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Immutability, Necessity and Triunity: Towards a Resolution of the Trinity and Election Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2012

Kevin W. Hector
Kevin W. Hector*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, IL 60637, USAkhector@uchicago.edu
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Abstract

The controversy sparked by Bruce McCormack's 2000 essay, entitled ‘Grace and Being: The Role of God's Gracious Election in Karl Barth's Theological Ontology’, shows little sign of waning; it seems, in fact, only to be heating up. In this article, I hope to make a modest contribution to this debate, one which will hopefully move it towards a resolution. My proposal is twofold: on the one hand, I will argue that we can do justice to McCormack's motivating concerns, without rendering ourselves liable to criticisms commonly raised against his view, if we accept two propositions: first, that God does not change in electing to be God-with-us, and second, that election is volitionally, but not ‘absolutely’, necessary to God. (By ‘absolutely necessary’ I mean something like ‘true in all possible eternities’, as will become clear.) I will try to demonstrate that this is Karl Barth's own position on the matter, which demonstration, if successful, would mean that the controversy should no longer be centred on the proper interpretation of Barth. This brings me to the second, shorter, part of my proposal, in which I argue that McCormack's position is innocent of some charges frequently brought against it. My hope is that these arguments, taken together, will advance the current discussion and contribute to its resolution.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 64 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2012

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References

1 McCormack's ‘Grace and Being’ appeared in Webster, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 92–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; he sheds important light on the controversy in the Foreword to the German edn of Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (repr. in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), pp. 291–304), ‘Seek God Where He May Be Found: A Response to Edwin Christian van Driel’, Scottish Journal of Theology 60 (2007), pp. 62–79. For some of the relevant responses, see Paul D. Molnar, ‘The Trinity, Election, and God's Ontological Freedom: A Response to Hector', Kevin W., International Journal of Systematic Theology 8/3 (July 2006), pp. 294–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Can the Electing God Be God Without Us? Some Implications of Bruce McCormack's Understanding of Barth's Doctrine of Election for the Doctrine of the Trinity’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 49/2 (2007), pp. 199–222; Hector, Kevin W., ‘God's Triunity and Self-Determination: A Conversation with Karl Barth, Bruce McCormack, and Paul Molnar’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 7/3 (2005), pp. 246–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunsinger, George, ‘Election and the Trinity: Twenty-Five Theses on the Theology of Karl Barth’, Modern Theology 24/2 (2008), pp. 179–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; van Driel, Edwin Christian, ‘Karl Barth on the Eternal Existence of Jesus Christ’, Scottish Journal of Theology 60 (2007), pp. 45–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology (New York: OUP, 2008); Nimmo, Paul T., Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth's Ethical Vision (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2007)Google Scholar; Smith, Aaron T., ‘God's Self-Specification: His Being is His Electing’, Scottish Journal of Theology 62 (2009), pp. 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dempsey, Michael T. (ed.), Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011)Google Scholar.

2 McCormack, ‘Foreword’, p. 296. A note on the recurrent use of the word ‘us’: there are obvious reasons to avoid first-person plural pronouns in an article such as this, but I have used them here since (a) doing so reflects the usage of McCormack as well as Barth and (b) the non-first-personal alternatives (e.g. ‘they’, ‘humanity’, ‘creatures’) end up delimiting the class of antecedents in ways which Barth and McCormack do not.

3 McCormack, ‘Grace and Being’, p. 101 (emphasis added).

4 Ibid., p. 96.

5 See, for instance, KD II/2, pp. 58 and 112: KD = Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, 13 vols. (Zollikon-Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag AG, 1932–67).

6 McCormack, ‘Foreword’, p. 295.

7 Examples of these criticisms can be found in the works cited in n. 1.

8 ‘Foreword’, p. 297.

9 I assume that McCormack does not think that God's determination to be God-with-us is subjectless, since that would render the determination a matter of fact rather than will, such that the God so determined could not be otherwise – not freely, at any rate. To be sure, McCormack has insisted that such a ‘prior’ subject is at best only a logical posit, since there is in eternity only God's single act of electing-and-triuning Godself, but he himself admits the propriety of considering priorities which exist only in logical space.

10 KD IV/2, pp. 386–7; cf. Barth's famous claim about God being ‘ours in advance’ (KD I/1, p. 404); trans. throughout are mine.

11 For a formulation along these lines, see KD I/1, p. 503, as well as Jüngel, Eberhard, Gottes Sein ist im Werden: Verantwortliche Rede vom Sein Gottes bei Karl Barth. Eine Paraphrase, 4th edn (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1965, 1986), pp. 27–37Google Scholar.

12 See KD IV/1, pp. 211–24.

13 On this point, see KD I/1, pp. 492–4.

14 Ibid., pp. 414–16.

15 Jüngel, Gottes Sein ist im Werden, p. 50.

16 KD IV/1, pp. 233–4. Note that Barth advances this claim well after his breakthrough in KD II/2; Barth thus seems not to have changed his mind on this matter (cf. KD I/1, p. 144).

17 KD II/2, p. 123, and KD IV/1, p. 51.

18 KD II/2, pp. 123–4.

19 Ibid., pp. 5–7.

20 Frankfurt, Harry, Reasons of Love (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 42Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., p. 61; cf. Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting it Right (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 41.

22 Ibid., p. 95.

23 Ibid., p. 50.

24 To be sure, one could think one's will is one's own when in fact it has been imposed upon one, but on the assumption that God cannot be duped into accepting another's will as God's own, we need not take up the problem here.

25 Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously, p. 15.

26 KD II/2, p. 5.

27 KD IV/1, p. 234.

28 KD II/2, p. 52.

29 KD IV/1, pp. 39–40.

30 KD II/2, p. 83.

31 KD IV/2, p. 47, cf. p. 92.

32 KD II/2, p. 176.

33 For Barth's own talk of the Verbum Incarnandum, see KD IV/3, p. 829.

34 KD IV/1, p. 70.

35 KD II/1, pp. 308–9.

36 KD II/2, p. 184.

37 Molnar, ‘The Trinity’, p. 302 (emphasis mine); cf. p. 306.

38 Ibid., p. 295; cf. p. 300.

39 McCormack comes close to saying as much in his recent essay, ‘Election and the Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger’, Scottish Journal of Theology 63 (April 2010), pp. 203–24.

40 For present purposes, it is worth noting that McCormack's argument is here relevantly similar to that advanced in Zizioulas, John, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

41 A further response would be to relieve McCormack of one of his collateral commitments, namely, his commitment to the proposition that God could have been God without us. Naturally, such a commitment is usually thought necessary to the proper affirmation of divine freedom, but some philosophers of religion have argued against this assumption; so see, for instance, Senor, Thomas D., ‘Defending Divine Freedom’, in Kvanvig, Jonathan (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: OUP, 2007), vol. 1, pp. 168–95Google Scholar.

42 This claim could be defended further in terms of the under-determination of inference – of the inference, that is, from the economic to the immanent Trinity – but I cannot do justice to that argument here.

43 I am grateful to George Hunsinger and Michael Rea for inviting me to present an earlier version of this article at the AAR and Notre Dame's Logos Workshop, respectively, and to Kevin Diller (my Logos respondent) and Bruce McCormack for their characteristically generous and incisive comments.