from things is to disparage the divine goodness.’59 In short, to attribute all created effects to God as omni-­causal is not to rob creatures of their proper action, because what God in his perfect wisdom, power and goodness causes is creatures who are themselves causes. The idea whose spell must be broken is that God is a supremely forceful agent in the same order of being as creatures, acting upon them and so depriving them of movement. What Aquinas commends here – something which Barth also reached towards in his theology of covenant and of God’s evocation of active human partners – is that the plenitude of God apart from creatures does not entail the thought of God’s segregation as sole cause, but rather the opposite: God’s perfection is seen also in bringing into being other agents. God bestows being and activity: this is part of the special sense of creation out of nothing in the Christian confession. Such specifications in theology proper show that affirmation of the world’s integrity of being and movement does not require denial of creatureliness. All that is not God is out of nothing, and its existence is sheerly gratuitous, non-­necessary. From God’s creative act there arises a condition of ‘absolute unconditioned inequality’ in which God the donor of being is ‘the founder of the entire order within which the giver gives and within which the recipient receives’.60 Such inequality – so runs our anxious argumentation – humiliates the creature, because without genuine diversity of being and capacity for action there can be no relations of dignity. In the absence of Christian characterizations of the creator, this would 56.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III.69.14. 57.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III.69.15. 58.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III.69.16. 59.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III.69.16. 60. Schmitz, The Gift: Creation, pp. 62f.

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be so – if, for example, divine creative action were reduced to continuous retrieval of creatures from nothingness and not understood as bestowal of being, or if absolute contingency were all that needed to be said about creatureliness. But the creator, once again, is benevolent and gives being: to be from nothing is not to be nothing but to be, instituted as an integral order of reality and given the capacity for operation. From this may be drawn a double assertion about created acts. First, no created thing is the principle of its own action; the creature is a moved mover. In the order of operation no less than in the order of being, the creature possesses no capability for pure self-­origination. ‘Created act is a received act.’61 This, because created substance is ‘determined in and through its radical participation in and relation to the Source of its existence. The supposit of the creature does not stand in any way “outside” of or “prior” to the ontological relation, not even as a possibility, but is brought into being within that relation.’62 ‘Even as art presupposes nature, so does nature presuppose God . . . Therefore God also operates in the operation of nature.’63 Second, the creature is a moved mover. God who is the creature’s principle is the creature’s source: not an abyss into which the creature tumbles, but one who in conferring being also bequeaths act. The relation of creatureliness includes ‘non-­ passive receptivity’,64 a given capacity for becoming through the enactment of created life. The reality and dignity of created act does not eradicate the non-­reciprocal character of the creator-­creature relation, but rather indicates that that relation is not malign. That which is ex nihilo and has being by divine gift adds nothing to what is uncreated; even after it has come into being, the creature is not a reality to which God is ‘other’, some correlate in a common order. Just because this is so, the creator does not displace the creature. To be created out of nothing is not to suffer deprivation but to be given a nature whose performance will certainly involve acts of courage and may include – for example – magnanimity and magnificence, the extension of spirit to great things, the performance of some great work.

61. Schmitz, The Texture of Being, p. 125. 62. Schmitz, The Texture of Being, p. 128. 63.  Aquinas, De potentia III.7 s.c. 2. 64. Schmitz, The Texture of Being, p. 196.

Chapter 8 N on e x a e qu o : G o d’ s R e l at io n t o C r e at u r e s

I ‘[T]he creature by its very name is referred to the creator and depends on the creator who does not depend on it. Wherefore the relation whereby the creature is referred to the creator must be a real relation, while in God it is only a logical relation.’1 The Christian doctrines of the Trinity and of creation alike entail that the relation of God and creatures is a ‘mixed’ relation, ‘real’ on the side of the creature 1.  Aquinas, De potentia III.3 resp.; see also Summa theologiae Ia.45.3 ad 1. My reading of Aquinas in what follows is indebted to a range of commentators: R. Acar, Talking About God and Talking About Creation. Avicenna’s and Thomas Aquinas’ Positions (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Braine, The Reality of Time and the Existence of God; F. C. Bauerschmidt, Thomas Aquinas. Faith, Reason, and Following Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 107–17; D. Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God; idem and B. McGinn, ed., God and Creation; idem, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions; idem, ‘Creation, Metaphysics and Ethics’; idem, ‘Aquinas’ Appropriation of Liber de causis to Articulate the Creator as Cause-­ of-Being’, in F. Kerr, ed., Contemplating Aquinas, pp. 75–83; idem, Faith and Freedom. An Interfaith Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); idem, et  al, ed., Creation and the God of Abraham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); M. J. Dodds, ‘Ultimacy and Intimacy: Aquinas on the Relation between God and the World’, in C-J. P. de Oliviera, ed., Ordo Sapientiae et Amoris (Freiburg: Editions Universitaires, 1993), pp. 211–27; G. Emery, ‘Trinity and Creation’, in R. van Nieuwenhove, J. Wawrykow, ed., The Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 58–76; M. G. Henninger, ‘Aquinas on the Ontological Status of Relations’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 25 (1987), 491–515; idem, Relations. Mediaeval Theories, 1250–1325 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); M. R. McWhorter, ‘Aquinas on God’s Relation to the World’, New Blackfriars 94 (2013), pp. 3–18; A. Krempel, La doctrine de la relation chez saint Thomas (Paris: Vrin: 1952); E. Muller, ‘Real Relations and the Divine: Issues in Thomas’s Understanding of God’s Relation to the World’, Theological Studies 56 (1995), pp. 673–95; P. Masterson, The Sense of Creation. Experience and the God Beyond (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Schmitz, The Gift: Creation; idem, The Texture of Being; R. Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason; idem, Eucharistic Presence.

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but a ‘relation of reason’ on the side of God. This teaching – refined in mediaeval theology but having its early authority in a passage of Augustine’s De trinitate on ex tempore predication2 – commonly draws the reproach that it takes for granted a doctrine of God whose lines are drawn in advance of consideration of the economy of revelation and grace, a doctrine in which God’s commerce with creatures is accorded no constitutive role. Its real import, however, is not to deny God’s relation to creatures but to invest that relation with a specific character. It accomplishes this specification by indicating that God’s simple perfection is such that he is not one term in a dyad, relatively or contrastively defined, and, by consequence, that God’s creative will and action are unrestrictedly benevolent and beneficent, giving life simply for the creature’s good. Precisely because God’s relation to created things has no effect on the divine integrity, it is the outward enactment of his goodness. Displaying the intellectual and religious cogency of this teaching requires (1) articulation of a spacious theology of creation which treats the simple being of the triune creator in his inner and outer works, before moving to consider his act of creation and the natures of created things; (2) attention to the proper proportions and sequence of these various elements of the doctrine of creation, and to their place and function in a system of Christian theology; (3) observation of some formal principles of theological inquiry which follow from the material doctrine of creation; (4) the presence of a range of moral and spiritual dispositions on the part of inquirers which put them in the frame to regard this teaching with complacency. Further, understanding this part (and some other parts) of Christian teaching necessitates struggle to attain freedom from some constraints of metaphysical and religious custom. Most of all it requires the ordering of theological intelligence and spiritual appetite away from a conception of the Christian faith in which the phenomenon of God’s engagement with creatures in time is considered id quo maius cogitari nequit – a conception so widely shared by dogmaticians and exegetes as to be largely invisible, yet one whose possession of some of the chief elements of divine instruction is insecure.

II Theological consideration of the asymmetrical relation of God and creatures requires recall of the principal elements of the Christian doctrine of creation of which it is an extension. Present circumstances, however, demand that this rehearsal be prefaced by consideration of the place and function of teaching about creation in Christian dogmatics, because misunderstanding of or antipathy to the concept of mixed relations are often symptomatic of a misplaced, atrophied or insufficiently operative doctrine of creation. Modern Christian dogmatics (if the portmanteau term be allowed) manifests a certain disorder or misalignment generated by excessive attention to the divine economy, which may be identified in the following way. 2.  Augustine, De trinitate V.16f.

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The matter of Christian divinity is God and all things in relation to God. A systematic account of Christian teaching, which presents this matter by topical anatomy and sequential arrangement, has two chief divisions. It begins by considering God’s being in himself in his inner works as Father, Son and Spirit, and then, without relinquishing its first theme but enlarging it and following its scope and direction, turns to consider God’s opera ad extra, the first body of material (the divine processions) constituting the founding principles of the second (the divine missions). The second body of material on God’s outer works may then itself be divided into consideration of the work of nature (creation and providence) and the work of grace (election, reconciliation and the consummation of all things). In such an arrangement of Christian teaching, two related features of the doctrine of creation may be observed. First, it is the bridge by which consideration of God in se passes over to consideration of God ad extra; it is the ground of the fact that Christian doctrine is responsible to attend not to a single but a double theme (God and all things). The categorical difference between these two themes, and the absolute subordination of the latter to the former, does not compromise the necessity of attention to created as well as to uncreated being. Christian dogmatics cannot be adequate to the range of its matter if it does not treat with full seriousness the fact that to the confession credo in Deum there corresponds creator caeli et terrae. Second, the doctrine of creation is one of two distributed doctrines in the corpus of Christian dogmatics. The first (both in sequence and in material primacy) distributed doctrine is the doctrine of the Trinity, of which all other articles of Christian teaching are an amplification or application, and which therefore permeates theological affirmations about every matter; theology talks about everything by talking about God. The doctrine of creation is the second distributed doctrine, although, because its scope is restricted to the opera Dei ad extra, its distribution is less comprehensive than that of the doctrine of the Trinity. Within this limit, the doctrine of creation is ubiquitous. It is not restricted to one particular point in the sequence of Christian doctrine, but provides orientation and a measure of governance to all that theology has to say about all things in relation to God. The pervasiveness of teaching about creation – the way in which it brackets and qualifies everything that is said about the nature and course of all that is not God – is such, however, that it is often implicit, built into a wide range of doctrinal material on, for example, providence, anthropology, soteriology or the theology of the sacraments, but not necessarily breaking the surface and becoming visible. The general inconspicuousness of the doctrine after its initial explicit treatment as the first external work of God belies its systematic range and bearing. ‘God’s first effect in things is existence itself, which all other effects presuppose, and on which they are founded.’3 3.  Aquinas, Compendium of Theology I.68.

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Teaching about creation ‘opens the logical and theological space for other Christian beliefs and mysteries’,4 because contemplation of that teaching enables discernment of essential properties of the relation between God and created things which will be further displayed when considering the history of their interaction as it unfolds in the economy. This does not entail that all other doctrines are to be derived from the doctrine of creation, or that those other doctrines do not also in their turn illuminate teaching about creation. Consideration of the opus gratiae enriches and extends what is said about the opus naturae, most of all by enabling closer identification of the archetype and agent of creation (‘in him all things were created’) and of its telos (‘all things were created through him and for him’, Col. 1.16). At the same time, teaching about God the creator and his work exercises considerable sway in articulating the work of grace, whose intelligibility depends in some measure upon principles about the coming-­to-be and the nature of created things in relation to God which are laid down in a theology of creation. In much modern exegetical and dogmatic theology, the doctrine of creation does not have this place and function. This may be attributed in part to the way in which in all conceptions of the matter of Christian teaching some doctrines achieve prominence and others contract. Concentration on the outer works of God, for example, may be such that the first body of dogmatic material on God’s infinite perfection in se receives only slight attention. By consequence, the existence and history of created things may be assumed as a given, quasi-­necessary, reality, rather than a wholly surprising effect of divine goodness, astonishment at which pervades all Christian teaching. Moreover, treatment of the opera Dei externae may be so structured that the opus gratiae has precedence over the opus naturae, of which it is the ‘inner ground’. Exposition of the history of grace as the final cause of creation takes priority over contemplation of God the creator and God’s act of creation as the first cause of created being and history, including the history of redemption. The resultant conceptions of Christian doctrine are customarily ‘historical’ or ‘dramatic’ in idiom, presenting the relation of God and creatures as one between divine and human persons and agents who, for all their differences, are strangely commensurable, engaging one another in the same space, deciding, acting and interacting in the world as a commonly-­inhabited field of reality. This may be especially the case when, in the absence of other considerations, the person and career of Jesus are deemed irreducible, since he is the one as whom God is and acts as God. The setting of the work of grace in the work of nature (as well as in the divine processions) thereby recedes from view because of the sheer prominence and human intensity of the central subject and episode of redemption history. Such an arrangement of Christian doctrine raises an expectation that what needs to be said about the natures of God and the creatures of God, and therefore 4. R. Sokolowski, ‘Creation and Christian Understanding’, in Burrell and McGinn, ed., God and Creation, p. 179.

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of their relation, may be determined almost exhaustively by attending to the economy of salvation – the history of election and reconciliation in the external missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, if God and creature are chiefly conceived as dramatis personae in an enacted sequence of lost and regained fellowship, talk of the non-­reciprocity of their relation seems theologically and religiously unbecoming. It is, however, possible to exhibit Christian doctrine in a different arrangement, with differences of proportion and placement as well as of material content. Such a reordering entails no diminishment of the importance of the work of grace, though it does not allow it constitutive significance as the principium of all talk of God and creatures. Moreover, it presents a conception of Christian teaching in which the non ex aequo character of the relation of God and creatures can be seen as fitting to the natures of both and to the unrestricted intimacy of God’s presence in the world.

III The Christian doctrine of creation treats four topics: the Holy Trinity as creator, the act of creation, the nature of created things, and the relation of God and creatures. The topical division corresponds to the scope of Christian teaching, which studies both God in se and God as principium rerum,5 and also follows its material sequence: ‘after treating of the procession of the divine persons, we must consider the procession of creatures from God’.6 Theological thought about creation begins with contemplation of God’s immanent being and only then moves to reflect upon God’s transitive acts. ‘[I]n the teaching of faith, which considers creatures only in their relation to God, the consideration of God comes first, that of creatures afterwards.’7 Moreover, the way in which each subsequent topic is handled is determined by the first topic’s treatment of the triune being of God, this opening material being ‘first’ not simply in sequence but in rank, because the divine processions are the causa et ratio of the making of creatures.8 1.  Christian teaching about creation is ordered by confession and acclamation of God’s matchless self-­sufficiency. In his inner works as Father, Son and Spirit, God is plenitude of life and incomparable excellence. The creator is ‘the blessed and only sovereign, the king of kings and lord of lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see’ (1 Tim. 6.15f.; cf. Deut. 10.17; Dan. 2.47; Rev. 17.14, 19.16). God’s kingship and lordship 5.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.2 prologue. 6.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.44 prologue (translation from Fathers of the English Dominican Province [London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1921]). 7.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.4.5. 8.  Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis bk. I, d. 14, q. 1, a. 1.

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have no common measure with any other reality; he is not merely contingently superior to other powers, but incomparable, unaffected and undisturbed in relation to them, falling outside the set of kings and lords. In the perfection of his immanent triune life, God ‘only’ is God, and God is ‘alone’. This confession, made in the wake of divine instruction, may be explicated through a range of concepts, which also serve to characterize in an initial way the relation of God and created things. God is unoriginate and self-­subsistent, having his being not through or in relation to some other, but per se. God is fully actual, possessing no potency whose realization would extend or complete his being. God is immutable – already infinitely sufficient and complete and therefore beyond alteration or acquisition – and impassible – inexhaustibly alive, stable and entire in himself and so beyond the reach of any agent or act of contestation or depredation. Concepts such as these direct the mind to two elements of the Christian doctrine of God which prove especially important in forming an understanding of the relation of God to creatures: God’s radically non-­composite or simple nature, and God’s absolute otherness from the world. Simplicity is a broad term for the fact that God is not formed from elements, whether internal or external; God has no career, no process of coming-­to-be. Simplicity indicates the intrinsic absence or need for derivation in God and, further, betokens that God is not ordered to anything else, even as the most excellent or supreme being. The world, therefore, is not a concomitant to God. ‘[I]t is absolutely necessary that God should be differently related to his effects than any other possible cause to its effects and that he should possess his nature in a different way from any other possible being. The concept of “incompositeness” enables us to secure the assertion of these things.’9 Because God is simple, he is absolutely and not merely contingently other than the world. God’s not being part of the world is not such that he is some reality alongside and contrasted with the world, as if God and the world formed a pair with their respective natures determined in part by their divergence and differentiation from each other. The otherness of God as creator is not an instance of correlativity or complementarity. God is non aliud, beyond relations of similarity or contrast. ‘Creatures are not related to God as to a thing of a different genus, but as to something outside of and prior to all genera.’10 2.  The act of creation is determined by the nature of its agent: God has his being per se and so creates ex nihilo. To say ex nihilo is simply to say ‘God alone’. For the coming-­to-be of creatures, nothing is required but God. The act of creation effects ‘the issuing of the whole of being from the universal cause’,11 and is undertaken in relation to nothing. 9.  Braine, The Reality of Time and the Existence of God, p. 353. 10.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.4.3 ad 2; cf. De potentia VIII.8 ad 2. 11.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.1 resp.

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This may be drawn out by a series of negations. The act of creation does not presuppose something other than God, and is not an act which forms antecedent matter, for it has no material cause, there being no patient entity to receive the divine work. Nor is the act of creation an act against anything, the assertion of mastery over contending forces. It is not a ‘dramatic enactment . . . the absolute power of God realizing itself in achievement and relationship’,12 because ‘absolute’ excludes self-­realization, achievement and constitutive relationship. Again, the act of creation is not an instance of efficient causality: it is without labour (not the exercise of force in relation to some opposing reality but the effortless introduction of being) and without temporal extension (not discursive achievement but instantaneous production), and it effects no change (the movement from non-­ existence to existence is not the modification of a common subject of ‘before’ and ‘after’). The negatives serve both to distinguish the act of creation from any contingent work of making and also to characterize the agent of creation. As the one who creates ex nihilo, God is not simply an agent of formation, effecting an alteration, but ‘the universal cause of being’13 or ‘the universal principle of being’.14 Further, as causa universalis totius esse15 God is entirely beyond the totality of all things. There is in God no esse-­ad, no constitutive relation to that which is not himself. The act of creation acquires a measure of intelligibility only as we respect its sheer incomparability, stripping those properties which we normally ascribe to particular acts and agents from our conception of the divine making, and so repeating in thought the confession that God the creator is ὁ μακάριος καὶ μόνος δυνάστης (1 Tim. 6.15). 3.  More briefly: what of the nature of created things? First, a creature is a ‘thing made’ (Isa. 29.16; Ps. 100.3, John 1.3,10), a work of God’s hands. Creatures have their being in such a way that both in coming-­to-be and in continuance they are marked by entire ontological deficiency apart from the person and act of the creator in his infinite charity. The being of the creator is per se, that of the creature ‘an existing which is a relation to a source.’16 This is not to deny that the creature possesses being, but to indicate whence and how it does so. The creature emerges from the non-­condition of absolute privation; its ‘background’ is the non-­being of the creaturely subject, to which nothing, no potentiality or expectation of being, may

12.  J. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil. The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. xvi. 13.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.16.3. 14.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.16.5. 15.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.2 resp. 16. D. Burrell, ‘Act of Creation with its Theological Consequences’, in T. G. Weinandy, et al, Aquinas on Doctrine, p. 39.

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be ascribed. ‘A creature is nothing but the relation of dependence upon the proper cause of its being: tantum esse ad Deum.’17 Second, created being is entirely gratuitous, that which might not have been. Created being is therefore not that in terms of which other things are explained, but that which stands in need of explanation by reference to an external principle. Created things are principiata, their phenomenal reality directing understanding beyond themselves to their source, in relation to which they have and enact their being, and apart from which they possess neither amplitude nor duration.

IV What is said of the first three topics of the doctrine of creation prepares us for consideration of its fourth division, the relation of God and creatures. ‘[I]n God [the relationship to the creature] is not a real relation, but only conceptual. The relation of the creature to God, however, is real.’18 In this matter theological reflection makes its way with more than usual difficulty, because, as Aquinas observes, ‘our mind struggles [nititur] to describe God as a most perfect being’.19 The struggle arises because thought about God operates under a double constraint, made all the more acute by its subjection to divine instruction in Holy Scripture. On the one hand, the created intellects of the prophetic and apostolic writers represent the relation of God and creatures as a reciprocal history of encounter or communion, drawing on conceptions of the kind of mutual relations which obtain between human persons: ‘all our knowledge takes its rise from sensation. Congenially, then, holy Scripture delivers spiritual things to us beneath metaphors taken from bodily things.’20 On the other hand, everything said of the relation of God and creatures must recognize that God is perfectissimus and so an entirely unconventional matter for creaturely thought and speech. Excessive or exclusive submission to either constraint unframes theology. To say that ‘it is not in keeping with this teaching to convey divine things under the symbolic representation of bodily things’21 is to incapacitate divine revelation, to fail to trust its ability to resist being extinguished by the imagery of temporal interaction.22 Yet theology may be so absorbed by Scripture’s dramatic-­historical presentation of God’s relation to creatures that the distinction between God and the world comes to be pictured in comparative or relatively contrastive terms as a distinction within the world, one between commensurable historical agents. 17. K. L. Schmitz, The Texture of Being, pp. 122f. 18.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.3 ad 1. 19.  De potentia I.1 resp, translation altered. 20.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.1.9 resp. 21.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.1.9 obj. 2. 22.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.1.9 ad 2.

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Both strategies evade the conversion or recasting of the sense of terms in divinis which accompanies all theological talk of creation and finds especial application in the term ‘relation’. Divine instruction engenders intellectual and semantic mobility: ‘the minds of those given the revelation are not allowed to remain arrested with the images but are lifted up to their meaning.’23 This mobility alerts us to the originality and unlikeness of the use of the term ‘relation’, as well as to the fittingness of its retention. Such conceptual adaptability readies theology for overcoming the obstacles placed in its way by a univocal concept of relation learned from dealings with created things. Its exegetical and dogmatic fruitfulness depends upon theology’s readiness to be unseated from habits of mind, and also upon persuasion that teaching about God’s self-­subsistent and wholly realized being has primacy in ordering thought about creation and creatures, that such teaching enables us to read Scripture well, and that it envisages no restriction to God’s loving and active presence among the works of his hands. First, then, relation to the creator is real on the side of the creature. Without this relation the creature would not be, because the creature is ordered to God and constituted by that ordering. ‘[T]hings that are ordered to something [res habentes ordinem ad aliquid] must be really related to it, and this relation must be some real thing in them. Now all creatures are ordered to God both as to their beginning and as to their end . . . Therefore creatures are really related to God, and this relation is something real in the creature.’24 This ad aliquid relation, however, does not come into being in the history of fellowship between God and the patriarchs, kings, prophets and all the people of Israel and the church; it is, rather, the principium of that history, that by virtue of which there is a creation and therefore an unfolding covenant – namely, the original gift of being by the creator, along with its providential maintenance, in relation to which the creature lives and moves and has its being. Second, the relation of God to the creature is a relation of reason. This requires some amplification . . . Two kinds of relation may be predicated of God: relations ad intra and relations ad extra. The relations ad intra – the divine processions – are eternal real relations, intrinsic to God’s perfection. To speak of paternity, filiation and spiration as real relations, however, requires a special sense of relatedness, of being ad aliud, in which relation is irreducible (this is a principal task for trinitarian theology). For at first glance it might seem that relations in God would be capable of resolution into the antecedent undivided divine essence.‘Seeing that God is the first beginning and last end of things, anything that is reducible to something previous cannot be in God, but only those things to which others are reduced . . . Now everything that denotes ‘to-­another’ [ad aliud] being is reducible to absolute or ‘to-­itself ’ [ad se] being. Therefore in God nothing is relative to another but all is absolute.’25 However, the relations between the divine persons are not accidental to God’s being; they 23.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.1.9 ad 2. 24.  Aquinas, De potentia VII.9 resp. 25.  Aquinas, De potentia VIII.1 obj. 9.

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simply are God’s being. The relations of Father, Son and Spirit are not some extended process in the course of which God acquires supplementary properties, behind which lies the unchanging divine essence. Thus, although ‘the movable and the accidental are reducible to something previous as the imperfect to the perfect’, nevertheless ‘relation sometimes follows from the perfection of a thing’. Accordingly, ‘the divine perfection does not hinder us from ascribing relations to God, as it forbids us to ascribe movement and accident to him.’26 God’s relations ad extra are relations of reason and do not ‘follow from his perfection’. Understanding why this is so requires alertness to the natural tendency of our minds to represent God and creatures as symmetrically related: on the basis of the fact that creatures are really related to God, we conceive of God’s relation to creatures in a similar way. ‘[T]he mind sometimes considers something in relation to another inasmuch as it is the term of the relationship of another thing to it, and yet itself is not related to the other: as when it considers something knowable as terminating the relationship of knowledge to it; and thus it imputes to the thing knowable a certain relation to knowledge, and such a relation is purely logical. In like manner, our mind attributes to God certain relative terms, inasmuch as it considers God as the term of the creature’s relation to him: wherefore such relations are purely logical.’27 That is, the mind may treat relations in which there is only one accident (on the side of the creature) as if we were dealing with a pair of mutual relata, a relative and a co-­relative: this, because we are ‘unable to conceive one thing related to another, without on the other hand conceiving that relation to be reciprocal.’28 The distinction between real relations and relations of reason is partly intended to inhibit this tendency, and so to give proper regard to the way in which God’s perfection in se unsettles conventions about relations. However, though the concept of logical relations encourages vigilance against the way in which the mind’s operations may entice us into metaphysical error, it is primarily a corollary of the dogmatics of God the creator, and follows from a double assertion: that God the creator is not ordered to another, and that God is wholly outside the genus of that which is ordered to him. Consider Aquinas’s extended denial in De potentia VII of ‘reciprocity in the relations of God and the creature’.29 A real relation ‘consists in the ordering of one thing to another’,30 and is mutually real when in both terms of the relation ‘there is the same reason for mutual order’31 – that is,‘mutual real relations require foundations of the same type’.32 This may be seen in instances of causality. Agents ‘sometimes have 26.  Aquinas, De potentia VIII.1 ad 9. 27.  Aquinas, De potentia VII.11 resp.; cf. De veritate IV.5 resp. 28.  Aquinas, De potentia I.1 ad 10; cf. Summa Contra Gentiles II.13.4; De veritate IV.5 resp. 29.  De potentia VII.10 s.c. 30.  De potentia VII.10 resp. 31.  De potentia VII.10 resp. 32. Henninger, ‘Aquinas on the Ontological Status of Relations’, p. 512.

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an order to their respective patients’,33 as in those agents who produce their like in species. But this is not invariably the case: ‘there are some things to which others are ordered, but not vice-­versa, because they are wholly foreign to the genus of actions or power from which that order arises [omnino extrinseca ab illo genere actionum vel virtutum quas consequitur talis ordo]’.34 Aquinas offers a number of examples: the way in which the thing known is not touched by the act of knowing; the relative location of a person and a pillar; the relation of money and price; the relation of depicted object to its artistic representation. So in the case of God’s relation to creatures: God’s ‘action is his substance and is wholly outside the genus of created being whereby the creature is related to him.’35 Aquinas’s analysis applies the dogmatic principle that, unlike God’s wisdom or will, God’s relations to creatures are not expressive of his essence.36 Simple and entirely realized, God ‘is not made happy by making things, but through being all-­ sufficient to himself and needing not the things he made.’37 The non-­interdependence of God and creatures is reinforced by contemplation both of God’s rest on the seventh day of creation, which indicates that God ‘is happy in himself and needs not creatures’,38 and of the way in which the ‘newness’ of the world demonstrates its non-­necessity for God’s eternal bliss.39 The existence of creation adds nothing to God, and in its absence God would be undiminished. Many recoil from this. In The Divine Relativity – a work which evokes admiration and exasperation in equal measure – Hartshorne argued not without passion that ‘if . . . God is wholly absolute, a term but never a subject of relations, it follows that God does not know or love or will us, his creatures.’40 Sed contra: it is precisely because God’s relation to creatures is not ‘real’ that his love is of infinite scope and benevolence. In God, absence of reciprocity is not absence of relation but the ground of limitless relation. God does not stand in relation to the creature as some commensurable particular agent in the same order of being, but more intimately and comprehensively as the principle of all being. ‘[A]lthough God is not in the same genus as the creature as a thing contained in a genus, he is nevertheless in every genus as the principle of the genus; and for this reason there can be a relation between the creature and God as between effect (principiata) and principle.’41 As principium God is the universal cause rather than a particular circumscribed agent, and so there are no bounds to his relation: he is ‘in every genus’, though 33.  De potentia VII.10 resp. 34.  De potentia VII.10 resp. 35.  De potentia VII.10 resp.; cf. Summa theologiae Ia.13.7 resp. 36.  Summa Contra Gentiles II.13.5. 37.  De potentia IV.2 ad 5. 38.  De potentia IV.2 ad 5; cf. Summa theologiae Ia.73.2. 39.  De potentia IV.2 ad 5. 40.  C. Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 17. 41.  Aquinas, De potentia VII.8 ad 2.

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contained within none. Further, God’s simplicity excludes any relation to creatures in which God receives an augmentation of his being from that to which he relates. But divine simplicity also means the absence of composition in God. God is not an aggregate of particular actions and interactions, and therefore his relation to all that he has made has limitless breadth. ‘[I]t is not incompatible with a thing’s simplicity to have many relations towards other things; indeed, the more simple a thing is the greater the number of its concomitant relations, since its power is so much the less limited and consequently its causality so much the more extended . . . Accordingly, from God’s supreme simplicity there results an infinite number of respects or relations between creatures and him.’42 Because God’s infinitely extended relations to created things neither add to nor subtract from his being, his work of bringing into being and maintaining creatures is wholly benevolent and beneficent. God is in himself infinitely happy, in need of nothing from the creature: how could the perfect be perfected? His work of creation is pure generosity: he makes things for their own sake, not for his. This, in turn, is the ground of the integrity of the creature and of its proper efficacy. Because God can be opposed by nothing – because, again, he is not a particular being acting upon others and acted upon by them – he is beyond envy of the creature, and there is him no reluctance to bestow upon the creature its own intrinsic substance and powers.

V Consideration of Christian teaching about creation requires ascetical as well as intellectual virtues. Most of all, it obliges those who consider it to recover the posture of creatures, the dependence and gratitude of derivation and the repudiation of self-­subsistence. This is acutely hard for the children of Adam, for we contend against our creaturely nature and calling, from stupidity or pride or fear that unless we snatch at our being and make ourselves authors of its perpetuation and dignity, it will slip away from us. And so we propose to ourselves, sometimes a little guiltily, sometimes with frank confidence, that we constitute a given reality around which all else is arranged. Even God may be so placed, as God ‘for us’, a protagonist whose identity, not wholly unlike our own, is bound to us, and whose presence confirms the limitless importance of the human drama. All this must be set aside, and, by the loving missions of the Word and the Spirit, it is already being set aside as the mortification and renewal of our spiritual, intellectual and moral nature proceeds. As it is left behind, we may begin to understand how it is that God is indeed for us. Only because the God who is for us is in himself God, entire without us, is his being for us more than a projection of our corrupt longing for a satisfying divine counterpart. The burden of the Christian doctrines of the Trinity, creation and incarnation is that, because God is from and in himself, he is God for us in ways we can scarcely imagine. 42.  Aquinas, De potentia VII.8 resp.

Chapter 9 O n t h e T h e o l o g y o f P r ov i d e n c e

I Providence is that work of divine love for temporal creatures whereby God ordains and executes their fulfilment in fellowship with himself. God loves creatures and so himself orders their course to perfection: mundum per se ipsum regit, quem per se ipsum condidit.1 A doctrine of providence is, accordingly, a conceptual meditation on the consolation and hope that this work of love generates. But it has commonly proved a point at which the gospel’s consolation is difficult to commend or receive; and the scandal is such that doing justice to the doctrine demands a greater than usual measure of resolution and clarity of mind in understanding the constraints and opportunities which attend its exposition. Providence is a permanently contrary doctrine. It is too simple to proceed on the assumption that the contrariety issues from an acute sense of unprecedented crisis – loss of confidence in epic readings of human history, a sense that we have witnessed a scale of horror unfelt by our forebears. If theology takes such outrage and unbelief seriously, it cannot placate them by modifying its concepts or eliminating embarrassing accretions; the contrariety is material, of the nature of the case, it must be seen through to the end or there can be no advance. Theodicy is a case in point. A theology of providence need not and cannot wait upon demonstration of the divine righteousness, because providence is not asserted on the basis of the insignificance of evil but on the basis of the belief that God outbids any and all evil. What makes evil problematic for providence is not its existence but the fact that we resist applying belief in providence to cases of it, especially those in which we are concerned. Theological answers to this will therefore be as much ascetic as argumentative: we need to learn what it is to apply belief in providence, and how to apply it, in order to be persuaded of the viability and fruitfulness of making the application. Reconciling providence and horrors is a task within fellowship with God; inability to commend and receive the proffered reconciliation indicates estrangement. ‘When my soul was embittered, when I was 1. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob XXIV.xx, in CCSL 143B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985).

