Our task has been to draw some of the contours to the question of how we may confess God as God in such a way that upholds God's qualitative distinction from creation both noetically and ontically. In this final chapter we may now compare constructively the positions of Aquinas and Barth for the sake of discerning what they have to offer contemporary reflection on these same matters. Nothing less than deciding is encouraged by both our interlocutors. Like philosophy, theology “aims not at knowing what men feel, but at what is the truth of things.”Footnote 1 And as concerns the truth of divine things, the “decisive point is the reading of the Bible itself.”Footnote 2 Throughout Parts I and II we have seen two approaches to learning God's being and activity, the whole scope of his perfection, and the account of God's relation to creation that such approaches fund. Chiefly these approaches were traced by looking at how Aquinas and Barth define theology's material object and the formal interest with which they seek to confess this object. Both approaches share much in common and yet nevertheless diverge on their central constructions of theology and economy. How do these similarities and differences inform the church's task to attend reflectively and systematically to the blessed God's glory announced in the gospel (1 Tim 1:11), and just so promote “the economy of God (ἢ οἰκονομίαν θεοῦ) which is in faith” (1 Tim 1:4)? A full consideration of the issues we have observed in analyzing God's perfection – his divine being, activity, and relations – would need to consider far more than what we have uncovered in Aquinas and Barth. However, for the sake of such a larger consideration, what follows draws on some themes from the foregoing analysis and reflects critically on how they inform systematic theology in the present. Specifically, our reflections are unified in how they inform the confession of God as God, and thus in his qualitative distinction from creation in both affirmation and thought. What kind of judgments about God's being and activity best serve this confession? And how does this concern inform the character of the relation God bears toward creation? Our adjudication and tentative resolution of these questions proceeds by isolating three themes: God's actuality, the relationship between God's activity and being, and the character of God's relation to creation. The first section on actuality is diagnostic, and the remaining two sections attempt to chart a way toward confessing God as God by gleaning from the analysis in Parts I and II.
Actuality and Theological Reason
In the introduction we suggested that theology's responsibility is to confess God in accordance with the way that God gives himself to be known, which involves judgments about the presence and activity of God to which it responds. With the analyses behind us, we may now explore how commonalities in Aquinas and Barth with regard to theological reason are parsed into differing accounts of reason's possibilities and responsibilities because of fundamental differences regarding the object of theological reason. These differences are set forth by attending to the relatively distinct accounts of God's actuality that surface in light of the preceding analyses in Parts I and II. Setting these differences in view will be useful for exploring the remaining concepts of God's being and activity, as well as God's relation to creation, as they bear upon the confession of God as God that both theologians pursue. Distinction here is for the sake of unification.
Inquiry into God's being and activity must be balanced between the positivity of what God reveals and the negativity of what God conceals in this revelation, or of what is inaccessible even in the light of that revelation. Aquinas and Barth each in their own ways model this balancing act through distinct uses of intellectual temperance. While the contrast between the two theologians is often proposed along the lines of their different attitudes toward the analogy of being (analogia entis) and revelation, or analogy and dialectic, it is useful to see them both as engaging in a speculative inquiry with different conceptions of the restraint proper to theological reason. Barth specifies the requisite intellectual humility of theology in an account of its obedient binding to God's self-revelation in his Word. Theology's modesty consists in reflecting and mirroring this Word in human words, and just so it is speculation in the most proper sense.Footnote 3 As the terms of his Anselmian procedure dictate, this temperance does not move beyond the actuality of God's self-revelation in Christ but rather seeks to discern in this actuality the truth of God's self-correspondence – its inescapable necessity. Aquinas voices a similar concern to temper theological reason about God's being in light of his revelation and offers some of his most pointed remarks in the opening to his commentary on Dionysius's The Divine Names:
For the truth of holy Scripture is a kind of light in the manner of a ray derived from the first Truth – a light that does not so extend that through it we are able to see God's essence or to know all that which is known by God in himself or by the angels and the blessed who see his essence – but [it extends] to a certain term or measure, whereby the intelligible things of divinity are manifest through the light of holy Scripture.
And thus, as we do not extend ourselves to acknowledge divine things more than the light of holy Scripture extends itself, we are bound on this account as if hemmed in by certain limitations concerning divine things by temperance and sanctity: sanctity indeed when we preserve the elegant truth of holy Scripture from every error; and temperance, as we do not throw ourselves upon those things more than is given to us.Footnote 4
Later when Aquinas discusses further the depth of Scripture's extension into the divine life, he notes the ambition that must attend temperance. Those “holy minds” who cast themselves upon God and his revelation must avoid not only pride but also despair. While they do not presume to know or say anything about God that is not given them fittingly (convenienter) in revelation, neither do they shy away from the greatness of their task. Theologians must not set their eyes on anything short of the heights to which divine revelation elicits their understanding, confession, and praise. Where theologians are led astray in this way, they succumb to the error of faintheartedness (pusillanimitas), which is the opposite of the highmindedness (magnanimitas) required for the intellectual discipline of holy teaching. Theological contemplation must be reverent, chaste, and holy: reverent because it does not transgress its boundaries, chaste insofar as it refuses to content itself with idle consideration of “inferior things,” and holy because it keeps to the tasks and objects God has ordained for it.Footnote 5
The notes of continuity in these remarks are instructive: a mutual concern that theological inquiry consider God's revelation in Scripture its cognitive principle, that theology find the full extent of the truth it confesses in and through this revelation, and that theologians neither fall short of nor transgress the boundaries set by it. Significant differences nevertheless ground these mutual convictions, and the differences are crucial for the consideration of God's distinction from creation as it presupposes teaching about God's being and activity, as well as God's relation to creation. One way of accessing these differences is through the divergent understandings of divine actuality that surface in both theologians. These differences have appeared quietly throughout our study, and only now are we prepared to make them explicit. The notion that God is pure act (actus purus) leads both Aquinas and Barth to an affirmation that God is actual without any potentiality standing in need of realization. Furthermore the notion of pure act leads to an understanding of the unity of God's being and his external activity that issues from the single, simple act of God's being. Astonishingly, from all eternity God relates himself to creatures; surely any theology that does not separate God from creatures must essay some such affirmation. However, such a statement must be handled with care. Both theologians have different approaches to and interpretations of God's simple actuality, as well as its unity with God's external acts. The question of theology's ability to understand divine actuality is thus framed for both thinkers within an account of intellectual temperance oriented toward a particular construal of divine actuality. While the precise limits of theological reason likely boil down to exegetical decisions, the viability of the notion of actuality to which it is oriented may nevertheless be helpful in adjudicating the boundaries of theological reason most befitting the acknowledgment of God as God. How then are we to understand the differences between Aquinas and Barth on God's actuality?
This divergence may be illustrated by what Kenneth Schmitz calls a difference between “the Aristotelian principle of originating actuality (energeia and entelecheia), on the one hand, and the modern concept of resultant actuality (Wirklichkeit, the facts or states of affairs), on the other.”Footnote 6 As with any conceptual device summarizing a history of ideas, we need to beware letting this distinction do too much, and we need to see exactly how it plays out in the accounts of divine actuality we have considered. That said, the distinction is useful for setting the differences between the positions under consideration into relief. Schmitz considers a number of examples to illustrate the general characterization of “resultant actuality” that emerges in the modern concept of totality (Totalitätsbegriff), which privileges an explanatory framework, system, or context over the more radical (in the sense of roots or sources) active powers that stand behind and even within it. What is important here is the insight into an influential strand of modern philosophy that no longer interprets actuality in terms of both “firstness” and “plenitude,” but rather sees actuality as a realized totality or context in which things come to be.
To grasp the significance of this modern transition from originating principle to resultant totality, it will be useful to review in very broad strokes some of the relevant background. Classically a principle is understood as an original source or primacy from which consequences may follow in keeping with the nature of their source. The quest for the cosmic source (άρχή) of the world generally arose in tandem with an interest in the essential features of divinity, and so philosophical reflection on ultimate principles was fundamentally theological.Footnote 7 At the same time, principles have cosmological significance. Ancient philosophy understood that such first principles establish the order in which their consequences are arranged and of which these consequences, or elements, take part. Just so, principles are distinguished but not separated from the elements that are constitutive parts of the established whole. This point becomes important because throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there arises an increasing suspicion toward analysis of reality by ontological principles and an attendant restriction of natural-philosophical inquiry almost exclusively to analysis by quantitative elements.Footnote 8 On the terms of this restriction, causes of things tend to be bracketed in favor of their elemental and phenomenal immediacy. In and of itself, such bracketing does not entirely do away with some principles. Within the complex order of elements arranged by a first principle, the elements may also serve as principles in the sense that they are constitutive causes of the composite whole to which they belong (like matter and form in different respects in any composition of the two). However, in any order there will be inevitably a primary principle whose primacy and originality cannot be sacrificed without the loss of the order to another. Axiomatically this means that where a principle establishes an order, that principle itself cannot be reduced to another principle without losing itself to another order entirely (or at a minimum, without its primacy being relativized). The abstractness of these terms may be eased somewhat with an example: we may reduce the order of a baseball team to its manager as its principle, but we cannot reduce the manager to another principle without taking leave of the team's order as such. We might do this where we considered the manager together with the players as part of a larger order (the principiate, or what the principle establishes) to which they both belong, this order in turn being reducible to their labor union (the principle). What this illustrates is that the primacy of any given principle consists in its irreducibility for the order it establishes, which is exacerbated in the case of metaphysical principles that are transgeneric and universal – above all the principle of the order of orders. In the latter case, an ultimate principle of principles would not only be irreducible for the order(s) it establishes but also would be incapable of being relativized by another principle or context. More on that in a moment. For now, these aspects of the concept's history show, as Schmitz notes, that the metaphysical notion of principle not only designates “firstness” but also includes an element of “plenitude” or fullness relative to the order it authors. This element of plenitude is what distinguishes the classical notion of principle from the modern concept of totality. The difference between the two is evident in their divergent understandings of actuality as originating and resultant, respectively. For the former, knowledge finds itself in a situation where various beings have actuality from some higher principle, and knowledge is thereby ultimately resolved into the communication of actuality from that principle. For the latter, the context in which knowledge finds itself is some totality.Footnote 9 How does this bear upon our analysis of Aquinas and Barth?
