Critiques of Church Dogmatics III/3

In Chapter 2 of Providence and Personalism, Darren Kennedy identifies seven common critiques of Barth’s doctrine of providence (pp. 14–20); and, following his analysis of Church Dogmatics III/3, Kennedy addresses each of these critiques in turn (pp. 310–313), showing how Barth pre-empts these critiques and defends himself. I thought it would be useful to summarise each critique and response here.

Barth’s doctrine of providence:

excludes authentic human personhood
This critique assumes that Barth places God and creation in a competitive relationship, where divine sovereignty rules out genuine human freedom and personhood. But Kennedy notes that each human person is actually and continually shaped before God and fitted for participation in God’s eternal life.

lacks rationality
In 1969, Charles Duthie wrote a paper in which he suggested that Barth’s thought on providence relied too much on assertion and not enough on ‘reasoned and reasonable Christian apologetic’ (Charles Duthie, ‘Providence in the Theology of Karl Barth’, in Maurice Wiles (ed.), Providence [London: SPCK, 1969], p. 75; quoted in Darren M. Kennedy, Providence and Personalism: Karl Barth in Conversation with Austin Farrer, John Macmurray and Vincent Brümmer [Bern: Peter Lang, 2011], p. 15). However, using the tools of personalist philosophy, Kennedy shows that Barth’s thought is perfectly coherent and rational.

lacks pastoral strength
If Barth’s doctrine of providence cannot show God acting in the world, then the doctrine has no pastoral value. But the heart of Barth’s doctrine, says Kennedy, is to challenge Christians to stand firm against the forces of chaos, to oppose what God opposes, and to love what God loves. Thus pastoral strength may be derived from the fact that the Christian always stands before God – and nothing can separate the Christian from the love of God in Christ!

falls into monism which precludes divine/human relationality
Does Barth conceive providence as a monism where God’s activity trumps all, or a dualism where God and humanity are engaged in a relationship of constant symmetry? For Kennedy, Barth argues that God and humanity are in covenantal, asymmetrical, personal relation, where each person is shaped in relation to God in Christ.

merely repeats the outdated providence of the tradition
Is Barth’s proclaimed ‘radical correction’ (CD III/3, p. xii) in fact a correction at all? Kennedy shows that Barth’s doctrine of providence does depart from the Reformed tradition in many respects, while retaining many of its central concerns. See here for how Kennedy argues Barth departs from his Reformed fathers.

is incompatible with modern science
Has providence to say anything to modern science, or does Barth close the doctrine to input from the natural sciences? Kennedy observes that far from being incompatible, Barth’s doctrine of providence assigns a proper place for science, and the concept of divine providence does not invalidate scientific enterprise. Miracles, for example, are not instances of divine intervention but rather instances of human ignorance about the way in which God can act in a world that accommodates divine action.

prompts Christian arrogance
Is it true that, according to Barth, Christians have an advantage over non-Christians in so far as they can ‘read’ history and actually participate in God’s providence? No; Kennedy notes that, for Barth, Christians must remain as agnostic as non-Christians in trying to read God’s action into historical events, even as they stand before God and continually place their trust in the God who acts.

Barth's 'Radical Correction' of Providence

Is Karl Barth’s account of providence truly the ‘radical correction’ (Church Dogmatics III/3, p. xii) of Reformed orthodoxy he believed? I never used to think so; but Darren Kennedy’s excellent Providence and Personalism has persuaded me to give Barth some sustained attention. Here are the ways in which, according to Kennedy (pp. 20–25, 308–309), Barth departs from his predecessors.

1. Reformed theologians were heavily influenced by Aristotle’s substantialist ontology, which meant that persons were reduced to ‘things’ operating within an ordered framework of cause and effect. Conversely, Barth assumes an actualistic ontology wherein humans are persons standing in relation to the Person of God.

2. In Reformed orthodoxy, election is a subsection of providence; but for Barth, the election of Jesus precedes everything else. Election is part of the doctrine of God, whereas providence is part of the doctrine of creation. Also, traditional Reformed takes on predestination divide humanity into elect or reprobate, whereas for Barth, Jesus is at once the elected human and the rejected human, which means that humanity is not divided or destined for a particular destiny apart from who they are in Jesus.