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pricked in heart, I was stupid and ignorant, I was like a beast toward thee. Nevertheless I am continually with thee; thou dost hold my right hand.’ (Ps. 73.21-23) This is not a matter of theology evading responsibility to its setting, but exercising it in the only way it knows. The task of a Christian theology of providence can be undertaken only by drawing upon the resources given to it by the gospel; it can only hear the prophets and apostles, and only speak after such hearing – otherwise it has nothing to say. What it is not permitted to do is to respond to its contrary situation by suspending its talk of providence until better instructed, until better warrants are provided to ensure a more fluent, less crisis-­laden exposition. Release from the dishonour of making this particular confession can only come at the price of abandoning the entire undertaking. The law of theology is the law of the matter, not that of its occasion. To follow the law of the matter and bear its contrariety is not self-­protection but evangelical charity. ‘Since we have such a hope, we are very bold’ (2 Cor. 3.12). I proceed by, first, identifying three formal features of a theology of providence; second, considering the knowledge of providence; third, examining its material content, and fourth, concluding with reflections on its proper use.

II First, three formal matters: the location of the doctrine of providence, the relation of expositio to disputatio, and the Christian specificity required in its exposition. 1.  Christian dogmatics has a double theme, God in himself and the outer works of God, theology proper and economy. Though in the order of exposition the economy may be treated first and with great elaboration, in the material order theology proper is primary, and all other Christian teaching is suspended from it. This means that all Christian doctrines are functions of the doctrine of the Trinity (though it should quickly be added that this is to appeal not to some abstract principle of relationality but to the pure originality of God’s perfect life). God’s immanent triune perfection is the first and last object of Christian theological reflection and governs all else. And that perfection is abundant, giving life to and sustaining that which is not God, and which is the object of economic reflection. Providence is a widely dispersed doctrine, straddling both theology and economy, because its theme is God’s government of created reality in execution of his will for creatures – what Aquinas calls ratio ordinis and dispositio et executio ordinis.2 It pervades dogmatics, because dogmatics treats the history of fellowship between the creator and his creatures in which God perfects that to which he has given life. Like the history of redemption which it accompanies and supports, providence is ubiquitous. Because of this, a materially separate treatment can only be for the purposes of exposition, and must not be allowed to obscure the linkages 2.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.22.1 ad 2.

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across the system of Christian teaching. This dispersed character is something which providence shares with other Christian doctrines; conceptual-­topical treatment must be undertaken in such a way that the historical order of the canon in which all doctrines are being treated all the time is not neglected. Moreover, dispersed in this way, providence is informed by other tracts of Christian teaching – most of all the doctrine of God, but also, for example, creation, soteriology and anthropology. Attending to these connections helps preserve Christian specificity; their neglect can issue in one of the most common disorders in an account of providence, namely dominance by questions or modes of argument not derived from the Christian confession. Particularly since the eclipse of classical Christian cosmology, providence has attracted to itself a set of problems whose solution has been considered essential to a plausible account of the doctrine. Such problems include theodicy, the nature of divine action or the freedom of creatures in relation to divine determination; of such problems, the Christian doctrine of providence is considered an instance. Proposed solutions are often descriptively slender, making little appeal to the resources of Christian teaching, and instead looking for help to – for example – better theories of causality. The result is a stripped-­down account of providence in which the identities of the agents – God and creatures – and the historical unfolding of their relations carries insufficient weight. The most effective counter to this is to resist the isolation and problematization of the doctrine: providence cannot be extracted from the corpus, cleaned up and then reinserted, for dogmatics is a whole, not an assemblage of discrete parts. Where, then, should providence be located? It can be divided between the doctrine of God and the doctrine of creation, as it is by Aquinas who treats providence proper in the context of discussing the divine knowledge and will,3 government in relation to creation,4 and fate in connection with the order of the world.5 Or it can be reserved for unified treatment as part of the doctrine of God’s relation to creation, usually after predestination. The former placement has the considerable contemporary advantage of underscoring the relation of providence to the eternal divine counsel.6 The latter is probably most convenient, however, to 3.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.22. 4.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.103–9. 5.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.116. 6.  Barth mounts a curious objection to Lombard and Bonaventure for placing the doctrine of providence in the doctrine of God, arguing that this imports God’s relation to the creation ‘in the being of God as though the creature too were eternally in God’: Church Dogmatics III/3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), p. 5. He is certainly correct to argue that God ‘would be no less God if the whole of creation had never been done, if there were no creatures, and if the whole doctrine of providence were therefore irrelevant’ (ibid.). But to go on from there to say that ‘there can be no place of this doctrine in that of the being of God’ (ibid.) is to overstate – as he implies when he argues that as an opus ad extra providence rests on the opus Dei internum, the election of grace in Jesus Christ (p. 6).

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display the coherence of the doctrine, provided that the all-­important backward connection to the doctrine of God is retained. Retaining this backward connection is crucial to prevent the soteriological subjectivization of providence that we find in, for example, Schleiermacher. Like Calvin, Schleiermacher is entirely correct to emphasize that the saving preservation of the community of redemption is the creaturely core of the doctrine of providence.7 But he lacks Calvin’s reference to the eternal divine will; though he speaks of ‘the Divine All-Sovereignty’,8 providence falls under the rule that ‘for a Christian consciousness, all the things have existence only as they are related to the efficacy of redemption’.9 The lack of a theology of divine perfection eventually leads to the absorption of the doctrine into morals or history or attitude to life. Moreover, placing providence after the doctrine of creation has the further advantage of ensuring that the doctrine of creation is not simply an account of origins, but inseparable from God’s establishment of creatures with movement towards finality, superintended by his care. 2.  As with all dogmatics, disputatio is subordinate to expositio. Dogmatics has a twofold task: an analytic-­expository task, in which it attempts orderly conceptual representation of the content of the Christian gospel as it is laid out in the scriptural witnesses; and a polemical-­apologetic task in which it explores the justification and value of Christian truth-­claims. The latter external orientation is necessary but derivative from the first; it may not without serious damage become the ground of exposition. This is, once again, to prevent the problematization of Christian doctrine in which material dogmatic content is suspended rather than applied to make headway with disputed questions. This we shall try to indicate in the relation of providence to creaturely freedom. Further, dogmatics will have a free relation to the necessary conceptualities and languages of which it makes use in explicating its material, and will not expect them to bear all the weight in disputatio. Both dogmatic and apologetic problems can rarely be eased conceptually or by the improvement of terms: most often what is required is the clearing away of some dominant theory or conceptuality by dogmatic description. In the doctrine of providence, the language of causality and agency is a matter in point, because refinement of such language is sometimes thought to be essential to successful exposition. The doctrine cannot, of course, manage without such language – all theology has its borrowings from elsewhere. But good dogmatics will be keen to retain a sense that the borrowing is ad hoc, not principled, and to let the real work be done by the matter itself. A doctrine of providence will best be conducted as an exercise in biblical reasoning, a conceptual, schematic representation of what theology is told by the prophets and apostles. 3.  These first two points serve to indicate the Christian specificity required of a Christian doctrine of providence: at each point, the cogency of the presentation 7. F. D. E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 723. 8. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 144 9. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 723.

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depends upon deployment of and governance by the Christian doctrine of God and its economic entailments. A Christian doctrine of providence is only derivatively a theory of history, a cosmology or an account of divine action in the world; most properly it is a representation of how the Father’s plan for the fullness of time is set forth in Christ and made actual by the Holy Spirit amongst the children of Adam. In other words, the identities of the agents in the history of providence – this God and his creatures – are fundamental to determining its course and character. (Barth’s insistence on providence as God’s ‘fatherly lordship’ is surely the most extended modern attempt to account for this.10) Again, Christian specificity about the ends of providence is crucial to grasping its nature, for providence is not mere static world maintenance but teleological, the fulfilment of the ordered fellowship with God which is the creature’s perfected happiness. The key questions are not cosmological but theological, and their answers derive from specifications of the enacted name of God. A natural extension of this is the need for caution over the derivation of teaching about providence from the general concept of deity which forms part of a natural philosophy. Zwingli’s de providentia is commonly held up as an example of this, for – despite its trinitarian content and its practical conclusion – it insists on the necessity of providence if there is a supreme good: ‘For since it is of the nature of supreme truth to see through all things clearly, inasmuch as that which is divinity must see all things, and since it is of the nature of supreme might to be able to do what it sees, nay, to do all things, and, finally, since it is of the nature of the supreme good to will by its goodness to do what it clearly sees and can do, it follows that he who can do all things must provide for all things.’11 The worry is reinforced by Zwingli’s appeal to Pico della Mirandola’s oration with its talk of God as ‘the great master workman’.12 Others stumble here: Turretin’s penetrating analysis is superb, but shadowed by a posteriori demonstrations of providence from a doctrine of God as supreme ruler,13 and by a concept of motion lacking in the required equivocation. If a theology of providence is to identify and steer away from the problem it requires that conceptual analysis not be inattentive to the personal-­ intentional idiom of Scripture, and the identities of agents and subjects of the history of providence, their modes of actions and ends, be protected from formalization. The rule is: He upholds the universe by his word of power.14 10. See Church Dogmatics III/3, pp. 3–288; a classic statement is, of course, that in the Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 10, Q/A 27. 11. H. Zwingli, The production from memory of a sermon on the providence of God in On Providence and Other Essays, W. J. Hinke, ed. (Durham: Labyrinth Press, 1983), pp. 132f. 12. See Zwingli, On the providence of God, p. 160. 13. F. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VI.i.vii (vol. 1, pp. 491f.). 14.  The examples from Zwingli and Turretin suggest that the roots of what Charles Taylor calls ‘providential deism’ reach back into the theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so that we require a rather more probing analysis of the theological disorder which cleared a space for deistic doctrines of the world order; see C. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 221–69.

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With these preliminary orientations in mind, we move to reflect on the knowledge of providence.

III ‘We struggle and waver in the matter of providence,’ Zwingli tells us. ‘When it presents itself before our eyes so plainly that we are forced even against our will to see it, regard it, and execute its commands, we yet bid ourselves to hope for results according to our own desires’.15 Knowledge of providence, that is, is always a matter of mortification and vivification, the chastening and reordering of desire; the application of the intellect in the matter involves its renovation and illumination by the Spirit’s grace. Only in that movement of disappointment and trust is providence known. This is simply to say that the knowledge of providence is knowledge of faith: ‘it is not after the manner of men, or by the natural sense, that in our miseries we acknowledge God to have regard of us, but we take hold of his invisible providence by faith’.16 Faith is creaturely knowledge, assent and trust which correspond to the free communicative presence and action of God. Such knowledge accords with the essential character of creaturely being, which is had not a se and in se but ab extra, enjoyed and exercised not in the mode of possession but in an act of the referring of creaturely intellect to God. Providence is knowledge of God, and known as God is known, in the act of faith. The creaturely act of faith is the work of the Holy Spirit, a point at which reason is caught up in an antecedent gracious causality which enables the intellect to see God and all things in God by locating its operations coram Deo. This is why faith in providence is only derivatively ‘subjective’, an interpretation of and attitude towards the world. Primarily and strictly it is objective, generated and sustained by a movement from outside reason. Its objectivity is of a special kind, in that it is derived from ‘revelation’, that is, from those acts in which God makes himself present to disordered creatures in such a way that they are caused to know that against which they have blinded themselves. To acquire ‘objectivity’ in knowledge – truthful attention to reality – we are required to submit to chastening and correction. Objectivity is not self-­generated knowledge, though we wish it were, and are restless when we discover that it is not; the restlessness is a further sign of the intellect’s disorder. To know providence, we need to be taught by the Spirit for, again, we know providence as we know God. One of the conditions under which faith exists is that of created temporality (this is why hope is faith’s extension of itself into the future). The knowledge of faith is not available apart from its acquisition and deployment over time; yet, because faith is faith in the omnipresence of God to whom all occasions are seasons 15.  Zwingli, On the providence of God, p. 231. 16.  J. Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, vol. 1 (London: James Clarke, 1965), p. 141 (on Ps. 13.1).

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of mercy, faith in providence is knowledge of what will be true in all occasions, namely: necesse est ponere providentiam in Deo.17 Without knowing our future course, faith in providence confesses that God orders our time. A cogent theology of providence will respect this particular kind of temporal objectivity. Bad doctrines of providence extricate knowledge of providence from the corruptions of temporality – by giving easy access to synchronic accounts of history, by neglecting the believer’s stance in medias res, by supplying history with a frame.18 Bad doctrines of providence abound, as do bad responses to them which try to reintroduce an element of indeterminacy by subtracting from divine determination or omni-­causality, but faith’s knowledge of providence will neither under-­determine or over-­determine. It will not allow that provisionality goes all the way down (this simply makes a doctrine of providence redundant); nor will it import the notion of the tragic to disrupt complacent teleologies of history (because God is, there is lament but no tragedy). And, equally, faith in providence will be unwilling to associate certain knowledge of providence with knowledge secured by proofs (certainty contingent on proof is not possible, for proofs are not of infinite range or applicability). Instead, if it follows the movement of faith in God’s providence, dogmatics will pay attention to the particular kind of certainty of divine providence that is given to faith. That certainty originates wholly outside the believing subject; it is given to the believer as she attends to the works of God.‘We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son in order that he might be the first-­born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified’ (Rom. 8.28-30).‘We know’ is a function of God, who is for us, and shows himself such by not sparing his Son. To know providence is to know that event in its infinite range – God ‘gave him up for us all’, and so ‘will he not also give us all things with him?’ (Rom. 8.32). It is possible to say no to Paul’s question, or to say that we do not know; but those are not possibilities for faith in providence, which can only say that ‘If God is for us, who is against us?’ (Rom. 8.31). Providence is known as God is known – in liberation from mistrust and anxious certainty, from paralysis and hubris, a liberation effected by the glory of Jesus Christ which illuminates all created being and time. Faith, then, confesses what Calvin calls God’s ‘invisible providence’:19 ‘by faith we take hold of God’s grace, which is hidden from the understanding of the flesh’.20 Providence is mystery, known as such. Its invisibility does not entail lack of 17.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.22.1 resp. 18. For an articulate reflection on these temptations, see B. Quash, Theology and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Further, see R. Williams, Wrestling with Angels. Conversations in Modern Theology (London: SCM Press, 2007), pp. 35–76. 19.  Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, vol. 1, p. 141. 20.  Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, vol. 1, p. 144.

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intelligibility, but is a summons to a particular act of intelligence, one conformed to the manner in which God cares for creatures – not all at once, in the midst of their conflicts, miseries and distractions, drawing them to direct themselves to God in ‘sighs and prayers’.21 Through faith in providence we may come to attain the conviction of things not seen (Heb. 11.1). Knowledge of providence is in part practical knowledge, a work of reason whose end is attitudes and activities in which our creaturely vocation is enacted. It is a practical perception of the origin and order of temporal episodes, not simply an observation of the nature of things or a ‘world picture’.22 This is not to say that knowledge of providence is not scientia, but to specify the kind of scientia that it is. Troeltsch suggests that, because belief in providence is religious belief, it ‘can by no means serve to explain the world’ and ‘does not infringe on the scientific explanation of the world’.23 But faith is knowledge, and by it we may venture judgements. These judgements are not ‘pure’: they are aspects of disposing of ourselves in time. By them we attempt to read human time as the history of fellowship between the creator and his creatures, seeing particular episodes as instances of judgement and blessing, seeing the whole as directed to our good, deriving consolation from the order which is discerned but not imposed. Belief in providence is not simply a gloss on the course of nature, which could quite adequately be interpreted without reference to the divine plan and its execution. Rather, it is a belief that time is (and is not merely taken to be) ‘under [God’s] hand’, that it cannot be enclosed ‘within the stream of nature’,24 and so to learn how to live in time.25 This being so, it is scarcely possible to suggest that the doctrine of providence is a ‘mixed article’, discernible partly by natural reason, partly by faith; it is faithful reason’s receiving of the consolation that, from before the foundation of the world and through all its course, God is for us.

IV We now turn to the material content of the doctrine of providence. God ordains that there should be an order to creaturely being and creaturely history, and so administers or regulates creaturely being and history that they attain their perfection. ‘It is not only in the substance of created things that goodness lies,’ Aquinas tells us, ‘but also in their being ordained to an end, above all to their final 21.  Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, vol. 1, p. 141. 22. See Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, p. 18. 23. E. Troeltsch, The Christian Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), p. 205. 24.  J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xvi.3. 25. On this aspect of Calvin see R. Zachmann, Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 73–104, and more generally, C. van der Kooi, As in a Mirror: John Calvin and Karl Barth on Knowing God (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

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end which . . . is the divine goodness. This good order existing in created things is itself part of God’s creation’.26 Providence is the divine work which enacts this order, both the immanent divine action of establishing the distinction of all things and the transitive divine action of temporal government.27 The doctrine of providence begins from the doctrine of God of which it is a function. It is important to begin far back in the doctrine of God – not simply with, for example, divine power or intelligence but with God’s complete inner life which he is from and in himself as Father, Son and Spirit, that is, with the eternal plenitude of the divine processions in which consists the divine blessedness. Providence is an aspect of the uncaused wonder of the overflow of God’s abundant life. God’s perfection includes his infinite love; he is in himself an inexhaustible fountain of life; he bestows life in limitless generosity. That is, God is the maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. The free loving work of creation is ex nihilo: it is a work of absolute initiation, and entails no compromise of the unqualified aseity of God’s life. God does not create out of something; nor does he create out of need, nor does his bestowal of life entail any impoverishment or loss, for it is ingredient within his perfection. ‘Since he is in need of nothing, is rich in all things, and is good and kind, nay is the Father of all the things he has made, it follows that he cannot be wearied or exhausted through giving, that he rejoices in giving, that he cannot help giving’.28 In this act of generosity, God wills, establishes and perfects a reality beyond himself as a further object of his love. God’s acts of creating and governing are inseparable. Indeed, providence is a special dimension of Christian belief in God the creator, in that it specifies the act of creation as the beginning not simply of contingency but of faithful care. Calvin notes that ‘unless we pass on to his providence . . . we do not yet properly grasp what it means to say “God is creator”. Carnal sense, once confronted with the power of God in the very creation, stops here, and at most weighs and contemplates only the wisdom, power, and goodness of the author in accomplishing such handiwork’.29 Creation, we might say, is not simply making. This can be seen in relation both to the creator and to the creation. In relation to the creator, the doctrine of providence indicates that God is no ‘momentary creator’;30 his relation to creatures is not simply initial but purposive and so temporally extended. He gives not only substantia but finis; that is, creatures have an historical nature, being which is ordained to acquire a particular perfection over its course. This perfection is fellowship with God. Creation is the love of God which bestows life in order that this fellowship may be (love as creativity); 26.  Summa theologiae Ia.22.1 resp. 27.  Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VI.i.ii (vol. 1, p. 489). 28.  Zwingli, On the providence of God, p. 136. 29.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xvi.1 30.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xvi.1; see also Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VI.i.v (vol. 1, p. 490).

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providence is the love of God which, corresponding to creativity, superintends the historical order of created being so that its relation to the creator may flourish (love as fidelity). As ordination, divine fidelity purposes the history of fellowship; as government, providence is that history’s execution. If we stand back a pace, two things are to be understood about these affirmations. First, like the doctrine of creation, the doctrine of providence is not only an aspect of cosmology. Although both treat of the metaphysics of the world order, neither can be restricted to that field. This is because, for the Christian confession, created being is not indeterminate but has a nature ordered towards relation to God. Creation is not simply making; providence is not simply maintaining. Both have to be viewed in relation to the specific Christian confession that the history of the creation is both presupposed by and reaches out towards the history of grace, because that is the kind of creation to which God gives being, a creation which may enjoy relation to him. Second, therefore, once again a great deal hangs on contemplation of the identity of the maker and governor of all things, and on understanding the act of creation as one of love issuing in fidelity rather than simply as manufacture. God does not simply provide the initial motion of nature, setting its inclination then allowing it to take its course; he is not a mere observer of creaturely time but an agent, one whose providence, as Calvin puts it, ‘pertains no less to his hands than to his eyes’.31 Providence cannot be restricted to foreknowledge, for God is ‘the ruler and governor of all things, who in accordance with his wisdom has from the farthest limits of eternity decreed what he was going to do, and now by his singular might carries out what he has decreed.’32 And this is so because God is triune; his works ad extra, though indivisible, manifest the properties of the persons to whom they may especially be appropriated. The Father determines the course of created time; the Spirit causes creaturely causes; the Son intervenes to draw creation back from ruin so that it may attain its end. Only because God is thus does creation issue in providence. That creation is not simply making can be seen, second, in relation to the creature. God creates what is not himself, life which is not in se, having no principle of life other than that of the continuing fidelity of the creator. Creaturely being needs conservation. ‘The esse of all creaturely beings so depends upon God that they could not continue to exist even for a moment, but would fall away into nothingness unless they were sustained in existence by his power.’33 To be a creature is to depend upon the creator not merely for coming-­to-be, but also for historical persistence. This is not to espouse a theology of continuous creation in the strong sense that the world is remade moment by moment (a weaker sense of ontological dependence sometimes goes under the same term). Creation bestows being, and 31.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xvi.4. 32.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xvi.8. Bavinck is thus correct to note that providence is to be attributed not only to the divine intellect but to the divine will: Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, p. 596. 33.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.104.1 resp.

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does not merely tantalize with the possibility of being. Once bestowed, the being of creation has its own relative independence; it needs no further creating but does need to be sustained by providential care. Providence thus confirms created being, but does not secure it, as if it were ontologically precarious. Further, as a reality with its own being, creation cooperates with God under God in its own persistence in a way in which it could not cooperate in its own coming-­to-be. And so again, the creator is not otiose once the act of creation is complete, but continues his love as the governor of what he has made. So much, then, by way of the relation between creation and providence. ‘Since it belongs to the same cause to give a thing its being and to bring it to completeness, i.e. to govern it, the way God is the governor of things matches the way he is their cause’.34 The triune God is creation’s first and final cause.35 How is God’s loving work of administration of the history of creation to be conceived? Once again, much depends upon the identity of the agent and his ends in determining the nature of his acts. That a theological metaphysics of divine action is required is unquestionable (without it, belief in providence shrinks to a subjective disposition); but the metaphysics must follow the confession which it explicates, and so take some care to register the fact that words such as ‘motion’ or ‘cause’ are ministerial and not principial. With this in mind, something like the following might be said. 1. God’s administration of creation is the execution of his ‘plan for the fullness of time’ (Eph. 1.10). ‘[T]he divine mind must preconceive the whole pattern of things moving to their end.’36 This seemingly dark and forbidding truth is of the essence of the gospel. How is it so? It is so because the pattern of things pre-­exists, as Aquinas puts it, in mente divina, in the divine mind. This mind is the mind of ‘The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Eph. 1.3), the one who wills our good, who ‘destines us in love’ (Eph. 1.5), and whose works issue in ‘the praise of his glorious grace’ (Eph. 1.6). God’s external acts are in accordance with his inner nature; his providence expresses his omnipotent holiness and goodness and wisdom, his infinite resourcefulness in being for us. And so to speak of God’s plan is to indicate God’s determination to bless creatures. For Calvin, to live by virtue of ‘a certain and deliberate will’, that is, ‘God’s ordinance and command’, is not a matter of fear or resentment but of comfort, for it means to be ‘under [God’s] hand’.37 This is why the Christian tradition devoted much effort to distinguishing faith in providence from fatalism. Fate is untrustworthy and capricious and has no goodness. But by divine determination, creatures are ‘destined and appointed to live’ (Eph. 1.12), to 34.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.103.5 resp. 35.  This is how Dorner relates the creative and providential works of God: I. A. Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 2, p. 44. 36.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.22.1 resp. 37.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xvi.3.

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fulfilment of being in praising the creator’s glory. That providence, in the strict sense of the divine plan, is not bleak destiny is above all decided in the fact that it is in him, in Christ – the one who is both the origin (Eph. 1.4) and the goal (Eph. 1.10) of what God’s love establishes for creatures. Providence is not a world system but the assurance that creaturely time has depth and direction, that it does indeed work for good. 2. God exercises his plan (providentia) in his work of caring for creatures (procuratio). This work is ceaseless and universal in scope. God’s love for creatures is infinite; it is not possible for there to be a creaturely occasion in which it is not at work, for providence is operative non in universali tantum sed etiam in singulari.38 ‘All things work together for good’. But because the end of creation which providence protects is the fellowship of God’s rational creatures with himself, then general and special providence (that is, God’s care for the world in general, and for all humankind) are subordinate to singular providence (God’s care for the elect or the church). Calvin judged that providence is particularly God’s ‘vigilance in ruling the church’,39 and his judgement was a hallmark of Reformed theologies of providence.40 This is emphatically not to undermine the universality of providence, but to say that the church is the special object of God’s care because it is the interim realization of the goal of rational creatures, namely fellowship with the creator. In the church the end of creation is being reached; that is why the history of the church is the meaning of the world’s history, which is the unification of all things in Christ (Eph. 1.10). 3.  Providence is thus directed to the creature’s good. With this we return to the rock of offence. How can this be when we suffer or watch inexplicable horrors? Here the gospel counsels us to endurance in which we may attain knowledge. Again: How can the governance of our ways be good if its cost is the creature’s freedom? How may believers with a good conscience take and offer gospel comfort? Here the gospel returns a longer answer. Creation (and therefore providence) is a work of love, that is, of divine power ordered to the bestowal of life upon another and to the perfection of that life, for God’s ‘power is the minister of God’s love and wisdom. It works with a teleological reference.’41 This already sets a theology of providence in the proper direction. If God is thus – if he is the Father who wills our good, the Spirit who gives integrity to created being, the Son who rescues it from self-­chosen ruin – then how can the divine regulation of all things not be for our good? We do not need to win freedom back from God, because God is its ground, not its denial. ‘Because it belongs to the best sort of being to achieve the best sort of effects, failure to direct the beings 38.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.22.2 resp. 39.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xvii.1. 40. See, for example, Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p.  723; Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, pp. 38f. 41. Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 2, p. 53.

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created to their perfection is not consonant with God’s absolute goodness. Now the highest perfection of any being consists in the attaining of its end. Hence it is appropriate to God’s goodness that, as he has brought things into being, he also guides them towards their end. That is what governing them means.’42 To see this, however, requires that we strip the notion of ‘moving’ of any abstract ideas of sheer causal force, maximize its equivocal character and fill out its form with reference to the canonical portrait of the Lord of the covenant. Moreover, we need to deploy conceptual resources to try to show how the freedom and dignity of creatures are caught up in, not suppressed or eliminated by, the rule of God. A little more on this last point . . . God’s governance secures the creature’s freedom. If this fails to commend itself, it is because it contravenes a destructive convention according to which true freedom is indeterminacy and absolute spontaneity or it is nothing at all. To say that is to deny creatureliness. Freedom is existence in accordance with created nature and towards created ends, not self-­authorship or aseity. This means that freedom is reception, but not passivity – that it is permission and summons, but not spoken by me, but to me by God. ‘God is the abiding cause of man’s being a cause able to determine the character of his existence.’43 The free person fulfils her self by perfecting a given nature. That perfecting is the work of providence which does not constrain but fulfils the creature’s self-­determination, because, in Aquinas’s terms, God’s providence moves the creature’s will ‘as he influences it interiorly’ (interius eam inclinando).44 Can a moved will be free? Yes, because ‘to be moved voluntarily is to be moved of one’s own accord, i.e. from a resource within. That inner resource, however, may derive from some other, outward source. In this sense, there is no contradiction between being moved of one’s own accord and being moved by another’.45 If we are to see that Aquinas’s argument is evangelically well-­judged, we need to grasp that divine providential acts are not simple compulsion (the archer sending the arrow) but rather intrinsic to the creature whom God moves, what Aquinas calls ‘natural necessity’,46 in which the creature is activated and not diminished.47 And to see this we also need to see that – as that astute reader of Aquinas, Turretin, puts it at the beginning of the modern period, ‘The fount of error is the measuring of the nature of liberty from equilibrium and making indifference essential to it. Liberty must be defined by willingness and spontaneity.’48 42.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.103.1 resp. 43. Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 2, p. 51. 44.  Summa theologiae Ia.105.4 resp. 45.  Summa theologiae Ia.105.4 ad 2. 46.  Summa theologiae Ia.103.1 ad 3. 47.  Bavinck comments: ‘the world and every creature in it have received their own existence, but increase in reality, freedom, and authenticity to the extent that they are more dependent on God and exist from moment to moment from, through, and to God’: Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, p. 608. 48.  Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VI.v.xi (vol. 1, p. 508).

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This points us to how, in the light of the gospel, providence dignifies creatures. As with creaturely freedom, so with creaturely dignity: it does not consist only in being agens seipsum, one’s own director.49 To be moved by divine government is not to be beaten, but to be moved to act. Here the conceptuality of secondary causality proves immensely resourceful. God’s providential activity is omni-­causal but not solely-­causal. His ordering of the history of creation includes the employment of creaturely ministers. Their ministerial operations do not threaten but draw life from divine sovereignty; divine sovereignty does not eliminate but generates creaturely operation. That creatures are so drawn into the ordering and moving of their own histories is a gift of love; it is of ‘the abundance of his goodness’ that God imparts ‘to creatures also the dignity of causing’.50 For not only is ‘operation . . . the goal of created being’, but to ‘deprive creation of its pattern of cause and effect . . . would imply lack of power in the creator, since an agent’s power is the source of its giving an effect a causative capability’.51 The creature’s ‘intrinsic power to act’ does not exclude ‘the extrinsic premotion of God’.52 Part, then, of seeing that providence is God’s goodness is grasping that God’s love of creatures includes his creation of them with a particular nature. They are creatures who are not a se; they possess causality; this causality is secondary or medial. As medial causes they are themselves caused; but – because God is who God is, the life-­giver – caused causes are not non-­causes but causes which exercise a specific mode of causality. ‘Secondariness’ is not a deficiency, a violation of creaturely agency, but a specification of the agency lovingly bestowed on us by God who summons us into his service. And further, self-­subsistent agency, curved in on itself, is not our dignity but our resistance to nature. 4. From all this, we may sketch in the most minimal way the modes of divine providential activity. God is faithful to the creature, calling it into his service, and guarding it against disorder that it may obtain its promised glory. That is, through the Son and the Spirit, God preserves, acts with and governs the creature in its passage into the eternal kingdom of God. God loves creatures faithfully in his work of preservation. He freely associates his being with that of the creature, continuing to bear up creaturely reality because he does not will that the creature should fail to attain its perfection. Creaturely history is thus stretched between its source and its end in God, yet its passage, though hidden, is not insecure because it exists under the divine promise. The inner court in which that promise is fulfilled is, of course, the mission of the Son; but its outer court is God’s providential service which makes possible the creature’s continuance in its goal of fellowship. 49.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.103.1 ad 1. 50.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.22.3 resp. 51.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.105.5 resp. 52.  Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VI.v.xiii (vol. 1, p. 509); see further Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 2, pp. 45–9.

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God loves the creature in his work of concurrence. His agency does not cease with the last day of creation; nor does he preserve created reality merely as its passive ontological principium. He acts in partnership with the acts of creatures, serving them by determining them for his service. ‘As the creature has itself in being with respect to God, so also it ought to have itself in working, for the mode of working follows the mode of being . . . now every creature depends upon God in being, therefore also in working.’53 God loves the creature in his work of governance. Creaturely self-­government is destructive and enslaving, because it exchanges the divine necessity for some other self-­imposed necessity, less wise and loving than that appointed by God, and leading not to our happiness but to decay. In his providence God overrules this; he so orders creaturely history that – without our invitation or consent – we are set free for our inheritance. This inheritance is not received apart from the saving missions of the Son and the Spirit. But these works, by which God’s kingdom is established, are anticipated by his providential government, which also accompanies and furthers the benefits which flow from them until in the fullness of time all things are united in God.

V Providence is gospel consolation, ignorance of which is, Calvin tells us, ‘the ultimate of all miseries.’54 Trust in providence signals the end of the evil self-­ responsibility which so afflicts much of our civil life (this we might expect), and of our ecclesial life (of this we should be ashamed). To embrace and trust ourselves to divine government is not resignation, but hopeful action towards the end secured for us by a loving creator. Calvin brooded on the fragility and transience of human life. ‘A man cannot go about unburdened by many forms of his own destruction, and without drawing out a life enveloped, as it were, with death . . . Yet, when the light of divine providence has once shone upon a godly man, he is then relieved and set free not only from the extreme anxiety and fear that were pressing him before, but from every care.’55 We must reach that comfort at the right pace – not too fast, lest we treat it lightly, not too slowly, lest we be overtaken by melancholy. We are instructed by the doctrine of providence to look to God for comfort; to cast ourselves in a tragic role, to allow ourselves to think that there is no comfort, is to fall prey to unbelief. But belief is learned, not given all at once. No small part of the office of dogma is to assist in that learning of the promises of God, describing them well and letting their goodness fill our sails.‘O God, whose never-­failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth; we humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which be profitable for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ 53.  Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VI.iv.ix (vol. 1, p. 503). 54.  Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xvii.11. 55.  Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xvii.11.