The utility of this distinction between interpretations of actuality becomes more evident if we draw another parallel between Hegel and Barth, since Hegel is one of Schmitz's key witnesses. Again we must stress that the purpose of this parallel is not genetic but strictly illustrative. Among other philosophers, Schmitz appeals to Hegel's Science of Logic, book two, and observes how actuality emerges at the final moment in the development of essence in its opposition with appearance. The net result is an account of actuality that privileges “fact” or “result” over “principle.”Footnote 10 The dialectic in both of Hegel's Logics, though they differ in the details and the order of presentation, is the progressive determination of being in its actualization. Hegel himself summarizes much of this movement concisely:
Actuality is that unity of essence and concrete existence [Existenz], of inner and outer, that has immediately come to be. The expression [Äußerung] of the actual is the actual itself, so that in the expression it remains something equally essential and is something essential only insofar as it is in immediate external [äußerlich] concrete existence. As forms of the immediate, being and concrete existence [Existenz] surfaced earlier; being is completely unreflected immediacy and [the] passing over into an other. The concrete existence is immediate unity of being and reflection, thus appearance, coming from the ground and returning to it. The actual is the positedness of that unity, the relationship that has become identical with itself.Footnote 11
Mercifully, the full intelligibility of these remarks need not concern us; it suffices for our purposes to note some of the terse logic expressed in these words. For Hegel our apprehension of the relative independence of “inner essence” is contradicted when we recognize that it is intelligible to us only through its relations to something else, in this case “external appearance.” There are two terms in this analysis, and though we may think of the first moment, inner essence, as the real unit of analysis, we cannot escape its correlation with what is dependent upon it, external appearance or concrete existence. Hegel argues that the inner essence is not something behind or above its externalization but is the manifest necessity of that external reality. The thing itself (Ding an sich) is knowable in its externality.Footnote 12 Hence, actuality is Hegel's attempt to overcome what he perceives as Kant's false separation of noumena and phenomena in many ways parallel to how Aristotle sought to avoid Plato's separation of form and matter.Footnote 13 The relevant logic is found in the definition of actuality as the higher ground from which the unity of both inner and outer moments in their opposition is intelligible. Actuality (Wirklichkeit) is the “positedness” of essence and existence, in other words. The real unit of analysis is therefore the totality and not the essence or its existence alone, because neither taken apart from the other is actual (wirklich): “for actuality is that which is effective and sustains itself in its otherness.”Footnote 14 Hegel has much more to say about all of this, and the dialectic does not stop or even reach its highest point here. What is germane to our analysis of divine actuality is the discernable tendency to conceive of actuality in terms of the posited unity of essence and existence – the totality or result of being and its self-realization. Not only is actuality thus understood as the totality of essence and existence but it also confines our understanding of both terms to their correlation. As this finds application to God's interaction with the world, “God does not cease to be God (does not give up universality), but God is God only in relation to a multi-faceted totality.”Footnote 15
According to Nicholas Adams, Hegel's interests are not in ontology as much as logic, and especially in a logic learned from reflection on Chalcedonian categories. Rather than thinking of two terms in a relation oppositionally, where one term of the relation would ultimately force a choice against the other, Hegel prefers to see a deeper compatibility with a reparative “logic of distinction in inseparable relation” that is not reducible to separation or identification.Footnote 16 Here both terms are what they are by virtue of their relation to one another, and so they must be learned in this relation or not at all, with the consequence that they are a “pair.”Footnote 17 Since the two terms are in relation, then as a logical pair they are one; we need not choose oppositionally between absolute otherness or strict identification. What this amounts to is the logic of actuality as totality, which licenses and requires a correlationist form of inquiry.
The formal logic of actuality as a posited totality is what finds a parallel in Barth, though with some significant modifications, not least of which is that Barth denies any self-realization on the part of God. Furthermore, God remains free even in his external works, which “are bound to Him, but He is not bound to them.”Footnote 18 Barth also retains a sense that God's being is more though not different than what is revealed in his works. Everything we have already noted in previous chapters about the asymmetry between God and his external activity, as well as the freedom of God, must be registered at this point if we are not to misunderstand Barth entirely. We are strictly interested in the formal logic of totality or unity obtaining between essence and existence in Hegel, and being and act in Barth, with the significant material differences between the two always in mind. Nor does this similarity require an equivalence between what essence and existence mean for Hegel and what being and act mean for Barth. One may exchange the terms of the pairing without abandoning the correlationist logic of actuality understood as totality.
Though located within a very different set of convictions, then, a similar logic to Hegel's seems to govern Barth's understanding of God's actuality.Footnote 19 For Barth, actuality “holds together being and act, instead of tearing them apart like the idea of ‘essence.’”Footnote 20 The unit of analysis is therefore not a totality of God and creatures that is higher than both, but rather the totality of God's being and activity: each is what it is only in relation to the other. So, for example, theology has to understand God as love in the “totality of this happening not only in its inner inter-relationship and movement but also in its unity. In the totality of this happening it is the creative and also the electing and purifying basis of human, genuine, Christian love.”Footnote 21 Understanding “God as an actuality” in his revelation is the “legitimate and indispensable” aspiration of realism for theology:
Our life is a process of perceiving ourselves, our world, and the two in indissoluble correlation. It runs its course as an experience of actuality, as a series of operations that happen to us and with us … Do I experience them? Do I experience them in the unity and totality of inner and outer experience? Are they real for me? Are they real for me? How do they concern me? Whatever does not concern me wholly and finally, how can that be anything for me but a nothing? Act means being, and being can only mean act.Footnote 22
Now Barth locates the givenness of God's actuality not in creation generally, but in the specific event of revelation: “We can think and speak realistically only by presupposing the act-character of God's actuality (Aktcharakter der Wirklichkeit Gottes).”Footnote 23 Dialectical consideration of this actuality must also beware of submitting itself to some foreign rational criterion. Presupposing the event of God's self-revelation in which we encounter God's actuality, the unity of his being and activity, theology considers the correlation between God's being and activity inescapable for thought that is “directed, guided and ordered by something superior to itself,” namely, the Word of God.Footnote 24 Creatures are always in danger of failing to render God's distinction from creation in thought where they speculatively identify God's givenness in the being or activity of the creature, rather than in the being and activity of God alone. Like Aquinas, Barth is concerned in his own way to acknowledge God as God.Footnote 25 Unlike Aquinas, this leads Barth toward an account of actuality that privileges result over principle. Theological reason is therefore temperate and obedient only when it submits itself to the criterion of God's self-revelation in his Word and consequently knows God's being strictly in correlation with his works. Reason's movements must therefore correspond to the movement of God. Within these parameters, as we have seen, Barth tends to restrict theological reason to tracing the correlation of God's self-determination and external activity.
