Of Chalcedon, keys, and 900 pound gorillas
A while back, Pr. Paul McCain did a post on his blog suggesting that Calvinistic theology might do well to pay a little more attention to Jesus and the Gospel, rather than making God's sovereignty so much its bottom line. The result was a firestorm of failed wit and forced rejoinder in the Calvinistic blogosphere, in which our Reformed brethren struggled in vain to find some allegedly parallel accusation to level at Lutherans in order make Pr. McCain's comments appear to be unfounded. The results ranged from the silly to the virtually incoherent, and pretty universally were lamer than the man the Lord healed at Bethesda.
But now, it's getting a little weird.
Calvinism's christology leans Nestorian. I'm not sure that I'd go quite as far as Pr. McCain, and actually accuse it of that heresy. It's not that Calvinists consciously deviate from christological orthodoxy; it's more that Calvinism falls into one of the same traps into which Roman Catholicism falls: granting a human philosophical system (Aristotelian scholasticism in Rome's case, and Platonism in Geneva's) what amounts to a veto power over what is and is not allowed to be true of God.
Calvinism asserts that if Christ's human nature is truly human, it must be locally confined to a specific geographical place, since human beings can only be one such place at a time. Given its Platonism, it must assert that; after all, in platonic thought things receive their definition from the characteristics they share with other members of a common class. It is a characteristic of God to be omnipresent, but a characteristic of human beings to be present in no more than one place at a time. Ergo, the divine nature of Christ may be omnipresent, but the human nature must be confined to one locality at a time.
Should God decree that I be in more than one place at a time, would I at that moment cease to be human? Calvinism's philosophical underpinnings require that it answer in the affirmative! Jesus, then, can and must be omnipresent according to His divine nature- but He cannot be in more than one place at a time according to His human nature, if it is to be truly human!
Whether or not the result is actually Nestorianism, to all practical purposes it might as well be. The Incarnation never actually takes place. God never actually becomes a human being; rather, He partially inhabits one. Christ's human nature is like a pair of pants: it contains part of Him, but not all. Christ may be present according to His divine nature where He is not present according to His human nature. Thus, the human and divine are effectively separated, Nestorian-style, wherever the divine nature is present, but the human nature is not. It is possible to speak of one existing in isolation from the other!
The human nature of Jesus, Calvinism asserts, is physically located at the right hand of God, and thus cannot be present in His body and blood at the altar. That this requires that heaven be a geographical location- just where is it on the star charts, anyway?- fazes Calvinists as little as the question of how it is possible to get literally and geographically to the right of a Being Who is omnipresent! For "the right hand of God" to be a metaphor, and heaven other than a geographical place, would be for Calvinism's christological and sacramental theologies to simply collapse. But to sustain those theologies requires one to effectively adopt the heresy that it is possible not simply to distinguish, but to actually to separate the two natures of Christ!
Pr. McCain mentioned an incident in Scripture which pretty well puts paid to the Calvinist view of the relationship between the human and the divine in Christ anyway- and demolishes their argument against a bodily Real Presence. In John 20:19-28, the disciples are described as meeting behind locked doors, for fear of the Jews. But suddenly, Jesus is standing in their midst. The locked doors were unable to keep Him out!
So how did He get in? The care with which John establishes that the doors were locked leaves little doubt that His sudden presence in a room from which He had been excluded by a lock was miraculous. If one sheds one's bondage to unbiblical and purely human platonic presuppositions, and acknowledges that answer to the question of where a Man who is also Almighty God keeps His human nature is the same as the answer to the question of where the proverbial 900- pound gorilla sleeps- anywhere He wants- all objections to the Real Presence instantly collapse.
They can be maintained only by stubbornly adhering to the non sequitur that any real communication of attributes between the two natures of Christ- any real incarnation- would result in the human nature of Christ ceasing to be truly human. The classical christological formulas of church history cry out against that conclusion as clearly as does the clear intention of John 20:19-28!
But it seems that one of Pr. McCain's Calvinistic interloculators has a response to his question: He had a key!
Well, OK. He now says that he wasn't serious. I can well believe it. That blog is the most remarkable collection of eisegesis, rationalization, special pleading, and question-begging I've come across in a long time. Read, and be amazed.
Meanwhile, I've added this comment:
If I might jump in here, it might be well to explain a point which Calvinists often miss: ubiquitarianism is not, and never has been, a Lutheran dogma. Luther never insisted upon it, and the Confessions nowhere teach it.
But one reason why Pr. McCain has not been more responsive to your arguments is that you're missing his point. He hasn't been necessarily arguing for ubiquitarianism- which, like a number of other philosophical positions (consubstantiation comes to mind), Calvinists often mistakenly characterize as Lutheran doctrine. That's what happens when one imposes one's own questions upon somebody else's answers!