Chapter 10 ‘I t wa s t h e w i l l o f t h e L o r d t o b ru i se h i m ’ : S o t e r io l o g y a n d t h e D o ct r i n e o f G o d

I The chief task of Christian soteriology is to show how the bruising of the man Jesus, the servant of God, saves lost creatures and reconciles them to their creator. In the matter of salvation, Christian theology tries to show that this servant – marred, Isaiah tells us, beyond human semblance, without form or comeliness or beauty – is the one in and as whom God’s purpose for creatures triumphs over their wickedness. His oppression and affliction, his being put out of the land of the living, is in truth not his defeat at the hands of superior forces, but his own divine act in which he takes upon himself, and so takes away from us, the iniquity of us all. How can this be? How can his chastisement make us whole? How can others be healed by his stripes? Because, Isaiah tells us, it was the will of the Lord to bruise him; because God has put him to grief; because it is God who makes the servant’s soul an offering for sin. And just because this is so – just because he is smitten by God and afflicted – then the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand, and the servant himself shall prosper and be exalted. And not only this: the servant shall also see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied; he shall see his offspring. As it tries to explicate how God is savingly at work in the affliction of his servant, Christian soteriology stretches both backwards and forwards from this central event. It traces the work of salvation back into the will of God, and forward into the life of the many who by it are made righteous. Soteriology thus participates in the double theme of all Christian theology, namely God and all things in God. The matter of the Christian gospel is, first, the eternal God who has life in himself, and then temporal creatures who have life in him. The gospel, that is, concerns the history of fellowship – covenant – between God and creatures; Christian soteriology follows this double theme as it is unfolded in time. In following its theme, soteriology undertakes the task of displaying the identities of those who participate in this history and the material order of their relations. The Lord who puts his servant to grief is this one, dogmatics tells us; this is his servant, these the transgressors who will be accounted righteous. So conceived, soteriology pervades the entire corpus of Christian teaching, and its exposition necessarily entails sustained attention to trinitarian and incarnational

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dogma, as well as to the theology of creatures and their ends. Indeed, no part of Christian teaching is unrelated to soteriology, whether immediately or indirectly. This does not mean that all other Christian teaching can be resolved into soteriology, or that other teaching is to be arranged around soteriology as its centre. Quite the contrary: making some variant of soteriology (such as the theology of the cross, or justification) into the rector et iudex super omnia genera doctrinarum distorts the order and proportions of Christian dogmatics. Soteriology is a derivative doctrine, and no derivative doctrine may occupy the material place which is properly reserved for the Christian doctrine of God, from which alone all other doctrines derive. The question from which soteriology takes its rise, and which accompanies each particular soteriological statement is: Quis sit deus? The answer which dogmatic soteriology gives to that question takes the form of an exercise in biblical reasoning. Biblical reasoning is the analytical and schematic presentation of the Christian gospel as it is announced in Holy Scripture. Dogmatics is a work of reason which is set in motion by, and at every point answerable to, the self-­communicative presence and action of God the Lord; it operates in the sphere of God’s rule, in particular, that rule exercised in the work of revelation. Dogmatic soteriology can, therefore, only be undertaken as attentiveness to the instruction of God in the gospel, the ‘word of reconciliation’ (2 Cor. 5.19). Further, attending to this reconciling instruction requires that reason itself be reconciled to God, for in the aftermath of the fall reason has lost its way, becoming estranged from and hostile towards God (Col. 1.21). If it is to discharge its office, therefore, reason must acquire renewed pliability and consent to God, teachableness. In practical terms, this means that as an exercise of theological reason soteriology is at every point directed to the prophetic and apostolic testimonies of Scripture, since they are the sanctified creaturely auxiliaries of God’s revealing and reconciling presence. Through their ministry, God addresses and quickens. This is why soteriology is repetitio Sacrae Scripturae.1 How does this conception of the task of soteriology govern the way in which it goes about its work? First, it presses soteriology to order its presentation of the material with a firm eye on the dramatic sequence of the biblical economy of salvation, both in the larger plot of covenantal history and in the concentrated episode of the work of the Word incarnate.2 Second, soteriology will acknowledge the priority of biblical concepts and titles, drawing upon them as the normative prophetic and apostolic stock of language and ideas which constitute the governing material content of dogmatic reflection. Third, soteriology will allow itself only such conceptual inventiveness and argumentative reordering of this material as serves to direct us to the biblical positum – by, for example, drawing attention to features of biblical economy through conceptual summary, or by setting forth the identities of the agents in that economy. Fourth, accordingly, soteriology will be 1. G. C. Berkouwer, The Work of Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), p. 10. 2.  Commanding examples of this can be found in Aquinas (Summa theologiae IIIa. 46–52) and Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II, especially II.xvi.

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cautious about ordering its material around some theme (such as ‘facing’3 or ‘hospitality’4), or as a response to a perceived problem (such as violence5). Thematic or problem-­oriented presentations are commonly nominalist and moralistic, since their centre of gravity lies, not in the irreducible person and work of God but rather in some human experience or action of which theological talk of salvation is symbolic. Soteriology must fall under the rule which governs all dogmatic work, namely ‘the claim of the First Commandment’.6 To speak of dogmatic soteriology as biblical reasoning is to press home the noetic application of that claim. But what of the material extension of the first commandment – that the doctrine of God precedes and governs all other Christian teaching? What follows is given over to reflecting on this matter, the argument proceeding in three stages. (1) A sketch of the setting of soteriology in the corpus of Christian doctrine is offered; this is followed by (2) an analysis of the subordination of soteriology to the doctrine of the Trinity, and especially to teaching about the processions and missions of God’s eternal and living fullness, and about the eternal purpose of God; (3) a brief concluding note on the human history of the Saviour. The argument in its entirety is to be regarded as no more than an extended gloss on a statement of Aquinas: ‘knowledge of the divine persons was necessary for us . . . so that we may have the right view of the salvation of humankind, accomplished by the incarnate Son and by the gift of the Holy Spirit.’7 Only on this basis, I suggest, can we understand why it is good and wholesome to confess that ‘it was the will of the Lord to bruise him’ (Is. 53.10).

II The bedrock of soteriology is the doctrine of the Trinity. The perfect life of the Holy Trinity is the all-­encompassing and first reality from whose completeness all else derives. God’s perfection is the fullness and inexhaustibility in which the triune God is and acts as the one he is. His perfection is not mere absence of derivation or restriction; it is his positive plenitude. God’s perfection is his identity as this one, an identity which is unqualified and wholly realized: ‘I am 3. See D. Ford, Self and Salvation. Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4. See H. Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross. Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004). 5. From a (repetitive) literature, see T. Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance. Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. D. Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). 6.  W. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, p.  398, n.1; consequently, Pannenberg notes, soteriology is to be treated ‘independently of existing and historically shifting hopes of salvation’ (p. 398). 7.  Summa theologiae Ia.32.1 ad 3; my translation, reading donum rather than dona.

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who I am’ – what the scholastic divines called the perfectio integralis in which God’s life is complete in itself. That completeness is fullness of life, the effortless activity in which God confirms his excellence as Father, Son and Spirit. God lives from himself, he is perfect movement, the eternally fresh act of self-­iteration. This act is the ‘processions’ or personal relations which constitute God’s absolute vitality: the Father who begets the Son and breathes the Spirit, the Son who is eternally begotten, the Spirit who proceeds – all this is the positive wholeness and richness of God’s life in himself. God’s boundless immanent life is the ground of his communication of life. God lives in himself and gives life. He is not locked up in his aseity; his blessedness is not self-­absorbed, for alongside the immanent personal works of God’s self-­ relation there are God’s external works in which of his own will he brings into being life other than his own, the life of creatures. He does so graciously, without compromise of his own freedom; he is not constituted or completed by the works of his hands, since as their creator he transcends them absolutely. And he does so lovingly, bestowing genuine life upon all that he makes and ennobling the human creature by appointing it for fellowship with himself. In his free and loving act of creation, God gives to creatures their several natures and ends. To be a creature is to have a nature, to be a determinate reality having its being as this. And to have a nature is to be appointed to a history in which that nature is perfected. In the case of human creatures, the enactment of nature through time involves consent, that is, conscious, willing and active affirmation of nature. Human creatureliness involves (though it is not exhausted in) spontaneity. Beasts give no consent to their nature and end; human creatures do so, and their consent is necessary for the completion on the creaturely side of the fellowship with God for which their nature determines them. These summary references to the doctrines of God and creation form the deep background to the economy of God’s saving works, helping us to identify the agents in that economy. This, according to dogmatics, is what goes on in created time: the high and eternal God who is life in himself gives life to creatures. Against this background, what is to be said of the divine work of salvation? Creatureliness is basic to being human. The nature and end granted by God the creator, and the consent in which they are enacted, are what it is to be human. Human being is being in fellowship, human history is the enactment of that being towards perfection. It is, however, inexplicably the case that creatures resist and repudiate their given nature and end, and refuse to participate in fellowship with God. Sin is trespass against creatureliness, but beneath that lies an even deeper wickedness, contempt for the creator in all its forms – pride, resentment, disordered desire, anxiety, self-­hatred, a catastrophic regime of evil which the creature unleashes by creating a nature for itself and assuming responsibility for its own course. By sin the creature is brought to ruin, for as fellowship with God is breached, the creature is estranged from the source of its life and condemned to exist in death’s shadow. Sin humiliates the creature, robbing the creature of the dignity which it can have only as it fulfils its destiny for fellowship with God.

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What stands between the creature and death? What secures the fulfilment of creaturely being against self-­destruction? This is the subject matter of soteriology. Creaturely defiance and self-­alienation from God cannot overtake the creator’s purpose; God will confirm his own glory by glorifying the creature. The form in which God realizes this determination is a special creaturely history, a particular history which represents and gathers into itself all others. This is the history of divine election and of the covenant to which it gives rise – the history of God’s determination of creatures for fellowship on the sole basis of his mercy. In it, God undertakes to bring human nature to perfection in accordance with his purpose. Its human subjects are the patriarchs, Israel and the church, that is, all who stand beneath God’s promise and summons. At its centre lies the time of the Word made flesh. He enacts the covenant fidelity of God; as this one, God stands by his creature, and puts an end to its distress. And he does so, moreover, in the face of the creature’s contradiction of his fidelity. Faced by its Lord and reconciler, the creature consummates its hatred of God and of itself in an act of staggering wickedness: ‘You killed the Author of life’ (Acts  3.15). The slaying of God’s Son and servant is an undisguised attack on the one by whom he is sent, namely the life-­giver himself – made even more base by the fact that ‘you asked for a murderer to be granted to you’ (Acts 3.14). If the wickedness is staggering, so is the absurdity: how can the creature who has no life in itself extinguish the one who is life’s ἀρχηγός? The Son’s death is comprehended within the life-­giving purpose of the Father, and by it the wicked creature is turned back to God and blessed (Acts 3.26). In the Son’s death there takes place the death of death. The Author of life having demonstrated himself to be the one he is – life’s Author, majestically and limitlessly alive – God’s special history with creatures lies open at its further side, expanding and annexing to itself creaturely history. Through the Holy Spirit, creaturely history is directed to fulfilment; the covenant determination: ‘I will be your God’ is now fulfilled as the Spirit generates its creaturely correspondent: ‘You shall be my people’. Such, in brief compass, is one possible construal of the overall shape of Christian soteriology. It is structured as three moments or loci: the eternal purpose of the perfect God; the establishment of that purpose in the history which culminates in the ministry of the incarnate Son; and the consummation of that purpose in the Spirit. A soteriology will only attain the necessary scope if it attends to all three moments in their integrity and due order. In modern Protestant divinity, the first and third moments were routinely eclipsed, the first often replaced by an abstract theology of divine love, the third by moral or hermeneutical theory. Recent work has done much to correct this latter deficiency, notably in linking soteriology to pneumatology, thereby easing a constrictive focus simply on the passion. But we still await a soteriology in which the first article plays more than a negligible role. Reasons for the neglect lie ready to hand: the dominance of the ‘economic’ in much contemporary trinitarian dogmatics; hesitancy about the metaphysics of God in se; functionalist readings of the biblical materials; the high profile enjoyed by Lutheran rather than Reformed incarnational teaching. Left unchecked, these tendencies can promote a soteriology in which the foundations of salvation in the

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will of the Lord remain inadequately articulated. What may be suggested by way of a remedy?

III The salvation of creatures is a great affair, but not the greatest, which is God’s majesty and its promulgation. ‘He saved them for his name’s sake,’ the psalmist tells us, ‘that he might make known his mighty power’ (Ps. 106.8). Salvation occurs as part of the divine self-­exposition; its final end is the reiteration of God’s majesty and the glorification of God by all creatures. Soteriology therefore has its place within the theology of the mysterium trinitatis, that is, God’s inherent and communicated richness of life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That soteriology has a trinitarian shape is relatively uncontroversial, at least in the more recent literature.8 So, for example, Christoph Schwöbel argues that ‘the doctrine of the Trinity makes explicit the identity of the God of the Christian faith’;9 it is the ‘conceptual explication of the understanding of God contained within the relation to God of Christian faith’.10 In soteriological terms, this means, first, that the doctrine of the Trinity furnishes an identity-­description of the agent 8.  By way of contrast to Richard Swinburne’s comment that ‘It is possible to discuss redemption without needing to analyse what is meant by the doctrine that God is three persons in one substance’ (Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 152), one might consult from the recent literature: V. Brümmer, Atonement, Christology and the Trinity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); C. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), pp.  143–71; idem, ‘Atonement: The Sacrifice and the Sacrifices. From Metaphor to Transcendental?’, in Father, Son and Holy Spirit (London: T&T Clark, 2003), pp.  181–200; M. S. Horton, Lord and Saviour. A Covenant Christology (Louisville: WJKP, 2005); R. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 179–93; idem, ‘Reconciliation in God’, in C. Gunton, ed., The Theology of Reconciliation (London: T&T Clark, 2003), pp. 159–66; idem, ‘Justification as Triune Event’, Modern Theology 11 (1995), pp. 421–7; N. B. MacDonald, Metaphysics and the God of Israel. Systematic Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), pp. 225–45; W. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology vol. 2, pp. 397–464; C. Schwöbel, ‘Die “Botschaft der Versöhnung” (2 Kor. 5,19) und die Versöhnungslehre’, in S. Chapman, C. Helmer, C. Landmesser, ed., Biblischer Texte und theologischer Theoriebildung (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 2001), pp.  163–90; idem, ‘Die Trinitätslehre als Rahmentheorie des christlichen Glaubens’, in Gott in Beziehung. Studien zur Dogmatik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), pp. 25–51; idem, ‘Reconciliation: from Biblical Observations to Dogmatic Reconstruction’, in C. Gunton, ed., The Theology of Reconciliation, pp. 13–38; R. J. Sherman, King, Priest and Prophet. A Trinitarian Theology of Atonement (London: T&T Clark, 2004); A. Spence, The Promise of Peace. A Unified Theory of Atonement (London: T&T Clark, 2006). 9.  ‘Die Trinitätslehre als Rahmentheorie des christlichen Glaubens’, p. 32. 10.  ‘Die Trinitätslehre als Rahmentheorie des christlichen Glaubens’, p. 37.

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of salvation, upon which a definition of salvation depends: ‘The character of that which is believed, experienced and expected as “salvation” can only be determined precisely by referring to the identity of the God who is believed in and worshipped as the subject of the activity which brings about salvation.’11 And, second, trinitarian teaching holds together creation, salvation and eschatological perfection by grounding them in ‘the unity of the trinitarian being of God.’12 The doctrine of the Trinity thus blocks soteriological nominalism and the isolation of teaching about salvation from the other loci of dogmatics. Yet more is required for an adequate theology of salvation. Working towards the doctrine of the Trinity by retrospection from the divine economy of salvation is certainly possible; but it may leave obscure the antecedent conditions of that economy in the life of God in se. If we only look at the saving economy as it were from the angle of its temporal occurrence, we may mischaracterize the kind of temporal occurrence which it is. The economy of salvation is the long history of the works of God, ingredient within the mystery of the Trinity. ‘Mystery’ (Eph. 1.9f.) is God’s self-­disclosing act in which he sets forth his will; it emerges from and is fully charged with his unfathomable prevenient purpose. ‘Mystery’ is revelation in time, a ‘making known’; but its energy is from ‘before the foundation of the world’; and it takes temporal form under pressure from ‘the counsel of his will’. Salvation-­history is thus special history, reaching back into the immanent life of the triune God. Aquinas again: ‘Without faith in the Trinity it is not possible to believe explicitly in the mystery of Christ’s incarnation; the mystery of the incarnation of Christ includes that the Son of God took flesh, that he redeemed the world through the grace of the Holy Spirit, and that he was conceived of the Holy Spirit.’13 The renewal of the world by Christ and the Spirit – that fact that, as Aquinas puts it, we now live post tempus gratiae divulgatae, after the revelation of grace – means that ‘all are bound to believe the mystery of the Trinity explicitly’.14 And for Aquinas that means confessing not only the trinitarian contours of God’s action in the economy, but also the antecedent personal relations within the Godhead which bear up the visible missions of Son and Spirit. If this is so, then soteriology – figuring out what happens when the servant is put to grief by the Lord – requires a theological metaphysics of God in se; only within the setting of God’s own life in its glorious self-­sufficiency can the history of salvation be seen as divulging divine grace to us. Few theologians in the tradition saw this with greater penetration than Jonathan Edwards. A celebrated sermon from 1730, ‘God Glorified in Man’s Dependence’ expounds ‘what God aims at in the disposition of things in the affair of redemption, viz., that man should not 11.  ‘Die Trinitätslehre als Rahmentheorie des christlichen Glaubens’, p. 32. 12.  ‘Die Trinitätslehre als Rahmentheorie des christlichen Glaubens’, p. 39; on this, see also C. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, pp. 143–71. 13.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.2.8 resp (my translation). 14.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.2.8 resp.

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glory in himself, but alone in God’.15 ‘There is an absolute and universal dependence of the redeemed on God.’16 Which God? The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: ‘that [God] be the cause and original whence all our good comes, thereon it is of him; that he be the medium by which is obtained and conveyed, therein they have it through him; and that he be that good itself that is given and conveyed, therein it is in him.’17 In this, of course, Edwards echoes ancient tradition18: ‘There is an absolute dependence of the creature on every one [of the triune persons] for all: all is of the Father, all through the Son, and all in the Holy Ghost. Thus God appears in the work of redemption, as all in all’.19 And, crucially, that God does so appear is rooted in what Edwards elsewhere calls the ‘eternal and necessary subsistence of the persons of the Trinity.’20 The ground of salvation is the internal works of God. Yet we should not let this train of thought pass without pausing to note a worry which it might evoke. Does not this talk of God in se, of the antecedent purpose of God, of God’s eternal and necessary subsistence, quickly regress into metaphysics uncorrected by the gospel drama? Does it not fold the economy of God’s works – above all, the agony of the cross – back into pretemporality, in such a way that the economy lacks any constitutive significance, as if we were saved by a divine plan rather than by its enactment? Do not Jesus and his death threaten to disappear? The objection has been raised on a number of occasions by Robert Jenson, who argues (with characteristic boldness) that formulations of atonement theory commonly assume that the saving power of Jesus’s death somehow lies behind the event itself with which it is not wholly identical. Jenson, by contrast, denies any such antecedents: ‘The Gospels tell a powerful and biblically integrated story of the Crucifixion; this story is just so the story of God’s act to bring us back to himself at his own cost, and of our being brought back. There is no story behind or beyond it that is the real story of what God does to reconcile us, no story of mythic battles or of a deal between God and his Son or of our being moved to live reconciled lives. The Gospel’s passion narrative is the authentic and entire account of God’s reconciling action and our reconciliation, as events in his life and ours. Therefore what is first and principally required as the Crucifixion’s right interpretation is for us to tell this story to one another and to God as a story about him and about

15.  J. Edwards, ‘God Glorified in Man’s Dependence’, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 17, Sermons and Discourses 1730–1733 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 200. 16.  ‘God Glorified in Man’s Dependence’, p. 202. 17.  ‘God Glorified in Man’s Dependence’, p. 202. 18.  Basil, On the Holy Spirit XVI.38. 19.  ‘God Glorified in Man’s Dependence’, p. 212. 20.  J. Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 20, The “Miscellanies” 833–1152 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 432.

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ourselves.’21 This is why he can elsewhere speak of ‘reconciliation in God’22: God’s life is the evangelical drama, and the economy of reconciliation is, we might say, groundless. By way of response: To say that God’s eternity undergirds the history of God’s servant is to specify that history’s origin, character and end; it is not to reduce it to a mere illustration of metaphysical objects, or to neglect its covenantal or relational structure,23 or to translate moral drama into ontology.24 The history of salvation is divinely willed history; it is preceded and enclosed by the great statement of God’s eternal fullness: ‘In the beginning . . .’; it is necessary history, history of which we can only say: ‘it must be so’ (δεῖ). Atonement, Barth wrote, is not a contingent event which might have turned out differently, but ‘a necessary happening’25 because its central agent, Jesus Christ, is ‘very God and very man, born and living and acting and suffering and conquering in time’, and ‘as such the one eternal Word of God at the beginning of all things.’26 To read the canonical Gospels is to read a history which is accidental only at its surface; the tensions of the whole, and of each incident in the whole, are pushed along by ‘the divine “must” ’.27 If this is the case, then no small part of any soteriology will be the exhibition of the divine necessity by which the economy is ordered. Calvin was correct to indicate that the task of the theology of salvation is to ask about ‘the purpose for which Christ was sent by the Father, and what he conferred upon us’28: soteriology concerns a history and its effects. Dogmatics answers those questions about the purpose and blessings of God’s saving work in time precisely by exploring that work’s ‘divine connection’.29 This does not entail that, in its actual presentation of its subject, soteriology must start from the dogmatics of the immanent Trinity. It would be quite possible to begin at some other point – with the fall and sin, or the cross, or the risen and exalted Christ. What matters is not starting-­point but scope, scale and distribution of weight. In any given set of circumstances a theologian might judge it more prudent to start from (for example) grace as benefit rather than from the divine 21.  Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 189. 22.  ‘Reconciliation in God’, pp. 159–66. 23. See Horton, Lord and Servant, pp. 11–13. 24. See J. Denney, The Death of Christ (London: Hodder, 1911), p. 236: ‘The Atonement comes to us in the moral world and deals with us there: it is concerned with conscience and the law of God, with sin and grace, with alienation and peace, with death to sin and holiness; it has its being and its efficacy in a world where we can find our footing, and be assured that we are dealing with realities.’ But Denney’s Ritschlianism betrays itself in his claim that the New Testament is ‘ethical, not metaphysical’ (p. 237). 25.  Church Dogmatics IV/1, p. 48. 26.  Church Dogmatics IV/1, p. 49. 27.  Berkouwer, The Work of Christ, p. 39. 28.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.xv. 29.  Berkouwer, The Work of Christ, p. 40.

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counsel. Provided that the full range of material is covered, without disproportion or distortion, and provided also that the material order is recognized even when the order of exposition may run in a different direction, method is arbitrary. Further, soteriology must always remind itself that the conceptual idiom and order of dogmatics is subservient to the idiom and order of Holy Scripture. The primary task of theology is commentary on the prophetic and apostolic texts, and its dogmatic-­metaphysical explorations have little purpose if they do not serve this undertaking. In a theological culture such as our own, which instinctively conflates being and time, the proportions of gospel soteriology are best displayed by drawing attention to God in se. This is necessary; but it is not sufficient, and soteriology requires for its completion a spacious exposition of the history of the covenant – a joyful and demanding task which cannot be attempted here. Instead, I restrict myself to exhibiting how, correctly made, the distinction and ordered relation of created and uncreated being is soteriologically fundamental. ‘[I]n the teaching of faith,’ Aquinas tells us, ‘the consideration of God comes first, that of creatures afterwards. And thus the doctrine of faith is more perfect . . .’30

IV The principle of God’s saving acts in the missions of the Son and the Spirit is the eternal divine processions. ‘Processions’ and ‘missions’ are formal terms to characterize God’s being as being in relation. Taken together, they signify that the relations between Father, Son and Spirit which constitute God’s eternal life in himself are the spring of his relations with the creatures whom he elects as his companions in the covenant of grace, and whom he saves and perfects through Christ and the Spirit. The divine processions are the eternal relations of origin in which God’s perfect life consists; in them he confirms his self-­existent self-­sufficiency. The Father begets the Son, God from God; God is this perfectly enacted paternity and filiation. And, further, God is perfect as the Father and Son who together breathe the Spirit, and so as the Spirit who proceeds from them. Paternity, filiation and spiration are the life-­filled abundance of God’s being, his pure act in which he is who he is. To speak of these as relations of origin is not, of course, to refer to events in the past, for they are eternal relations and not completed acts of self-­constitution. The Son is the Son, not because he has been originated by the Father’s paternal act, but because God is eternally the relation of paternity and filiation. Nor does the language of origin indicate any subordination within the triune life. Between the persons of the Trinity there is ‘priority of subsistence’31: the Father is the fount of 30.  Summa Contra Gentiles II.4.5; on the relation of ‘on God’ and ‘on creatures’, see G. Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of Thomas Aquinas, pp. 41–3, 413–15. 31. Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 430.

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the life of the Godhead, the one from whom Son and Spirit proceed, but who is himself a nemine, from no one. But there is no ontological disparity here; there is ‘dependence without inferiority of deity’,32 and so no ‘natural subjection’.33 God’s unified, singular and wholly realized life is these relations; they are not as it were the process by which God becomes God; neither God’s unity nor his personal differentiation precedes them. These relations are what God is; the processions are the infinitely mobile, wholly achieved life of God; they constitute what Edwards calls ‘the economy of the persons of the Trinity’,34 the inner order in which God lives and to which the external economy of God’s works is anchored. The divine missions are the further movement of God’s being in which he relates to what he freely creates to be other than himself. In the context of soteriology, missions refer to the Father’s sending of the Son, the Son’s fulfilment of his office as reconciler, and the Spirit’s being sent to sanctify and perfect creatures. These missions repeat ad extra the relations ad intra (hence they can be called ‘temporal processions’). In speaking of the divine missions, we are, crucially, still in the sphere of God’s perfect life, his uncreated movement; but we look at it as it were from a vantage point in which our eye is trained on that divine movement as it draws near to creatures. The mission of each person is constituted, first, by the eternal procession of the person (the person’s orientation to the sender or origin), and, second, by the person’s orientation to the one to whom that person is sent (the mission’s destination). Again, ‘sending’ implies no inequality of status between ‘sender’ and ‘sent’; it simply indicates the mode in which each person enjoys full deity in its outward movement. The divine missions are thus the pure divine energy of God’s self-­giving, the fact that his self-­communicative and saving presence to creatures has its ground in God’s very self. Hence the rule: the divine missions follow the divine processions. This means, first, that the works of God repeat the immanent being of God and are ‘agreeable to the order of their subsisting’.35 It means, second, that the engagement of each person in its mission is not a ‘becoming’ on the part of the one sent, in the sense of an expansion of identity: the Son, for example, is not more Son by virtue of his obedience to the Father’s appointment of him to the office of redeemer.36 The divine missions are already anticipated, included within the life of relations 32. Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 430. 33. Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 431. 34.  J. Edwards, Discourse on the Trinity, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 21, Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 135. 35. Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 431. 36.  There is certainly a ‘new, particular determination’ of God with respect to the work of redemption (Edwards, ‘Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption’, p. 432); but it is what Edwards calls ‘circumstantially new’ (p. 440), not God’s becoming what he was not; see also Aquinas’s statement in Summa theologiae Ia.43.2 ad 2: ‘The reason that a divine person is present in a new way in anyone or is possessed in time by anyone is not a change in the divine person, but in the creature’.

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which is God’s being. The realm of the divine missions is not contingent or mutable, for they rest on God’s unchangeable completeness. But, third, the processions cannot be segregated from the missions. The ‘origin’ of each person is not a mere whence, but a whence which includes a whither. Filiation and sending, spiration and outpouring, are inseparable. Because God is this one, we are not required to choose between a-­historical essentialism (which isolates the processions) and the constitution of God’s being as a temporal project (which isolates the missions).37 Origin is not divine self-­absorption; mission is not divine self-­completion. The technicalities are soteriologically charged. Using concepts to apprehend the mystery of the Trinity which the drama of salvation sets before us, they attempt to describe the history of saving fellowship by exhibiting its divine depth, the conditions of its occurrence which lie in the infinite recess of God’s very self. The conceptual apparatus is not a speculative replacement for that history, as if the latter were a mere shadow cast by a high metaphysical object: how could incarnation and passion be grasped without reference to their peculiar creaturely-­historical intensity? Rather, the theological metaphysics functions a bit like the Johannine Prologue: this is where saving history is from, its says, it is from this that saving history is suspended, this is its divine agent, this its inexhaustible inner saving power. Why is this imperative in the theology of salvation? Because what happens in the Son’s work of redemption and the Spirit’s gift of life is – in a lovely phrase of Gilles Emery’s – ‘an embassy of the eternal, bringing a part of its home country into our history’.38 What we encounter with concentrated historical force in Son and Spirit is the reality in time of a divine movement of sending which is itself the repetition of God’s self. Saving history emerges from and points us back towards God’s entire adequacy. Here, at least, the adage quae supra nos nihil ad nos is untrue. The hidden life of God – precisely in its inaccessibility and completeness – is the ground of creaturely well-­being. It is because of the divine processions and the missions which rest upon them that there is a creature, and a servant of God to come to that creature’s aid, and a Spirit to bestow life. The trinitarian setting of a doctrine of salvation thus has much to do with the matter of assurance. Salvation is secure because the works of the redeemer and the sanctifier can be traced to the inner life of God, behind which there lies nothing. And so for Calvin, trinitarian doctrine locates the source of salvation in God, thereby eradicating fear. Commenting on the phrase ‘God sent his Son’ in 1 John 4.10, he writes: ‘it was from God’s mere goodness, as from a fountain, that Christ flowed to us with all his blessings. And just as it is necessary to know that we have salvation in Christ because our heavenly Father has loved us of his own accord, so when we are seeking a solid and complete certainty of the divine love, we have to 37. See G. Emery, ‘Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in St. Thomas Aquinas?’, in Trinity in Aquinas, pp. 165–208. 38.  The Trinitarian Theology of Thomas Aquinas, p. 368.

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look to none other than to Christ.’39 The waste and deprivation of sin is countered by God’s own self which overflows in abundance. ‘The secret love in which our heavenly Father embraced us to himself is, since it flows from his eternal good pleasure, precedent to all other causes.’40 This is why the servant has prospered; this is why he is authorized and able to bear our griefs and carry our sorrows.

V So far my concern has been to trace the backward reference of soteriology, its indication of the infinite divine milieu which encompasses salvation’s temporal occurrence. But, however necessary this indication, it does not exhaust the task of a theology of salvation. Having set forth its all-­important first principles, soteriology moves to presentation of the economy of salvation as it unfurls itself through time: because there are the processions and missions, then a creaturely history unfolds. This history is of God; and what is of God really is this history, the human history of the Saviour. By way of conclusion, we may consider briefly this second element. One of the functions of trinitarian teaching in soteriology is to instruct us in how to read rightly the evangelical narratives of the Saviour, by specifying the identity of their active subject. Trinitarian doctrine shows who indeed it is that bears our griefs, whose chastisement it is that makes us whole. To say that external saving history is just that – ‘external’, a sequence of acts and sufferings referring back to the infinite, groundless life of God in his inner relations – is not to reduce saving history to a mirage, but simply to indicate what takes place in that history. To contemplate the principles of the history of salvation in the divine processions and missions is to attempt conceptual penetration of the Saviour’s evangelical ministry and self-­announcement: ‘I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh’ (John 6.51). Teaching about the Trinity thus clarifies what kind of human history is ‘of God’: ‘flesh’, certainly and inescapably, because this is what the eternal Word unreservedly 39.  J. Calvin, The Gospel according to St. John 11–21 and the First Epistle of John (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1961), p.  291. See also his comment on 1 Tim. 1.15: ‘For although God the Father a thousand times offers us salvation in Christ, and Christ himself proclaims to us his own saving work, yet we do not cease to be afraid or, at any rate, to wonder within ourselves whether it be so. Thus, whenever any doubt about the forgiveness of sins comes into our mind, we should learn to drive it out, using as our shield the fact that it is truth sure and certain and should be received without any controversy or demur’: idem, The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, and the Epistles to Timothy, Titus and Philemon (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1964), p. 198. 40.  J. Calvin, The Gospel according to St. John 1–10 (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1959), p. 74 (on John 3.16).

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became. Yet ‘becoming’ indicates a relation of Word to flesh which is not simple identity, and this particular mode of relation (in which the Word is not exhausted in his act of self-­identification in the historical activity of Jesus of Nazareth) is fundamental to the Saviour’s temporal identity. Jesus’s human history is the taking place of a ‘descent from heaven’, a giving of living bread, the enactment and manifestation of the divine ἐγώ εἰμι. Certainly a full soteriology would be impossibly idealist without a presentation of the human history of the Saviour. But such a presentation could not proceed as if Jesus’s human history were in some straightforward way comparable with our own and narratable as such; it would need, rather, to exhibit the special character of that history, the mystery of its occurrence at the intersection of created time and divine eternity. Jesus’s history is incomparably and irreducibly strange, and the strangeness (as Donald MacKinnon put it in a searching essay) ‘may be judged rooted in, and expressive of, the way in which he lived uniquely on the frontier of the familiar and the transcendent, the relative and the absolute’.41 The human history of Jesus is the divulgence in time of divine grace. Yet if the force of ‘is’ there is properly to be seized, considerable restraint is needed: the human history of Jesus may not be allowed to become in and of itself soteriologically primitive or constitutive.42 Certainly, the humanity of the Saviour – his living of this human life – is soteriologically indispensable, for only in that way, as Calvin puts it, can we be reassured that Christ is ‘comrade and partner in the same nature with us’,43 that there is indeed naturae societas, fellowship of nature, between him and us. ‘Ungrudgingly he took our nature upon himself to impart to us what was his, and to become both Son of God and Son of man in common with us’.44 Yet already Calvin’s reference there to Dei filius shows that Jesus’s human history is not a quantity in itself. There is no human history of Jesus in se, in abstraction from its enhypostatic relation to the divine Word; the only history of Jesus which there is is the history of the God-­man. Jesus’s history is the Son’s mission in the world; the Son’s sending is not some additional element, superimposed upon the history of Jesus or concurrent with his ‘natural’ history as if that history could be considered as at least initially complete in itself without the relation it bears to the eternal Son. Jesus’s human history is exhausted in the fact that it is the form of the divine descent into the world, acting out in time (but not, as it were, constituting for the first time) the eternal relation of Father and Son. We can therefore scarcely hope to render the saving human history of the Saviour intelligible without appeal to teaching about Trinity and hypostatic union, by which its reference back to the infinity of God’s life is shown; only thus may it be seen as the divine κατάβασις 41. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Prolegomena to Christology’, in Themes in Theology. The ThreeFold Cord. Essays in Philosophy, Politics and Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987), p. 180. 42. For a recent argument that Jesus’s humanity is so to be regarded, see Spence, The Promise of Peace. 43.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.xiii.2. 44.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.xii.2.