At this point, it will be helpful to see how similarly correlational understandings of divine actuality have become quite common since Barth, if only to show how Barth is in some respects to be differentiated from them. We may start with two examples from Anglophone theology. For instance, Joe Jones denies that God is pure act yet proposes to distinguish between God's essence and actuality, and to maintain God's actuality as the “more fundamental reality.” He continues,
It is the actuality of God that is the fundamental ontological subject, and the essence of God is simply the necessary structure that is always present in God's actuality. God's essence is itself a logical subject, but it is not an ontological subject. Only the actuality of God is the ontological subject. And it is this subject that we have trinitarianly identified in the economic self-communications of God.Footnote 26
The basic correlationism of this construal is evident in the thin depiction of God's essence as the logical structure of his economic activity. Another, more striking example is that of Robert Jenson, who argues for a strong identification of God with his history in Israel and the Church: “God is one with himself just by the dramatic coherence of his eventful actuality.”Footnote 27 And again, “the plot of the biblical narrative … is the final truth of God's own reality.”Footnote 28 Jenson maintains that God's “triune life is in its actuality a life with us,” which carries a decisive restriction on theological inquiry: “We know God in that the Word of God that is God, that is homoousios with the Father, is actual only as conversation with us.”Footnote 29 Hence, Jenson notes that God's goodness is the honor and benefit he exercises toward us, “and of a goodness in God that was not his goodness to us we yet again may not speculate.”Footnote 30 We can see here again how something like a notion of resultant actuality accompanies a correlationist inquiry. In German theology, Wilfried Joest similarly identifies the actuality of God with the totality of his self-determination to be for us in Christ and the Spirit. For Joest, Scripture only speaks of the divine persons with a forward reference to their economic activity, which prompts him to make the striking but representative claim that the Holy Spirit's essence just is his self-determination.Footnote 31 Like Jones and Jenson, such an account entails that theology is not licensed to ask what God might have been before and apart from his works in time. These examples illustrate what one finds in recent discussion within German philosophical theology where the concept of actuality is given direct attention. In such discussions, actuality assumes two primary and related meanings: the first is that of the “whole of being” (All des Seienden) and is related to the second, which is that same whole to the extent that it encounters and is effective (wirksam) in the human.Footnote 32 As we would expect by now, the concept embraces the objective and existential into a higher unity. Thus understood, actuality is an intrinsically correlational concept much in keeping with its sense in Hegel's logic. As one theologian puts the matter, God's actuality is almost identical to, or at least coincident with, the act of faith: “The actuality of God is, as it were, the occurrence of faith itself as reflexive self-knowledge.”Footnote 33 We can see clearly enough the influence of Hegel's sentiment that the “expression of the actual is the actual itself.”Footnote 34
While these examples illustrate the wider influence of a logic similar to the one we find in Barth, they also throw into relief Barth's own reserve with this logic. True, theological reason is restricted to tracing the correlation of God's self-determination and external activity, for this is the movement in which God shows himself to be God. And similarly, in this respect it is correct to note that God's self-revelation is, for Barth, “irreducible” in the sense that it forecloses the attempt to render intelligible God's existence in abstraction from the encounter of God in his demonstration of his existence (Existenzbeweis).Footnote 35 No moment of inquiry or aspect of God's life can be bracketed from the other. God's actuality is understood primarily as the result of God's active self-determination to the covenant in Christ, and not the principle of that self-determination and the history it necessitates in God's being “as such.” We acknowledge God as God is – rather than as we might wish God to be – when we refrain from seeking to know anything beyond what is given to us in God's self-revelation. This much is demanded by Barth's Christological interpretation of God's simplicity. However, Barth is convinced the correlation within which theology traces God's being and activity will not collapse the two because theological reason does not reproduce, replace, or become the Word of God but only “witnesses to” the Word of God.Footnote 36 This eschatological and ectypal reservation about theological reason in Barth's hands shows a bit more reserve than the earlier examples about the deliverances of any logical correlation, even that of God's self-determination and external works. We might say Barth was attempting to achieve something more by ambitioning something less. All the same, the family resemblances are clear in the formal commitment to a correlational inquiry.
The difference now emerges with Aquinas, for whom God's actuality is referred to God as subsistent being itself (ipsum esse subsistens) in the sense of a radical principle of plenitude that subsists prior to and apart from any determination or movement toward creatures. Metaphysically stated, the intensity of actuality is located in being (esse). Indeed “being (esse) is the actuality of all acts” and functions as the principle both of things’ existence and of those acts by which they are conformed to the good that is their end.Footnote 37 In creatures primary act is ordered to secondary act because being is self-expansive: “act is the reason for the being of being (raison d'être de l'être), its blossoming, its highest realization.”Footnote 38 Employed analogously to the life of God, there is no distinction between primary and secondary act; God is pure act because he is self-subsistent. Theologically stated, the actuality of God is the being-in-act of the mutual relations of the Father, Son, and Spirit in their eternal blessedness. The subsistent relations that are the divine persons in their mutual coinherence is the simple divine actuality. But in this simple actuality, the processions of the Word and Love from the Father “include, but secondarily, a reference to creation, inasmuch as the divine truth and goodness are the principle of God's knowing and loving any creature.”Footnote 39 In the simple act that is his being, God is eternally the one who knows and wills himself as Creator, savior, and glorifier of the creature in Christ and the Spirit. It is imperative for us to notice, however, that Aquinas teases apart this singular and simple act so that it is intelligible to our mode of understanding. Through his manipulation of positive and negative theology and his speculative grammar, Aquinas shows how the consideration of God as pure act requires two logical moments: a first moment of absolute necessity in which God's will is necessarily ordered to his own goodness alone, and a second moment of hypothetical necessity in which God's will mercifully extends to creatures. These moments are not sequential or temporal but merely logical by-products of what Scripture prompts him to say about God. Both moments are part of the full acknowledgment of God in his relation to and distinction from creatures implicit in the concept of pure actuality. Temperate yet properly ambitious theological reason therefore may consider the intelligibility of God's life in himself “prior to and apart from” creatures as one stage in its discursive reasoning about that which is simple. Aquinas thus agrees with Barth about the priority of actuality over possibility, but considers actuality in terms of a noncontradiction between plenitude and principle rather than as self-determining fact. Consequently, actuality includes demonstratively the acknowledgment of both God's absolute necessity to be nothing but himself and God's hypothetical necessity to be the Creator and Redeemer of his people. Therefore, for the sake of our analysis, we may draw a distinction in Aquinas's thought between divine actuality as plenitude and as principle: the latter represents God's causal relation to creatures, and the former represents God's self-subsistent fullness.Footnote 40 Neither moment is sufficient in itself for the full confession of God. Crucially, perhaps the most important element to emerge in our analysis of Aquinas is how his consideration of God's pure actuality enables him to distinguish God's actuality as subsistent plenitude and as principle without conflating or separating plenitude and principle. At its most basic, this distinction is the insight we attempt to exploit in the remainder of this chapter because it is particularly suited to uphold the confession of God as God both noetically and ontically.
We may now return to the question about the possibilities of and restraints upon reason in confessing God as God, material differences about which we have traced through divergent understandings of God's actuality. If, starting with a notion of God as pure act, both Aquinas and Barth operate within a correlation of act and being under the formality of God's relation to the world, what distinguishes the two accounts is how Aquinas's intricate pattern of considering God's causal efficacy subverts this correlation sufficiently to account for something higher than it. As we argued in Chapter 2, Aquinas's concern to acknowledge God as God leads him to construe the relationship of theology and economy in such a way as to secure the insight into God's simple blessedness, which corresponds to the higher truth of the divine processions. Through the formal orientation of a causal analysis of God's ways we come to understand that God's possession and enjoyment of his own goodness has a modality that surpasses the necessity of creation for its intelligibility. As blessed, God himself is the principal material object of theological inquiry. This characterization of God's perfect life in himself enables theology to think of God as independent of the world and possibly being all that exists without pretending to think of God apart from creatures’ relation to him. In other words, Aquinas's construal of theology's principal material object understands God's actuality as plenitude, while the formal orientation of his inquiry understands God's actuality as principle. Theological inquiry is bound to think of God within his relation to creation according to the order of knowing, but the character of God's internal life that this inquiry achieves renders intelligible the thought of God absolutely and thus without creation according to the order of being. Theology's principal material object is thus God himself, understood as the internal life of the blessed Trinity.
Barth's procedure contrasts with Aquinas's in many respects, but it begins with a similar concern to acknowledge God without compromising God's qualitative distinction from creation. However, Barth's appropriation of the way of causality (via causalitatis) means that he is concerned to confess God as God is, and thus in the concrete actuality of God's self-revelation.Footnote 41 Barth achieves this by reinterpreting the notion of God's perfect life so as to render intelligible God's actuality as the unity of being and act that is God's self-determination to be God for us in Christ. That is, God's actuality is “His own conscious, willed and accomplished decision.”Footnote 42 At the conclusion to Chapter 4, we suggested that this line of thought tends on proportion to construe theology's material object as God in his self-determination rather than God himself “as such.” Whereas Aquinas accounts for God's distinction from creation by subverting the formal orientation of theological inquiry that traces the correlation between God's being and external activity, Barth tends to account for the same without subverting this formal interest but discerning God's perfection within the contours of the boundaries set by God's will to be this way and not another.
The question we must consider is which approach best accounts for what theology must say about God's being and activity on the one hand and the relation to creation this precipitates on the other in order to secure the confession of God as God both noetically and ontically. Pursing this question will involve us retracing elements of our analysis in two broad strokes. First, for theology that prioritizes actuality over possibility like both Aquinas and Barth, what kind of actuality serves the confession of God as God sufficiently? The initial steps toward an answer are provided in critically reflecting on the accounts of God's being and activity traced thus far. Specifically, it will involve answering two further implied questions: If God is qualitatively distinct from all things ontically and noetically, then would God be God without creation? And if so, must a fitting coordination of divine act and being sustain the counterfactual statement that God might not have created the world without any detriment to God's being as God? Second, is it necessary for the confession of God as God that theology subvert with its movements of thought the formal orientation of correlating God's external works and being? Or is it sufficient to confess God's perfection within the limits of this correlation, with the caveat that theology does not capture the full truth of God? Answers to this question are suggested through critical reflection on the relation God bears to the world and its metaphysical intelligibility. The question about how best to confess God as God noetically and ontically is therefore indexed to broader questions about God's being and activity and the character of God's relation to creation we have sought to understand. The remainder of this chapter now takes up each of these issues respectively.