But ubiquitarianism is a side issue. For now, I'm going to assume, out of charity, that you were being facetious in your remark about the key. Obviously, in the absence of any mention of such a key in the text, the care with which John makes the point that the room was locked implicitly asserts that Christ's entry into the room was remarkable in view of that fact. A key wouldn't cut it. Rather than reflecting careful adherence to the historical-grammatical method, to go reaching for a naturalistic understanding of what the text describes would demonstrate an unwillingness to submit one's own, naturalistic dogmatic and philosophical presuppositions to the judgment of the text.
If one does, indeed, faithfully interpret the text, Christ's entry into the room must at least be seen, as I mentioned, as remarkable in view of the fact that the door was locked. In fact, I would go so far as to say that to substitute the word "miraculous" for "remarkable" would not do violence to the apparent intention of the text.
Now, the nature of the miracle is an interesting question. Could Jesus have made Himself invisible, been in the room all the time, and suddenly appeared to His disciples- a divine game of "peek-a-boo," as it were? Sure. He's God. He can do anything He wants with His human nature. Or yours or mine, for that matter. It would have been an easy thing for Him to have concealed His presence from them.
Could He have simply walked through the door, without being ubiquitous? Of course. He's God. He can do anything He wants with His human nature. He once walked on water, didn't He? Would walking through a door or a wall be that much harder?
Could He have created a key? Absolutely! He created the world! Why not a key?
You're right: there are all sorts of things which might have happened. But we are limited by the text's clear implication that whatever happened was remarkable, in view of the fact that the doors were locked.
So could He cause His own body and blood to be literally present in, with, and under the bread and wine every time the Sacrament is celebrated?
Of course. He's God. He can do anything He wants with His human nature.
Is it possible for His body and blood to be present in he Supper, but not physically? No- not because He can't do what He wants with His human nature, but because a non-physical presence of a body is an oxymoron. "Physical" is merely a synonym for "bodily," an adjectival equivalent of the very noun Jesus uses. And as we've seen, the Zwinglian position, which Calvin rightly rejected, has no possible basis- if it be conceded that Christ, being God, can do whatever He wants with His human nature.
Could Jesus be present everywhere in the created universe according to His human nature, if He chose to be? Sure. He's God. He can do anything with His human nature He wants.
Hmmm?
Would it cease to be fully human if He willed it to be omnipresent? Only if one is limited by the terms of a single completely human and far from universally accepted philosophical system that is in no sense endorsed by Scripture.
Would it the human and the divine thereby be conflated into a single nature? Not at all. Omnipresence could remain a proper attribute of the divine nature, while being communicated to His human nature not as its own proper attribute, but by means of the personal union. On the same basis, if He chose that I should be present simultaneously, though non-locally, throughout the universe, it would be so- and I would be no less human for it. Nor would it make the human nature of Jesus less than human if the person of Jesus, through the hypostatic union, were to access the prerogatives of divinity with relation to a condition contrary to ordinary nature with regard to His human nature. What is true of His walking on water could be claimed, were one to assert it, of Ephesians 4:10.
What, precisely, does it mean that He "ascended above all the heavens, that He might fill all things?" Sure sounds like ubiquitarianism to me! But the Confessions, following Luther's example, stop short of insisting on that. Could we? Well, if one confesses the sola Scriptura and in principle rejects human philosophy as a source of doctrine, it's hard to miss the point that Ephesians 4:10 is a stronger scriptural argument for ubiquitarianism than can be adduced against it!
But we Lutherans, contrary to the conclusion to which Calvinists usually jump, just aren't interested in telling Jesus where He has to keep His human nature. And that's the point: He's God. He can do with His human nature whatever He wants. We, on the other hand, don't get to dictate to Him on this matter.
I believe it was Beza who sought the unity of the human and the divine natures of Jesus in their common name. Luther saw it in the Person of Jesus. If it's to be found elsewhere... well, if you're ever burned at the stake, it won't be for Eutychianism! In fact, if it is to be found elsewhere, there never was an actual Incarnation, and we are yet in our sins.
Key in his pocket, created key, walking through the door or the wall... macht nichts. The risen Christ is simply not limited by the puny presumption of human philosophy.
Which is rather the point at which dialog between Lutherans and Calvinists has always generally tended to break down. Calvinism, after all, is heavily indebted to Platonism, just as Catholicism is to Aristotelian scholasticism; a key part of Luther's theology, though, was the rejection of any human philosophical system as a means to arrive at authoritative knowledge of a Being Whose ways are not our ways, whose thoughts are not our thoughts, and Who is simply not obligated to respect our philosophical restrictions upon Him. In fact, we understand the supplementation of Scripture by philosophical deduction to be, ipso facto, a denial of the sola Scriptura and a descent into crass rationalism. That's why we take umbrage at imposing an alien philosophical explanation upon the words, "This is my body," and "This is my blood." After all, Jesus is God. He can do anything with His human nature He wants.