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which really does bring life: ‘It was his task to swallow up death. Who but life could do this? It was his task to conquer sin. Who but very Righteousness could do this? It was his task to rout the powers of world and air. Who but a power higher than world or air could do this? Now where does life or righteousness, or lordship and authority of heaven lie but with God alone? Therefore, our most merciful God, when he willed that we be redeemed, made himself our Redeemer in the person of his only-­begotten Son.’45 The special character of Jesus’s saving history may be stated by speaking of it as a commissioned history, the discharge of an office. This is not to eliminate personal and historical spontaneity, for what is commissioned is precisely a personal history, not an inexorable divine process in which a human life is merely caught up like flotsam. But this personal, historical spontaneity is not that of a lost creature drifting through time, untethered to the divine telos, a mere accumulation of episodes. It is a doing of the works ‘which the Father has granted me to accomplish’ (John 5.36). The enactment of these works constitutes the office and role of Jesus. But, again, his office and role are not external to his inner person, so that his real identity is somehow anterior to his function. For, like his humanity and divinity, Jesus’s ‘personal’ identity and his ‘official’ activity are inseparable.46 Is it then the case that ‘the atoning work of Christ is something which Jesus does as a man towards God?’47 If the work of the Saviour reinstitutes the covenant between God and creatures from both sides – if he is the high priest of the eternal covenant – then Jesus’s human obedience to the will of the Father is intrinsic to the achievement of reconciliation.48 But a further question must be pressed: is there a man Jesus apart from the being and act of the eternal Word, and so apart from the being and act of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit? Is there a human obedience on the part of the man Jesus which is not a temporal repetition of the Son’s active consent to the will of the Father? There is no such one; there is only the human Jesus whose coming is the descent to us of the ‘very majesty of God’.49 And it is as the history of such a one that the human history of the Saviour is to be told: as the accomplishment of the incarnate Son, the servant of God who is exalted and lifted up, and very high.

45.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.xii.2. 46. On this, see the finely-­drawn interpretation of Calvin on Christ’s persona in J. Edmondson, Calvin’s Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182–219, and, more generally, Berkouwer, The Work of Christ, pp. 58–87. 47. Spence, The Promise of Peace, p. 22. 48. See on this Horton, Lord and Servant, pp. 208–41; the covenantal framework which Horton brings to bear upon the topic enables him to integrate the deity and humanity of the Saviour much more tightly than Spence. 49.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.xii.1.

Chapter 11 R e c t or et i u de x su pe r om n ia g e n e r a d o c t r i na rum ? T h e P l ac e o f t h e D o ct r i n e o f J u st i f icat io n

I The ruler and judge over all other Christian doctrines is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is not one doctrine among others; it is foundational and pervasive. To expound any Christian doctrine is to expound with varying degrees of directness the doctrine of the Trinity; to expound the doctrine of the Trinity in its full scope is to expound the entirety of Christian dogmatics. This is a formal assertion about the structure of Christian doctrine; but it is also, more significantly, a material claim. Indeed, its legitimacy as a directive about the organization of Christian dogmatics depends upon its coherence with the substance of the Christian confession of God. In its praise, testimony and action, the church confesses: God is. It makes that confession in response to God’s self-­ expressive form – his ‘revelation’ – which shapes the content of what the church confesses. That content may be spelled out in summary form as follows: The statement ‘God is’ is not a closed statement but an open and inclusive one. Because and only because it is a statement about this one, who is who he is and who demonstrates himself to be such in his self-­communication, it is also a statement about the ways of God with creatures. This is why the doctrine of the Trinity comprehends within itself all further teaching about creatures, their natures and ends. Further, this is why theological talk about creatures – including talk about the justification of creatures before God – does not require us to move away from talk about the triune God, but simply to follow the direction and content of the divine self-­exposition. Because – and, once again, only because – there is this God, there are other realities of which Christian doctrine is obligated to speak. By way of a more extended account of this, we may reflect on the statement: God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is life in himself. This can be expanded in two ways. First: God is life in himself. God’s being is the wholly original, uncaused and glorious fullness of life of the three-­in-one. God is in and from himself, in se and a se. Talk of the aseity of the triune God is not principally a negative characterization, differentiating God from created being by denying that his being originates from or is in any way causally dependent upon another. God’s aseity is most properly

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grasped as inseity; God is not merely the unconditioned, but is within himself an unrestricted fullness of personal relations. Aseity is life: God’s life in and from himself, in the relations of Father, Son and Spirit. The self-­existence of the triune God is his existence in the opera Dei personalia ad intra, the personal internal works of God. These inner-­divine acts are the personal relations which are God’s being, the modes of subsistence in which each particular person of the Trinity is identified in terms of relations to the other two persons. God’s life is thus his perfect life in the eternal relations of paternity, filiation and spiration, the inner processions of the Godhead in which God’s self-­existence consists. Aseity is therefore the eternal lively plenitude of the Father who begets, the Son who is begotten and the Spirit who proceeds from both. Further, this fullness of life in relation is the order or righteousness of God’s being. God’s righteousness in himself, his iustitia interna, is his perfect correspondence with the law of his being, the integrity of his will and his existence, the completeness and bliss of his self-­relation. Second: God is the giver of life. God has life in himself and wills the life of creatures. As the one who is antecedently and eternally life in himself, God directs himself to that which is not himself. What God intends, according to the Christian confession, is not only his own perfection and plenitude in the opera Dei ad intra but also a corresponding creaturely perfection and plenitude. The consilium Dei includes an intentional act, namely the decretum Dei in which he actively, immediately and eternally wills that there should be a domain of life other than his own. This domain is wholly dependent upon him, not a se but ab alio; yet it is given the gift of life. God’s life therefore includes a movement of life-­giving, in the opera Dei exeuntia in which he directs himself towards creatures. This purposive turning of the life of God is the utterly spontaneous and unconditioned bestowal of being, as a result of which alongside the creator there is also creaturely being, life and history, willed and affirmed by him. God’s intending of creatures is thus an act of love. The love of God, made known in his works ad extra, is entirely a matter of God’s free determination. God does not lose himself in this intention; the destiny of the creature is not bought at the price of some diminishing of the divine being. Of his own will and in accordance with his nature, God designs that his life should execute this further movement. Its necessity is therefore solely a necessitas naturae, arising from the divine nature in its free self-­enactment. But what God freely wills is, precisely, that in his perfection he should stretch forth to creatures as life-­giver. God wills that the fellowship of his wholly self-­realized life should have a creaturely coordinate in his fellowship with creatures. To the divine processions there correspond the divine missions, so that the righteous order of the being of God should find a creaturely echo. God ‘accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will’ (Eph. 1.11); and the things which he accomplishes are, first, his entire perfection as Father, Son and Spirit, and, second, the appointment of creatures to live for the praise of his glory. What are the consequences of this for the way in which Christian doctrine is structured? (1) There are two constituent parts of Christian doctrine: God in himself and the outer works of God. The content of the first part is the doctrine of the triune life ad intra; that of the second is the doctrine of God’s acts ad extra, and

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thus the doctrines of creation, providence, salvation, the church and the consummation. In one sense, there is only one Christian doctrine, the doctrine of the triune God, because in following that doctrine to its end theology will treat all the topics customarily brought together in a systematic theology. But to state the matter in such terms might attract the charge of theomonism, however unjust. A rather happier way of putting the matter would be to say that the content of Christian dogmatics is the double theme of God and his external works. (2) Both parts of this double theme are integral to any adequate theological account of the Christian confession, and neither may be considered in isolation from the other. A theology of the life of God a se and in se which failed to depict the opera Dei exeuntia would not simply be a severely diminished account; it would fail precisely as an account of God’s life in himself. Conversely, a theology of God as life-­giver detached from the exposition of God as life in himself would be wholly inadequate as an account of the works of God ad extra, precisely because the opera Dei are the opera Dei. (3) There is a specific order proper to this double theme. The topic of God is materially (and so logically) prior to the topic of God’s works, because these works are grounded in God’s being in and for himself. This order should not be taken to imply that the second element is merely accidental. The works of God are not contingently related to God’s being in and for himself, because God’s determination to be the life-­giver is eternal, ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph. 1.4). Nor should we conclude from the order that in turning to the second theme we leave the first behind as just so much ballast (attempts to do this have been strangely persistent in Protestant theology after Kant). The material order is irreversible. Nevertheless, the material order is not necessarily the order of exposition, and it would be quite possible to begin an account of Christian doctrine at any point, provided that proper attention is paid to systematic scope in order to prevent the hypertrophy of one article at the price of the atrophy of another. In sum: the only Christian doctrine which may legitimately claim to exercise a magisterial and judicial role in the corpus of Christian teaching is the doctrine of the Trinity, since in that doctrine alone all other doctrines have their ultimate basis. Other topics of Christian teaching may from time to time become particularly acute points of theological conscience, in which the fidelity of church and theology to the gospel is at stake. Amongst such topics, teaching about the person and work of Christ have in the course of Christian history had a high profile. But they have played that role, not because they are in and of themselves the sole bearers of Christian truth or because they comprehend all teaching within themselves, but because in them is made especially visible the fact that the triune God is in himself the first and the last.

II The setting of Christian soteriology, and therefore of Christian teaching about justification, is in a comprehensive account of the works of God, which is in its turn grounded in a theology of the opera Dei immanentia.

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Theologies in the Reformation tradition have sometimes been tempted to make soteriology into the material centre of a systematic account of the Christian faith. This has taken a particular form in the wake of Kant, where the severe restrictions placed upon the reach of the mind encouraged some theologians to divert towards ‘promeity’, thus generating expositions of the Christian faith making extensive use of a moral or existential idiom of salvation as human reality. Such expositions could appeal – selectively – to elements in the work of the magisterial Reformers. Most of all, appeal could be made to the Reformers’ perception that inflation of the intermediary role of churchly office and sacramental action threatened the unique, non-­transferable character of Jesus Christ’s office as mediator, a threat which could be countered by insisting on a certain theology of the immediacy of access to saving grace as fundamental to the gospel. Yet, detached from the trinitarian and incarnational metaphysics presupposed by the Reformers, this soteriological accent can distort, most obviously in the direction of a theology of salvation which is little more than lightly revised anthropology. When that happens, soteriology becomes a theology of Christian existence, around which the objectivities of the Christian confession are ranged as so much raw material for appropriation. When this distortion presents itself, it needs to be countered by a twofold relativization of soteriology. First, the setting of a Christian theology of salvation is not in anthropology, but in the works of God ad extra; those works, in turn, have their setting in and refer back to the opera Dei immanentia as their condition and ground. ‘Salvation’ as a determination of Christian existence is a function of the divine work; the divine work is the work of the one who is perfect in himself. The recital in which God’s work of salvation has its place does not begin with the moment of his redemptive dealings with sinful creatures, but with the infinite peace and glory of the three. Why is this – perhaps counter-­intuitive – move of such dogmatic consequence? It is vital to articulating the sheer gratuity of God’s work of salvation. The origins of the saving act of God lie wholly within the being of God. Whatever necessity the work of salvation has is a necessity internal to God’s own being, not a necessity laid upon God from outside. Salvation is grace: spontaneous, uncaused, rooted in the eternal sufficiency of God. Accordingly, soteriology has to be grounded upon a doctrine of the Trinity in order to ensure the ontological depth of what theology has to say about salvation. The history in which the salvation of the world is achieved is not simply a set of contingent or accidental transactions. It takes place, rather, at the frontier or intersection point of the eternal and the temporal. Its course is not that of a self-­enclosed ‘natural’ history, for it is a sequence of events open to the divine reality upon which it is founded and from which alone it draws its substance. The condition for there being a history of salvation is that these events are the temporal outworking of God’s self-­consistency. In them is made actual the eternal divine decree to be and therefore to act thus. Without this reference backward to the divine intention, there is only a temporal surface, and so no prospect of the creature’s redemption. Consequently, the grounding of the theology of salvation in the doctrine of the immanent Trinity is necessary to avoid what has been a persistent problem in modern Christian theology, namely a

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certain Christological and soteriological inflation. This is the assumption that the person and mission of Jesus are intelligible per se, without immediate reference to the Christian doctrine of God or to such Christological teaching as the pre-­ existence of Christ or the theology of the regnum Christi. This is, of course, an aspect of the larger problem already identified: the insertion of a gap between the works of God and the being of God, which allows the former to be expounded in relative isolation from the latter. When this occurs, the pro nobis character of the external works of God expands from being a trinitarian and Christological affirmation of God’s eternal love for creatures, and turns into a condition for all true theological discourse, providing it with existential warrants and applicability. This suggests that, far from being a mere background idea without any directly operative consequences for soteriology, the doctrine of the Trinity is critical in ensuring the correct placement and proportions of the Christian doctrine of salvation. Accordingly, a Christian theology of salvation has to be undergirded by a double theological principle: (1) God’s saving history with creatures is to be conceived as the outworking of the divine missions in which the sending of the Son and the Spirit is the bodying forth of the Father’s eternal divine counsel, and not simply as an intra-­historical reality; (2) description of God’s saving history through a theology of divine missions must rest upon a theology of the divine processions, in accordance with the principle missiones sequuntur processiones. The saving roles of the Son and the Spirit are grounded upon their processional roles in the inner life of the Godhead. A second relativization of soteriology follows from this. If the first relativization sets soteriology in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity as its foundation, the second sets soteriology in relation to the other topics which make up the corpus of Christian teaching about God’s external works. This sets soteriology in a horizontal axis, corresponding to the vertical axis which has been discussed so far. The scope of the opera Dei exeuntia is wider than that of the single theme of salvation, however widely ramified that theme may be. A theological account of the works of God has the task of tracing the entire history of God with creatures as it is announced in the canonical witnesses and confessed in the church. In attempting to give such an account, dogmatics (at least in the form which it received at the hands of the seventeenth century practitioners and which remains the shape of most sophisticated overall accounts of the material) arranges its presentation both narratively and topically. The ‘plot’ of a systematic theology tends to be roughly historical – God, and God’s works treated in what is basically the order of canonical salvation-­history, particular stages in the history of salvation providing the opportunity for discussion of associated topics. Further, an overall account of the works of God will be shaped by an overall construal of their theme or matter. If such a construal is not to prove reductive, it must be able to demonstrate that it emerges in a natural, unforced way from the canonical materials, and that it is sufficiently spacious to do justice to the range of the canon. Broadly described, the matter of the opera Dei exeuntia is the fellowship of life between God and God’s creatures. The form of this fellowship is the history in which God who is life in himself gives life to creatures, defends them against the

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mortal enemy of sin, and brings them to fullness of life in the kingdom of God. This history can be set forth as a series of ‘moments’ (both temporal and topical): election, creation, providence, the history of the covenant people, the sending of the Son and his life, passion and glorification, the bestowal of the Holy Spirit, the time of the church, the consummation of all things. Taken together, these moments are the enactment of the fellowship in which creatures have their being at the hands of this God. No one moment of the history can bear the weight of the whole; none can be isolated from the others. Even that moment which of all others has an especial claim to supremacy – the incarnation of the divine Word – is only the centre of this history because around it other moments are ranged. And so the moment of the Son’s saving work cannot be secluded from what encompasses it. God’s act of salvation is his intervention in the history of creation to ensure that the creature with whom he purposes fellowship (election) and to whom he gives life (creation) will finally attain perfection in the coming kingdom (consummation). Soteriology is not an erratic doctrine, and cannot of itself constitute the heart of the system of Christian truth. To speak in such terms is not to rob soteriology of its proper significance, but simply to indicate what soteriology is about. The subject matter of the theology of salvation is how the triune God acts with the sovereign competence and authority of his love to establish the perfection of the creature. Creaturely being is life in fellowship with the creator. By dealing a death-­blow to the creature’s resistance to its own well-­being, contending with and overcoming the creature’s futile contention with God, God gives the creature a new and further gift of life. God alone is able to give this gift because God alone has life in himself. ‘God is said to have life in himself,’ Calvin writes, ‘not only because he alone lives by his own inherent power, but because he contains the fullness of life in himself and quickens all things.’1 Soteriology is a particular intensification of this double theme – the life of God in himself and his quickening power as the one who has the fullness of life. And to say this is to say that the setting of soteriology is the theology of the being and works of the triune God.

III The dogmatic location of justification is a comprehensive trinitarian soteriology.2 At this point we move to reflect directly on claims that the doctrine of justification by faith is the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae. It is important at 1.  J. Calvin, The Gospel according to St John 1–10, p. 131. 2.  This matter remains seriously under-­explored. The most stimulating current account is R. Jenson, ‘Justification as triune event’, Modern Theology 11 (1995), pp. 421–7, slightly modified in his Systematic Theology, vol. 2, pp.  290–301. On Jenson, see T. Mannermaa, ‘Doctrine of Justification and Trinitarian Ontology’, in C. Gunton, ed., Trinity, Time and Church. A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 139–45. More generally here, see P. Molnar, ‘The Doctrine of Justification in Dogmatic

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the outset to note the diversity of claims which cluster around this slogan, concerning such matters as: the prevenient character of sovereign grace in human salvation; the sole sufficiency and effectiveness of the work of Christ; resistance against moralizing or sacramentalizing construals of Christian faith, or against self-­realization as a motif in anthropology; the properly forensic character of God’s dealings with creatures; the definitive significance of the Word of God for the life of the church. Here we are not concerned with these particular issues or with the appropriateness of deploying the doctrine of justification to sound an alarm signal, but rather with the need to place the theology of justification within a larger trinitarian structure. We may orient ourselves from one of the most penetrating recent defences of the centrality of justification for the entire corpus of Christian teaching, Jüngel’s Justification,3 arguably the most impressive presentation of justification as the evangelische Grundartikel since Kähler.4 ‘At the heart of the Christian faith lies a declared belief in Jesus Christ. This confession, however, also has a centre, a living focal point, which turns the confession of Christ into something that vitally concerns my own existence. Thus the heart of the heart of the Christian faith is the belief in the justification of the sinner through the one “who was handed over to death for our sins and was raised for our justification”.’5 The metaphors by which Jüngel describes the place of justification within the Christian confession – ‘centre’, ‘focal point’, ‘the heart of the heart’ – are double-­edged. On the one hand, part of their intention is to ensure that justification is not isolated from other tracts of Christian teaching, and so to resist the charge of one-­sided Paulinism. Indeed, Jüngel starts his analysis by relating justification to some primary topics in Christian teaching: the nature of life with God, what it means to be a human person, the identity of God, God’s relation to creatures through the death and

Context’, in M. Husbands, D. Treier, ed., Justification. What’s at Stake in the Current Debates (Leicester: Apollos, 2004), pp.  225–48. Attention should also be drawn to the important study by R. Sherman, King, Priest and Prophet. A Trinitarian Theology of Atonement (London: T&T Clark, 2004), which weaves together the three persons of the Trinity, the three offices of Christ and three major soteriological motifs (victory, sacrifice and instruction). Sherman does not treat justification directly, but his account is companionable with what is proposed here, although I am less concerned to appropriate specific aspects of salvation to specific Trinitarian persons, and have a heavier investment in the doctrine of the immanent Trinity. 3. E. Jüngel, Justification. The Heart of the Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001). 4.  M. Kähler, Die Wissenschaft der christlichen Lehre von dem evangelischen Grundartikel aus im Abrisse dargestellt [19053] (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1966), pp. 67–79. For an important historical placement here, see E. Lessing, ‘Der evangelische Grundartikel in theologiegeschichtlicher Perspektive. Die Rechtfertigungslehre zwischen Ritschl und Holl’, in M. Beintker, E. Maurer, H. Stoevesandt, H. Ulrich, ed., Rechtfertigung und Erfahrung. Für Gerhard Sauter zum 60. Geburtstag (Güterloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 1995), pp. 59–76. 5.  Jüngel, Justification, p. 15.

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resurrection of Jesus Christ.6 On the other hand, Jüngel is insistent that what Christian faith has to say about these topics acquires full definition only through the doctrine of justification. ‘[I]n the justification article all these statements come to a head. The decision is made here first of all as to who this God is, and what it really means to be creatively active. Next, it says what it means to die for others and to bring forth new life in the midst of death: a life that imparts itself through the power of the Spirit to our passing world in such a way that a new community arises – the Christian church. The justification article brings out emphatically the truth of the relationship between God and people and in so doing the correct understanding of God’s divinity and our humanity. And since the Christian church draws its life from the relationship between God and people, and only from that relationship, the justification article is the one article by which the church stands and without which it falls. So every other truth of the faith must be weighed and judged by that article.’7 Here we may already be able to sense a certain constriction: justification is moving from being a potent soteriological article which connects across the corpus of doctrines, and is beginning to adopt the role of norm for all other areas of teaching. Following a suggestion from Gloege, Jüngel proposes that ‘the best way to express the central function of justification is to highlight its hermeneutical significance for the whole of theological knowledge and . . . to see it accordingly as the “hermeneutical category” of theology.’8 He explains: ‘By using the doctrine of justification, all theological statements gain their distinctive image, focus and character . . . The doctrine of justification has this strength of a hermeneutical category because it brings all of theology into the dimension of a legal dispute: that is, the legal dispute of God about his honour, which is at the same time a legal dispute about the worth of human beings.’9 Two comments are in order here. The first concerns the systematic range of a theological account of the Christian faith. The proposal that ‘all of theology’ is determined by the forensic idiom of a legal dispute about divine honour and human worth risks not only narrowing the scope of the divine economy but also isolating the forensic from the context of election, covenant and eschatology within which it has to be understood. Like other soteriological metaphors such as sacrifice or ransom, that of a legal dispute acquires its force from a broader conception of the nature and purposes of God, and of his relations to creatures, in which the identities of the ‘disputants’ are set forth. The second comment is more material. The emphasis upon the centrality of justification gives high profile to the soteriological pro me. Thus, for example, responding to Barth’s prioritizing of Christology over justification, Jüngel argues that it is ‘precisely the function of the 6.  Jüngel, Justification, pp. 3–5. 7.  Jüngel, Justification, p. 16. 8.  Jüngel, Justification, p. 47; see G. Gloege, ‘Die Rechtfertigungslehre als hermeneutische Kategorie’, in Gnade für die Welt. Kritik und Krise des Luthertums (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1964), pp. 34–54. 9.  Jüngel, Justification, p. 48.

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doctrine of justification . . . to convey the being and work of Jesus Christ for us, to us and with us. It is only when explained by means of that doctrine that Christology becomes appropriate (sachgemäß) Christology at all. It is appropriate Christology when it is the doctrine of justification.’10 Behind that ‘only’ lies a long history of post-Ritschlian Lutheran theology, and in particular its unease about the way in which the metaphysics of substance may push theology into abstraction or objectification. ‘The doctrine of justification goes beyond the “fact” of the personal unity of Godhead and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ to make clear the soteriological effectiveness of that unity, an effectiveness which belongs to the being of the God-­man.’11 From his early attempts to make sense of the double legacy of Bultmann and Barth,12 Jüngel is undoubtedly alert to the perils which afflict theology when the soteriological pro me is expounded primarily as a qualification of Christian existence and only derivatively as a determination of the divine being; this is why he roots soteriological effectiveness in ‘the being of the God-­man’. He is aware, too, that spelling this out requires trinitarian language: God’s righteous relations to creatures in justifying sinners are grounded ‘in his relation to himself ’ as Father, Son and Spirit.13 Yet the trinitarian theology remains largely economic,14 and when combined with an inflamed doctrine of justification and a gravitational pull towards anthropology, the effect is some loss of dogmatic proportion in presenting the mysterium salutis. For salvation, and therefore justification, is mystery. It can be conceived in its fullness only in relation to its deep ground in the eternal divine counsel, ‘the mystery of God’s will’ (Eph. 1.9) which is inseparable from the eternal divine being. This mystery is, of course, ‘revealed’, that is, enacted and made known in Christ and the Spirit. But its revelation derives its force from the perfection of the being and will of God which turns to us in self-­communicative love and mercy. Soteriology cannot be therefore the principium of Christian doctrine. The saving work of God, including his work as the one who justifies sinners, is a central episode in the gospel. The theme of the gospel, however, is the eternal glory of the triune God, a glory which includes (though infinitely exceeds) the glorification of God’s creatures. Soteriology may be the leading edge of a theological account of the gospel; but the order of knowing may not so shape the order of being that God’s immanent life and glory is relegated to mere background.

10.  Jüngel, Justification, pp. 28f. (my italics). 11.  Jüngel, Justification, p. 30 12. Notably, of course, in God’s Being is in Becoming. The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001). 13.  Jüngel, Justification, p. 82. 14.  The differentiation of Father and Son, for example, is expounded in terms of incarnation without reference to paternity and filiation: ‘The heavenly Father is the Other to the Son who became man, in that he, the eternal Source and Creator of life, sends the Son into the world of sinners’ (Jüngel, Justification, p. 83).

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From the vantage-­point of soteriology we are afforded a particular view of the entire range of God’s ways with creatures in the history of fellowship. The canonical witnesses articulate this history of fellowship, and above all its central temporal episode in the person and work of the Word made flesh, in varying ways: as the giving of life, as the bearing of punishment, as substitutionary and representative action, as revelation or sacrifice or ransom or liberation, as victory and rule. Amongst these different articulations of God’s saving work, the idiom of justification has an indispensable place for at least four reasons. First, justification is a primary theme in some of the key texts of one of the major New Testament witnesses; an ‘apostolic’ soteriology loses its claim to the title if it diminishes the importance of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ.15 Second, justification is inseparable from many other themes in the economy of salvation (covenant, sin, law, the death and resurrection of the Son, God’s holiness and the sanctification of the people of God) and so has greater scope than more narrowly focussed concepts such as ransom or penal substitution. Third, the idiom of justification lays particular emphasis upon salvation as historical encounter, what Dantine called ‘die Gott-Mensch Konfrontation’.16 Fourth, justification – especially a radical notion of iustitia imputata – is especially suited to convey the anthropological entailments of the sheer gratuity of God’s work. ‘The articulus iustificationis reminds us that God’s grace is the fundamental and all-­ determining dimension of human life.’17 Yet none of this entails that justification is the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae. Confessional polemic – however necessary for the maintenance of the church’s fidelity to the gospel – should not be allowed to distort exegetical or dogmatic proportion. Indeed, one of the primary functions of a system of Christian doctrine is to retrain the capacity of a confessional focus upon one particular aspect of Christian teaching from deforming or reducing the scope of the church’s apprehension of the gospel as a whole. In the case of the locus de iustificatione, this means that dogmatics, as the servant of exegesis, must seek to ensure that this 15. Equally, of course, the apostolic gospel is not to be restricted to the Pauline gospel: Johannine themes such as life and light are no less significant in the presentation of the nature of salvation. 16.  W. Dantine, ‘Krise und Verheissung der Lehre von der Rechtfertigung’, in Recht und Rechtfertigung. Ausgewählte rechtstheologische und kirchenrechtliche Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1982), p.  4; whether Dantine is correct to see this as in competition with ‘Augustinian ontologism’ is an open question. 17.  M. Beintker, ‘Einleitung: Zugänge zur Rechtfertigungsbotschaft in der heutigen Lebenswelt’, in Rechtfertigung in der neuzeitlichen Lebenswelt. Theologische Erkundungen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), p. 4; the rest of Beintker’s book examines some primary anthropological themes, such as guilt, freedom and meaning, in this light. See also Jüngel, Justification, pp.  261–77; W. Härle, Dogmatik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995), pp.  505–10; O. Bayer, Living by Faith. Justification and Sanctification (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); idem, ‘The Doctrine of Justification and Ontology’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 43 (2001), pp. 44–53.

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element of soteriological teaching does not either atrophy or grow beyond its limits, but undertakes its task in an orderly account of the mystery of God’s saving work. ‘The problem of justification does not need artificially to be absolutised and given a monopoly.’18 Consider such statements as the following: ‘All theological frameworks are subordinate to the doctrine of justification . . . The doctrine of justification is the basis for theology, since it directs theology’s task as giving Jesus Christ as sacramentum to those oppressed by the law, living under the divine wrath or being made uncertain by the hidden God . . . It is the boundary of theology in that it sets limits to all attempts to subordinate this activity to any other comprehensive task.’19 ‘Justification is not to be seen as the foundation for the structure of one’s theology. Rather, it is the discrimen by which all theological loci are to be evaluated.’20 ‘In the doctrine of justification there is not handed over to us one doctrine alongside others; rather, there is entrusted to us the “category” which determines all our thought, speech and action “before God”.’21 ‘Whatever is asserted about God, his essence, his truth, his attributes, his providence, his actions, and his will, must be done in such a way that he appears as the God who summons man to the bar of his court.’22 Justification ‘should, like a mathematical term, stand in front of a parenthesis, within which the individual dogmatic loci are lined up.’23 Claims such as these – they are ubiquitous in the literature – accord a transcendental status to the doctrine of justification. Justification is not so much a locus as the discrimen, a kind of first theology (Dantine suggests that its treatment should precede all special theological topics). What makes the claims problematic, however, is not the formal place accorded to the doctrine of justification but rather its material superordination to all other doctrines, which situates justification in a position which it is not suited to occupy and places upon it demands which it cannot be expected to meet. The matter can be approached by observing that claims for the transcendental or foundational status of the doctrine of justification commonly make the concession that justification is inseparable from Christology. Gloege, for example, having emphasized the hermeneutical function of justification goes on somewhat bizarrely to admit that, because Jesus Christ is the ‘Person-Mitte’ of Holy Scripture, then ‘in view of the exclusive place which from the beginning Jesus Christ has within Christianity, the doctrine of justification has no special privilege’; indeed, that doctrine has what he calls ‘enclitic significance’.24 In effect, therefore, because of the 18. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, p. 528. 19.  M. Mattes, The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 5. 20.  Mattes, The Role of Justification, p. 15. 21. Gloege, ‘Gnade für die Welt’, in Gnade für die Welt, p. 26. 22.  W. Dantine, Justification of the Ungodly (St Louis: Concordia, 1968), p. 130. 23. Dantine, Justification of the Ungodly, p. 131. 24. Gloege, ‘Die Rechtfertigungslehre als hermeneutische Kategorie’, p. 42.