3. Traditionally, Reformed orthodoxy assumes an angelic fall, which raises questions about God’s primary causation or God’s sovereignty. Barth’s response is simply to reject this idea of an angelic fall, because he rejects the idea of a change in angelic ontology – that what God has created good can actually become bad or evil to the core of its very being. (Barth also argues that angels can only obey God; they have no capacity to deviate; and, if so, this means that, whatever they are, Satan and the demons cannot be fallen angels.)

4. Reformed orthodoxy distinguishes between providentia ordinaria (God acts mediately through secondary causes) and providentia extraordinaria (God acts immediately without secondary causes), whereas, through double agency, Barth holds to a single united providentia that also includes heaven within the sphere of God’s action in creation.

5. Reformed orthodoxy tends to present God in terms of philosophical abstraction (God is omnipotent, omniscient, etc.). But for Barth, God can only be understood in Christological and trinitarian terms, which means, when applied to the doctrine of providence, that God’s election in Christ serves to shape providence as a doctrine. (Nonetheless, Kennedy believes that the Spirit is somewhat absent in Barth’s doctrine of providence.)

Book Review: Darren M. Kennedy, Providence and Personalism

Darren M. Kennedy, Providence and Personalism: Karl Barth in Conversation with Austin Farrer, John Macmurray and Vincent Brümmer (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011)

I read Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics III/3 for the first time around 1999 – though here, to be honest, ‘III/3’ should be interpreted as §§48–50 only. And when I was conducting my doctoral research on providence, a few years later, I considered III/3 worthy only of a glance to remind myself that my initial reading – that, despite its length, III/3 didn’t represent any major contribution to the doctrine of providence – was correct. Darren Kennedy’s Providence and Personalism has persuaded me that I am a fool and that, even if, in the end, I disagree with Barth, I need to take the contribution of III/3 to discussions of providence more seriously. And so, with this review, I repent in sackcloth and ashes.

In Providence and Personalism, a PhD thesis completed in 2008 under the supervision of David Fergusson, Kennedy argues that Barth’s doctrine of providence must be understood as personal. The human person stands in providential relation to the Person who is God in Christ. And given Barth’s personalist presuppositions here, Kennedy believes that much of the confusion generated by Barth’s doctrine of providence is clarified by utilising the tools of personalist philosophical theology. To this end, Kennedy engages Barth in conversation with Austin Farrer (on double agency), John Macmurray (on divine intentionality), and Vincent Brümmer (on causal and personal relations), to great effect. The majority of Providence and Personalism is occupied by detailing these ‘conversations’, and it is fascinating to observe the extent to which Barth’s thought is indeed illuminated by the light of philosophical theology. So, for example, whereas for Macmurray, world history is a process approaching the ‘intention of God’ incarnate in the particular history of Israel, Barth argues that the person of Jesus himself is the intention of God made real in history. In practice, this means that while for both scholars, all things happen in relation to God, for Barth all things happen specifically in relation to Jesus. It is here that Barth’s self-announced ‘radical correction’ (CD III/3, p. xii) is made clear: God’s will for creation consists in the election of Jesus Christ, and all things transpire as willing or unwilling witnesses to this election. Thus Kennedy insists that Barth’s priority of election over providence is a significant departure – indeed, a radical correction – from the Reformed tradition. (Personally, and against Kennedy, I read Calvin as prioritising election over providence, too.) The point is that reading Barth alongside Macmurray (or Macmurray alongside Barth?) on divine intentionality helps to clarify what is meant by ‘divine intentionality’ and assists Barth’s readers in the often complex task of understanding him.

The explication of these conversations acts as the foundation for the second half of the book, where Kennedy offers his own reading of CD III/3. He takes each of the four paragraphs of III/3 in turn, drawing attention to areas where the thought of Farrer, Macmurray and Brümmer clarifies Barth’s points. Perhaps even more worthy of celebration is Kennedy’s identification of connections between the different parts of III/3, especially of the way in which §51 (on angels and heaven) relates to §§48–50 as part of a proper and fully coherent doctrine of providence. While at times Kennedy appears unconvinced by Barth’s theology here, he is less scornful and more appreciative of this paragraph than other commentators, probably because he is clear about how this fourth paragraph connects to the preceding three. The concluding paragraph includes Kennedy’s own criticisms of Barth on providence: that Barth retains causal language for no reason; that his depiction of eternal life needs development; and that the role of the Holy Spirit in providence is similarly underdeveloped (Kennedy argues, for example, that in §51, angels effectively displace the Spirit).