Being and Activity
What we have suggested are divergent understandings of actuality between our interlocutors are also evident in their equally divergent views concerning God's goodness. Not insignificantly, differences over God's goodness are also the site of their different construals of divine being and activity. Exaggerated for the sake of comparison: Where divine actuality is understood primarily as plenitude, it is intelligible as God's possession and enjoyment of his goodness in eternal blessedness. Conversely, where divine actuality is construed in terms of “result” or “totality,” God's goodness is identical with the decision for its communication. In the first case Aquinas understands God's goodness absolutely with principal material priority and derives certain relative divine attributes from its communication, such as mercy or grace. In the second case Barth equates God's goodness with love, defining the intelligible characteristic (ratio) of goodness with its communication, and derives the divine perfections from the dialectical movement of God's history with creatures in a unity of form and content, internally and externally. This helps Barth to historicize the correspondence between God's being and activity, since the unity of the form and content of God's perfections in his history with creatures corresponds to their unity in form and content in God's eternal decision for this history between himself and humanity. Both construals of divine goodness parallel how God's being relates to his external activity and his internal activity. But which best serves the insight that God would be God without having created the world? Our task in what follows is not to offer an exhaustive account of divine being and activity, but to sketch some parameters of an account that enables the full confession of God as God. First, we discuss the notion of God's self-correspondence, which describes the relationship between God's being and external activity. Second, we analyse the function of God's self-consistency, which is to demonstrate how God would be the self-same God “prior to” and without creatures. Particularly in this latter notion we are occupied with the “reducibility” of God's external and internal activity to God's perfection and the intelligibility as well as priority of his perfection over any activity with an external reference. In what follows, reducibility functions to show how even internal acts like God's outgoing immanent activity (opera immanentia donec exeunt) logically presuppose God's perfection as their basis, and so are logically reducible to God's perfection insofar as the latter is intelligible without them. The purpose of such language is not to suggest positively some absolute priority of possibility over actuality or to deny that God's being is identical with his activity. The logical priority of divine perfection is in view because only where this has demonstrable priority is the confession of God as God secured with the depth and radicality it requires.
God's Self-Correspondence
First we consider the relationship between God's being and his external activity, which we have followed throughout our analysis in terms of divine self-correspondence. Our analysis concentrated on the doctrine of the divine attributes in each thinker, and here we need to reflect on how questions about the divine attributes bear upon the confession of God as God. In this section we address first the relationship between the orders of knowing and being, and second the question of the derivation of the divine attributes. How do we navigate these issues most fittingly to confess God as God?
The noetic principle operative in the hermeneutical concept of divine self-correspondence is that God's acts reveal his being, which is where we find the truth of the dictum that being follows activity (esse sequitur operari). The question is how this noetic commitment about the order of knowing relates to the order of being. Barth is adamant that it cannot be reversed into a metaphysical statement about the order of being, or at least that if it is reversible, it refers us to something only God could know.Footnote 43 Beyond this denial, what our analysis has shown is that what Barth might want to affirm about the relation between the orders of being and knowing is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand Barth seeks to understand God's being in light of his external works and vice versa, restricting theological inquiry to thinking of God's relation to the world. At least insofar as Barth applies the methodological commitments developed in his Anselm book, it is impossible to think God apart from his relation to the world because this relation is God's freely posited necessity. On the other hand, there are moments where Barth gestures toward an ontic reserve beyond this noetic restriction. This is visible where he appeals to the counterfactual that God might not have created without being any the less loving, gracious, or merciful. Barth invokes such counterfactual arguments formally to reinforce the gratuity of God's external works, and it is difficult to discern whether or not he means for there to be anything more material in these claims.Footnote 44 Quite apart from affirming the hypothetical possibility of a positive will in God not to create, the claims require for their substantiation some demonstration of the intelligibility of God's perfection logically “prior to and apart from” God's self-determination to be for us in Christ. Otherwise, these claims risk being hollow. The ambiguity about how Barth relates the order of being and the order of knowing surfaces in light of Barth's affirmation, and yet inability or unwillingness to demonstrate, that God would be just as gracious and merciful without his self-determination to be for us in Christ. Thus, the question that interests us about the relation between act and being for Barth concerns how God's internal being and perfections relate to God's outgoing internal acts. What coordination of the orders of knowing and being sustains the hypothetical counterfactual that God would be God in undiminished perfection and goodness without creation?
Where the question is considered an illegitimate abstraction, then at least one of two concessions is possible. First, one might maintain that God's perfections are those of the electing God and knowledge of any other God we neither have nor need. Only knowledge of this God binds our thought and speech to the covenant in which God has bound himself to us and us to himself. This indeed has precedent in Reformed theology, as we see in Turretin:
But when God is set forth as the object of theology, he is not to be regarded simply as God in himself … but as revealed and as he has been pleased to manifest himself to us in his word, so that divine revelation is the formal relation (ratio formalis) which comes to be considered in this object. Nor is he to be considered exclusively under the relation of deity (sub ratione Deitatis) … but as he is our God, that is, as he is covenanted in Christ.Footnote 45
However, when wed to Barth's polemic against semi-nominalism this restriction creates the difficulty that the intelligibility of God in himself “prior to and apart from” his decree is something beyond or more than what God reveals to us in Christ.Footnote 46 But to the extent that Barth wants something of this “beyond” in his counterfactual statements, he ultimately falls back upon the nominalism his procedure is designed to avoid when he discusses God's grace and mercy. The second response presses into the tension consistently and contracts the ontic to the noetic: God gives himself his essence through an act of self-determination.Footnote 47 Questions about the logical implications of counterfactual statements are thus considered “nonsense.”Footnote 48 Consequently the order of being and order of knowing are coextensive and there is nothing of God knowable – and perhaps nothing of God – beyond the correlation of his decision and external works. There are clear signs that while Barth's methodological approach to God's self-correspondence may lean in this direction at moments, he nevertheless wants something more than this method can offer.
How then are we to proceed? Aquinas's sapiential inquiry into divine act and being adopts something like a noetic “being follows act.” But Aquinas is insistent that the order of knowing is distinct from the order of being, and so it does not follow ontically that being is strictly correlative with activity, understood as either external works or outgoing internal acts. Thus Aquinas maintains that ontically “act follows being” (agere sequitur esse). What we have to learn from Aquinas is how to subvert the correlation of being and externally terminating acts to confess God himself not only in his aseity but also in his inseity; God not only has life from himself but abides in himself. While theology's formal orientation seeks to know God strictly in light of God's relation to creation, the operative thought patterns must subvert this noetic restriction in order to arrive at the material insight into God as God if we want to maintain that God would remain in undiminished perfection without creation. Barth clearly wants the same thing but resists any metaphysical reversal of the order of knowing that would pretend to a greater knowledge of God than we are given in revelation. The fundamental question thus concerns how exactly God has revealed himself to be: one who consumes our attentions with the historical drama of his fellowship with us, or one who in this fellowship beckons our thoughts to things that are above by the fact of his sheer majesty? In essaying an answer to this, we turn to the paradigmatic event of Moses's vision of God's glory. This text suggests two things relevant for our question. First, we see here grounds for drawing a distinction between God's goodness and the various forms it acquires in God's covenant history with his people. This suggests something material about the distinction between the orders of being and knowing. And second, in this account we find implicitly the importance of the divine names for an account of God's being and activity that registers a truth higher than the correlation between the two.
First, from God's disclosure of his glory to Moses, we may glimpse the truth of the maxim that in the order of being “act follows being” (agere sequitur esse). When Moses petitions God to reveal his glory, God responds, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name, ‘The lord’” (Exod 33:19). As God “passes” (רבָעַ) before Moses, the movement of all God's goodness is articulated alongside the proclamation of God's name: “The lord, the lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty” (Exod 34:6–7). In the condescension of its movement toward God's people, God's goodness is reflected as mercy, grace, patience, and love. The communication of God's goodness is therefore the occasion for God's self-declaration as the merciful and gracious God. For similar reasons a long scholastic tradition maintains that “God's goodness is the fount of the grace, love, mercy, patience, and gentleness of God.”Footnote 49 As God moves toward creatures in his goodness, he shows himself merciful to those in misery, gracious to sinners, patient with all, and abounding with covenant love in supreme fidelity to his nature as God. Commenting on the word “all” in “all my goodness” (Ex 33.19), Aquinas says that “the divine nature is sufficiently full, because every perfection of goodness is there.”Footnote 50 Every perfection of goodness includes all the relative perfections of grace, mercy, patience, and so forth. Barth is unsatisfied by this reading of the passage, not only because it results in semi-nominalism but also because, in his own interpretation, he focuses almost exclusively on God's passing before Moses.Footnote 51 Thus Moses hears God's name, but only in “God's passing before and going before, in God's work and action, in which he does not see God's face but in which he can only follow God with his eyes.”Footnote 52 It means that “God is the One whose being can be investigated only in the form of a continuous question as to His action.”Footnote 53 Barth's reading of the text demonstrates a unidirectional coordination of names and acts, making the former subservient to the latter. But nothing in the text demands this prioritization of act over name, “passing before” over “goodness.” What might an alternative reading look like, and how is it suggested to us?