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identity between ‘the message of justification’ and ‘Jesus Christ’, the article on justification is a function of the person and work of Christ which is its content. Or again, Beintker’s presentation of the doctrine of justification as casus regens or matrix of all other teaching is, in fact, a commendation of the status of ‘Jesus Christ as the event of the love of God made man’.25 ‘Since in a comprehensive way the theme of the message of justification is the relation of God and humankind, obliging us to see this relation out of the Christ event, the doctrine which interprets the message of justification is not one doctrine alongside other doctrines of the Christian faith, but . . . the description of the Archimedean point from which all themes of theology and proclamation must be thought’;26 but this is to say that the person of Christ (to which justification points) is rector et iudex, not justification itself. These concessions indicate the impossibility of arranging all Christian teaching around the doctrine of justification. It is simply not possible to maintain the unqualified claim that of itself justification suffices to answer the questions: ‘Who or what is a really divine God? Who or what is a really human human being?’27 Such questions can only receive a full theological answer in the course of a trinitarian dogmatics in which the drama of God’s fellowship with his creatures is allowed to unfold itself as a matter for thought and praise. In drastically simplified form, a dogmatic treatment of the matter would include the following elements. 1.  The triune God is in himself righteous. His righteousness is, as we have already noted, the peace and order of his perfect self-­relation as Father, Son and Spirit. In this perfect communion God corresponds with himself, that is, perfectly fulfils his own will to be the one he is, and so perfectly enacts the law of his being. His righteousness is the unbroken and fully realized harmony of God’s life and his will, in the eternal moments of paternity, filiation and spiration which constitute his being. 2.  The triune God is righteous in his relations with creatures, willing, establishing and perfecting righteous fellowship. His perfectly righteous self-­relation which stands in need of no repetition or completion but is antecedently full, extends itself as God purposes and calls into being a reality which is an object of his love other than his own being. God wills this object and bestows life upon it. This life is truly given, that is, given in such a way that the creature does indeed have a proper substance and is not merely an extension of or emanation from the being of the creator. The relation of God to the living creature is thus wholly different from the relation of the living God to himself, for the creature is not integral to God’s own life, but a recipient, a made reality. The creature ‘has’ life, but its life is not in se but ‘in’ the divine gift. It is characterized, therefore, by that peculiar condition of creaturely being, namely being in the event of dependent relation, having no being as a term apart from the relation to it of the other term. This does not mean the creature’s 25.  Beintker, Rechtfertigung in der neuzeitlichen Lebenswelt, p. 2. 26.  Beintker, Rechtfertigung in der neuzeitlichen Lebenswelt, p. 15. 27.  Jüngel, Justification, p. 3

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instability; rather, it is a characterization of the kind of stability which is proper to the creature, that which is had in the course of the creature’s relation to God the Father who purposes life, God the Son who enacts and protects the Father’s will, and God the Holy Spirit who perfects it as the lordly life-­giver. Creaturely life is life in this ‘order’ of being which is the fulfilment of the righteous divine will. That is, creaturely life is not indeterminate or unformed, a kind of raw material handed over to the creature for projects of the creature’s devising. It is life in relation, life whose content is fellowship with the righteous God. To be a creature is to have one’s being in the divine gift; it is therefore to stand beneath the divine requirement. To live before the righteous God is to be summoned to life in righteous fellowship. 3.  The shape of this righteous fellowship is life under the law or declared will of the triune God. Law is not arbitrary command, but the imperative presence of God, quickening creatures to responsible life in accordance with the nature given to them by the creator; law is not simply statute, but the form of fellowship. The internal righteousness of God is manifest in his external righteousness (iustitia externa). This external righteousness, grounded in God’s nature and in his eternal will to be the one he is, characterizes the dealings which the triune God has with creatures, giving shape to the life which creatures have from, with and for God. It may be conceptualized as legislative righteousness (righteousness as acts of commanding, iustitia legislativa) and judicial righteousness (righteousness as acts of judging, iustitia iudicalis). God gives life; but he does not give it away, casting it from himself to take any form that it may choose. God stands in permanent relation to the life which he gives; he is not simply its origin but the one who maintains it for the end which he establishes for it. This he does as legislator and judge. Of course, these terms quickly run away from us, and we need to be on our guard to ensure that we do not allow even a hair’s breadth of distance between them and the identity of the one who here acts as legislator and judge, namely the triune God in his directedness to creatures. Righteousness, command, law, judgement only make Christian theological sense in direct and immediate relation to this God and the history of fellowship between him and those whom he calls into life. Put formally: iustitia interna and iustitia externa are both iustitia Dei; and the Deus in question is not mere transcendent cause or magistrate, but the Father, the Son and the Spirit who are righteous and give and sustain righteous life. 4. Sin is law-­breaking, and so unrighteousness. Law-­breaking is a repudiation of the righteous order of fellowship in which alone the creature has life. It is a refusal of the summons of God to fellowship. It is the perversity in which the creature considers it possible to be a creature in a way other than that established by the will of the creator. The one who breaks the law believes himself capable of transcending the law, somehow able to occupy a position outside the order of creaturely being. Law-­breaking treats that order as contingent rather than as something given to the creature with absolute authority. But in rejecting the law, the law-­breaker rejects God whose righteousness is manifest in his righteous will. Again, in formal scholastic terms: sin rejects the lex ectypa, the law which God promulgates as his

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will for creatures and as the shape for creaturely existence. But thereby sin rejects the lex archetypa, God’s inner righteousness which is the ground of his dealings with creatures. To reject the law of God is to reject God. To reject God is to destroy life in righteous fellowship with God. As law-­breaking, sin draws punishment on the sinner, exposing him to the punitive righteousness of God in which God asserts the authority and right of his holy purpose. God is the moral governor of those with whom he enters into the fellowship of life. That ‘moral government’ is not remote, merely the application of an abstract standard, distribution of reward or punishment after the manner of an official. God’s moral government is the maintenance of his will to fellowship, eradicating unrighteousness so that the creature may indeed have life. God’s work as moral governor is an integral part of his purposive work as creator, saviour and consummator, that is, part of the full scope of his covenant acts. 5. How does God help and guard the creature in the situation of absolute jeopardy which is brought about by spurning the law of life? In what way does God act to restore the creature’s righteousness and so reconcile the creature to fellowship with himself? The righteous triune God interposes himself between the creature and its unrighteousness, thereby arresting its self-­eradication. This means, first, that the will of the Father before the foundation of the world, the will to righteous fellowship, prevails against the unrighteousness of the creature. The Father’s purpose cannot be overthrown by the creature’s fall into unrighteousness (ἀδικία); his will is wholly superior and resistant to any creaturely onslaught. In the matter of the overthrow of unrighteousness, the Father is once again he ‘who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will’ (Eph. 1.11). In purposing righteous fellowship with his creature the Father also purposes reconciliation; this purpose is the deep ground of justification. Second, the creature’s restoration to fellowship rests upon the perfect filial relation of the Son the Father. The eternal relation of Father and Son, in which the Father begets and the Son is eternally generated, is soteriologically indispensable. This is because the divine procession is the inner-­divine potency of the Son’s temporal mission in which he comes to creatures to restore fellowship and re-­ establish righteousness. The Son’s mission is savingly effective only because its depth is his eternal sonship. Only because the Son is God himself, within the divine iustitia interna, is he empowered and authorized to restore the creature to righteousness. Third, creatures become righteous because the Holy Spirit, who seals their fellowship with the righteous God, is himself Lord. Only because the Spirit, too, shares in the eternal divine righteousness is he able to re-­incorporate creatures into communion with the Father through the Son. In sum: the justification of creatures, as part of their reconciliation to God, rests upon the entire and equal deity of Father, Son and Spirit. 6.  The end of the Son’s temporal mission is to restore righteous fellowship between God and lost creatures. Reconciliation is effected and righteous relations are restored in his person and work, that is, in what he does as the one he is. The Word became flesh. He took to himself ruined human nature, making its unrighteousness his own, though it was not his own and though it was utterly hostile to him and an object of

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his abhorrence. He took upon himself the situation of the transgressors, the breakers of the law. In this is his righteousness: that he, the righteous one, sharing in the inner-­divine righteousness and administering the divine law and its just commands, takes upon himself the guilt and alienation of the unrighteous creature. His divine righteousness is not in opposition to this assumption of the creature’s burden; he does not have to lay aside or negate the iustitia Dei interna to come to our aid. Quite the opposite: his taking the part of the unrighteous is the enactment of his righteousness, precisely because in so doing he recreates righteous fellowship. As with God’s holiness, so with his righteousness: God’s holiness in se is made known ad extra not in the destruction of creatures but in the fulfilment of his purpose in election by purging the creature of sin and so perfecting a people for himself. God’s righteousness in se is made known ad extra not in delivering the creature over to the penalty of the law but in the supreme act of fellowship, in which he takes the creature’s penalty upon himself. In making the creature’s just condemnation his own in the person of the Son, he arrests the creature’s plunge into nothingness, holding creaturely being in relation to himself. Without ceasing to be the divine Word, without renouncing his deity and so ceasing to be capable of acting as saviour, the Son continues the Father’s purpose of righteous fellowship, entering into the creature’s unrighteous state and appropriating it to himself. The Son’s work in this matter is his suffering of the Father’s judgement upon sin, in passive obedience. In our place and for our sakes, the righteous judge submits to God’s judicial righteousness. He does not do so helplessly, abandoning himself to the Father’s judgement as its victim. He does so, rather, as the eternal Son who actively fulfils the Father’s will, in relation to which he is not mere object but also subject. In our place and for our sakes, submitting to the Father’s will, he affirms and establishes from the creaturely side the righteous order of life. He enacts the relation which creatures are to have to God who gives life and therefore gives the law. In him, therefore, creatures are accounted righteous – that is, the good order of creaturely being in fellowship with God is restored by a person and an action not the creature’s own. This righteousness in Christ, like the original righteousness which it secures, is gift, and so always iustitia aliena. But its alien character does not mean that it is wholly foreign to the creature, a fictional quantity. The double ontological rule of creaturely being is: what we are, we are in God; and what we are in God, we are. There is no other manner in which creatures can have their being. Only in this fellowship, only in this history in which God both creates and recreates creaturely life, can the creature be said to be. This is why the ‘realization’ of the soteriological extra nos is not brought about by some work of the creature in which righteousness is appropriated or given form by creaturely enactment. Rather, through the Holy Spirit the fellowship which is secured by the Son’s submission to and fulfilment of the Father’s will becomes that in which the creature also participates. By the Spirit, the creature enters into the history of reconciliation, not as initiator but surely as participant, as one accounted righteous before God. Righteousness – life and activity in fellowship with God – is iustitia fidei imputata. The foregoing is, in effect, a trinitarian gloss on Ps. 11.7: ‘The Lord is righteous, he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.’ God is in se righteous

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and because he loves righteous deeds, delighting to see the reflection of his own nature and works in those of creatures, he maintains the life of the upright, so that they may enjoy his presence in unashamed fellowship. In his comment on the verse, Calvin catches this double theme of God’s internal and external righteousness: ‘For inasmuch as [God] is righteous, [the psalmist] shows how it is of consequence, that he should love righteousness; for else would he renounce himself. Also it were a cold speculation, to think that righteousness is shut up in God, if it were not also to our minds that he acknowledges whatsoever is his and shows proof thereof in the governance of the world.’28 God is righteous in his perfect harmony with himself, and just in his dealings with creatures. Because he is righteous he makes righteous. God is ‘righteous for ever’ (Ps. 119.142) – righteous to the eternal depths of his being; his righteousness ‘is like the deep mountains of God’ (Ps. 36.6) – immovably established. This righteousness of his prevails in his jurisdiction of all things in the history of the covenant in which the fellowship determined by the Father is effected by the Son and by the Spirit brought to full fruition. God who is righteous rules righteously; and so he justifies sinners that they may behold his face.

IV Much more could and should be said. In particular, the foregoing sketch of the setting of justification in the history of righteous fellowship between the triune God and his creatures would need to be expanded in conversation with a quite different trinitarian model of justification, one which lays emphasis upon the participation of the justified in the triune life or upon theosis.29 The task would be to show that the covenantal soteriology presupposed in the foregoing is not, as it is sometimes charged to be, an extrinsicist repudiation of the ontological dimensions of God’s relation with creatures, or (Ockhamist? Ritschlian?) retraction of the scope of that relation to mere Tatgemeinschaft. Rather, it is an attempt to give expression to the ontological entailments of God’s justifying work without falling into the trap of making ‘participation’ into the only way of conceiving of the metaphysics of creaturely being in relation to God. If there is a drastically one-­ dimensional theology of imputed righteousness, there is a no less one-­dimensional theology of koinonia, and neither can serve as the exclusive basis for an account of how the righteous God makes creatures righteous. What is required is a metaphysics in which relation to God is conceived neither in terms of a preconceived conception 28.  Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, vol. 1, p. 133. 29. See, besides Jenson, ‘Justification as triune event’, T. Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith. Luther’s Doctrine of Justification (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005); the essays by Mannermaa, Peura and Juntunen in, C. Braaten, R. Jenson, ed., Union with Christ. The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); R. Saarinen, Gottes Wirken auf uns. Die transzendentale Deutung des Gegenwart-Christi-Motivs in der Lutherforschung (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1989); W. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, pp. 211–39.

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of ontological union, nor in terms of an abstract opposition between divine and creaturely being, but in accordance with the canon’s recital of the differentiated fellowship of the perfect triune life-­giver and the creatures of his mercy.30 Such a task lies beyond the present sketch. We may close by recalling that at the beginning of the Schmalkald Articles Luther points briefly to ‘the lofty articles of the divine majesty’ – above all, the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation – noting, before he passes on to controversial matters that ‘these articles are not matters of dispute or conflict’.31 It is the recovery of just these lofty articles which is required for a good ordering of the church’s confession about justification: there is nowhere else to begin.

30. Some initial moves in this direction are made in B. McCormack, ‘What’s At Stake in Current Debates over Justification? The Crisis of Protestantism in the West’, in M. Husbands, D. Treier, ed., Justification, pp. 81–117. 31. In W. Russell, Luther’s Theological Testament. The Schmalkald Articles (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), p. 121.

Chapter 12 ‘I n t h e s o c i e t y o f G o d ’ : S om e P r i n c i p l e s o f E cc l e sio l o g y

I ‘So powerful is participation in the church’, notes Calvin, ‘that it keeps us in the society of God’.1 In Dei societate is fundamental to the being and the forms of the church; because of this, a doctrine of the church is a function of the doctrine of the Trinity. Intellectual apprehension of the being of the church requires us to explicate it as an element in the covenantal economy of God’s goodness towards creatures; this, in turn, requires a theology of the divine missions, which is itself rooted in a theology of the inner-­divine processions. Like all Christian doctrines, the doctrine of the church is to be traced back to the immanent perfection of God’s life and his free self-­communication in the opera Dei exeuntia; a theology of the church is not simply a phenomenology of ecclesial social history but an inquiry into that history’s ontological ground in the being and works of the church’s God.2 Put a little differently, ecclesiology proposes answers to the question: what kind of society is the church? The answer that ecclesiology returns is: the church is the human assembly which is the creaturely social co-­efficient of the outer work in which God restores creatures to fellowship with himself. The natural and historical properties of that society only become objects of intelligence (rather than simply of phenomenal regard) when they are understood as elements in the saving transit of creatures from their origin to their end in God’s society. A corollary here is that ecclesiology has a proximate and a principal res: its proximate res is a form of 1.  J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.i.3. 2. One of the most important recent treatments of ecclesiology which parallels some of the ideas pursued here is that of Hans-Peter Großhans in Die Kirche – irdische Raum der Wahrheit des Evangeliums (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2003). Großhans’ account is a well-­judged and concentrated piece of biblical dogmatics, concerned above all to secure the right sort of relativity of ecclesiology to the doctrine of God. However, it does not make extensive use of trinitarian doctrine, preferring to concentrate on an understanding of the church’s relation to the truth of the gospel as the way in which its reference to that which lies outside its life is to be conceived.

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human society characterized by a certain estrangement from other such forms; its principal res is the temporal processions of God and the eternal processions from which they are suspended. In this double character, moreover, the res of ecclesiology is no more available, no less difficult of access, no less reserved from us than the Christian doctrine of God, for the simple reason that it is an extension of the Christian doctrine of God. Such an orientation in dogmatic ecclesiology seems doomed to fall into idealism, since its core proposal is that the being of the church is not identical simpliciter with a human historical project, a social-­material reality in time. Resistance to idealism commonly underlies appeals for the deployment of the social sciences in ecclesiology, or for a shift away from apparently abstract doctrines of the church, to accounts of ‘churchly practices’ in which ‘theological reflection upon the church is in fact from the very outset a matter of practical rather than theoretical reasoning.’3 How might a dogmatic ecclesiology respond? The threat of a failed connection between a dogmatic account of the church and the empirical realities of its history is always present. Dogmatics, especially in an exhausted tradition which has in some measure lost touch with the realities to which it is responsible, can rest content with abstractions of this kind, especially when organized as an exposition of ecclesiological ‘models’. And this is not simply a problem within degenerate school dogmatics: one of the temptations for a certain style of high ecumenical ecclesiology has been to think that a resonant theological description of the church – as koinonia, for example – holds the key to resolving the church’s disunity and re-­establishing its mission in the world. But the concern to scour out idealism from doctrines of the church raises a deeper issue, one highlighted by Healy’s identification of ecclesiology as a matter of practical, not theoretical, reasoning. Behind the worries about idealism lies a conviction, part metaphysical and part theological, and often only half-­articulated, that the real is the social-­historical. This conviction commonly promotes the metamorphosis of what I have called the proximate res of ecclesiology into principal res. ‘The principal object of ecclesiology consists in the empirical organization or collectivity or communion called church’:4 so Roger Haight in Christian Community in History (a book whose large ambitions are thwarted by a mixture of dogmatic ineptitude and formulaic historical exposition). Or again, note the principle enunciated at the opening of Johannes van der Ven’s Ecclesiology in Context: ‘God does not cancel out the activities of people in the church, but inspires, intensifies, and orients them. God gives to the people to form the church themselves, to do the church themselves.’5 What presents itself as a principle of non-­competition between divine 3. N. M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life. Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.  46. For a significant correction, see idem, ‘Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness?’ International Journal of Systematic Theology 5 (2003), pp. 287–308. 4. R. Haight, Christian Community in History, vol. 1 (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 5. 5.  J. A. van der Ven, Ecclesiology in Context (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), xiv.

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and social agents turns out to require us to fold language about divine action into language about the functions and codes of the Christian society. Once more, in a much more penetrating essay by Joseph Komonchak: ‘If the Church is the People of God, the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, it is all of these as a human reality, that is, because certain events occur within the mutually-­related consciousness of a group of human beings.’6 Notice the sequence: the church is the people of God because certain events occur within a group of human beings – a causal order at which even the most frankly intrinsicist theology of grace might be dismayed. Sometimes such proposals may express a sense of the irresistibility of the modern turn to history; sometimes they may be warranted by appeal to elements of the Christian faith, often rather randomly chosen, abstractly conceived and without much sense of their systematic linkages – appeal to the doctrine of the incarnation, for example, or to the theology of grace and created habit. The underlying assumption is, again, one concerning the res of Christian theology: since the object of Christian theology is the economy of God’s works as creator and reconciler of humankind, then theology should naturally direct its attention to the temporal and social as the sphere of God’s presence and activity. And this conviction has proved companionable, not only to the deployment of modes of analysis of the phenomena of the church which derive from social and cultural science, but also to those kinds of ecclesiology which lay heavy emphasis upon the church as social body. I suggest a different account. For Christian dogmatics, God is ens realissimum, God’s acts are acta realissima.7 The temporal economy, including the social reality of the church in time, has its being not in se but by virtue of God who alone is in se. Time and society are derivative realities, and that derivation is not simply a matter of their origination; it is a permanent mark of their historical condition. The temporal is suspended from the eternal. As Aquinas puts it, God’s relation to creatures cannot be conceived as that of an agent who ‘is the cause of its effect in regard simply to the coming-­to-be, and not directly in regard to the esse of the effect’, for ‘the esse of all creaturely beings so depends upon God that they could not continue to exist even for a moment, but would fall away into nothingness unless they were sustained in existence by his power’.8 This, in the end, is why ecclesiology cannot be only a matter of historical sociology or practical reasoning: to make it such is not only to neglect the aseity of God in which all creaturely being is grounded, but also to misapprehend the kind of historical society which the church is – in Aquinas’s terms, a society whose ‘essence is not its esse’.9 Put simply: 6.  J. Komonchak, ‘Ecclesiology and Social Theory: A Methodological Inquiry’, The Thomist 45 (1981), p. 269. 7. See I. U. Dalferth, ‘Wirklichkeit Gottes und christlicher Glaube’, in Gedeutete Gegenwart (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), pp. 99–132. 8.  Summa theologiae Ia.104.1 resp. 9.  Summa theologiae Ia.104.1 resp.

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ecclesiology and ecclesial action are creaturely realities, to be set under the metaphysics of grace.10 Because Christian dogmatics does not concede the self-­evidence and primacy of the social-­historical – because it depicts historical realities in their ordering to God – its account of the church is an extension of the doctrine of God, and so of teaching about God’s immanent perfection and goodness. To speak of the church’s being, dogmatics is required to speak of God who alone has being in se; to speak of the church’s acts, dogmatics is required to speak of the opera Dei interna et externa. 10. It is this emphasis which distinguishes my proposal from that of the late Dan Hardy in one of the most searching reflections on the dependence of the doctrine of the church upon the doctrine of God: ‘God and the Form of Society’, in God’s Ways with the World. Thinking and Practicing Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), pp. 173–187. Hardy argues that the church’s capacity to offer ‘a new orientation and impetus to the form of our society’ (p.  174) by showing that social structures are relative to God is inhibited by the ‘marginalization of the Christian understanding of God’ (p. 183) in Christian social theory, that is, by inattention to ‘the presence in human social structures of the social coherence which is embedded in God’s very being and work’ (p. 183). This marginalization he traces to monarchical conceptions of deity in Western theology according to which God is by nature ‘disinvolved from social structures and human relationships’ (p.  183): by ‘allowing only extrinsic and occasional relations’ (p. 183) between God and social forms, and by denying any ‘intrinsic relation between God and the natural or social orders’ (p. 183) in the name of divine sovereignty, God is reduced to external agent, ‘occasionally related to the world when it pleases him’ (p. 183). Hardy’s counter to this is a doctrine of the Trinity which undergirds an intrinsic account of God’s relation to created sociality. God, he writes, is ‘self-­structured (in accordance with his own self-­determined conditions) and self-­identified in a complex and dynamic unity which rests on his energy to structure and restructure himself in self-­ sustaining cohesion . . . he is seen as an energetic unity (the Holy Spirit) which is true to its internal conditions (the Father) through ordering its interactions (the Son). But this is to be regarded not so much as a “state of affairs” in God as an energetic faithfulness maintained in his dynamic relation to the world’ (p. 186). There are intimations here of God’s immanent life (‘self-­determined conditions’ or ‘internal conditions’), but the main tendency is towards the economic. The ‘self-­structuring of God’ he continues, ‘is to be seen as a self-­structuring which occurs in an ongoing “relation” with human life in this world’ (p. 186). ‘It is in the energising of his relationality that God reaches his fullness, and in this ordered relationality interacts energetically with human beings to enable them to structure their life together’ (p. 186). If there is something problematic here, it is that what Hardy in a further essay calls the ‘social transcendental’ (‘Created and Redeemed Sociality’, in God’s Ways with the World, pp. 188–205) is too deeply embedded in human history, its immanent plenitude forming only a remote background to its economic presence, which is to be traced to ‘the Logos of God operative in creation’ (p. 202). Hardy is entirely correct to root created social being in the doctrine of God; but his emphasis on the priority of creation over redemption, and his relatively thin description of the inner divine relations as the church’s ultimate ontological ground, point in a significantly different direction from that followed here.

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In ecclesiology, much hangs on the doctrine of God – on the content of that doctrine and on the directness with which it is invoked. Whether such an approach is judged idealist will depend, in part, upon prior judgements about the nature of created community and its relation to the work of God. It is, doubtless, more exposed to the danger of extrinsicism which de Lubac exposed in Catholicism than, for example, those ecclesiologies which appeal to teaching about the totus Christus, or which deploy cultural ethnography, to prevent ‘a complete severance between the natural and the supernatural’.11 But apparent ‘extrinsicism’ in talking of creatures may be no more than the attempt to take with full seriousness and consistency the fact that God’s relations to creatures are non-­reciprocal, ‘mixed’ relations, and to try to grasp how that condition shapes what it means for creaturely community to be and act in Dei societate. Nor need this mean an abstract doctrine of divine transcendence, deployed, perhaps, to keep the church in its place or underwrite sectarian disengagement. Properly undertaken, with the right kind of evangelical determinacy, it may be simply a way of identifying the kind of social history which the church is, namely a social history which is one long reference to its origin in God’s goodness. ‘To go back to origins is not to go back to annihilation, if we go back to the Origin of origins – to God. On the contrary, it is only in God that we can come to a positive position’12 – so Barth in the Tambach lecture of 1919, the abstract term ‘Origin of origins’ acting as a kind of place holder for the doctrine of the Trinity, whose discovery still lay ahead of him. It is to that doctrine that Christian dogmatics turns in order to explicate the kind of positive social-­ historical reality which the church is.

II Dogmatics arrives at the doctrine of the church by trinitarian deduction. Ecclesiology has its place in the flow of Christian doctrine from teaching about God to teaching about everything else in God. It is a derivative doctrine concerned with the fulfilment of God’s covenant with his rational creatures, and in its explication the doctrine of God is directly at work. This, in turn, means that the life of the people of God is a necessary theme in Christian dogmatics, since dogmatics treats not only theology proper but also economy, and within the economy, the church. Because the one to whom dogmatics attends in theology proper is this one – the one who is moved by perfect goodness to bestow and maintain creaturely fellowship – there is a necessary ecclesial component to Christian teaching without which the doctrines of God and creation would be imperfectly apprehended. Deduction of ecclesiological doctrine from trinitarian doctrine is, of course, familiar in the kind of trinitarianism in which the relations of the persons of the 11. H. de Lubac, Catholicism. A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1950), p. 166. 12. K. Barth, ‘The Christian’s Place in Society’, in The Word of God and the Word of Man (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928), p. 294.

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Godhead are ‘echoed’ in the Christian community.13 There are evident benefits here: in terms of the doctrine of God, getting beyond abstractly monist conceptions of God as an undifferentiated principle or cause of the church; in terms of the doctrine of the church, resistance to ecclesiological naturalism. But deploying ‘relation’ (or, more abstractly ‘relationality’) as a bridge term between God and creatures can prove precarious, effecting the passage from God to church too comfortably, without securing an adequate sense of the unqualified gratuity of the church’s created existence and of its difference from God who is the uncreated source of its life. The relation of theology proper and ecclesiology is best explicated not by setting out two terms of an analogy but by describing a sequence of divine acts both in terms of their ground in the immanent divine being and in terms of their creaturely fruits. The sequence has its rise in the eternal inner-­divine counsel, which then finds temporal execution in the missions of the Son and the Spirit, through which the Father’s purpose is enacted. God the Holy Trinity is alive with self-­moved life. This movement of his is unlike creaturely movement because it is self-movement, a se, not moved from beyond itself, and so in its very mobility a kind of perfect repose, a movement without agitation. As God moves himself, he does not come into being or stretch towards his fulfilment; his movement is not theogony but inexhaustible plenitude, the fullness of eternal life. The form of this life is the divine processions, in which God’s perfection is enacted. We have only the faintest glimpse of these as we reflect on God’s outer works, but we may identify them as the acts in which the Father generates the Son in the eternal relations of paternity and filiation, and Father and Son together breathe the Spirit in the eternal relation of spiration. These relations have no beginning or end, they suffer no diminution or increase; they are the eternal abundance and blessedness of God in himself. But that abundance – because it is God’s abundance – is not self-­enclosed or self-­revolving, even in its repleteness, for God’s perfection includes God’s goodness, and God’s goodness is manifest in his creative love. In his goodness, out of his own fullness and free determination, God bestows life upon a reality other than himself. In doing so, he does not replicate or communicate himself; creaturely being does not partake of the divine being but rather has its own identity and integrity at the hands of God, who gives life (creatio) and cares for what he creates by sustaining and governing it (curatio, providentia). Amongst the beings so created and sustained are God’s rational creatures, appointed to fellowship with the creator. The history of this fellowship is the history of the covenant, that is, the history of Adam’s race which, after Adam’s defection, is set again on the way to perfection through Israel and the church of Christ. 13.  ‘Echoed’ is Gunton’s term in a representative essay, ‘The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community’, in C. Gunton, D. Hardy, ed., On Being the Church. Essays on the Christian Community (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), pp. 48–80. For a more searching analysis, see C. Schwöbel’s Heidelberg inaugural, ‘Gottes Ökumene. Über das Verhältnis von Kirchengemeinschaft und Gottesverständnis’, in Christlicher Glaube im Pluralismus. Studien zu einer Theologie der Kultur (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), pp. 107–32.

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The trinitarian deduction of the church may be described in a little more detail by tracing how particular external works of God with respect to the church may be appropriated to particular persons of the godhead, always bearing in mind that all such external works are the work of the undivided Trinity, and that appropriation to one or other divine person may be eminent or distinct, but not absolute, appropriation. The church has its being because of the eternal will of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who ‘destined us in love to be his children through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will’ (Eph. 1.5). The church exists as a form of human common life because and only because God the Father purposes that it should be. This intention of the Father emerges from the primal reality of the inner-­divine life. The Father is properly and personally autotheos, not because he is superior or prior to the Son and the Spirit who share in divine aseity, but because he is the one who eternally generates the eternal Son and (with the Son) breathes the eternal Spirit. As this one the Father is also the divine person to whom the purposing of creaturely existence and the determination of its course and end is most properly to be attributed. This purposing is wholly antecedent; it is not a set of arrangements made in respect of an already existent reality upon which God comes to exercise his will; it is ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph. 1.4). Further, this purposing is ‘in love’; not a dark imposition of order or an arbitrary restriction but a gift of history and form, ‘loving’ because it wills the existence of another reality with its own identity. The divine counsel, and its application in predestination, is an act of divine benevolence. This purposing is effected with the Son. In classical Reformed dogmatics, this common engagement of the first two triune persons is brought to expression by the concept of the pactum salutis in which Father and Son agree together to effect the history of the covenant with creatures. The inner-­divine concord receives temporal administration in the Son’s mission, the Son consenting that alongside his wholly unique relation to the Father there should also be other children of God, that he will be the ‘first-­born’ (Rom. 8.29; cf. Heb. 2.10-13), graciously placing himself at the head of Adam’s lost race to re-­establish fellowship with the Father. All this is animated by the Father’s goodness, his love for what is not God, his resolve that creatures should be and that their being should not be overcome by self-­destruction. So conceived, the life and activity of the triune God are the fundamental context in which the history of the common life of God’s creatures is acted out. ‘See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God. And so we are!’ (1 John 3.1). For the apostle, the existence of the church is a matter for astonishment. The Father and the children are not simply elements within created sociality, but elements in the history in which created sociality is regenerated after sin has set human common life under the sign of death. The church’s dynamic is thus that of adoption and the bestowing of status, a status which fulfils natural sociality but only by way of redemptive grace. The church is, therefore, society within the foedus gratiae, not the foedus naturae. ‘It was no common honour . . . that the heavenly Father bestowed on us, when he adopted us as his children’, notes Calvin, for when the apostle says that ‘love has been bestowed, he means that it is

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from mere bounty and benevolence that God makes us his children . . . for why are we sons? Even because God began to love us freely, when we deserved hatred rather than love’.14 A doctrine of the church is in this regard retrospective, drawing its substance from ‘that which was in the beginning’ (1 John 1.1); that ‘beginning’ includes the love of the eternal Father, the unoriginate origin of all things, who elects and adopts creatures into fellowship through the person and saving acts of the eternal Son. The church has being because of the person and work of the eternal Son, the first and the last and the living one (Rev. 1.17f.). Relating ecclesiology to Christology depends in part upon ensuring that the full compass of Christology is brought to bear on the matter. When too narrow a selection of Christological material is deemed pertinent, ecclesiology suffers disfigurement.15 The person and work of the Son can be so identified with his incarnate presence that his eternal pre-­existent deity recedes from view; or the post-­existence of the Son in his state of exaltation can come to be retracted. In both, Christology is constricted, as the temporal career of the Son is allowed to expand and fill the whole (and thereby the real force of that episode itself is in some degree blunted). As a result, ecclesiology tends to be preoccupied with the question: What kind of continuity is there between the incarnate and the ecclesial body? Retaining the scope of Christology in expounding ecclesiology involves giving due weight to three Christological moments: the eternal deity of the Son, his temporal mission as reconciler, and his exaltation as the one under whose feet are all things (Eph. 1.22). Keeping each of these three moments in mind serves to ensure the relativity of ecclesiology to Christology and to prevent the ecclesiological functionalization of Christological doctrine. It is, first, ecclesiologically elemental that the Son shares in antecedent, wholly realized deity, that he is the eternal Son proceeding from the eternal Father, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, and replete in that procession. His identity as Son is, therefore, not wholly determined by the status exinanitionis of the incarnation. ‘Son’ and ‘incarnate Son’ are not wholly coincident realities, for the Son’s becoming incarnate is not the divesting of deity or the mutation of deity into flesh; the Word becomes flesh without ceasing to be God. This does not mean that flesh is merely extrinsic to the Son’s identity, but rather that his taking of flesh is a wholly spontaneous act of obedience to the will of the Father, and of love of creatures, an act which does not exhaust his deity. The Son is not made Son by the flesh; nor can he be deduced from it. There is that of the Son which is extra to the flesh he assumes. Logos and sarx are asymmetrical: to grasp the identity of the 14.  Calvin, Commentary on the First Epistle to John, in Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1855), pp. 202f. 15.  The problems emerge with some seriousness in J. Milbank, ‘The Name of Jesus’, in The Word Made Strange. Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 145–68; idem, ‘Ecclesiology. The Last of the Last’, in Being Reconciled. Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 105–37.