Providence and Personalism is an important, even exciting, contribution to Barth scholarship. Kennedy shows clearly precisely what is Barth’s ‘radical correction’ in relation to the Reformed tradition, and his analysis of CD III/3 has the potential to open many other avenues of research, both for Barth scholarship, and for research into the doctrine of providence more generally.

If I have a criticism, it is this: Shouldn’t we be able to understand Barth clearly even without the use of philosophical theological tools? Consider this quotation, from p. 307:

CD III.3 is theology and not philosophy. Nevertheless, Barth’s theology cannot be understood without philosophical tools. Each of the four sections of III.3 gains significant clarification through the conversations with philosophical theology.

Is it truly the case that Barth’s theology cannot be understood without philosophical tools? Granted, no theologian can write or be interpreted apart from the wider intellectual context in which he or she lives, but to say that one needs a grasp of philosophical theology in order to understand what is first and foremost a piece of theology seems counterintuitive. Is it truly so that, say, the concept of concursus cannot be understood Christologically as a theological term in its own right? Still, although I described this earlier as a criticism of Kennedy’s work, arguably it is actually a criticism of Barth and his writing style!

Kennedy concludes Providence and Personalism by noting that Barth’s doctrine of providence ‘has largely been overlooked and offers a great deal of potential in deciphering aspects of his theology located in more well-researched volumes of CD. My hope,’ he continues, ‘is that this book has been a step in this direction.’ (p. 314). It certainly has: Providence and Personalism is an essential read.

Updated: Providence Bibliographies

Folks, you can rest easy and sleep well tonight: I’ve made some minor changes to the About Me section, plus to bibliographies C, E and F.

And, as a special treat, here is a photo of something I posted on my previous blog, The Aardvark Conundrum:

Karl Barth: Determination Without Determinism?

By identifying God’s will with election in Jesus Christ, Barth removes the complexity, mystery and multiplicity of providence. God no longer wills this or that occurrence in abstraction from history. Instead, all occurrences remain under God’s sovereignty and are actively ‘determined’ in correspondence to this singular will. Freely or inadvertently, positively or negatively, openly or obscurely, every detail of world-occurrence is ‘determined’ by the living God in its correspondence or lack of correspondence to election in Jesus Christ.

Darren M. Kennedy, Providence and Personalism: Karl Barth in Conversation with Austin Farrer, John Macmurray and Vincent Brümmer (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 206

It’s been a few years – probably the best part of a decade, in fact – since I last read Church Dogmatics III/3. I’ve never moved beyond my conviction that, concerning providence, what Barth gives with one hand he takes with the other. I’ve never truly recognised his so-called ‘radical correction’ (CD III/3, p. xii) of the older dogmatic tradition on matters providential. But Kennedy’s Providence and Personalism is opening my eyes to a couple of things, and the above quotation makes a great deal of sense to me, demonstrating how God can determine something without determinism!

Expect a review of Providence and Personalism before the end of the month.

What Does God Love?

In my opinion, one of the most stimulating reads of the past few years has been Mark Robson’s Ontology and Providence in Creation. I’m privileged to be in contact with Mark, and he’s written the following post for this blog. I hope you find it as enjoyable and interesting to read as I did.

What Does God Love?

Many Christians say that John 3:16 is their favourite verse. It forcefully and dramatically conveys the wonder of the Christian message: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ (NIV). What does God love? ‘The world’ we are told. But what exactly is the world, and why does God love it? This is what we shall briefly investigate.

I sometimes ask my students to imagine something, say, a tiger. They do so. They think they have a pretty good image of a tiger in their minds. They are then asked to count the stripes on the tiger’s back, or count the tiger’s whiskers. They are taken aback. They were certainly imagining a tiger, but they had not concerned themselves to imagine it in such fine detail! The tiger they were imagining did not seem to have a determinate number of stripes upon its back or a set number of whiskers. This is, of course, quite unlike a real tiger, which presumably possesses no such indeterminacy! Every real tiger has all its properties set in flesh and fur – an imagined tiger, in contrast, seems to lack this full set of properties. Of course, if we try hard, we might be able to mentally determine the number of stripes along the imagined tiger’s back, but there are limits to our imaginative powers. I don’t possess the imaginative capacity to imagine each hair that comprises the tiger’s fur for example. I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to either, even if you try really hard. Our imaginations are limited.