At several points Scripture suggests a distinction between the content of goodness and its many forms in God's grace, mercy, and steadfast love. Thus the psalmist says, “Oh give thanks to the lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!” (Ps 118:1, 29). We are told first that God is good, and subsequent to this identity statement is the fact that his steadfast love is inexhaustible. Something of this same order is present elsewhere in the Psalms: “The lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Ps 145:9); “For the lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations” (Ps 100:5). Throughout Scripture God's goodness is glossed in this confessional manner with its many perfections (Ps 86:5; 106:1; 107:1; 1 Chron 16:34; Ezra 3:11; Jer 33:11; Nah 1:7).Footnote 54 Israel waits on God's “name, for it is good” (Ps 52:9, 11). Again, a similar pattern is found in Isaiah: “I will recount the steadfast love of the lord, the praises of the lord, according to all that the lord has granted us, and the great goodness to the house of Israel that he has granted them according to his compassion, according to the abundance of his steadfast love” (Isa 63:7). Here God's goodness is said to be given in the forms of, or “according to,” his compassion and steadfast love. All of these statements cohere with the order found in God's response to Moses: God's goodness passes before Moses and is accompanied by the declaration of its manifold forms. God not only names the forms (mercy, grace, patience, steadfast love, and faithfulness), but their essential content (goodness). Indeed, these acts of naming are proof enough that God's “passing” before Moses does not exhaust God's activity.
For just such reasons, when explaining the perfections of God's goodness such as grace, mercy, patience, and clemency, Polanus constantly refers back to God's goodness through a series of related terms like benignity and propensity. God's grace is thus “the most benignant will and favor of God, through which he is truly and properly gracious, and by which he is favorable and gratuitously beneficial to his creatures.”Footnote 55 Similarly, God's mercy is the “utmost propensity of his will” to come to the aid of those in need, and God's patience is “his most benign will” to moderate his wrath and defer the penalties of sin so that the creature may repent.Footnote 56 Finally, God's clemency is “the utmost benignity of his will, by which even in wrath he remembers his mercy, is favorable and lenient toward us, although otherwise we deserve dung, he prefers our recovery and conversion over our death.”Footnote 57 But rooting these manifold perfections as relative forms of God's absolute goodness is not an abstract principle with which the divine attributes are deduced. Each perfection is addressed as exegesis demands, and Scripture says that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). Thus, Polanus accounts for God's love in both absolute and relative dimensions while still rooting it in God's goodness. First, he defines God's love as “the essential property or essence of God by which he delights himself in and wills good to that which he approves. For this is to love: to delight oneself in that which pleases, and to will and bestow good upon it.”Footnote 58 He then proceeds to distinguish between God's natural and voluntary love. Naturally, or absolutely, God's love is that “by which God loves himself before all things: the Father loves the Son and the Holy Spirit; the Son loves the Father and the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit loves the Father and the Son.”Footnote 59 Voluntarily, and thus with reference to economy, God either loves creatures generally or specifically and singularly God loves the elect in his love for Christ. These distinctions between natural and voluntary, absolute and relative, assume heightened significance in light of the concern to confess the truth of God's plenitude apart from his efficaciousness toward creatures. We saw in our analysis of Aquinas's account of God's mercy the importance of designating God's goodness as the source from which relative attributes like grace and mercy derive. Chiefly this understanding of Scripture's metaphysical intelligibility means that what is most essential about mercy and grace is already true of God apart from any hint of privation, opposition, and overcoming. The perfection of God is thus intelligible apart from the contingencies of history, and above all apart from the sinful creature's rebellion.
Second, we may note how God's naming of both his goodness and the manifold perfections of that goodness highlights the importance of God's own acts of self-naming. Aquinas internalizes the importance of this feature of the biblical texts in his use of both negative and positive theology, which is an instance of the doctrine of the divine names operating with the full “threefold way.” This interplay allows divine names such as “goodness” to inform the doctrine of God by virtue of their capacity to name God's being analogously, and not merely to serve as descriptors for, or transcendental conditions for the possibility of, God's economic activity – much less as pointers to an “experience of his working.”Footnote 60 Barth's approach to divine self-correspondence is one among many similar modern approaches to deriving the divine perfections or statements about God's being from God's activity.Footnote 61 But to discern God's life only from God's external acts is to operate within the confines of a particular construal of the way of causality alone, which presumes that Scripture only speaks to God's being by witnessing to God's external acts. To an extent, Aquinas's inquiry into divine act and being is similar insofar as it proceeds as a causal analysis of God's external works that traces these works to their foundation in God's being. Through the notion of “procession” he demonstrates how God corresponds to himself in his act of creating because how and why creatures proceed from God has an inner basis and archetype in the Father's begetting of the Son and their common spiration of the Spirit. Yet this is not all Aquinas marshals to his inquiry, for he also considers it indispensable for theology to consider God's names, careful analysis of which is directly relevant for consideration of God's works but not strictly correlated with those works.Footnote 62 One of the chief names of God, “i am who i am” (Exod 3:14), signifies God's self-subsistent being that “comes before the idea of cause” absolutely – hence God's being is presupposed to his causal activity and is demonstrable as such.Footnote 63 Patient reflection on the biblical names of God therefore serves a critical function in securing the reducibility of God's externally directed acts to his being. What this suggests is that, properly set forth, a retrieval of the divine names might be one of the more promising tasks for contemporary theological reflection on the doctrine of God that seeks to uphold the confession of God as God.Footnote 64
This is not, however, to separate names from God's external acts; both are still required. If some names – like Father, Son, or Spirit – tell us something about God that is true apart from God's external works, it nevertheless remains true that these names are explicated in the economy. A name like “blessedness” (1 Tim 6:15) leads Aquinas to affirm that God possesses and enjoys his own goodness in supreme bliss. Since nothing can give God a good he does not already possess and enjoy in himself, then God has no need to create, “nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). Thus understood, God is God apart from and antecedent to any element of economy. Significantly, however, the theological intelligibility of divine beatitude through naming is only part of a process that must proceed to its identification in history. God's economy is the wider context in which the concepts acquired through naming are articulated, which is why a robust account of God's perfect life he lives from and in himself is insufficient if it separates theology from economy. God's reconciling activity in Christ and the Spirit is therefore essential to grasping the proper significance of God's goodness and beatitude alike. From revelation we learn that it belongs to the nature of goodness to communicate itself, and so God's creative activity befits God's possession and enjoyment of his own goodness without adding anything to it. Moreover, God's blessedness is not the false bliss of the pagan gods; God does not to lock himself up in stolid isolation but extends his life miraculously to creatures to elicit their gratitude and joy at “the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Understanding the economic articulation of perfections like God's goodness and beatitude help us discern how the truth of God's perfection obtains apart from his economy.
This is in very abbreviated form an account of God's self-correspondence that notes the utility of both action and names for a theology of God's perfections. Neither one is sufficient apart from the other. Names possess an essential significance that is inseparable from their intertextual connection with other words across the biblical canon, as well as the immediate logic implied in their grammar and syntax. Yet the full significance of any name acquires its articulation across the whole history of God's works, in which the gospel events critically chasten otherwise infelicitous associations of concepts abstracted from their articulation.Footnote 65 Much more should be said to vindicate such a coordination, but this outline suffices to gesture toward a more constructive account that takes the concerns of both Aquinas and Barth seriously insofar as their approaches recognize the importance of both general and specific inquiries into divine being and activity.
What might these brief reflections suggest about the character of divine actuality that best enables the confession of God as God? God's decisive self-demonstration in Christ is indeed paramount for our understanding of God's being, but an unwarranted historicism that failed to discern the full depths of Christ's deity in his eternal beatitude with the Father and Spirit would fail to understand God's self-demonstration. No moment of the theologian's inquiry into God can be “bracketed” from the others, but this does not mean consequently that within this encounter theology is unable to say anything more comprehensive about the actuality of God without violence to its determinacy. God's activity in the economy is absolutely binding on us, but it need not for that reason be irreducible. Indeed we have every right to question the polarization of general and specific or comprehensive and determinate elements of theological inquiry; these two need not be competitive, depending on the kind of inquiry into divine actuality theology proposes. Contrary to some entrenched dispositions this side of Kant, it is not manifestly less speculative to adopt an account of actuality that leans toward determinate totality rather than originating plenitude. Both involve wide-ranging judgments about what there is to see in revelation. The question is rather more explicitly what kind of actuality best enables theology's task of biblical reasoning to confess adequately the God of the gospel as God. We have suggested that the way Scripture talks about God's goodness suggests the very distinction between form and content that Barth resists, and that furthermore this reinforces the distinction between God in himself and toward us as something more than merely heuristic. While an emphasis on God's action is crucial for the chastening of concepts and names in accordance with the gospel, a retrieval of more traditional accounts of the divine names could help theologians resist the correlationist impulse of some contemporary theology. Theology needs to subvert its noetic restriction in the order of knowing, not to master God but to acknowledge an ontic Object that is infinitely more and greater than the dialectics with which He is confessed. Therefore, to the extent that resisting a strictly correlationist inquiry into divine being and activity is necessary to confessing God as God, an account of actuality as original fullness is more accommodating to theological reason's responsibilities. As we turn now to consider divine self-consistency and then God's relation to creation, the reasons for resisting a strictly correlationist inquiry will become more transparent.