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verbum incarnatus we need also to look beyond its temporal occurrence to the Son’s antecedent divine capacity, a capacity not expended in the act of incarnation but remaining full and free. Why is this ecclesiologically elemental? Because it identifies the right sort of externality in Christ’s relation to the church: not an externality which presupposes a gulf between God and creatures, crossed by occasional divine forays into created time, but rather the irreversible relation-­indistinction between the uncreated and created which is the energy of God’s covenantal fellowship with his rational creatures. It is this distinction which may be breached in, for example, ecclesiologies organized around the concept of totus Christus, in which the full identity of the Son is achieved only as he takes the church into union with himself: Calvin’s strictures against a crassa mixtura of God and creatures16 ought not to be passed over too quickly in reaching a judgement about contemporary ecclesiologies of koinonia. The distinction between uncreated and created, expressed in the Son’s transcendence of the flesh even in its assumption, is crucial to a theologically intelligent grasp of the historical forms and acts of the church. Second, it is ecclesiologically elemental that the incarnate Son of God is the reconciler of lost creatures. The Son’s deity issues in an outward movement, that is, in the temporal mission of reconciliation. Out of the groundless depth of his divinity he comes to creatures by taking creaturely form, and with it creaturely distress and culpability; in so doing, he effects the destruction and reconstitution of Adam’s race. The first Adam was lawless, withholding assent to the nature and end bestowed on him by divine goodness and drawing down upon himself and his heirs deathly alienation from God and the dismembering of created society. The second Adam fulfils the law by obeying the Father’s will, taking upon himself the curse of Adam’s race, and so restoring creaturely fellowship with God and bringing into existence a community which is, indeed, in Dei societate. As lordly reconciler, the Son ‘creates in himself one new man’ (Eph. 2.15). His history – the fact that there and then, this one, the incarnate Son, spoke and acted and suffered thus – is the ontological condition of the church: not simply a symbol to provoke creatures to common life but a making, a bringing to effect or setting forth of the mystery of the Father’s will that creatures should attain their end by being united in him (Eph. 1.10). Third, it is ecclesiologically elemental that the Son of God is in heaven. ‘He who descended is he who ascended far above all the heavens’ (Eph. 4.10). The Son’s exaltation entails his removal from direct historical presence among creatures. This in turn reinforces the ecclesiological importance of affirming that the Son’s relation to the church is external, but not in such a way as to contradict the union with Christ which is proper to the church as one of the fruits of redemption. The church is indeed ‘made alive together with Christ’; it is ‘raised up with him’, it ‘sits’ with him in the heavenly places (Eph. 2.5f.). This ‘with Christ’ has ontological weight: the church has its being with him. But what is the force of this ‘with’? It 16.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.xi.10.

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indicates an intimacy of relation between Christ the Lord and those whom he exalts to share his location, but one in which he retains his free, sovereign incommunicable identity. His co-­location with the church is not such that his identity as the exalted Son becomes porous, or that he is no longer gracious towards the community. The church adds nothing to the identity of the exalted Son. ‘By grace’ (Eph. 2.5, 8) is not merely the means of the church’s entry into union with Christ but the permanent characteristic of that union, and therefore a signifier that the church’s relation to its Lord is characterized by ever greater dissimilarity. This element of distinction between the church and its Lord is routinely muted in ecclesiologies ordered around a particular construal of the ‘body of Christ’ metaphor. Jenson’s account of the matter is a striking (because drastic) example. Embodiment is a person’s ‘availability to other persons and thereupon to her or himself ’17 (note that the account begins from observations about embodiment rather than from the identity of the agent of whom the metaphor is predicated). The ecclesiological extension of the principle of embodied availability runs thus: ‘That the church is the body of Christ . . . means that she is the object in the world as which the risen Christ is an object for the world, an available something as which Christ is there to be addressed and grasped. Where am I to aim my intention, to intend the risen Christ? The first answer must be: to the assembled church, and if I am in the assembly, to the gathering that surrounds me.’18 And so ‘[t]he church with her sacraments is truly Christ’s availability to us just because Christ takes her as his availability to himself. Where does the risen Christ turn to find himself? To the sacramental gathering of believers.’19 It is surely odd to ask where the risen turns to find himself; one could hardly ask that question of God unless the attribute of perfection had ceased to bear any real weight, and to ask it of the risen Christ assumes that his identity is in the process of construction rather than eternally replete. This requires Jenson to develop a – strained – account of the otherness of Christ to the church, focussed on the eucharistic elements: ‘the object that is the church assembly is the body of Christ, that is, Christ available to the world and to her members, just in that the church gathers around objects distinct from herself, the bread and the cup, which are the availability to her of the same Christ. Within the gathering we can intend Christ as the community we are, without self-­ deification, because we jointly intend the identical Christ in the sacramental elements in our midst, which are other than us’.20 But this is surely an emergency measure, which can scarcely compensate for the absence of a sense of Christ’s singular, self-­constituting and church-­creating subjectivity as the enthroned Son. To say that the church is the body of Christ is to say that its being is a predicate of his lordly and complete identity and activity.21 ‘He is the head of the body, the 17.  Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, p. 213. 18.  Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, p. 213. 19.  Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, p. 214. 20.  Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, p. 213. 21. See here H.-P. Großhans, Die Kirche, pp. 31–54.

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church; he is the beginning, the first-­born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-­eminent’ (Col. 1.18). The string of metaphors here – headship, origination, primogeniture, pre-­eminence – are all, of course, terms of relation. The exalted one is not separate from the church; fellowship flows from his work, for he is the reconciler. But the fellowship which he brings about is not such that the identity of the exalted one is extended, completed or enacted in the community over which he presides. The eternal Son creates the church by exalting it to his side; but he does not thereby create or intend himself, for his identity is antecedently replete; as himself autotheos, his identity as Son is given him by the Father in full measure. As this perfect one, he is ‘far above all the heavens’. This train of thought simply observes some basic dogmatic rules: that ‘we with God’ derives from ‘God with us’, and that ‘God with us’ does not mean the diffusion of God’s life but its generativity. Because this is so, there really is fellowship with God, there really are brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. The risen Christ does not cast about him for some other reality through which to find his identity or intend himself; he declares himself: ‘Here am I, and the children God has given me’ (Heb. 2.13). The third element in the trinitarian deduction of the church is pneumatology. The church is and acts by virtue of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life. The sequence of this confession about the Spirit is significant: the Spirit gives life because he is Lord. Whatever is said about the economic activity of the Spirit is therefore predicated upon his consubstantiality with Father and Son. His quickening is ‘the work of the Eternal Majesty’;22 its effectiveness rests upon the fact that the Spirit is no immanent created power, that he is ‘not amongst but above all things’.23 Ambrose’s point is that the Spirit is not to be numbered among creatures; but it is precisely as this one, sharing in the eternal lordship of God, that the Spirit is active in the created realm, distributing the gift of life from the store of the divine generosity. The Spirit is the divine agent of creaturely perfection, that is, the one in whom the works of God towards creatures are completed so that creatures attain their end. Creatures do not have life in themselves, and so cannot maintain their own life; they are maintained by the Spirit, through whose presence and activity creatures do indeed live – act in spontaneity, move through time, deliberate and relate. Above all, the Spirit gives new life, since he is the divine agent who consummates Christ’s objective work of reconciliation and realizes in a final way God’s purpose for creaturely being in fellowship with himself. In fulfilment of the Father’s decree, and in consequence of the Son’s perfect work of reconciliation, the Spirit animates and preserves a human social world in which the old order of sin and death has been set aside and the life of the children of God is unleashed. Through the Spirit it comes about that there exists a temporal, cultural, bodily reality in fulfilment of the divine appointment: ‘You shall be my people’. All this takes place as the accomplishment of the Spirit’s mission, that is, his being sent by 22.  Ambrose, On the Holy Spirit (NPNF 2.10), II.iv.29. 23.  Ambrose, On the Holy Spirit I.i.19.

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the Father and the Son, in order to effect in time the full realization of the economy of redemption. There is a stream of life which flows from heaven towards creatures, whose source is God the Father and whose power is God the Son; this is the Holy Spirit, by whom God’s covenant with his rational creatures takes social-­historical shape. With this we turn to consider the church as social-­historical phenomenon.

III We are to be led by the questions: What kind of social-­historical phenomena characterize the society which exists in God’s society? By what modes of action and suffering may the life of this society be picked out? And what kinds of acts of observation do these acts and sufferings require if they are to be known? Three initial points by way of orientation. First, the acts of the church are characterized by the fact that their motive power is not inherent within themselves. They are modes of action whose movement is itself moved. It is not easy for us to access the concept of moved movement, still less to incorporate it into ethnographical description. This, because at least since the seventeenth century, natural motion has been immanentized and eventually secularized, so that, for example, the entelechy of society finds sufficient explanation in description of its natural agents and course.24 At best, divine causality in respect of the world is restricted to the efficient causality which establishes the conditions for the world by setting it in motion; but appeal to divine causality is not required for observation of the way things now are, beyond simply invoking the fact that what now is has come into being. The most obvious casualty of the immanentization of divine motion is, of course, the Christian doctrine of providence, but its wider effect is erosion of the category of creatureliness from our explanation of ourselves and its replacement by those of pure nature, history and society. The muting and eventual exclusion of reference to divine motion was closely tied to the emancipatory potential of the study of human society in and of itself. To liberate society from divine motion is to open a space for free human action and social spontaneity. The deep assumption here is that natural motion is purely natural or nothing at all; put differently, that to talk of human acts as creaturely is simply to indicate their ultimate origin, not the ontological condition for their present performance. Yet it is elemental to a scriptural metaphysics that the motion of God and the motion of creatures are not inversely but directly proportional: the more God moves the creature, the more the creature moves itself. In the case of the church, then, the acts by which this society realizes itself are acts whose description requires constant deployment of language about God. The phenomena of church 24. On this, see M. J. Buckley, Motion and Motion’s God. Thematic Variations in Aristotle, Cicero, Newton, and Hegel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); Oliver, Philosophy, God and Motion.

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action have to be traced back – reduced – to God as their exemplary, efficient and final cause. The divine wisdom by which God ordains the church’s life and activity and the divine providence by which God enacts what he purposes have to be primary elements in the description of what the church does in time. The phenomena of the church are not only phenomena within a stream of empirical history; they are also – primarily – phenomena in the history by which God conducts creatures away from the ruins of the earthly city towards the heavenly. Second, because the acts of the church are not acts of pure natural spontaneity, but movements which are moved by God, they bear within themselves a certain excess. That is, they are signs, ostensive acts which refer beyond themselves to the triune being and work by which the church is brought into and maintained in being. ‘Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?’ Paul asks the Corinthians, not without a measure of exasperation (I Cor. 3.16). Our temptation in handling such imagery is to think that ‘temple’ is the signum and the goings on at Corinth the res. The opposite is the case: God’s temple is what the Corinthians are, not what they might be said to be by metaphor. It is not their active self-­realization which determines their being, but rather the fact that they are the temple of God. They are this temple, further, by virtue of being indwelt by the Spirit and set apart or made holy. The dynamic of the life of the church is not self-­derived, and its acts are indicative. Third, there is by the nature of the case a certain obscurity to the historical-­ practical reality of the church.25 Its temporal forms are not unconditionally transparent; they do not show the church’s source of life without ambiguity. The church is spiritually visible. Spiritual visibility is not invisibility but special visibility, that is, visibility to prayerful reason illuminated by the Holy Spirit to see and trust the work of God in creaturely occurrence. Spiritual visibility is not the antithesis of practical-­historical form but a characterization of it. De Lubac dismissed such talk as baleful Protestant ‘monophysitism’, dissociating the divine and the human. ‘Having stripped [the church] of all its mystical attributes, [Protestantism] acknowledged in the visible church a mere secular institution’.26 That is a bad misjudgement. The church which is spiritually visible has historical shape and endurance, but only because it is granted to exist in that way by the secret energy of the Spirit. At this point, a comprehensive ecclesiology would move to treat the fundamental forms of the church (here only the barest outline can be offered). The fundamental forms of the church are the primary structures of its creaturely, social-­historical existence. By speaking of the church’s fundamental forms, dogmatics picks out attributes and activities by which the church can be identified. Though they are encountered in particular concretizations of practice in the history of the church, fundamental forms are not wholly identical with those practices. Talk of the 25. For what follows, see E. Jüngel, “Credere in ecclesiam. Eine ökumenische Besinnung’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 99 (2002), pp. 177–95. 26. De Lubac, Catholicism, p. 29.

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church’s fundamental forms thus has a critical or relativizing function with respect to the empirical life of the church. In this respect, talk of the church’s fundamental forms functions similarly to talk of the church’s marks: both are concerned not simply to make empirical observations but to grasp how even in defect or misperformance the church remains under the determination of the divine appointment and its attendant promises. Statements about the church’s fundamental forms describe the divine gifts promised to the church as the coetus electorum, the imperatives which those gifts bear within themselves, and the certainty that the church’s temporal declension cannot annul its being. Three examples may be given: assembly, hearing the divine Word, and order. First, the church is a human assembly or form of association. But its human act of assembly follows, signifies and mediates a divine act of gathering; it is a moved movement of congregation. To describe the human assembly as what it is, therefore, reference must be made to certain antecedent divine works: choosing before the foundation of the world, predestination to be the sons and daughters of God, appointment to live for the praise of God’s glory (Eph. 1.4-12). These divine works are the exemplary cause of the church’s temporal assembly. Further, reference must be made to certain divine works in the present, such as the work of the glorified Christ in whom the assembly is joined together and grows into a holy temple (Eph. 2.21). The church assembly is a social-­historical reality ‘in the Lord’ (Eph. 2.21) – ‘in the Lord’ being no mere rhetorical flourish through which the ethnographer penetrates to some more primary natural level, but rather metaphysically irreducible. The historical actuality of the church is determined by its being as the coetus electorum et vocatorum, that is, as that society by the election and summons of the triune God. Election and calling are not simply features of the distant origin of the church; they determine not only its inception but its continuance, permanently marking its life. These divine acts of determination, election and vocation precede, accompany and direct the action of the community which is chosen and summoned. The communion of the saints exists on the basis of and in virtue of the divine work. Indeed, the primal sin in the history of the covenant is neglect of the fact that the covenant people has its life ab extra, that it is, indeed, ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people’ (1 Pet. 2.9), and instead thinking of its life as self-­assembled and self-­governed. Because the church is a creature, self-­realization is not fundamental to its being, and its (necessary) acts bear the traces of this creaturely status.27 The practical-­historical acts of the church are not self-­making, but a following of its given nature. This does not make the church less than an historical project; what it does suggest, however, is that the project which the church is is more than a rather indeterminate set of cultural negotiations in 27. See M. Beintker, ‘The Church of Jesus Christ: An Introduction’, Ecclesiology 1 (2005), pp. 45–58; I. U. Dalferth, Gedeutete Gegenwart, pp. 57–9; C. Schwöbel, ‘The Creature of the Word. Recovering the Ecclesiology of the Reformers’, in C. Gunton, D. Hardy, ed., On Being the Church, pp. 110–55.

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which the church figures out some kind of identity for itself. The church is not finished, it learns itself over time, it does not possess itself wholly, because its source of life is the infinity of God.28 But God’s infinity not only opens up an historical horizon which the church fills with social forms; it is the law of churchly action, giving direction and shape. The church is not an indefinite or arbitrary social-­cultural assembly, but shaped by the divine plan, and its history unfolds as that plan moves towards fulfilment. Second, the church is a society which is built upon the foundation of the prophets and apostles whose testimony to the gospel is set before the church in Holy Scripture.29 Its common life and culture flourish as it submits to that witness. The church is a mode of common life established and edified by God’s communicative presence mediated through the biblical writings; in this sense it is the creature of the divine Word. Its acts of intelligence and speech are, therefore, receptive and attentive acts, referred to God’s self-­communication in Holy Scripture. Any adequate ethnography of the church’s communicative economy will need to follow the ways in which that economy makes reference to Holy Scripture. Holy Scripture is the unified canon of texts appointed by God as the herald of his self-­publication. The canon is holy, that is, it is a set of creaturely textual acts sanctified to serve God’s revelatory presence. By the divine act of sanctification these creaturely acts are made fitting attestations of the divine Word. As a field of the Spirit’s operation in its production, Holy Scripture is inspired, that is, God undertakes that Scripture’s prophetic and apostolic authors give creaturely voice to what the Spirit says to the churches. As a field of the Spirit’s operation in its reception, Holy Scripture possesses clarity, because the Spirit who inspires Scripture also illuminates its readers, making the prophetic and apostolic word intelligible and effectual. As an attestation of the rule of Christ and his gospel, Holy Scripture is authoritative; in reading Holy Scripture the church receives an embassy from the church’s Lord, so that its speaking can legitimately require the attention which is properly given to the viva vox Christi. As that to which Christ entrusts the task of instructing the church, Holy Scripture is sufficient; it is not one of a number of potential creaturely mediations of revelation, but fully adequate to guide the church into the comprehensive truth of the gospel. None of these affirmations entails thinking of Scripture as other than a creaturely product, but simply specifies the way in which God acts mediately through its testimony (a robust theology of mediated divine action provides release from a modern quandary according to which Scripture is either a purely natural religious product which represents the circumstances of its production, or a supernatural reality only incidentally related to creaturely processes). The scriptural embassy presents an over-­arching account 28.  A point consistently emphasised by R. Williams in, for example, ‘Word and Spirit’, in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 107–27, or ‘A History of Faith in Jesus’, in M. Bockmuehl, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 220–36. 29. O. O’Donovan, ‘What Kind of Community is the Church?’, Ecclesiology 3 (2007), pp. 171–93.

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of the magnalia Dei as the fundamental line of God’s history with creatures. This account orders the church’s identity, both in relation to its divine ground and in relation to its temporal passage, and it also presents the imperative force of the divine work, as not just a condition in which the church rests but as a legitimate directive of the church’s action. The church exists in the wake of divine revelation; it is a ‘convocation’, gathered by and around Jesus Christ’s presence as himself prophet and apostle who exercises his office through creaturely auxiliaries. What may reliably be predicated of the practical-­historical life of the church is that his reality – Christ’s inexhaustible eloquence, his voice resounding in Holy Scripture – is a promise beneath which the church is set. The reality and trustworthiness of that promise lies at the basis of some primary activities of the church: expectant reading of Scripture as Christ’s address of his community through the Spirit; discursive repetition and intensification of the prophetic and apostolic message in proclamation; governance of the church’s public life and assemblies by the scriptural norm, and deference to that norm in the church’s decisions. There is a proper churchly self-­negation, an ascesis of the church’s mind, which is part of the process whereby the church comes to act out its relation to the truth. Its history is, we might say, one of learning the truth, a learning which is, however, not undirected curiosity but a matter of being ‘sanctified in the truth’ (John 17.17) by the Father through the Spirit in response to the Son’s petition. The church reads Scripture and tries to speak what it hears and order its life accordingly; and this happens because at the Son’s behest ‘the Spirit of truth’ is active in the church’s life to ‘guide it into all truth’ (John 16.13). Third, the church exists and enacts its life in a distinctive and limiting order.30 It is a ruled society, common life under ‘law’. It has a determinate shape, received from its origin in the purpose and acts of God, and by that directed to its end in fellowship with him. Order promotes identity, integrity and duration over time. It does so, positively, by safeguarding the church’s access to its fundamental resource, and, negatively, by indicating that which the church is not authorized to be or do. The basic signs of the church – Scripture and sacraments – are its primary instruments of order, but they are administered by derivative instruments: creeds and confessions, canon law, a publicly authorized ministry. Order sanctifies human common life, and so is a provision of divine goodness. The relation of order to divine goodness is easy to overlook; feeling its full weight requires some spiritual discrimination, a grace acutely hard to exercise in the agonistic cultures of crisis which afflict some mainstream denominations. The order of the church, its existence in limitation, is a grace because it is essential to the healing of created society from the disarray by which it is overcome. Sin is a repudiation of creaturely vocation, and thereby a transgression of the limits which form the good order in which creaturely life is blessed. In the realm of sin, desire is detached from intelligent perception of human nature and ends, and becomes 30. On this see E. Radner, ‘To Desire Rightly: The Force of the Creed in its Canonical Context’, in C. Seitz, ed., Nicene Christianity, pp. 213–28.

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chaotic, untethered to the human good. This chaos also engulfs the common human realm and corrodes its good. Healing comes by the restoration of creatureliness, that is, through the saving gift of determinate form: hence the covenant enunciations ‘You are a people holy to the Lord your God’ (Deut. 14.2), ‘You are . . . a holy nation’ (1 Pet. 2.9). Reception of this gift involves passion, frustrating culpable desire, wrenching affections away from what is worthless – only thus can creatures be set again on the path to perfection. The church is the theatre of this mortification, not merely as a kind of association of those undergoing spiritual transformation, but as a society whose public forms of life instantiate and promote the discipline in which creatures may come alive.

IV What kind of society is the church? To ask that question is already to suggest that the term ‘society’ is used equivocally of the church. Because the church is the society which keeps us in God’s society, because it is the convocation of the elect and the community of the Word, the church does not possess its social properties after the manner of other societies. The church is not simply social nature but created and fallen social nature recreated by the saving missions of the Son of God and the Holy Spirit and so reconciled to God and on the way to its perfection. This already means that the ethnography of such a society will be irregular, even aberrant, utterly enigmatic if we restrict the matter of ethnography to purely natural motion. The church is a society which moves itself as it is moved by God. Without talk of this divine movement, of the electing, calling, gathering, and sanctifying works of God, an ethnography of the church does not attain its object, misperceiving the motion to which its attention is to be directed, and so inhibited in understanding the creaturely movements of the communion of saints. Ecclesiological investigations are of two sorts. One pursues the question of the origin of the church – ‘origin’, not in the sense of inner-­historical genetics but in the sense of the theological-­metaphysical depth from which the church arises as an apostolic society. Investigation of the origin of the church is the task of dogmatics, as it offers a trinitarian reduction of the Christian society. A second investigation concerns itself with the phenomena of the church. These phenomena are characterized by a certain elusiveness. They are signs whose matter does not inhere in themselves; they have a special visibility; they do not exhaust themselves in their natural manifestation. There is a proper hierarchical arrangement of the two sets of ecclesiological investigations: at least in the order of being, investigation of origins precedes and governs investigation of phenomena (in the order of knowing, which comes first is probably a matter of indifference). Respecting the hierarchy is important because pursuit of the second set of enquiries can find it difficult to resist becoming naturalized, regarding the phenomena of the church while suspending their reference to the depth from which they come into being. In a naturalized ecclesiology, the first set of enquiries into the church’s depth is interrupted or overtaken by the second set of enquiries; or answers to the second

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set of enquiries are taken to be answers to the first set of enquiries. In both cases, the proper object of ecclesiology finds itself relegated to the shadows. Dogmatic ecclesiology resists this by keeping alive the distinction between and due order of uncreated and created being; by indicating that the phenomena of the church are not irreducible but significative; and by introducing into each ecclesiological description and passage of ecclesiological argument direct language about God, Christ and the Spirit. The condition for these acts of dogmatic reason is, however, the conversion of intelligence from love of temporality, which is why prayer is indispensable in ecclesiological understanding. What are the conditions, then, for profitable deployment of ethnography in ecclesiology? Here are four closing suggestions: (1) Questions about the suitability of modes of inquiry or disciplines are properly decided in relation to objects and ends of inquiry. An ethnography which serves in the project of constructing the church as natural social body is quite different from one which tries to observe the church as an element in the divine mystery set forth in Christ. (2) The use of ethnography in ecclesiology requires metaphysical clarification, including clarification of the distinction and relation between uncreated and created being, and between divine and social action. (3) Ethnography may find itself defeated by the concealed, secret character of the church as social body or life world; the church remains in some measure indiscernible, because its motion is not purely spontaneous or original to itself but ‘in the Lord’. (4) Theology is not one science among others; it is inquiry into God and all other things ordered in some way to God; and so it is inquiry into the conditions for all science, including social science.

Chapter 13 P u r i t y a n d P l e n i t u d e : R e f l e ct io n s o n C o n g a r’ s T r a di t i on a n d T r a di t i on s

I Fifty years on, Tradition and Traditions remains a deeply impressive book, both in manner and substance a classic of ressourcement theology.1 There are the long walks through the patristic and mediaeval countryside; there is the characteristic lack of anxiety about wissenschaftlich criteria, and the trust in the adequacy of citation for rational persuasion; there is confidence that – though Western Christian history stumbled rather badly around the end of the thirteenth century – we can with care recover the losses and extricate ourselves from the dualisms which have trapped theology and the estranged confessions of the churches. More than anything, it is a book animated by a sense that theology is rational worship in the church, and that the church is the realization in time of the self-­communication of the triune God. It is not a clever or stylish book, nor in one sense is it especially original. But it is a very joyful piece of theology; Congar – now reinstated and about to begin his work preparing for Vatican II – writes with fluency and confidence at a point of particular vibrancy in his own life and in the life of the church: ‘By God’s grace, we are today emerging from the seven years of famine.’2 The two parts of the book were originally published separately, the historical essay in 1960, and the theological essay (perhaps less vivid than the first part) three years later. There is a good deal of overlap between the two, however: as often with Congar, the argument is not so

1. Y. M.-J. Congar, Tradition and Traditions. An historical and a theological essay (London Burns and Oates, 1966) [originally La Tradition et les Traditions. Essai historique (Paris: Fayard, 1960); La Tradition et les Traditions. Essai théologique (Paris: Fayard, 1963).] For a full account, see J. Bunnenberg, Lebendige Treue zum Ursprung. Das Traditionsverständnis Yves Congars (Mainz: Grünewald, 1989); see also J.-P. Jossua, Yves Congar. Theology in the Service of God’s People (Chicago: Priory Press, 1968), pp. 109–116; C. MacDonald, Church and World in the Plan of God (Frankfurt: Lang, 1982), pp. 118–43. 2.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 397.

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much sequential as cumulative (sometimes, indeed, associative). The book works simultaneously on a number of fronts (historical analysis, dogmatics, spiritual theology, ecumenics, polemics), the whole undertaken as an act of homage and an appeal. The appeal is in part to Roman Catholic theology to renew the apprehension of the gift with which it has been entrusted, and in part to the separated Protestant churches to grasp again the plenitude of the Christian faith from which they have in some measure become isolated. Congar’s account of tradition is commanding on at least three counts. First, the book is suffused by a sense that tradition is a theological and spiritual reality and not simply a historical-­social magnitude. More pointedly: in order to talk about tradition, one needs to talk about God, and to do so directly. There is an immediate lesson to be learned here. A good deal of recent theological work has sought to reinstate tradition through extensive appeal to, for example, theories of cultural practice, the social character of knowing or the hermeneutics of reception.3 Congar occasionally touches on non-­theological matters, but he does not have any particular theory about them, and they remain ancillary, not foundational, to what he has to say. The book’s real centre of gravity is the historical depiction of the place of the church in the economy of salvation. ‘What theology means by Tradition,’ he writes, ‘is something other than a mere human factor of moral inheritance or social cohesion.’4 Throughout the study, Congar resists an immanentist account of tradition (whether the idiom be juridical, as in some postTridentine Catholic theology, or that of Romantic ideas of a human ‘common spirit’, a problem from which even Möhler is not entirely free). Tradition is an ecclesial, and therefore a Christological, and especially a pneumatological, concept, its explication requiring discernment of that ‘unity of the subjects of Tradition’ which ‘has for its inner principle the Holy Spirit’.5 This leads to a second factor in the book’s power: it exemplifies a way of speaking of the history of the church and its theology in which the notion of ‘church’ has some real work to do. From the early nineteenth century, Protestant church history often went about its business rather determined to allow no explanatory power to theological teaching about, for example, providence or the work of the Holy Spirit. This assimilation of church history to its non-­theological neighbour is, of course, an aspect of the more wide-­scale decline of a specifically theological rationale for the theological sub-­disciplines. In church history, it leads to the bracketing of talk of divine action; one of its more recent fruits is a certain fondness for analysis of the church’s past in terms of the agonistics of power. Congar was, of course, no stranger to such matters, and had more reason than most to look at the church 3. Examples from a large literature would include Delwin Brown, Boundaries of our Habitations. Tradition and Theological Construction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); David Brown, Tradition and Imagination. Revelation and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 4.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 234 5.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 313.

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without illusions. This does not, however, betray him into writing a critical history of tradition (one, that is, which isolates the human history of the church and uses it as a sufficient explanation for the reality of Christianity). He certainly exposes what he regards as deformities in the church’s past, most of which involve the hypertrophy of law and office in the church. But for Congar, the work of the Spirit outbids human depravity, and so a critical history can never be exhaustive. His encomium on the fathers in the second part of the book is a case in point. Why, he asks, are the fathers ‘such a unique and very precious locus theologicus’?6 The answer he gives is in the end a matter of ‘Christian ontology’, one which entails ‘a certain view of the Church and its historical life’.7 In that ontology, certain creaturely realities are, without detriment to their creatureliness, instrumental in the divine self-­communication. If this is the case, then the church historian is permitted to interpret the fathers not simply as contingent actors in a social and religious history, but as ‘those who have contributed a decisive element to the Church’s life’.8 This is not naivety. ‘The tradition of the Fathers is a very human thing. It is not an epiphany of glory, but a work of God in frail human vessels, a work whose luminosity of outline is apparent only to the eye of faith’.9 Yet for Congar the history of the church may not be written as if it were not luminous in this way. Put somewhat sharply; ‘History is the science of mankind’s past. Tradition is something else entirely’.10 More pacifically: the church ‘has a special and ongoing relation to history which is itself superior to history although the Church does live out its life within history’s confines’.11 One of the major questions raised by Congar’s book is thus the extent to which church history is just that: church history. Third, therefore, Congar grasps that questions about tradition are in large part ecclesiological questions, and therefore questions about the manner of God’s relation to the creation and the common life of God’s creatures. Tradition and Traditions is in many ways an extended ecclesiological proposal, as important in its way as de Lubac’s Catholicism.12 As an essay in ecclesiology, it is also an essay on Christ and the Spirit – and not, it is worth adding, an essay in social or political anthropology. The book’s title does not quite make the point, suggesting that the heart of the argument concerns the relation of Tradition to what Congar calls the ‘monuments’ or ‘witnesses’ of tradition. In fact, this is only a corollary of the deep

6.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 436. 7.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 436. 8.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 438. 9.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 440. 10.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 455. 11.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 457. 12.  More generally on Congar’s ecclesiology, see J. Famerée, L’ecclésiologie d’Yves Congar avant Vatican II. Histoire et Eglise. Analyse et Reprise Critique (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1992); G. Flynn, Yves Congar’s Vision of the Church in a World of Unbelief (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Jossua, Yves Congar, pp. 87–126.

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theological conviction which underlies the argument in its entirety, namely that ‘Tradition is a theological reality which supposes an action of the Holy Spirit in a living subject, and this subject is the Church, the people of God and the Body of Christ’.13 In what follows, I offer an analysis of the main proposals of Tradition and Traditions and suggest some lines of reflection from the perspective of a Protestant dogmatician who brings to the reading of the book a rather different arrangement of Christian doctrines from that which Congar himself expounds with such serenity and perceptiveness. No serious Protestant theologian reading Congar or any other ressourcement thinker should fail to register the challenge which this theology poses, and which continues to be pressed by de Lubac’s rather mannered Anglo-American epigones. Briefly stated, the challenge is whether the Protestant zeal for purity – in the doctrines of God, Christ, the church and elsewhere – leads to a segregation of the divine from the creaturely, which in turn inhibits grasp of the plenitude of God’s self-­communication.

II Congar’s historical essay is in part a celebratory description of the abundance and spaciousness of the Christian tradition, and in part a pathology of modern Western divinity (‘modern’ in the rather loose sense of stemming from the Reformation and its antecedents). Before turning to the main lines of the historical presentation, three preliminary orientations about the general character of Congar’s historical theology will be useful. First, history serves theology. ‘My immediate aim . . . is historical; but my ultimate intention remains strictly theological’.14 This does not mean that Congar is in the business of historical apologetics: far from it. Tradition is not just a source book of evidences, unearthed by clever historians and then deployed in the service of polemic. Rather, history is inseparable from theology because a true conception of the history of the church sees it as the temporal process of God’s saving revelation. Historicist attempts to study it as something else do just that: they study something other than the history of the church. An immediate effect of this, second, is that Congar’s history is strongly synthetic in character. ‘I have tried to draw out the key points of an overall history, with a logic and development of its own. Basically, my aim has been to outline a history of how the problem of tradition has been examined’.15 The task, he says later, is one of gathering together ‘the general witness provided by the way [the fathers] prayed, lived and died’.16 Synthesis may cause the professional historian’s heart to flutter; 13.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 452. 14.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. xix. 15.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. xix. 16.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 353.

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but it is worth pointing out that Congar’s aim here is not to privilege the grandes lignes over the annoying counterfactuals, but rather to propose a different ontology: the history of Christianity is a unified reality; church history is (and is not just taken to be) the history of the church. Third, however, if history is taken up into theology, theology is equally an intrinsically historical undertaking. This is because its object is the mystery of Christ as it takes form in human time. When Congar aligns himself with ‘the present threefold return to the biblical, liturgical and patristic sources’,17 he is directing attention to the historical realities which testify to the fact that the gospel is not available apart from its presence in history through forms of common life, thought and action. Part of Congar’s genius is his resistance both to the naturalization of the forms of the church and to their eclipse by a separate supernatural realm. To grasp Christian truth is to see it in its historical career and plenitude. In substantive terms, Congar’s account of the history of tradition is, at heart, a proposal that, until the period around the Gregorian Reform, tradition is envisaged as a salvation-­historical reality, integrally related, on the one hand, to the divine self-­communication and, on the other hand, to the corporate life of the people of God to which that self-­communication gives rise, and in which it continues to bestow itself. The point is made initially with reference to the growth of the biblical tradition. The matrix and the interpretative milieu of the biblical materials are to be found in the church as the community of salvation. ‘Begotten in tradition, or even from tradition, the biblical writings come to us borne on a living religious reality – the community of God’s chosen people, and this religious reality itself existed before these writings.’18 This enables positive theological use of the findings of Formgeschichte with respect to the biblical texts, precisely because ‘the formgeschichtlich school . . . reinstated the spiritual bond uniting Scripture and Tradition, in the reality which embraces both of them: the Church’.19 In effect, Congar can de-­secularize the critical history of the biblical tradition, allowing its findings but replacing its overemphasis on community creativity by talk of divine action in the acts of the church. The theological principle to which he appeals in giving an account of the growth of the biblical tradition is that ‘the Lord himself effects everything in his church’, and that there is, accordingly, ‘the coincidence of an historical transmission and a direct act of the Lord’.20 This means, further, that tradition has both an historical and a charismatic character. Apostolic tradition properly concerns both origin and present effectiveness.‘Historical in its origin and in the materiality of its content; pneumatic or charismatic in the power that is at work in it: power of perception, of faithful conservation, and of dynamic affirmation. The tradition of the apostles is 17.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 64. 18.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 2. 19.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 6. 20.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 12.