Is God’s imagination like this as well? Of course we want to insist that God’s imagination possesses no such limitation! When we think of God creating the world we suppose He had a specific, fully determinate world in mind. We think of God as thinking through what He is going to create. He thinks, for example, of you and me, Adam and Eve, Mount Everest, and all the rest. He picks that world then makes it real. So is the world that God has in mind exactly the same as the world that He creates? There is certainly a strong inclination among believers to say that it must be. As we have said, surely God has no limits to His imagination. When He imagines a tiger, and then makes it real, surely the imagined tiger has exactly the same number of hairs upon its back as the real tiger. God knows exactly what He is going to make and makes it. He does this by using His unlimited imagination.

Can God know every aspect of a person or thing before He creates it? Again, many believers want to say an enthusiastic ‘Yes!’ We want to say that there isn’t any aspect of the divinely imagined you that is not thought about by God before you are made. He can know what your smell will be like, what you will feel like, what your thoughts are to be. If you hope that one day Newcastle United will win the cup, God will know exactly what your hope will be like. He is not in the least bit surprised when you are made and He knows your disappointment when Newcastle consistently fail to win the cup. He knows your disappointment before you feel it. Our imaginative capacities and powers are so limited and indeterminate. God’s imagination, on the other hand, is infinitely discriminative.

Questions

But think through this contrast a little bit more. When I make something I do so partly because my imagination is so bad. The resultant real thing has a life of its own, which it could not have in my imagination. I make a model aeroplane, for example, because I can look at the real model in a way that I cannot when it merely resides in my imagination. But if God is so good at imagining people and worlds and Mount Everests before He actually makes them, why does He go to the trouble of making them real? There doesn’t seem to be anything he is adding – after all, haven’t we said that the imagined you is exactly the same as the actual you! We’ve already said that God is not in the least bit surprised at whatever He creates because He knows exactly what He is doing in the creative act. He knows what He is doing by looking at His perfect imagined representations of you and me and Mount Everest. So what is the point of creation? Why doesn’t God just content Himself with examining mental people, mental worlds, mental stones and trees?

Possible Answers

One answer could go like this. Imagined people – even if they are determinate in every property – do not actually exist. They do not exist in reality. They only exist in God’s mind.

What shall we say to such an answer? Well, for one thing, it seems to have a very low view of God. Although it exalts His imagination, it says that God’s imagined persons are not really real – they do not exist in reality. But surely to exist in God is to exist in the most supreme kind of reality there could possibly be! Do we want to say that so-called actual existence is somehow to take on a better form of existence – as if perfectly determinate existence in God’s mind is not somehow good enough! If all we mean by actual existence is that the imagined you is ejected from God’s mind into so-called reality, this seems a bit like a punishment. If so, then, Plato was right. To be in this world is to have left the perfect world behind. However, I don’t think any Christian understanding of creation should say this. Surely creation is something rather marvellous and wonderful!

So what does God add to His imagined you? Another answer could be this – he adds self-consciousness – the imagined you is devoid of life and feeling and that special feel it is to be you. God, in His graciousness, gives the imagined you an internal set of feelings.

This, I think, is a better answer. But I don’t think it is good enough. It seems to me that the imagined you has to have self-consciousness before you are ‘created’. This might seem shocking. Surely an imagined thing is just a mental thing – it must surely be devoid of life and feeling. It surely has no first person perspective!

But remember what we said before – God is not in the least bit surprised at what He creates. God’s imagination is infinitely more discriminative than yours. There is nothing in the created you to which God can say ‘I didn’t expect to see that!’ Recall that the imagined you is meant to be perfectly determinate in every aspect. Why should we say that this only counts for physical properties and not mental ones? God has to see what you feel from the inside before He makes you. If He doesn’t, then, He will see something new that He didn’t see before.

What’s Gone Wrong?