God's Self-Consistency
In our analysis of Barth's doctrine of God, we saw how he leans proportionately on articulating God's self-correspondence as the electing God rather than God's self-correspondence as God “as such.” Barth would see this as a distinction without a difference, but it is nevertheless implicit in the tension between his invocation of the counterfactual hypothetical that God would be self-identical without the decree and creation, and yet his inability to render this invocation intelligible when discussing the divine perfections of grace and mercy. The problem, therefore, is one of not being able to demonstrate how the election of grace is itself an act self-consistent with his nature. Some responses to this problem in the wake of Barth suggest that the true problem lies in the question itself and the counterfactual that implies it. This section proposes a different response. To this end, we first set forth a brief apology for the conceptual import of analysis into divine self-consistency, and second provide an outline of how it helps render coherent and intelligible theology's appeal to God's self-sufficiency as the one who would remain in undiminished perfection without creatures, and thus the confession of God as God.
Self-consistency is itself a conceptual gloss on the biblical theme of God's faithfulness, and since dogmatic reasoning should be an extension of exegesis, we should start by seeing how Scripture orders the question of self-consistency. Moses's encounter with God in the burning bush is instructive on the question of self-consistency if we pay attention to the grammatical features of the text and its literary order. When God calls to Moses from the burning bush and says, “i am who i am” (Exod 3:14), the tautologous character of the statement performs grammatically what it communicates: something absolutely self-referential that requires nothing relative for its intelligibility.Footnote 66 That is, the self-sufficiency of this name's form as a tautology speaks to the self-sufficiency of God, who here refers himself to himself in concise but pregnant reflexivity. After this initial and ambiguous statement, God proceeds to tell Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘i am has sent me to you’” (Exod 3:14). On the basis of the self-referential statement, a further declaration follows that is relative to Israel; the “deep logic” of both statements is that because God is “i am who i am,” then he can be the same for his people.Footnote 67 Taken together, the first two declarations are clear indications of God's self-consistency: God is self-identical and proves himself the same in his presence with his people. Though God's consistency with himself is left without much by way of metaphysical intelligibility, part of theology's task of dogmatic reasoning is to render this statement intelligible in light of what it confesses about God's nature. For the moment, it is crucial to observe the order of these two statements declaring God's self-consistency. God for Israel is the same God who is in himself, but if the grammatical details of the passage are of any significance then they suggest that the first statement's self-referential character means that God's self-identity is irreducible and his economic condescension is not. Only on the basis of the first statement's absoluteness does the second statement's relativity acquire its comforting power. The sequence of the two statements therefore speaks to a material order between them.
However, God is not finished naming himself. Both of these initial “i am” statements are preparatory for the final statement, in which God reveals the Tetragrammaton, the most proper of God's most proper names.Footnote 68 If the first two statements are unique in what they mean, the third, “in contrast to both, expresses God's uniqueness merely by what it is.”Footnote 69 In this sense it is set apart from the other two; indeed, it is God's “holy name” (Lev 20:3). The difference between God's proper name yhwh (הוהי) and his name “i am” in its absolute and relative pronouncements is that the first two statements are plays on and therefore encompassed within the third. In an important sense logically, the Tetragrammaton has priority over the two “i am” statements “by virtue of its status as a personal proper name that fixes the referent of biblical discourse.”Footnote 70 What may we make of this? If the Tetragrammaton fixes the referent of the other two, then it shows how discourse about God's self-consistency fundamentally concerns the God of Israel who reveals himself in Jesus Christ. However, discourse about God's self-consistency will require absolute and relative moments corresponding to God's pronouncements as “i am who i am” in the first moment and the “I am” pronounced on the lips of Jesus in the second (John 8:58). In the conceptual idiom of our present analysis, divine self-consistency will therefore be a matter of elucidating that with which God's activity is faithful, both internally and externally. This is part of the significance of “i am who i am” preceding the Tetragrammaton in our text.Footnote 71 The scholastic vocabulary and distinctions are particularly useful in a consideration of God's act and being for precisely these reasons. Specifying the logical consistency of God's outgoing immanent acts with his perfection corresponds to the absolute moment, and specifying the consistency of the former with God's external works corresponds to the relative moment. Something similar is found in Aquinas's two-step consideration of God's will as pure act, in which he identifies God's absolute necessity to be himself and only his hypothetical necessity to be the Creator. Whatever approach one adopts, both absolute and relative moments are part of rendering intelligible the self-consistency of the God of Israel in the missions of the Son and Spirit, and thus confessing the God who is faithful to save because faithful to himself. When God swears to Abraham, God swears by himself and not merely by his promise or decree (Gen 22:16; Heb 6:13).
God's self-consistency is therefore a matter of articulating that with which God's activity is faithful, both internally and externally. Most theologies have an explicit or implicit account of that with which God's external and internal activity is consistent; bringing these notions to light is the critical task of dogmatic reasoning about God's self-consistency.Footnote 72 On one level God's external activity is consistent with God's internal activity that is its ground: the Trinity's external works are indivisible and yet preserve their personal properties and order because these common external works correspond to the distinctive internal acts logically grounding the divine persons’ relations to one another.Footnote 73 And yet on another level God's essential internal activity is logically self-consistent with God's perfection, which is intelligible as the notional acts of begetting and spirating (opera relationis), as well as the self-referred personal internal activity among the Father, Son, and Spirit on the basis of their preexisting relations (opera Dei simpliciter personalia). Various theologies might construe the details of this general structure of God's faithfulness differently given doctrinal differences in other areas. Where differences in soteriological conceptions of Christ's mediatorship obtain, differences likely also find expression in God's outgoing internal act that grounds God's works of grace. Thus the visible mission of the Son could be self-consistent with the Trinity's predestination of Christ's humanity and his procession from the Father. Alternatively, the visible mission of the Son could be self-consistent with his appointment as the Mediator in the covenant of redemption, which itself follows the pattern of the intrapersonal activity of the Trinity (opera simpliciter personalia). Despite their differences, both are accounts of the self-consistency of God's external activity with his essential internal activity that seek also to show the consistency of God's outgoing internal works with what logically precedes them: notional and self-referential intratrinitarian activity. That is, both accounts seek to reduce God's acts to his perfection so as to account for God's self-consistency as God, and not merely God's self-consistency as the electing or covenanting God. Aside from concerns about unwarranted vestiges of voluntarism, why is it crucial for the acknowledgment of God as God to observe the logical reducibility of God's acts to his perfection?
To outline an answer to this question, we must concentrate on the function of God's internal activity relative to divine perfection. God is pure act and therefore God's internal activity is identical with his essence, but certain of God's internal acts are not essential to the truth of his perfection, whereas others are. This distinction must be articulated theologically by distinguishing between absolute and relative moments of theological inquiry, which results in an account of God's perfection as both plenitude and principle, or sufficiency and efficaciousness. Both aspects are part of theology's concentration on its material object, but the former, self-referential moment has material priority over the relative moment. The reason why is that God's notional acts of begetting and spirating are constitutive of God's perfection, thereby serving as the ontological presupposition of any common acts whereby God relates to anything outwith himself. If this ontological order is not observed and carefully rendered in speech and thought, God's outgoing internal acts become logically irreducible and thus function to designate divine perfection tout court. To render God's internal activity proceeding to an external term irreducible is in effect to adopt a correlationist inquiry companionable to a notion of divine actuality as totality. However, the problem with failing to specify God's perfection as something logically antecedent to and intelligible without God's outgoing immanent operations is that God's perfection becomes either really rooted in or coterminous with his will, or else it remains something unknown. Under these circumstances, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate how God's outgoing internal acts do not contribute essentially to God's perfection either ontically or noetically. That is, even where one affirms that God's outgoing internal acts are free and nonconstitutive, without a demonstration of their logical consistency with God's perfection, one jeopardizes this affirmation by making God's perfection unintelligible without at least an anticipatory reference to creatures. The consequence is that affirmations about God's intrinsic perfection become subject to easy abuse or dismissal. An account of actuality as originating fullness helps guard against such failures by enabling theology's ministerial metaphysics to confess God's internal activity as principle and plenitude. Robust teaching about God's intrinsic perfection will therefore have something to say about God's internal activity, including the distinctions noted here between essential and personal internal activity. These distinctions serve the articulation and intelligibility of God's absolute self-referentiality as part of theological reason's two-step, complementary inquiry concerning God's pure actuality. The distinction of moments in this inquiry renders God's outgoing internal acts logically reducible to God's perfection as God, in a way that the intratrinitarian activity is not. Note: logically reducible, and not actually reducible. There is no physical motion in God, and so nothing imperfect that is reducible to something perfect. God is perfectly simple, and so the reducibility in question is only logical. Specifying these notions proves important for the character of what Robert Sokolowski calls the “Christian distinction,” namely, that “God could and would be God even if there were no world.”Footnote 74 For unless God is intelligible as blessed and glorious apart from and prior to any reference to creatures, description of God's perfection is likely to be exhausted in description of the conditions for the possibility of God's relation to creation at best, and in description of God's relation to creation at worst. To see why, we now need to consider the relation that follows from the character of God's self-correspondence and self-consistency outlined earlier. Once the character of this relation is in view, we will see why confessing God as God is best secured by distinguishing the complementary confession of YHWH's simple perfection as plenitude (“i am who i am”) and as principle (“i am has sent me to you”).