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simultaneously unchanging and timely, recollection of events and unfolding of their significance, conformity to what has been given or done once and for all, and the permanently present and dynamic reality of this thing given or done once and for all’.21 Put a little differently, tradition can be seen as both deposit and pattern (ὑποτύπωσις). It refers to an accomplished reality, but not in such a way ‘that the Holy Spirit will cease to actualize and explain, in the course of history – of a true history – the meaning of inexhaustible treasure of the deposit of faith.’22 What is crucial to Congar’s account here, we should note, is an ecclesiology in which the processes of the church’s history, including its transmission of the apostolic heritage, are the temporal showing forth of the divine mystery, and as such intrinsic to that which they transmit. And so of the ante-Nicene period he says: ‘We are at the point where the concepts of Revelation, the Church and tradition overlap: what was hidden in God is manifested in time. This manifestation, as knowledge, is revelation and tradition; as a present mystery, it is the Church, salvation and again Tradition, paradosis being this content of saving knowledge and practice which the Church transmits and by which it lives.’23 Congar is quick to emphasize the sheer gratuity of what the church transmits: revelation is not simply identical with its ecclesial transmission. ‘The source whence springs the tradition of the Church descends, before flowing over the plain, like a cascade out of heaven, from God (the Father) who manifests himself in human terms in sending Jesus Christ.’24 Nevertheless, revelation and church cannot be sundered, for ‘like the Church itself, tradition is simply the manifestation, in the time of human history, of the “mystery” of salvation which, already announced, outlined and launched under the old Dispensation, has now appeared and been given to us in its fullness on Jesus Christ.’25 As a reading of the history of the early church, this is a far cry from the doctrinal criticism which exercised such a long fascination in patristic scholarship (especially British). It shows little interest in the philosophical environment of early Christian and patristic thought, and is largely silent about its political surroundings; it is much more interested in liturgical and exegetical materials than in either the history of religions or conciliar dogmatics. It is also startlingly direct in its invocation of a number of theological themes which Congar firmly believes to be crucial to making sense of the material: apostolicity, for example, and above all that ‘supratemporal and supraterrestrial principle, the Holy Spirit’.26 Like de Lubac, Congar identifies a distortion of this revelatory and ecclesial conception of tradition in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In the early Middle Ages, his argument runs, the authority of tradition was not tied to its 21.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 19. 22.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 21. 23.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 25. 24.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 25. 25.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 43. 26.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 37.

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apostolic genesis and so to its capacity to function as historical warrant, but to the capacity of tradition to extend the communication of divine truth into the present, a communication which ‘continues via the human cooperation which is coextensive with the duration of the church’.27 Put rather formally, ‘interest centred on the present reality of transcendent causalities, rather than on the occasional causes at some time in the past of the historical appearance of some idea or institution’.28 This is fractured in the very early modern period. Congar adduces a range of factors: the translation of an antique notion of auctoritas into the idiom of theological criteriology and institutional warrant; the immanentizing of God’s presence as an ecclesial property rather than a spiritual movement; a shift from language of the mediation of the invisible through the visible to that of efficient causality; protest against the perceived expansion of the governing power of office in the church; the consequent deployment of apostolicity and Scripture as ‘anti-­ ecclesiastical’ realities.29 The synthesis of revelation, Scripture, tradition and church begins to disintegrate. Revelation becomes an act of origination; Scripture and church become ‘two authorities forced into competition’;30 the church becomes less the corporate manifestation of salvation than a juridically governed institution. The Reformation’s assertion of sola scriptura is simply the outworking of an earlier loss, namely of a sense that through the Spirit the divine acts of revelatio and inspiratio are permanent realities in the church. From here, the historical presentation is wrapped up in fairly short order. There is a cautious reading of Trent’s 1546 decree de canonicis scripturis, which suggests that in Trent’s pneumatological ecclesiology it is not always as clear as it might be who is calling the shots, Spirit or institution. And this is followed by a more leisurely account of post-Tridentine developments to 1950, with some generous and finely-­drawn portraits of Möhler, Franzelin, Newman, Scheeben and others. The theological essay which follows gives a more schematic presentation of the materials which have emerged from the history. Three major themes can be identified: the coherence of revelation, tradition and church; the relation of Tradition and ‘traditions’; and the inseparability of Scripture from tradition. 1.  At the centre of Congar’s proposal in Tradition and Traditions (and elsewhere in, for example, The Mystery of the Temple) is a conviction that God’s saving self-­manifestation is not punctilliar but a spacious, historically and socially extended reality, such that ‘the total self-­communication of God’31 embraces both supernatural and natural agents and their relations in time. In terms of a theology of tradition, this means that a primary task is ‘to determine the place of

27.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 90. 28.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 89. 29.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 98. 30.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 98. 31.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 308.

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tradition . . . in the whole complex of the plan whereby God’s mystery is made known to men’.32 A key element in the argument is Congar’s description of what he calls ‘disclosure through created signs’33 – a theology of mediation. ‘God’s plan,’ he writes, ‘is one of mission and tradition’:34 ‘mission’ in the sense of ‘the entrusting of a task to another by one who has responsibility to see that the task is completed’, and ‘tradition’ in the sense of ‘successive communication of one and the same object to others’.35 There is, in other words, no isolation of revelation, but rather a cumulative temporal expansion of its range through creaturely instrumentality. Consequently, the church is not merely a kind of empty space into which revelation intrudes; it is, rather, an historical process of receiving and extending onwards, of inheritance and transmission, and so at the same time ‘an incorporation into a communion’.36 Divine self-­communication is thus of its essence generative of history, not self-­enclosed or segregated but diffusive; and what it brings about is ‘a structure of relationships . . . in the world’.37 This history may fittingly be called ‘sacramental time, the time of the Church’.38 A crucial component of Congar’s analysis is that this sacred history evoked by God’s revelatory extension of himself in Christ and Spirit is ‘both human and divine’.39 Because of this, the church is what he calls ‘the subject of Tradition’40: that is, the agent through which God ‘communicates his revelation’.41 Congar’s insistence here (and elsewhere) that it is the church in its totality which undertakes this task, and not just the magisterium, need not detain us here. What is most important for our purposes is his attempt in a number of places to deploy the notion of tradition in order to repair the breach between divine revelation and the acts of the church in time. He can speak of ‘the history of the Church as the People or City of God, which unfolds at the heart of secular history as the gradual realisation of man’s covenant relationship with God’.42 Or again: ‘The time of the Church is . . . the time of those responses that are stirred up in us, in the order of truth and love, by the “divine missions” or visitations, of the God who is, who was, and who is to come, by which he brings this relationship, revealed and definitively established in Christ, to its final fulfilment’.43 Nevertheless, an

32.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 237. 33.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 238. 34.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 238. 35.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 240. 36.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 241. 37.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 258. 38.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 260. 39.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 257. 40.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 239; cf. p. 35. 41.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 327. 42.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, pp. 262f. 43.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 264.

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adequate statement of tradition as ‘the continuing presence of the past in the present’44 requires the transcendent reference afforded by Christological and pneumatological language: Christology, because tradition concerns ‘a finally established and supra-­temporal deposit’; pneumatology, because it is by the Spirit that tradition is ‘interiorized and actualized in the faithful throughout the course of history’.45 The Christology remains oddly muted in the theological essay, perhaps because Congar is anxious to avoid the excessive emphasis on the Christological ephapax which he finds so problematic in Protestantism. The pneumatology, by contrast, does the lion’s share of the work, precisely because only a thoroughly charismatic ecclesiology can escape the extrinsicism of those plodding controversialist manuals de traditione. ‘If spiritual men are thus bearers of Tradition, this tradition itself must be holy, heilige Überlieferung. That is holy which comes from God, who alone is holy, from his Spirit, who is the Holy Spirit. It is because the promptings of the Spirit are at the origin of the whole succession of genuine spiritual gnosis whose total aggregate, stored up and transmitted through the centuries, forms its basis, that we can justly term Tradition itself holy’.46 2.  This expansion of the notion of tradition to become ‘the active presence of revelation in a living subject’47 facilitates the distinction between Tradition and traditions, or what he more happily calls the ‘monuments’ or ‘witnesses’ of Tradition. Because ‘[t]he monuments of Tradition are objective historical realities, but Tradition is a theological reality which supposes an action of the Holy Spirit’, then ‘Tradition is . . . prior to its monuments, since they are only expressions of it.’48 This kind of distinction is, of course, a common modern strategy for avoiding some inherited historical embarrassments. In Congar’s hands, it has anti-­juridical and anti-­historicist force, serving to recommend a more pneumatological and sacramental understanding of the relation between the theological reality of Tradition and its historical visibility. His account of the distinction may only be partially successful, largely because his understanding of the liturgy as efficacious representation tugs in rather different direction from the basic idea of traditions as witness. That being said, there is doubtless a certain liberation in disentangling tradition and traditions, since it at least makes possible a sense that the historical monuments of the church’s past are contingent, and so not wholly beyond the possibility of revision. 3.  More weighty for our purposes here is what Congar has to say of the relation of Scripture and tradition. The basic shape of his treatment should by now be clear: ‘re-­examination of the sources and of traditions prior to the divisions, 44.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 264. 45.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 265. 46.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 396. 47.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 401. 48.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 452.

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polemics and separations of the modern period’49 unearths an earlier tradition in which ‘Scripture, Tradition, the Church were three inseparable terms’.50 In telegraphic form, Congar’s argument goes something like this: Scripture is materially sufficient (everything the church needs can be found in it) but formally insufficient because not perspicuous apart from the activity of the Holy Spirit in communicating the Word of God in the life of the church. Scripture and tradition cannot be separated because inspiration and illumination form a single trajectory of the Spirit’s action in communicating divine truth and generating a form of common life bound together in part by ‘an exegetical tradition’.51 Hence ‘Scripture is not, by itself, the word and message of God by which God purposes to give life to men’ because ‘in order that its content may be rendered actual in a living mind, its meaning must be perceived in the present movement of such a mind, as a result of a new act of God’.52 More schematically, Scripture is a first stage of revelatory action (‘the definitive formation of an objective deposit’), and tradition is a second stage, that of ‘the Gospel’s flowering in a personal human subject’.53 The scriptural texts have their place in the communicative presence of God as it takes place in the church. Tradition is not an independent source of revelation so much as the ecclesial and historical environment in which Scripture is at work, towards which Scripture is directed, and by which its witness is expanded. Tradition is the amplification of the gospel communicated in Scripture, what Congar calls ‘the essential means’ of ensuring the ‘fullness’ of the apostolic heritage.54 None of this is intended as a rejection of the supremacy of Scripture; but supremacy is not isolation: ‘Scripture’s sovereign character does not prevent it from being just one component of God’s redemptive work, a work which demands in addition the Church and Tradition.’55 It is just this that Protestantism has failed to see. Throughout his exposition, Congar distinguishes his salvation-­historical and ecclesial view of tradition from, on the one hand, the juridical strand of post-Gregorian Catholicism and, on the other hand, the tradition of the Reformation (both, of course, are versions of the same dysfunction). Of the two, the Reformation is handled more severely, and, it must be said, rather less knowledgeably: Congar read widely in modern Protestant materials on tradition, especially of the ecumenical variety (Leenhardt, von Allmen, and others), but was a good deal less secure in the literatures of the magisterial Reformation or the dogmatic theology of later Protestantism. Yet what he has to say is extraordinarily instructive, most of all because he perceives that the fundamental point at issue is not the relative authority of Bible and church 49.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 377. 50.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 378. 51.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 399. 52.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 400. 53.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 401. 54.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 416. 55.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 422.

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tradition, but ‘the actual ideas of what constituted the spiritual relationship between God and man’.56 As Congar presents things, Protestantism is flawed by its isolation of Scripture from the total history of God’s revelatory presence in the history of the people of God. The isolation results from making a gesture of defiance into an all-­embracing principle: faced with the expansion of ecclesiastical power, the Reformation reacted by asserting the primacy of Scripture as a way of reaffirming the absolute, non-­transferable rule of God in his Word. ‘It was with the intention of restoring the sovereignty of God alone that they presented that of Scripture as exclusive’.57 It is this solus which troubles Congar. If for Luther and Calvin ‘it is a question of restoring to God . . . the full determination of religious existence’, the problem is not ‘God first’ but ‘God alone’.58 ‘Alone’ for Congar signals an ecclesiological deficiency and at the same time a drastically straitened conception of the economy of salvation, one which cuts it loose from its occurrence in the church’s temporal existence. In effect, this means ‘[e]limination of the reality “Church” as a constituent of the covenant relationship’.59 The cost of maintaining the revelatory ephapax is a purely vertical concept of revelation and thus ‘the concentration of all the means of grace, or of the realization of man’s covenant relationship with God, solely in the Word of God, in practice identified with Scripture’.60 Sola scriptura is ecclesiologically ruinous. It leads to a fatally competitive picture which forces a choice between ‘the primacy of Scripture and the primacy of “the Church” ’.61 It reduces the history of the church’s acts to the history of exegesis, failing to see that the lived tradition of the community of salvation cannot be given an exhaustive textual determination – that there is what Odo Casel called the element of Nicht-­schrift-sein in the fullness of the church’s life. It is inattentive to the ‘public order of faith, worship and salvation’.62 And, more than anything, in the notion of sola Scriptura there surfaces the sorry divide of natural and supernatural, the separation, the splitting of that ‘one single event of grace: a heavenly moment of the gift promised, and an earthly moment of the gift given’.63 Whether Congar is 56.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p.  145. On the ecclesiological dimensions of Congar’s critique of Protestantism, see M.-M. Wolff, Gott und Mensch. Ein Beitrag Yves Congars zum ökumenischen Dialog (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1990); Famerée, L’ecclésiologie d’Yves Congar avant Vatican II, pp. 103–8; C. Meakin, “The Same But Different”? The Relationship between Unity and Diversity in the Theological Ecumenism of Yves Congar (Lund: Lund University Press, 1995), pp. 124–71. The ecclesiological critique of the Protestant tradition was already worked out by Congar in Vraie et fausse réforme dans L’Église (Paris: Cerf, 1950). 57.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 116. 58.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 141. 59.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 463. 60.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 464. 61.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 142. 62.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 142. 63.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 147.

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right to argue that Protestantism restricts the temporal presence of the supernatural to Scripture, individually interpreted, is a moot point. But what he wishes to secure is that for Catholicism ‘the reality of God’s gift is transmitted in a far more complex and richer way than textual statement’.64 Hence his appeal to Protestant theology, ‘to draw the implications of the fact, witnessed to in the whole saving economy, that revelation has not an individual and private, but rather a social and public, nature’, and ‘to take seriously the promises made to the Church of the presence and assistance of the Holy Spirit’.65 Otherwise, Protestants will simply ‘sacrifice the Church’.66

III What might a Protestant admirer of this book be moved to say by way of response? 1. First, a comment on Congar’s characteristically ressourcement way of proceeding, namely retrieving and putting to work a set of theological resources which antedate early modern problems and can help us circumvent them. The procedure enjoys almost unquestioned ecumenical prestige after its use in ARCIC (‘almost’, because unless one dismisses the worries of some substantial German Lutheran theologians about the Common Declaration on Justification, those worries constitute a significant disavowal of this style of ecumenical work67). But, whatever its historical merits and ecumenical utility, it ought not to go by default. Three comments might be made. First, it ‘explains’ Protestantism by presenting it as part of the larger malformation of Western Christianity after the Gregorian Reform. There is a truth here; but it ought not to be pressed in such a way as to deprive the Reformation of any insight into the permanent character of Christianity. Second, the ressourcement method is heavily Catholic, insofar as it tends to assume that the emphasis on ecclesial visibility which it reconstructs out of patristic and early mediaeval materials is normatively Christian, and thus that Protestantism is a declension into spiritualism, transcendentalism, individualism and the like. Congar’s own version of ecclesial visibility is, of course, immensely impressive and subtle, and resists any crude identification of the church with institutional regularity. But there are other ways of conceiving ecclesiology which de-­emphasize ecclesial ‘realization’ of the saving mystery and are more heavily invested in the church’s passivity, whose legitimacy tends to be excluded by Congar’s way of proceeding. Third, ressourcement theologians commonly write the history of Christianity on the understanding that the distinction between ‘apostolic’ and 64.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 150. 65.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 338. 66.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 402. 67.  The worries are expressed with some force in E. Jüngel, Justification. The Heart of the Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001).

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‘post-­apostolic’ ought not to be pressed. Apostolicity is not primarily a matter of backward reference because, as Congar puts it, ‘the Church and her tradition were the spiritual content of what came from the apostles’.68 This is why he is heavily critical of, for example, Cullmann’s account of the formation of the canon69: by interpreting the canon in terms of sola Scriptura, Cullmann bifuircates ‘apostolic tradition and Church tradition’.70 But part of what it means for the church to stand beneath apostolicity as a law of its existence is that there is a proper retrospective dynamic in the church. That is, the church is not only a Spirit-­produced set of expressions of the mystery of salvation, but a company which looks back to the apostolic testimony set before it in Scripture and finds itself placed beneath its judgement. That testimony is properly segregated, discontinuous, intrusive in the busy processes of ecclesial invention. This is not to fall victim to those styles of Christian historiography (of which Protestantism has been lamentably fond) which regard the history of the church as simply one long decline from apostolic purity. Such a reading of the Christian past is a denial of credo in Spiritum Sanctum. But the creedal sequence is not without its ecclesiological significance: I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the remission of sins – the last is as ecclesiologically fundamental as what precedes it, and is therefore also a sign under which the church stands. Indeed, the remission of sins is constitutive of the holiness, catholicity and fellowship of the church. And at the very least this ought to alert us to the danger of assimilating the apostolic testimony too thoroughly into the life of the church, lest its summons to conversion be in some way muted. 2.  This leads to a second line of analysis, namely Congar’s ecclesiology. Congar very acutely sees that in the confessional divergences over the relation of Scripture and tradition, the real issue is often‘one of ecclesiology rather than of hermeneutics’.71 ‘It seems to me,’ he writes, ‘that Protestant thought separates Christ in too radical a manner from his Body, the Church. Failing to recognize sufficiently that by the sending of Christ and his Spirit God has truly entered into history, it isolates in an excessive manner the ephapax of Christ from its effects in humanity, which effects it plays down in order to exalt the sovereignty of the Lord’.72 By way of response: Congar speaks of ‘the absence in Protestant thought of a genuine ecclesiology’.73 But Protestant ecclesiology is not absent; it is just different. The difference can best be characterized by seeing it as a function of a deep sense of the perfection of Christ, that is, the utter uniqueness, integrity and sufficiency of the Word made flesh. Protestant ecclesiology, especially in its Reformed strand, is undergirded by 68.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 41. 69. See O. Cullmann, The Early Church (London: SCM, 1956). 70.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 40. 71.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 409. 72.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 409. 73.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 422.

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an affirmation of Christ’s character as an ontological perfectum. Of course, as such he communicates himself; he is risen, alive, present, active. But what is present and active is one whose identity is in a real sense exclusive, because already fully achieved. His perfection includes his self-­communication; but his communication of himself does not make him as it were porous or diffuse. Consider what Congar says of Protestant accounts of the lordship of Christ. They view this lordship ‘too exclusively as an attribute of the glorified Christ and not enough as a de jure power residing already in Christ . . . It is this royal power of Christ which efficaciously inserts his priestly and prophetic functions into time, making him truly the Lord of time: and he is this not only in himself in heaven but also in his Church’.74 But what are we to make of the phrase ‘also in his Church’? Congar is very far from wanting to reduce Christ to some immanent principle of ecclesial life. Yet Christ’s royal power, his offices as priest and king, his lordship, are not in any way extensible. His lordship has its ecclesial sphere; but his presence there is always the presence of one who is infinitely superior, even as he gives himself in the most intimate fellowship – a point which is not adequately built into the fabric of Congar’s account of God’s presence in The Mystery of the Temple (Congar’s attraction to the temple motif – rather than to prophecy, for example – is telling, as is his presentation of the temple theme in terms of divine indwelling rather than the terrors of holy mercy). The question here to Congar is a sort of ecclesiological extension of the so-­ called extra Calvinisticum, namely the conviction that in the incarnate Word’s relations ad extra he enjoys sovereign liberty. One way of broaching the issue would be to reflect on the term ‘covenant’ with which Congar often describes the relation of Christ and the church. As he uses the term it has strong overtones of participation, functioning as a summary term for the way in which the history of the church is the temporal bodying forth of the Christological mystery of salvation. Congar is, of course, highly alert to the difference ‘between a hypostatic and a covenant union’.75 But rather more is needed to secure the distinction: an emphasis that covenant is a term for differentiation and drastic inequality as much as of mutual encounter, a term which signals the astonishing unitio of God and the fallen creature, not ontological unio. To speak in such terms is not to repeat some principled separation of nature and supernature, but simply to indicate that the history of the covenant is about God’s merciful election. The topic of election does not figure large in Congar’s presentations of salvation-­history, eclipsed by a Christological and pneumatological conception of the divine presence. But the inattention to election is not unproblematic. The force of ‘election’ is to underscore that the sheer difference between creator and creature remains uncompromised even in the covenant fellowship between Christ and his people. 74.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 490. 75.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 312. See here his article ‘Dogme christologique et ecclésiologie. Vérité et limites d’un parallèle’, in Sainte Église: etudes et approaches ecclésiologiques (Paris: Cerf, 1963), pp. 69–104.

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Even as he gives himself, he remains the electing God, solus, unassimilated, his plenitude in se. There is a pneumatological dimension here: does Congar compromise the transcendence of the Spirit by associating him so firmly with the processes of tradition? Again, the term ‘covenant’ may offer a safeguard: ‘the Church and the Spirit,’ he writes, ‘are only united by a covenant link’.76 Nevertheless, Congar fears that with its apparently exclusive vertical reference Protestant ecclesiology does not take with sufficient seriousness ‘the promise of the Spirit’.77 Yet: what kind of promise? God’s promises are about the inexhaustibility and infinite reliability of his grace, not about its availability as historical reality. They are about eschatological security as much as about the presence of a gift. Once again, this is not extrinsicism. It is, rather, a hesitation in following Congar when he affirms ‘the complete historicity of God’s gift’.78 3.  Third, sola Scriptura. In one highly important sense, Congar is entirely correct to set Scripture in the larger context of the history of God’s self-­communication. For a variety of reasons, Protestant dogmatics often lost the plot at this point, relocating Scripture away from soteriology into criteriology, with rather disastrous results. But I am not fully persuaded that the resultant extrinsicism can be adequately dealt with by Congar’s folding of Scripture into the larger stream of the church’s life. This is because Scripture’s task as prophetic and apostolic witness to the divine Word can only be accomplished if it is in some sense an alien element in the church. Congar argues that Scripture is materially sufficient but formally insufficient. But without formal sufficiency, material sufficiency has no teeth. The sufficiency of Scripture (formal and material) does not, of course, mean that Scripture exists in abstraction from its presence to the church. But what kind of presence? Church and tradition, though they are the ‘space’ in which Scripture is active as sanctified testimony to the viva vox Dei, do not ‘fill out’ Scripture or make good its insufficiency, any more than the servants of Jesus Christ fill out his lordship. Sola Scriptura does not extract Scripture from Christian history. But it does qualify that history as one which is addressed by an intrusive voice, the voice of the one who awakens the sleepers and raises the dead.

IV By way of brief conclusion. ‘The dialogue between Catholicism and Protestantism,’ Congar remarks, ‘is not yet by any means over; perhaps it has scarcely begun, at least as an eirenical dialogue, carried on with the resources supplied by a biblical theology made transparent to the light of Truth at the price of much humility, 76.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 345. 77.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 345. 78.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 492.

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prayer and love of God’.79 Just so! No Protestant theologian with any measure of spiritual or theological intelligence can fail to be moved by the appeal of Congar’s work or of that refreshing work of the Spirit in the church of which it is part. But is it too much to hope – for ecumenical reasons! – that in this eirenical dialogue Protestant theology may not entirely forget some of what lies in its own traditions, may, indeed, look at them with more love than embarrassment, may even think of them as worth offering to the wider fellowship? If that is to happen, Protestant theologians could do worse than follow Congar’s example in those grim years of exile, poring over the texts of the past, and doing so with expectancy, hopefulness and joy. Karl Barth – whose deep investment in historical theology is now only beginning to be appreciated with the publication of his lectures on the history of Reformed theology from the 1920s – thought of such theological work as obedience to the fifth commandment.80 Whether Protestant theology can grow beyond its attachments to a culture of suspicion and listen to its own past, remains to be seen. If it does so, others will be in its debt.

79.  Congar, Tradition and Traditions, p. 346. 80. In theology’s respect for and deference to the confessional tradition of the church, Barth argues, ‘there is no question of bondage and constraint. It is merely that in the Church the same kind of obedience as, I hope, you pay to your father and mother, is demanded of you towards the Church’s past, towards the “elders” of the Church . . . In obedience to the Church’s past it is always possible to be a very free theologian. But it must be borne in mind that, as members of the Church, as belonging to the congregatio fidelium, one must not speak without having heard’: K. Barth, Credo (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1936), p. 181.

E pilogue

Chapter 14 W hat M a k e s T h e o l o g y T h e o l o g ica l ?

I We determine whether or to what extent a specific intellectual act or intellectual practice or domain of study is theological on the basis of an understanding of the nature of theology. An understanding of the nature of theology comprises, inter alia, an account of theology’s object, its cognitive principles, its ends, and the virtues of its practitioners. Acts of creaturely intellect are theological to the extent that they are directed to this object, operate on the basis of these cognitive principles, pursue these ends, and are undertaken by persons in whom these virtues may be discerned. Further, the various studies – historical, literary, speculative and moral-­practical – which are found in the theological curriculum are not disparate inquiries having no common genus; they are elements of a unified science, and their purpose, scope and proper operation are ascertained by reference to their place in the theological encyclopaedia, the circle of theological study and instruction.

II The object of Christian theology is twofold: God the Holy Trinity and all other things relative to God. 1.  The principal object or matter of Christian theology is God. This matter is treated under two aspects. First, Christian theology considers God absolutely, that is, God in himself in his antecedent self-­existent perfection, integrity, beatitude and simplicity as Father, Son and Spirit, prior to and apart from any relation to creatures. Theology’s first object is the divine essence and properties, and the persons of the godhead in their specific modes of being and their eternal processions. ‘The divine being itself is the first formal reason, foundation, and object of all religion’, says John Owen1 – and we may also say the first formal reason, 1.  J. Owen, Christologia, in The Works of John Owen, vol. 1, p. 44.

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foundation and object of Christian divinity. This matter – invisible, entirely exceeding our comprehension, and yet possessing infinite fullness of actuality – is the first and final matter to which all theological studies are directed in their different ways and with varying measures of explicitness. As theological intelligence tends to this object, it necessarily gives its attention to interim, mediating matters: Greek syntax, the eschatology of the apostle Paul, the political history of the Gregorian Reform, practices of eucharistic presidency. But, however absorbing, such studies are preparatory, contributory or dispositive, serving to conduce the mind to contemplation of the infinite excellence of the divine being. Intellectual activity is theological if it tends to that contemplation. Second, theology considers God relatively, that is, God in his works towards creatures. Theology treats these transitive works in relation to their source in the goodness and wisdom of the divine nature and counsels, and then considers their outer enactment in the divine works of nature and grace, which, under the direction of divine wisdom, communicate divine goodness by making, sustaining and perfecting created things. God relatively rather than absolutely considered is a derivative element of theology’s attention to its principal matter; it is not first science, and it is not self-­standing. The nature of God’s works ad extra cannot be grasped without immediate reference to God’s intrinsic self-­satisfaction which is their principle or ground; put differently: the temporal divine missions are intelligible only as derivative from the eternal divine processions. Outward communication is for God not natural or necessary but gratuitous. Yet, because God has so acted – because from his inner personal acts there flow his transitive operations – theological attention to God in his absolute being must be accompanied by attention to those acts in which of his charity God sets himself in relation to other beings as their first cause and final end. 2.  The second element of the twofold object of Christian theology is ‘all things relative to God’. Three matters are to be noted here. First, attention to non-­divine things is a necessity for theology, whose accomplishment of its task remains incomplete unless it addresses itself also to these things. This is not, however, because non-­divine things bear any intrinsic claim upon theological attention, still less because they are believed to have an immediate density and presence which obliges theology to consider them. Rather, theology treats non-­divine things because it first treats God in himself, and then God the maker of heaven and earth. Theology treats things other than God, not because there is a world, but because there is God and there is a creation. Second, accordingly, theology’s treatment of non-­divine things derives from its treatment of its principal object; it is an extension of its contemplation of God. When theology turns to consider non-­ divine things, it does not suspend its talk of God, moving into easier waters where it can count on its competence to deal with things which are both more available and less demanding. In talking of non-­divine things, theology talks of the effects of God, and does so as an enlargement of its consideration of the outer work of God the origin and cause of all being. Consequently, third, theology treats non-­ divine things with a particular interest, namely ‘relative to God’. Theology is a

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comprehensive science, a science of everything. But it is not a science of everything about everything, but rather a science of God and all other things under the aspect of createdness. It considers creatures not absolutely but relatively, as caused and as caused causes, as realities which live and move and have their being in God. So far, then: the twofold matter of Christian theology is God and created things; intellectual acts across the different domains of theological work are theological insofar as they intend this matter. As theological intelligence does this, it is required to be attentive to proper order and proportion in its inquiries. The material order – God in himself, God’s external work, created things – is irreversible, because created things are comprehensible only as effects of God’s external operations, and those operations are in turn comprehensible only as they are seen to flow from God’s perfect beatitude and simplicity. This material order is, of course, not necessarily the order of discovery or instruction, where for prudential reasons we may legitimately begin from creatures; what matters is not primarily cognitive or pedagogical sequence but rather that what one discovers or teaches be manifested in its inherent disposition and arrangement. This disposition is to be reflected in the proportions of a theological treatment of the matter, that is, in decisions about what requires the most ample consideration, what may safely be treated less fully, and in expectations about which elements of the matter of theology bear the greatest weight. Here theology finds itself in a permanent quandary. What is first in material order and has the greatest material proportion – God in himself – infinitely exceeds our comprehension: about this supremely great matter, therefore, theology has very little to say. Faced with this restriction the temptation is to evade its demand by passing on quickly to other things – to the works of God in the economy, or to creatures, believing these things more manageable. We may be more disposed to take this turn as inheritors of a long history in which the order of discovery from created things to God has been projected onto the order of being, in such a way that God in himself drifts to the periphery of theological concern. The cultural history of this neglect – the history of naturalism or phenomenalism and its theological variants – is complex and beyond my scope here. It ought not to be forgotten, however, that there is also a spiritual history of this neglect: complacent satisfaction with consideration of creatures and creaturely histories apart from their cause; preference for surfaces rather than origins; reluctance to allow the intellect to follow divine instruction and be conducted to God. Such defects impede theological inquiry; sometimes they defeat it. They may be corrected only by the conversio ad rem which is a chief work of the Spirit in the sanctification of theological intelligence. Theology becomes theological.

III We turn, next, to the principles of theological knowledge. Theological work involves a range of intellectual acts – acts of reading and interpretation, of historical inquiry, of conceptual abstraction, of practical judgement. All these different acts

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will count as theological insofar as they are undertaken in accordance with theology’s cognitive principles, which may be stated thus: the objective cognitive principle of Christian theology is God’s infinite knowledge of himself and all things, a share of which God communicates to creatures; the subjective cognitive principle of Christian theology is regenerate human intelligence. 1. Reflection on theology’s cognitive principles begins with the doctrine of God: not, that is, with survey of the capacities, incapacities and operations of human knowers, but with contemplation of the Lord who is ‘a God of knowledge’ (1 Sam. 2.3). In beginning thus, theology continues its conversio ad rem by turning to a knower and a knowledge which are objective, extrinsic to theology itself. Theology does this in repetition of its creaturely condition, and therefore in genuine normality (as well as, perhaps, in anxious or cheerful defiance of its idealistic neighbours). What is to be said of the divine knowledge on which theology rests? God’s knowledge of himself and all things is ‘beyond measure’ (Ps. 147.5). It is so extensively and exhaustively: God knows everything, and everything about everything. Further, the perfection of God’s knowledge includes its entire self-­ sufficiency. It has no internal or external cause, because God knows all things by his own being, and has need of no instructor (Isa. 40.13). God’s knowledge is not acquired; it is already, as Augustine puts it ‘infinitely capacious’,2 not open to extension; it is, therefore, not discursive but simultaneous, eternal and uncompounded. God’s knowledge is a single, simple act of intuition of unrestricted scope. This infinite divine knowledge is not merely the remote and inert background against which created cognitive acts appear in relief. It is, rather, an operative cognitive principle, that which alone makes possible, forms and guarantees the knowledge of creatures. Recollection of and appeal to the super-­eminent divine scientia is to accompany any act of theological intelligence, because any such act is not first of all a cause but an effect of knowledge. Only in this subalternate position – in this reference to God – is an act of theological intelligence also a cause of the acquisition of knowledge. This reference to God’s knowledge is, of course, an element in the pathos of theology, because it is a reference to that which exceeds visible demonstration, and so may engender a certain dishonour in the minds of our fellows and dismay in our own. But subalternation is not primarily a negative state of affairs, the embarrassing absence of intrinsic grounds for knowledge. Much more is it an affirmation that a movement of love has taken place and continues to take place: God condescends to communicate to creatures a share in his knowledge and to invite them into rational fellowship. In one sense, of course, God’s knowledge is proper to him alone, incommunicable to creatures: ‘no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit’ (1 Cor. 2.11). Yet: ‘what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived . . . God has revealed to us through the Spirit’ (1 Cor. 2.9f.). Theology is possible as a 2.  City of God XII.17.