Somehow, somewhere we must have gone along the wrong path. In my view, it was where we said that for God to have a perfect imagination He must be able to peruse perfect copies of the things He might make actual. This seems to reduce creation to the duplication of already perfectly real entities – as if creation is God copying out what He has already eternally contemplated. These copies are sent out of God to live and work in a lesser reality. Instead of creation being a wonderful making of things from nothing, we have a rather miserable picture of being somehow (r)ejected!

Christianity teaches us the wonderful truth that God created from nothing. There were no things which are made ‘actual’, or copied out into a lesser reality. God loves us because we are brand-new without divine precedent. As Genesis testifies, God sees that creation is good, not some dimmer, less grand version of what He sees in Himself.

It seems to me that God loves this world because it has life of its own. We might even go as far as to say that it is an Other. God is able to make that which is, in a very special sense, independent of the divine. Without God, of course, it could not be, but the wonderful thing about our Creator God is that He can make something absolutely new and novel. He loves Others, not just dimmer copies of some aspect of Himself as if He could only bring Himself to love that which reflected Himself.

God is amazed at you because once you simply did not exist! God’s exuberant creative act is truly creatio ex nihilo! God is wonderfully original, and He loves the world that He has created so much that He was willing to give His only begotten Son to die upon the Cross.

Thomas Aquinas and Science

Here’s another forthcoming book for all you Thomists and divine action enthusiasts out there:

Michael J. Dodds, OP, Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (forthcoming, September 2012)

Our ability to talk about God’s action in the world is closely tied to our understanding of causality. With the advent of modern Newtonian science the conception of causality narrowed, and the discussion of divine action became locked into that contracted understanding. There seemed to be simply no room for God to act in the world without interfering with nature and the laws of science that describe it.

Fortunately, the idea of causality has been greatly expanded through developments in contemporary science. Discoveries in quantum mechanics, cosmology, chaos theory, and biology have all led to a broader understanding of causality. These developments have opened two fundamentally new ways for theologians to “unlock” the discussion of divine action. One is to use the developments of science themselves to speak of God’s action. The other is to speak of divine action not directly through the theories and interpretations of science, but rather through the broader understanding of causality that they suggest.

This book explores both approaches and argues that the latter provides a more effective way for discussing divine action. After showing that the idea of causality in contemporary science is remarkably reminiscent of key concepts in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, it then retrieves those notions and applies them to the discussion of divine action. In this way, it provides a sustained account of how the thought of Aquinas may be used in conjunction with contemporary science to deepen our understanding of divine action and address such issues as creation, providence, prayer, and miracles.

It’s my plan, once my son starts school in September, to begin some serious research on Thomas and providence, etc., so this looks like a very useful book. (Of course, I have many plans, but few seldom come to fruition – mainly due to procrastination [why read when one can watch The Walking Dead?]. Still, one can genuinely intend.)

Stephen Webb on the Transfiguration

http://www.nigelgroom.com/en/The_Transfiguration_%28Triptych%29.html

It is quite possible to overemphasize the newness and strangeness of what the disciples saw on Mt. Tabor. As an example of this overemphasis of the astonishment factor, which leaves this event more perplexing than it needs to be, some of the Greek fathers of the church, beginning with Irenaeus, tended to let the glory of this revelation blind them to its message about human nature. After all, the disciples saw that day their own destiny as well as the essential reality of Jesus Christ. Far from being an event of such otherworldly significance that the disciples should not even have been there, no moment in the Gospels is more plainly practical in its implications for how we should think about the relationship of God to matter. What the disciples saw at the transfiguration is the light that blinded Paul at his conversion and the flame that amazed Moses because it did not consume the burning bush. It is the “light that shines into the darkness” but also “the light of men” (John 1:3, 4). The transfiguration revealed not only who Jesus is but also what we are meant to be.

[…]

When the glory of God is emphasized in the transfiguration, it is too frequently interpreted as an occasion of a realized eschatology, as if God is cutting away the human medium of revelation and showing the disciples the divine substance in the entirety of its entire naked splendor. Nothing could be further from the truth. The incarnation is not just the medium but also the substance of the transfiguration. Jesus is showing us that just as his flesh is the form that God has given him and has thus made one with the divine, so too our flesh will one day be made one with his. Jesus Christ is unique but not exclusively so. His uniqueness, that is, serves a purpose. He is the one in whom all the saved shall find their lasting identity.

Stephen H. Webb, Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 162–163, 163–164