Relation and the Confession of God
Throughout our study we have seen the central importance of teaching about God's intrinsic being and activity for the interpretation and intelligibility of God's relation to the world. In the previous section we argued for the importance of discriminations about God's perfection antecedent to and without those initiating acts that refer God's fullness of life to his presence with creatures. Such considerations have material priority over questions about God's relation to creation because the latter is intelligible only in light of the former. This is true for both Aquinas and Barth, though we have observed notable differences in light of their understandings of God's actuality and self-consistency, differences that emerge in light of their distinct approaches to God's self-correspondence. The question about God's relation to the world involves for both thinkers the no less important question of God's distinction from creation; the proper confession of God as God is at the forefront of their deliberations. If arguing God's absolute self-consistency discloses the “special sense of sameness in God “before” and “after” creation,” then arguing God's noetic and ontic distinction from all things in his relation to the world discloses “the special sense of otherness between God and the world.”Footnote 75 In this final section we need to consider in summary fashion how best to negotiate God's relation to the world while taking seriously this concern for confessing God as God and thus rendering in speech as well as thought the insight that God is not a kind of thing (Deus non est in genere).
How then are we to understand God's relation to the world in terms that capture both ontically and noetically God's qualitative distinction from all things? We acquire some initial orientation toward these questions by returning to Barth's analysis of God's relation to creation. At the conclusion of the previous chapter we noted that Barth's view is formally parallel to late-medieval nominalist conceptions of God bearing a real relation to creation. The medieval nominalists in question adopt a line of thought Anselm advances in his Monologion. Notably when Anselm considers how God might bear an accidental relation to creation that does not violate his immutability, he frames the question in terms of God's self-consistency: God's “essence is, as is clear, entirely the same as itself, substantially. But is it not sometimes different from itself in terms of its accidents?”Footnote 76 Anselm's goal is to procure both divine immutability and yet the accidental or contingent character of God's relation to the world. Prayerfully thinking out loud without really landing on any concrete proposal, Anselm proceeds to distinguish proper from improper accidents: the former indicate some change in the substance to which they adhere, whereas the latter, like relations, do not. He illustrates this with an example of his relation to someone who will be born next year: at the moment he is not taller than this other person, but when they are born he is considered taller relative to that person and thus bears a relation to them without having undergone any substantial change himself. We should note what is unexpressed in Anselm's example, namely, that it presupposes a foundation in the subject of the relation for the comparison with the term of that relation. On this basis he notes that any accidental relation God bears to creatures impugns neither his immutability nor simplicity because the accident does not really add anything to him. He concludes: “The supreme essence is, therefore, never different from itself, not even accidentally. Just as substantially, it is always the same as itself. Whatever the rules are for using the term ‘accident’ properly, this is true and beyond doubt: nothing may be predicated of the supreme and immutable nature which might suggest that it is mutable.”Footnote 77 What secures God's self-consistency in relating to the world is that God does not undergo any change at the onset of this relation because, presumably, there is always already a foundation in God's being and activity for this relation. Through a purely formal comparison, such a foundation is what we find in Barth's account of God's self-determination, in which God posits himself in relation to creatures in and through Christ. What should we make of this?
Recall that the nominalist theologians affirm three of Aquinas's criteria for real relations, and yet only reject the fourth. Thus they affirm that (a) God and creatures are both real, (b) both are distinct, and (c) that both have a foundation for the relation in question. However, they deny that (d) both terms must belong to the same ontological order if there is to be a real relation between them. When Suárez addresses these nominalists’ views, he notes pacifically that the difference between this view of real relations and Aquinas's view of nonreal relations is not a question of orthodoxy because they affirm God's perfection. This is a welcome preface to everything that follows as we try to navigate the full confession of God as God. That said, Suárez raises an important objection to the metaphysical details of the nominalists’ position that is relevant for our analysis. Even though the nominalists’ view avoids attributing imperfection to God through the acquisition of accidents, Suárez maintains that God cannot “be related to creatures through his intrinsic form and entity. For this is proper to being of the same order, but God and a creature are of entirely diverse orders, as is self-evident.”Footnote 78 If God and creatures are not part of the same order, then how or why would we understand his relation to creatures as real? Suárez implies that the question about order is not as superfluous as the nominalist tradition in view supposes, because if God relates to creatures through himself then can God's relation to creatures even begin to be described as real? On Suárez's terms one would need to assume at least a formal proportion between God and creatures to get such a claim off the ground. Another way of registering this concern is to ask whether positing a real relation of God to the world sufficiently keeps God's qualitative distinction in view noetically and ontically. That is, does the metaphysical intelligibility of our confession of God's relation to creation maintain the confession of God as God ontologically in terms of what we say about God's being, but also noetically in the sense that God's perfection is intelligible without this relation? We need to address the ontic and noetic aspects in turn.
First, we must confess that ontologically God and creatures are not part of the same order. Aquinas and Barth are almost of one mind on this score. Aquinas's denial of a mutually real relation between God and creatures relies in no small part on the immeasurable disproportion between the two as concerns order. The intrinsic structure of God's life is described in how God is ordered to himself in the reflexive circularity of his eternal beatitude. God's will is determined to his goodness, for which reason all contingent acts of God's will are acts self-consistent with his nature: “because God's will is content with His own goodness it follows that He wills nothing else except on that account, not that He wills nothing else.”Footnote 79 Because this self-reflexivity of divine bliss means that God's acts of creation and grace order creatures to himself and not vice versa, then God's blessedness is the plenitudinous principle of the benefit God bestows in creation. The notion of order here serves the purpose of showing that God and creatures do not belong on the same plane because God does not order himself to creatures but only creatures to himself, and there is an infinite disproportion that attends this spontaneous act of mercy. The important thing to note is that the character of God's perfection does not require that God is intrinsically ordered to anything other than himself to be everything for us. Barth construes matters differently precisely out of a concern for the character of God's perfection. Resistant to any general teleological constraints on God's perfection, Barth affirms that God is free in his love to give himself to creatures by virtue of a dispositive act of lordship in which God orders himself to creatures and creatures to himself in the covenant. This self-posited teleology is consistent with God's perfection because God's act of self-determination is understood in terms of a self-qualification that does not impugn God's constancy or perfection. In this regard, Barth shares some similar convictions with Anselm in a considerably different register. Therefore, both Aquinas and Barth affirm that God is not part of the same order as creatures ontologically in the sense that God is not another piece of furniture in the room. However, Barth's account of God's inner-divine teleology does depart from Aquinas's notion of order. Insofar as Barth affirms that God's actuality is unthinkable apart from God's self-posited relation to creatures through Christ, his view prompts the kind of question Suárez asks the nominalists: Is this sufficient to confess God as God noetically? In other words, is this view of self-posited real relations sufficient to render God's perfection intelligible without God's movement toward creatures?
The argument thus far leads to the conclusion that we should affirm the intelligibility of God antecedent to and possibly without his relation to creation and just so preserve the Christian distinction. This relates to the thread we have been tracing in trying to discern the appropriate construal of God's actuality that theology recognizes, which we have argued is bound up with decisions about God's being and activity. Understanding God's self-correspondence and self-consistency properly requires that we demonstrate the intelligibility of God above and without his works, and so show the logical reducibility of God's activity to God's perfection. This concern is easily misunderstood if interpreted as licensing detached and curious contemplation of God's inner life, as if knowledge of God's essence in itself were possible for pilgrims or as if such knowledge exhausted theology's responsibilities. Employed responsibly, construing God himself as the principal material object of theology and the demonstration of its intelligibility prior to and apart from creatures serves the confession of God as God that is the requisite backdrop to understanding God's works of creation, reconciliation, and consummation as acts of God. The material object of theology in its full scope is, after all, God and his works of nature, grace, and glory. Yet if these works are not constitutive of God's perfection ontically, then theology should be able to render this confession noetically such that God is intelligible as possibly having been without them. These considerations bear upon the question of God's relation to creation because they demonstrate how the proper understanding of this relation upholds the recognition of God as God noetically. We may better appreciate the relevance of this aspect of the Christian distinction by surveying some alternatives.
Contemporary reflection on God's distinction from creation sidelines this noetic aspect to the extent that reflection is situated within correlationist frames of inquiry.Footnote 80 God's distinction from creation is thus thought to be secured where God is confessed as ontologically distinct from creatures, without pressing the inquiry further to acknowledge God as intelligible antecedent to and possibly without his relation to creatures. This is where Barth's account would be best served by his earlier insight that God is beyond all relations and not simply all but self-posited relations. The point is a fine one, but it nevertheless bears consideration. Where God's relation to the world is understood as a transcendental relation, for example, theology's understanding and description of the terms of this relation is restricted to and exhausted by description of the relation itself.Footnote 81 Similarly, God's relation to creation could be understood in terms of a “Chalcedonian pattern” stressing the irreducible asymmetry between God and creatures that coherently acknowledges God's qualitative distinction from creation ontically, without ever managing to render this acknowledgment noetically. Whether it is a mutually real relation of the nominalist variety, a transcendental relation, or Chalcedonian pattern that construes the relation between God and creatures, none capture the full insight that God is not in a genus, which is one of the linchpins of the denial of any real relation of God to the world. How does the traditional account secure this?