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well-­grounded work of created intelligence because it is enclosed and activated by a divine work, by virtue of which creatures come to know. Of this work of God we may say: (1) it is a work of divine originality, which takes place in the revelatory missions of the Son and Spirit. ‘No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’ (Matt. 11.27) – the ‘and’ there signifies not mere accumulation of further cognitive subjects, but the Son’s ministry of election and apocalypse. ‘We have received . . . the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God’ (1 Cor. 2.12) – here, as elsewhere in 1 Corinthians, ‘from God’ signifies the infinite divine depth from which the gift of understanding comes forth. (2) This work of God is an outward enactment of God’s generosity in which he fulfils his intention that creatures should flourish by knowing and so reach out towards the completion of their nature. (3) It is a work of revelation or instruction in which God condescends to establish intelligent fellowship with rational creatures, taking the initiative to set aside and overcome our incapacity, reluctance and resistance. Our divine educator, Clement tells us, ‘does not simply follow behind, but . . . leads the way’.3 This divine work is not void of creaturely form and extension. Addressed to creatures and summoning them to acts of knowledge, it is also a created quantity. Divine instruction is not immediate but mediate, served by creaturely assistants and accommodating itself to the forms of creaturely intelligence. These assistants are, principally, the prophets and apostles and then, secondarily, other human teachers who repeat and apply the heavenly doctrine which they have received from its prophetic and apostolic ambassadors. With these embassies, the revelatory missions of the Son and Spirit reach their human goal. All this means that theology is possible. There is not only theologia in se, the archetypal knowledge of God himself; there is also theologia nostra, ectypal theology. The possibility of human intellectual acts which are genuinely theological is discerned not first of all by enumerating human capabilities but by attending to the fullness of God’s own life and knowledge and by tracing the outer works of God’s love. Mirabile dictu: we have received the Spirit, we have the mind of Christ. 2.  The subjective cognitive principle of theology is regenerate human intelligence. Divine revelation is not manifestation tout court; it is teaching which intends reception and effects learning. Divine teaching is not conditional upon its reception; but it is purposive, and its telos is not reached apart from its activation of the work of created intellect. Much energy might be expended in distancing theology from some deep instincts of modern intellectual culture which extract human intelligence from the economy of creation and regeneration, and consider it a capacity for transcendent judgement. But the chastening of cognitive pretension, however resonant with some themes in the theology of sin and grace, is not without risk. Imprudently prosecuted, it may threaten to eliminate the human knower; this threat will loom larger in the absence of a well-­formed theology of creation. Divine 3.  Clement of Alexandria, Christ the Educator, FC 23 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1954), I.1.

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revelation is not magnified but restricted and made ineffectual by the absence of creaturely intellect. What then is Christian theology required to say about the creaturely coordinate to God’s infinite knowledge and loving acts of instruction? (a)  Created intelligence is a set of capacities bestowed and preserved by God. Having these capacities, creatures exercise intelligence to apprehend and understand reality in more than its sheer phenomenal presence, to reach judgements about reality and to direct conduct in relation to reality. The exercise of intelligence is a moved movement: inalienably our own, but only so because moved by God intrinsically, and therefore neither wholly spontaneous nor devoid of the dignity of an act which is proper to us. As God sets himself before created intelligence, he does not stun it but causes it to live and move. (b)  Created intelligence is finite, neither intuitive nor comprehensive. It is discursive and laborious, operative in the process of coming-­to-know over time, and, though there is genuine creaturely acquisition and accumulation of knowledge, creaturely intelligence remains always in via, never fully achieved. (c)  Created intelligence is fallen and regenerate. Estranged from God, our intellectual acts participate in the disrepair and enfeeblement of our nature brought about by the fall. The intellect’s operation is hampered by passion, given to idolatry or to fascination with surfaces, cunning and deceitful. Yet even here, caution is not out of place: theology may sometimes give disproportionate attention to intellectual depravity, especially when it takes the form of highly-­ charged undifferentiated critique of the cognitive regimes of modern intellectual culture. The shaming of such pretensions may be undertaken in application of the theology of sin and alien righteousness; but imprudently prosecuted, it may threaten to diminish the importance of created intellect and may reflect malformation or restriction of the theology of creation and regeneration alike. Created intelligence is caught up in the reality of regeneration in which created powers are reborn, ordered to right objects, liberated from self-­reliance and so set free to begin to operate to their utmost extension. In sum: a properly theological theology will operate in conformity with these cognitive principles, the principles supplying orientation in a theological subject domain as well as norms by which to order intellectual operations, to deliberate about procedures, and to evaluate success.

IV 1.  Christian theology is not an arbitrary activity but an activity governed by and directed towards ends which antecede particular theologians or theological acts. What may be said of the ends of theology? Ends are not the same as purposes. A purpose is a human intention, something which some agent wishes and for the acquisition of which that agent acts. An end,

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by contrast, is not intentional but natural, belonging to the nature of something itself independent of human desire. To speak of the end of a thing is to indicate the completeness or perfection which it comes to have when its nature is fully achieved, when it is what it is to the maximal degree. Inanimate and animate things, beasts and humans, human acts and their products (including the arts of the mind) all have their proper ends in which their several natures are brought to fulfilment. In human creatures, ends and purposes are not easy to disentangle. This is because we are rational and moral beings, and we fulfil our nature in an intentional way. Our nature presents itself to us as a vocation. We fulfil our nature not simply instinctually, but by processes of deliberation and choice: we appropriate our nature and its ends, we make these ends into our purposes. In our present state of moral and spiritual deformation, in which the repair of our nature has begun but remains incomplete, we often find it difficult to maintain the distinction between ends and purposes, and to govern purposes by ends. This is because our purposes are driven – sometimes overwhelmingly so – by our desires, and our desires may be inadequately formed, or immoderate, or vicious. Moreover, our absorption in ourselves and our fondness for self-­rule may so overwhelm us that the purposes which we set for ourselves may come to eclipse or replace the ends which are given with our nature and which hold out our good. In all domains of human existence and activity, therefore, we are required to exercise vigilance and conform purposes to ends. Christian theology is an intellectual activity with ends which derive from our nature as that nature is caught up in the history of creation, revelation and redemption. These ends are scientific, contemplative and practical; theology will be theological when it makes these ends into its purposes, directing and moderating its activities accordingly. 2.  Christian theology pursues scientific ends, that is, the acquisition of that knowledge of its matter which is proper to creatures, in accordance with its cognitive principles. Pursuit of scientific ends is an element of the fulfilment of our intellectual nature, and is a creaturely good. Human creatures are by nature studious. We have an appetite to acquire knowledge beyond what is necessary for the immediate fulfilment of our animal nature, and we possess intellectual powers which we apply to satisfy this appetite. Well-­ordered, temperate studiousness is not self-­derived or wholly spontaneous; it is creaturely, the exercise of powers which have been given and which are moved, preserved and fortified by a movement beyond themselves. Studiousness is the arduous application of these powers; it is not indolent or casual, but concentrated, determined, painstaking and resistant to premature termination. All theological activity requires this kind of purposive pursuit of scientific ends: revelation awakens theological science. It is through study that God becomes actually intelligible, and defects in the acquisition and exercise of studiousness threaten the attainment of other ends in theology. However, pursuit of scientific ends is instrumental and interim: necessary, but not sufficient or final. Forgetfulness of the instrumental status of scientific ends arises from disordered intention: our

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purposes for this activity fail to coincide with its intrinsic ends, and excessive devotion to scientific ends inhibits attainment of the true ends of theological intelligence. Much harm to theology is done by this disordered purpose. Theology’s object becomes one which is ours to appropriate or master by scientia; its cognitive principles become naturalized; the dependence of theology on divine instruction is neglected. Some kinds of institutional setting in which theology is undertaken may provide opportunities for such distortions to flourish, but their chief cause is the crookedness and futility of our intellectual nature after the fall. Only with the restoration and regeneration of that nature can our purposes be taught to direct themselves to fitting ends; theology will be theological as it is caught up in this renewal. 3.  Christian theology also pursues contemplative ends. Contemplation – what Aquinas calls ‘a simple gaze’4 – requires the mind to move through created things to the divine reality of whose self-­communication they are signs and bearers. Contemplation is rapt attention to God the cause of all things rather than to the things of which he is the cause. ‘[I]n contemplation “the Beginning”, which is God, is the object we seek’.5 This contemplative end of theology expresses a certain teleology of human nature, according to which that nature is completed in knowledge of God. ‘The contemplation of God is promised us as being the goal of all our actions and the everlasting perfection of all our joys’.6 It is no exaggeration to claim that a good deal of modern theology has been reluctant to consider contemplation a proper end of theological intelligence. The marks of this reluctance are not difficult to find. It may be seen, for example, in the remarkable prestige enjoyed by literary-­historical science in the study of Holy Scripture; or in presentations of Christian doctrine which are devoid of metaphysical ambition and treat dogma as ancillary to the science of Christian practice which is first theology. The assumption (sometimes the explicitly articulated conviction) in both cases is that only the historical is the real, that intellect can extend itself no further than the economy of texts or moral practices. It is an impatient assumption, but one which has proved remarkably adept in shaping the purposes with which theological study is undertaken. Its elimination of the contemplative is an inhibition of theology’s theological character. 4.  Christian theology pursues practical ends. Contemplated truth forms and governs the enactment of our lives, because this truth presents us with the law of our existence. In a remarkable passage of thought, Aquinas ponders whether the gift of understanding is only contemplative. Apparently so, he begins, because ‘understanding . . . penetrates to the depths’ whereas ‘the practical intellect . . . works more on the surface, namely with the individual occasions which engage 4.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.180.3 ad 1. 5. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1845), VI.61. 6.  Augustine, De trinitate I.8.

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our actions’.7 Again, the practical intellect ‘is engaged, not with necessary truths, but with contingent things which can be otherwise and which are wrought through human action’.8 He clearly feels the tug of these considerations; but in the end he finds them restrictive. ‘[F]or the gift of understanding the field is not confined to matters which fall under faith primarily and principally, but includes as well all interests relevant to faith. Among them are good deeds . . .’.9 Or again, in reply to the second objection: ‘The value of the gift which is understanding lies in this, that eternal and necessary truths are considered not only as they are in themselves but also as certain rules for human conduct’.10 There is no moralization of theology here, no elevation of the practical over the speculative intellect. Rather, there is the sense that contemplation does not exhaust the ends to which theological intelligence directs itself. Primarily and principally, theological intelligence intends eternal and necessary truths, by the gift of God penetrating to their depths. But by derivation these truths are regulative, and theological intelligence would have too narrow a view of the interests of faith if it did not also consider the realm of human conduct. Such in brief compass are some of the ends of theological intellect. The objectivity of these ends makes acts of theological intellect occasions for the extension, even the transcendence, of self. That is, these ends place us in a situation and establish a vocation not of our own invention, to which we are required with divine assistance to conform ourselves, which we must learn to love and take into our intentions. Moreover, because ends present the natural law of the intellect – that which the intellect has to be, those ways in which it must act, if its nature is to be complete – they furnish the basis for ordering and ranking specific intellectual tasks and determining the validity or utility of specific intellectual procedures. Does analysis of discourses of power illuminate early Christian asceticism? Our answer will depend in large part upon what we take to be the ends of theology. But ends can perform this discriminating function only as they are appropriated. And in Christian theology the appropriation of ends cannot take place without mortification and vivification, the repetition in the life of the mind of the baptismal pattern of all Christian existence. With this, we turn to consider the virtues of the theologian as a fourth element in what makes theology theological.

V Understanding the theological character of the Christian theological intellect requires, finally, some attention to its practitioners and their obligation to exercise certain virtues. Rational objectivity and Christian common sense alike prohibit us 7.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.8.3 obj. 1. 8.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.8.3 obj. 2. 9.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.8.3 resp. 10.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.8.3 ad 2.

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from saying too much too early about the subjectivity of the theologian, which enters into consideration only after we have treated theology’s object, cognitive principles and ends. Yet in its proper place a modest sketch of the personal graces which the theologian is to exhibit is a necessary extension of an account of the theological intellect in the realm of regeneration. The telos of that divine work is our sanctification: the cleansing and enrichment of our corrupt and impoverished nature by the Holy Spirit in which our life, including our intellectual life, is renewed. That renewal, communicated in baptism and continually reiterated in the putting off of the old nature and the putting on of the new, includes the renewal of the spirit of the mind (Eph. 4.22-4). It is both condition and vocation, the gift of a new moral and intellectual history of which the work of theology is also an instance. What more may be said of this history? God is the maker and instructor of created intellect, creating, preserving and addressing himself to us. Our intellect is therefore possessed by us as creatures. To have intellect is to stand in relation to God its giver; as a property of our created nature, it remains an endowment, and in having it we are, as Calvin puts it, ‘clothed and ornamented with God’s excellent gifts’.11 In the exercise of this endowment, we enact our creaturely condition, because that exercise is a self-­movement which is moved by God who, Calvin continues, ‘fills, moves and quickens all things by the power of the same Spirit, and does so according to the character that he bestowed upon each kind by the law of creation’.12 Yet the performance of our intellectual nature is distorted by the fall. The depravity of the intellect is not such that our intellectual nature is wholly destroyed: ‘something of understanding and judgement remains as a residue’.13 But in the wake of the fall, our intellect is no longer well-­directed; it no longer moves swiftly to its goal, but is dissipated. ‘[T]his longing for truth . . . languishes before it enters upon its race because it soon falls into vanity. Indeed, the human mind, because of its darkness, cannot hold to the right path, but wanders through various errors and stumbles repeatedly, as if it were groping in darkness, until it strays away and finally disappears. Thus it betrays how incapable it is of seeking and finding truth’.14 Fallen intellect is ‘futile’ (Rom. 1.21; Eph. 4.17f.). In this state of futility, studiousness is distorted into curiosity. Curiosity is the disorder of the intellectual appetite in which created intellectual powers are applied to improper objects of new knowledge. Curiosity seeks to know created realities without reference to their creator – as phenomena, not as created things – and the process of coming-­to-know takes place inordinately, indiscriminately and pridefully. Baptism sets an end to curiosity; but it does not eliminate it, and it continues to harass us, even in the work of theological intellect. How does curiosity enter theology? Curiosity enters when theology neglects the particular object of theology and instead gives itself promiscuously to whatever sources of fascination present 11.  J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.ii.15. 12.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.ii.16. 13.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.ii.12. 14.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.ii.12.

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themselves, particularly if they are novel; and so, theology becomes restless and unstable. Curiosity enters when theology ignores or detaches itself from its location in the sphere of divine instruction and considers itself spontaneous and quodlibetal, busy about the acquisition of all sorts of new knowledge but no longer shaped by the curriculum of the school of revelation. Curiosity enters when theology terminates on surfaces, failing to complete the intellect’s course in running to God. Absorbed by the natural historical properties of the various matters to which it attends, it does not follow their indication, it does not allow itself to be directed by them to divine truth. Curiosity enters when theology distorts its proper ends, attaching itself so intently and exclusively to the ends of science that contemplation and the formation of conduct are allowed to atrophy. Curiosity is absurd, the spurious enactment of a nature which does not exist, the failure to enact the nature which does exist. For it is the office of the eternal Son to terminate corrupt nature and in its place to create a new nature; and it is the office of the Holy Spirit to make this new nature actual and operative in creaturely conduct. Through the Spirit’s ‘physical’ work, the new nature is imparted and its course governed, so that the spirit of the mind is indeed renewed. Christian theology is an instance of this renewal, and its pursuit summons us to undertake its tasks in ways which demonstrate the righteousness and holiness of the new nature. Some examples . . . In regenerate theological activity, intellectual greed is replaced by hunger for divine instruction. ‘I will meditate on thy precepts, and fix my eyes on thy ways . . . thy testimonies are my delight, they are my counsellors . . . teach me good judgement and knowledge, for I believe in thy commandments’ (Ps. 119.15, 24, 66). There is in what the psalmist says an entire metaphysics and morals of the theological intellect: trust that its undertakings can flourish because there is divine counsel; a sense of the infinite loveliness of divine teaching; eagerness to give undistracted attention to God’s instruction; confident appeal to God to continue to bestow knowledge. In regenerate theological activity, attention is directed to a singular matter with a definite interest. Christian theology is a comprehensive science which treats God and all things. But for all its scope, Christian theology is an exercise in concentration, required to fix its eyes not on everything but on the ways of God (Ps. 119.15); only in assent to this restriction will theology find itself having something to say about everything. Regenerate theological activity will be accompanied at every point by the practices of religion. ‘Religion’ is the condition of being bound to God; it denotes, as Aquinas puts it ‘a relationship to God. For we ought to be bound to God as to our unfailing principle, we must unceasingly choose him as our last end, and if we lose him through the heedlessness of sin, we ought to recover him by believing and professing our faith’.15 The practices of religion are those acts which are fitting expressions of the situation of fellowship with God into which, after the long exile of sin, we have been newly introduced by the reconciling missions of the Son and 15.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.81.1 resp.

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the Spirit. Fellowship with God and the religion to which it gives rise are the setting for all regenerate life: domestic, civil, practical and intellectual. Theology cannot long retain its theological character in the absence of religion. If it is not intent upon Holy Scripture, if it does not appeal to God’s beneficence in prayer, if it does not mortify distraction by right use of the body and set aside ironic detachment from its object, theology will be at best of indifferent value, at worst a strange figure in the kingdom of divine goodness.

VI These preliminary remarks do not even begin to address the cultural and religious history at whose latter end we find ourselves, in the course of which this understanding of the nature of Christian divinity has largely disappeared. In particular, they do not address the fragmentation of theology over the course of the eighteenth century, its dispersal into a diverse set of inquiries into cultural-­ religious objects studied by different methods, and the attempts of theological encyclopaedia to recover theology as a unified science. Nor do they give attention to the naturalization of both the objects and the operations of theological intellect. Nor, again, do they say anything of the effect of these processes on the various settings in which theology is pursued, or on the curricula established in such settings. Had we but world enough and time . . . When is theology theological? Not when it considers itself a polite, if somewhat deferential, contributor to the wider discussions of the academy, bringing its set of ‘values’ to an agenda which it did not generate, and often finding itself reading out a script written by someone else: that is simply the triumph of the philosophical faculty which Kant considered theology’s fate in the age of criticism. Nor, again, when theology tries to give some coherence to its activities by earnest conversations between sub-­disciplines: ‘theology and biblical studies’ and the like. Such conversations, pleasant enough and instructive though they are, commonly assume that though the family has broken down and its members have gone their own separate ways, there’s no reason not to have an occasional get-­together. Something more comprehensive is asked of us: a recovery of sacra doctrina in its full sense and with its attendant notions of divine instruction, church, holiness and the like. Whether theological institutions possess the willingness or capacity for such a recovery remains unclear. But a properly theological theology has no reason to be locked in lament and every reason for that magnanimity in which we extend ourselves to great matters. ‘If thy law had not been my delight, I should have perished in my affliction’, the psalmist says (Ps. 119.92); but: the Lord’s word is indeed ‘firmly fixed in the heavens’ (Ps. 119.82), and so, theology is possible.

Index OF NAMES

Acar, R. 115 Ambrose 32, 34, 36–7, 101, 187 Anselm 15–16, 106, 108 Aquinas 4, 6, 33, 35–7, 46, 48–9, 57–8, 83, 89, 92–4, 98, 99, 102–7, 109, 111–13, 115, 117, 119–29, 133–4, 136–40, 144–5, 149, 152–4, 179, 220–1, 223 Aristotle 89 Athanasius 32–5, 37, 104 Attridge H. 63 Augustine 14–16, 24–7, 84–5, 87, 90, 92–3, 101, 105–6, 116, 216, 220 Barth, K. 8–9, 18–19, 32, 34, 40, 43, 56–7, 63 n.12, 84, 91, 93, 96 n.40, 100, 112, 129 n.6, 131, 134, 138, 151, 166–7, 169, 181, 210 Basil of Caesarea 73, 101–2, 104–5, 150 Bauerschmidt, F. C. 115 Bavinck, H. 94, 136 n.32, 139 n.47 Bayer, O. 168 Beintker, M. 165, 168, 170, 190 Berkouwer, G. C. 144, 151, 157 Boersma, H. 145 n.4 Bonaventure 88, 129 n.6 Bonhoeffer, D. 106 Braine, D. 85 n.5, 91, 107, 115, 120 Brown, David 196 n.3 Brown, Delwin 196 n.3 Brümmer, V. 148 Buckley, M. J. 110, 188 n.24 Bunnenberg, J. 195 n.1 Burrell, D. 85 n.5, 90 n.17, 91, 115 n.1, 121 Caird, G. B. 62, 68–9, 72 n.40 Calvin, J. 19, 26–7, 37, 63–5, 68–9, 71–3, 75, 80, 130, 132–8, 141, 144, 151, 154–7, 164, 174, 177, 183–5, 205, 222 Casel, O. 205

Chrysostom 59–60, 62–3, 71, 73–6, 105 Clarke, S. 16–18 Clement of Alexandria 217 Congar, Y. M.-J. 195–210 Cullmann, O. 207 Cunningham, D. 96 n.39 Dalferth, I. U. 179 n.7, 190 n.27 Damascus, John of 20–1, 24 Dantine, W. 168–9 de Halleux, A. 86 n.8 de Lubac, H. 181, 189, 197–8, 200 Denney, J. 151 n.24 Dodds, M. J. 115 n.1 Dorner, I. A. 18, 22, 54–5, 90, 108, 110, 137 n.35, 138–9, 140 n.52 Dunn, J. D. G. 78 n.55 Edmondson, J. 157 n.46 Edwards, J. 27–8, 149–50, 152–3 Emery, G. 36, 86 nn.7–8, 94, 98, 115 n.1, 152 n.30, 154 Famerée, J. 197 n.12, 205 n.56 Flynn, G. 197 n.12 Ford, D. 145 n.3 Frei, H. 57 Gathercole, S. J. 50 n.8 Gerhard, J. 9 Gloege, G. 166, 169 Gorringe, T. 145 n.5 Grässer, E. 62 n.4, 63 Greer, R. 62 n.3, 75 n.49 Gregory the Great 127, 220 Grosseteste, R. 104 Großhans, H.-P. 177 n.2, 186 n.21 Gunton, C. 39 n.53, 148 n.8, 149 n.12, 182 n.13

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Haight, R. 178 Hardy, D. 180 n.10, Härle, W. 178 n.17 Hartshorne, C. 125 Healy, N. M. 178 Henninger, M. G. 115 n.1, 124 Hilary of Poitiers 32, 37, 84 Hoffman, J. 22 Horton, M. 148 n.8, 151 n.23, 157 n.48 Hurst, L. D. 62 n.5 Jenson, R. 39, 94, 148 n.8, 150, 164 n.2, 174 n.29, 186 Jerome 22 Jossua, J.-P. 195 n.1, 197 n.12 Jüngel, E. 165–7, 168 n.17, 170, 189 n.25, 206 n.67 Junius, F. 3–4 Kähler, M. 165 Kant, I. 54–5, 161–2, 224 Käsemann, E. 62 n.6, 67–8 Kierkegaard, S. 8 Koester, C. 73 n.42 Komonchak, J. 179 König, J. F. 5–6 Krempel, A. 115 n.1 Kretzmann, N. 106 Lactantius 100 LaCugna, C. 40 Lane, W. L. 67 Lessing, E. 165 n.4 Levenson, J. 121 Lombard, P. 129 n.6, 105 Lovejoy, A. O. 104 Luther, M. 175, 205 MacDonald, C. 195 n.1 MacDonald, N. B. 148 n.8 MacIntyre, A. 109 n.47 MacKinnon, D. M. 156 Mannermaa, T. 164 n.2, 174 n.29 Masterson, P. 115 n.1 Mattes, M. 169 McCormack, B. 175 n.30 McWhorter, M. R. 115 n.1 Meakin, C. 205 n.56 Michel, O. 64 n.15, 65–6

Milbank, J. 184 n.15 Mirandola, P. della 131 Molnar, P. 164 n.2 Muller, E. 115 n.1 Nazianzus, Gregory of 29, 34–6 O’Donovan, O. 191 n.29 Oliver, S. 109 n.46, 188 n.24, Origen, 32, 35, 36 n.35, 38, 71–4 Owen, J. 6, 8, 50–1, 84, 87, 89, 95, 98, 213 Pannenberg, W. 22 n.25, 38–9, 96 n.40, 145, 148 n.8, 174 n.29 Polanus, A. 35 Quash, B. 133 n.18 Radner, E. 192 n.30 Ringleben, J. 23 Ritschl, A. 55–7 Rosenkrantz, G. S. 22 Russell, W. 175 n.31 Saarinen, R. 174 n.29 Schell, H. 22–3 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 17–18, 53, 130, 138 n.40 Schmitz, K. L. 109 n.47, 111–13, 115 n.1, 122 Schwöbel, C. 148, 182 n.13, 192 n.27 Shedd, W. G. T. 89 n.12 Sherman, R. J. 148 n.8, 165 n.2 Sokolowski, R. 85 n.5, 90 n.17, 91, 99, 115 n.1, 118 Sorabji, R. 109 n.46 Spence, A. 148 n.8, 156 n.42, 157 Spicq, C. 63–5, 74, 76, 79 Swinburne, R. 22 n.28, 148 n.8 Taylor, C. 131 n.14 te Velde, R. 93 n.28, 106 n.37 Theodoret of Cyrus 71–2, 76, 79 Tillich, P. 17–18 Torrance, T. F. 54, 92 Troeltsch, E. 134 Turretin, F. 31, 33–5, 37, 131, 135, 139–41

Index of Names Ulrich, H. 165 n.4 van der Kooi, C. 134 n.25 van der Ven, J. A. 178 Vanhoye, A. 73 n.43 Ward, K. 96 n.39 Weaver, J. D. 145 n.5 Weisheipl, J. A. 109 n.46 Westcott, B. F. 64, 76 Weinandy, T. G. 37

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Wiles, M. 36 n.35 Williams, R. 41 n.61, 93 n.29, 133 n.18, 191 n.28 Wippel, J. F. 104 n.21 Wolff, M.-M. 205 n.56 Young, F. M. 62 n.3 Zachmann, R. 134 n.25 Zwingli, H. 131–2, 135 n.28

Subject INDEX

Baptism 220–2 Christology 43–58, 62, 67, 69, 75, 166–7, 169, 203 and ecclesiology 184 systematic distribution 47, 53 Creation 7, 9, 34, 52, 83–98, 99–113, 116–18, 126, 130, 135–7, 140, 214, 217 act of 71–2, 92–3, 104–6 without divine self-­interest 110 creator and creature 83, 85 n.5, 87, 90–1, 107–8, 111, 120, 194, 208 ex nihilo 13, 52, 83, 92–3, 99–113, 120–1, 135 gratuitous 122, 126 and history of grace 136 participation 30, 86 n.7, 106–7, 113, 174 part of the credo 84 topical arrangement of doctrine 83, 119 Creatures: being 173 dignity 93, 139 integrity 100, 111 moved movers 140, 188, 190, 218 nature, 106, 121, 135, 146 Curiosity 222–3 Ecclesiology: church as reconciled society of God 177, 185, 193 church’s relation to Israel 65 and Christ’s exaltation 185 and Christology 184–6 and election 183, 190 fundamental forms of the church 189–90

grounded in doctrine of God 178 as social-­historical phenomenology 178 participation 208 and Trinity 181 Eschatology 62–3, 66, 68 Father: as principle 36–7 creative agency 95–6 innascibility 21, 31, 36 indivisibility of external operations 52, 94–8 material order of teaching about the doctrine 85 missions 9, 31, 117, 152–4, 160, 163, 214 notions 87–8 personal differentiation 88, 94 processions 9, 30–8, 92–3, 102–3, 117–19, 123, 152–5, 163, 182 relation of essence and persons 83, 86–8 relations 37–8, 89–90 distinct from God’s relation to creatures 123 ruler and judge of all doctrines 159 God: activity 85–6, 92, 135, 137, 182, 191, 196, 199 aseity 27, 135, 179 as causa sui 22–3, 89 definition 19 economic 23–4 immanent 19–20 positive concept 13, 23–4 being 53, 68, 79, 86, 123–4, 152–4, 159–61 causality 109, 188

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external acts 6–8, 30, 46, 52, 83, 85–6, 89, 92, 94–5, 102–3, 117, 119, 137, 160–1, 163, 177, 214 division into two spheres 52 glory 73 theme of gospel 167 goodness 104, 112, 139, 182, 192–3 immutability and impassibility 34, 120 internal acts 5–6, 20, 86, 89–90, 92, 146 distinction from external acts 102–3 knowledge 216 love 40, 92–3, 98, 147, 154–5 necessity 22–3 perfection 9, 30, 34, 38, 41, 55, 88, 91, 106, 111, 123–4, 130, 135, 145–6, 177, 182 trinitarian shape of 19, 21, 24–5, 37–8, 152 power 103 relation to creatures 90, 93, 113, 115–26 concept of ‘relation’ 123–6 infinitely extended 126 mixed relation 107, 115–16, 181 rational in God 123–5 real in the creature 123 and Scripture’s dramatic-­historical presentation 122 righteousness ad extra 171 righteousness in se 160, 170, 174 simplicity 107, 120, 125–6 will 26–7, 35, 52, 93, 105, 130, 136 n.32 Holy Spirit: creator 97–8 and faith 132 and knowledge of God 101–2 perfector of creaturely fellowship with God 147, 172, 187–8 and tradition 196–8, 203–4 work in Scripture 59 Justification 159–75 as alien righteousness 173 considered as article on which church stands or falls 164–70 dogmatic location 164–74

enactment of God’s internal righteousness 172–3 grounded in God’s inner life 161–2, 172 and theosis 174–5 Magnanimity 113, 224 Metaphysics 8, 29, 54, 85 n.5, 90–1, 104, 124–6, 137, 154, 174–5, 188, 220 Nature and grace 30, 181, 209 Principial analysis 7, 48–9, 51, 109–10 Providence: directed to creature’s good 138 dogmatic location 129–30 and God’s intellect and will 136–7 immanent and transitive act 135 invisibility 133–4 known by faith 132–4 rests upon God’s triunity 136 as preservation, concurrence, and government 140–1 systematic dimensions 75 and theodicy 127–8 universal in scope 138 Religion 102, 109, 223–4 Revelation 6, 13, 53–4, 60–1, 63–9, 74, 122, 159, 200–6, 217–18 Scripture 191–2, 217 apostolicity of 59–60 ontology 59–60 sola Scriptura 201, 205–6, 207, 209 sufficiency 191, 204, 209 theological interpretation 59–60, 122 Sin 84, 144, 146, 151, 208, 218, 220, 222 Son of God 39, 44, 47, 49–50, 55, 57–8, 97, 155–7, 172–3, 183–4, 187 as autotheos 37 Christ’s humanity 48–9, 156 creative agency 71–2, 97 eternal appointment 70–1 exclusivity of Christ’s identity 207–8 glory of the Father 73–4 governing agency 75–6 historical Jesus 41 human obedience to the Father 153–4, 157

Subject Index incarnation 39–40, 47–8, 53–4, 149, 155–6, 164, 167 n.14, 184–5, kingly rule 77–8 priestly work 76–8 reconciling work 76–7 Sonship 33, 67, 78, 172 superior name 79 Soteriology: dogmatic location 147, 162–3 grounded in God’s internal acts 150–1 repetition of Scripture 144 systematic distortion 162 trinitarian shape 148–52 Studiousness 219, 222 Theology 3–10, 30, 152, 163, 168–9, 180, 213–24 archetypal 10, 217 as biblical reasoning 144–5 cognitive principles 45, 215–18 and economy 40, 116–19 distinct but not separate 46 ectypal 10, 31, 85, 89, 217

231

ends 4, 45, 218–19 contemplative 220 practical 220–1 scientific 219–20 formal vs material order 7, 45, 46–7 object 4, 44–6, 213–15 priority of exposition over disputation 130 proportions 7, 44, 151–2 science of history 7 setting 45 systematicity 44–5 virtues required of theologians 45 Trinity: appropriation 86, 94 divisibility of internal operations 90 eternal generation 20–1, 25, 29–41, 73, 75, 96, 102, 123–4, 154 act of the Father 30–1 hyperphysical act 34 natural act 34 eternal spiration 20, 21, 31, 87–8, 89, 96, 102, 123–4, 154, 182