We have already noted that to construe God's relation to creatures as a rationate relation is not to deny any relation of God to creatures, but to prescind from any positive description of that relation. It is fair to ask Aquinas if his apophatic reserve is so thoroughly necessary, and whether theology is not licensed to depict and name God's unique relation to creatures without the strictures of the conceptuality of relation. Regardless of how we answer that question, teaching about the mixed character of the relation between God and creatures serves helpfully to remind us of the radical difference of the relations that obtain in God himself and the relations he bears to creatures. God's internal relations are intrinsic to his perfection: the relation between the Father and Son, as between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is that which “follows from the perfection of the thing.”Footnote 82 This is precisely what an account of God's self-consistency enables us to deny demonstratively of God's relation to creation. God's external relations do not simply follow from God's perfection itself, but are those to which God's matchless perfection de facto extends itself in spontaneous gratuity. The relation God bears to creation is characterized by his reflexively perfect bliss and simplicity. God's perfection is complete in reference to nothing but itself: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are what they are by virtue of their relative opposition to one another, and not even in part by virtue of a relative opposition to the world. God's possession and enjoyment of his goodness in triune fecundity mean both that God's relation to creation is supremely appropriate and becoming of God, while nevertheless being a complete miracle. There is nothing inhering in God that requires or inevitably leads to this relation, but this relation is nevertheless fitting of God. If God is such, then understanding his presence is no straightforward undertaking. The nonreal relations with which we try to understand God's presence are grasped only indirectly in Scripture, but acutely at those moments where God presents himself indirectly.Footnote 83 When God discloses himself to Moses, God descends in the cloud and stands with Moses in his presence (Exod 34:5), but God does so only by obscuring and thereby protecting what Moses sees (Exod 33:20–23). Moses must hide behind a rock and be covered by God's hand so that Moses does not see God like he sees anything else. Moses may only see God's “back”; he sees God indirectly, and it is enough to make his face shine (Exod 34:29–30). Similar instances could be marshaled when Christ is questioned or accused in the Gospels and yet responds indirectly, redirects questions, and subverts accusations. In each instance the reality of God's presence in Christ is not as directly available and transparent as creatures think. And so the metaphysical intelligibility of God's presence to creatures likewise involves a critique of any parallel we might draw to the directness with which we render intelligible the relations among creatures.
The conceptuality of nonreal relations can serve this critique by reminding us that God's relations to creatures do not follow from his perfection in its essential intelligibility. God is free from composition in himself, but also from any ontic or noetic composition with a greater whole outside himself – even where he is understood as relating to it in irreducible asymmetry and qualitative transcendence. God must be confessed and should be known as such. The reason: “as that which participates is posterior to that which is essential, so likewise is that which is participated.”Footnote 84 In other words, God's primacy is not qualified and contingent upon the creature's existence. God is unqualifiedly primary and absolute in himself, “i am who i am.” Hence, in himself God is God in simple blessedness, in perfectly free love, antecedent to and possibly without any reference to the economy. Just so the confession of God as God is rendered with the radicality positive teaching about God's perfect life in himself requires.
Such positive teaching will require the kind of metaphysical thought forms, like acts of reduction (zurückdenken), necessary to render God's perfect life in himself intelligible to the extent this is possible for pilgrims. Such thinking does not look away from the determinacy of God's activity for us but attends radically and comprehensively to the depths of that activity. The insight we touched upon at the beginning of this chapter concerned Aquinas's complementary consideration of pure act and how it enables him to confess the distinction in God between absolute and hypothetical necessity, thereby demonstrating the intelligibility of God's perfection as such, or theologically. In this section we have offered a minimalist account of why such a process is warranted biblically and sound theologically. Systematic theology reckons with God as pure act through a complementary inquiry that assumes several steps, similar to how it reckons with God's name, YHWH, as the primary referent of biblical discourse about God. However theologians do this, and whatever specific philosophical tools they employ, the procedure in question must account for the two moments of inquiry into God's pure actuality that correspond to God's two pronouncements that play on and are encompassed within the Tetragrammaton. God says first, “i am who i am,” and to this performative grammar of self-reference theology recognizes in one logical moment that God's life as plenitude is entirely self-referred. This account of self-referential plenitude serves a critical function in an account of God's self-correspondence that shows how God's relative perfections and activity derive radically from his intrinsic perfection, a process which we suggested is secured in a traditional concept of God's goodness. Thus is God's perfection intelligible as antecedent to and possibly without creatures and the contingencies of history. God says second, “i am has sent me to you,” and eventually we find in Jesus Christ both the “i am” and the sending in one man (John 8:58). To this pronouncement theology recognizes in a second logical moment that God's life as principle refers creatures to himself as their Creator. As the thrice-holy God, God is not ordered to creatures but set apart in himself; his works are holy in that they set creatures apart and order them to himself (Isa 6:3; Lev 20:26). The relation of theology and economy is thereby given shape. Theology's principal material object is God himself considered as God's perfection, intelligible without the economy, and as such this object outpaces the formality with which the mind directs itself in prayerful expectation to this object. The subversion of the correlation of theological inquiry into God's being and activity, and the confession of God this subversion enables, therefore does not follow from formal principles of thought or general metaphysics necessarily but from material teaching about the fullness of life God enjoys in himself from and to all eternity. Imperatively, recognition of this principal material object is only a passing moment of theology's obedient concentration on its genuine material object: God and all things in relation to God as their principle and end. Only where the confession of God as God serves and does not marginalize such concentration on the divine economy is it genuinely theology.
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We have sought an account of God's perfection that does not separate God from creatures or identify God with creation, but which upholds God's Godness both ontically and noetically. This involved an exploration of distinct construals of theology and economy and how reflection on God's being and activity grounds the intelligibility of God's relation to creation. In so doing, a number of issues surfaced that deserve to be on the agenda of contemporary systematic theology. First, systematic theology must not so occupy itself with polemics against metaphysics that it fails to see how the ambition required of its response to revelation involves metaphysical questions implicitly or explicitly. Competing understandings of divine actuality are but one example of why explicit attention to metaphysical matters is wise. Our analysis has also suggested that reflection on such issues in traditions as different as those represented by Aquinas and Barth has always involved accounts of the moral determinations of theological reasoning and the habits and virtues proper to such reasoning. Approaching concepts like pure act in isolation from the intellectual virtues and movements of thought within which these concepts are employed traditionally is therefore to miss their ministerial meaning entirely.Footnote 85 So, for example, questions about commonalities of a “single-act perspective” between Barth and Aquinas are underdetermined to the extent that they fail to reflect on the dispositions and strategies that ply concepts like pure actuality apart in service to theological ends.Footnote 86 Second, while many theologians in the twentieth century and the present have considered the relationship between theology and economy in terms of the relationship between the immanent and economy Trinity, or concerns with “Christocentrism,” our analysis shows that there are equally fundamental matters that often receive insufficient attention. These are matters of what we have called God's self-correspondence and self-consistency, consideration of which is aided by recovering that locus of theological inquiry devoted to God's works (de operibus Dei). Contemporary theology would benefit from renewed critical attention to God's internal and external activity, including the distinctions and relationships between the two. Carefully tracing out the requisite distinctions for confessing God's perfection in his self-enactment in time and his blessed self-sufficiency from which these acts spring is part of the task of a doctrine of God's internal activity. So, too, is construing the subject of God's external works, the proper construal of which requires an intelligible articulation of God's self-consistency. This will involve a demonstration of the intelligibility of God's self-identity without his self-posited relation to creatures as only one provisional but essential moment of a complementary inquiry into God's actuality. The question is neither nonsensical nor an inordinate occupation with magisterial metaphysics necessarily, but is prompted by positive teaching about God's majesty. Finally, contemporary reflection on God's relation to the world would benefit from careful considerations of how this relation depends upon materially prior teaching about God's life in himself and how the proper understanding of this relation attends questions of the proper confession of God.
The details of how systematic theologians should negotiate these issues will remain a topic of critical reflection. At a minimum, theology must see itself in Moses's predicament, having to heed both the Lord's prohibition, “Do not come near” (Exod 3:5), and command, “Who has made man's mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak” (Exod 4:11–12). Webster comments: “The command is also a promise – that God will make holy reason capable of that of which sin makes it incapable … Idolatry is reproved, not by silence, but by speeches that set forth what God has taught.”Footnote 87 We have suggested that the Christian distinction grounded in an account of God's perfect life in himself should find a place among these speeches. This means securing the intelligibility of God's perfection antecedent to and possibly without creatures because this most coherently grounds the confession of God as God without violence but in supreme service to the confession of the humanity of God. Our preliminary suggestions throughout this chapter have only gestured toward a fuller account, development of which is the joyful and prayerful task of theology: “Great are the works of the lord, studied by all who delight in them” (Ps 111:2).