But Calvinists and Catholics alike nevertheless insist on imposing an alien philosophical framework on Luther's thought. Ubiquitarianism arose less as a proposal of dogma than as a challenge to certain unsustainable assertions of Reformed dogma! If it is true that Christ's session at the right hand of God, for example, is to be understood literally and geographically, so as to preclude His bodily presence on the altar (as if God could not, after all, do whatever He wants with His own human nature), one is left with the task of explaining how one goes about getting to the geographical right of an omnipresent Being. And of course, the entire notion that heaven is a geographical location- a place itself is an assertion without much in either Scripture or logic to recommend it.
So why can't God keep His human nature anywhere He wants? Rather than "ubquitarianism," the Lutheran position is more accurately described as "multivolipresence." Christ's human nature is wherever He jolly well wants it to be. He's God. He gets to do whatever He wants to with His human nature. Or yours. Or mine. Or any other part of His creation. That's a point this Lutheran has always been amazed that Calvinists, of all people, have so much trouble with!
Parenthetically, though you haven't touched on this point, Lutherans don't teach "consubstantiation," either. We note that Christ says "this is My body," and that there is no objection to the literal understanding of those words which does not do violence to Scripture. We also note that in 1 Corinthians 11:27, Paul refers to the consecrated bread as bread. But we reject the notion that bread and body on one hand, and wine and blood on the other, are somehow combined to form a third thing. Rather, we suggest that the relationship between the earthly and the heavenly elements exist in the precisely the same relationship as exists between the human and the divine natures of Christ.
What christology results when the same analogy is drawn between the person of Christ and the Calvinistic understanding of the Sacrament, BTW?
But we're just not interested in defending philosophical positions. As much fun as it can be, philosophy simply can't trump the plain words of Scripture, or supplement it as a source of authority. And as the christological and sacramental trouble which Calvinistic Platonism lands the Reformed tradition demonstrates all too well, it can even put you in the awkward position of trying to invent contrived ways to shoehorn philosophically derived positions which contradict the plain sense of Scripture into a theology which means to affirm both the unique authority of Scripture and christological orthodoxy.
I disagree with Pr. McCain in that I think it unjust to accuse Calvinists of crass Nestorianism. Like Calvinists who accuse Lutherans of Eutychianism, Lutherans who take their criticism that far are overplaying their hands. I accept that Calvinists intend in good faith to conform to the historical definitions of christological orthodoxy. But while you guys may not be full-blown Nestorians, that doesn't mean that your christology passes Chalcedonian muster:
We also teach that we apprehend this one and only Christ-Son, Lord,
only-begotten -- in two natures; and we do this without confusing
the two natures, without transmuting one nature into the other,
without dividing them into two separate categories, without
contrasting them according to area or function. The distinctiveness
of each nature is not nullified by the union. Instead, the
"properties" of each nature are conserved and both natures concur
in one "person" and in one reality (hypostasis). They are not
divided or cut into two persons, but are together the one and
only and only-begotten Word (Logos) of God, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Thus have the prophets of old testified; thus the Lord Jesus
Christ himself taught us; thus the Symbol of Fathers (the Nicene
Creed) has handed down to us.
You shouldn't be fishing for red herrings like ubiquitarianism. You should be trying to explain why- as intent upon christological orthodoxy as you are- you should have to go so far as to propose the separation of the human and the divine natures of Christ in order to defend the untenable philosophical conclusion that the verba of the Lord's Supper cannot be taken in their plain and natural sense, because a Man Who is Almighty God is philosophically precluded from doing with His own human nature what those words, taken in their natural and obvious sense, plainly propose.
Sure, he could have created a key- though there is no reason why He would have had to. He could have played "peek-a-boo." He could have done all sorts of things. And He could have been illocally present throughout the universe.
The troublesome question is why one would prefer some other explanation- any other explanation- to that last one. After all, He's God. He can do whatever He wants with His human nature.
So where is Christ's human nature? The same place that 900 pound gorilla sleeps.
Anywhere He wants.
ADDENDUM: The blogger who first raised the key possibility has directed us in the comments section for this post to another blog, which points out that he (the original blogger) did not in fact assert that Jesus had a key, but only mentions that as a theoretical possibility among others.
He is correct. In the interest of avoiding violation of the Eighth Commandment, let it be made clear that the claim was not that Jesus had a key. It was merely that Jesus having a key was one of several options more credible as an explaination of the incident recounted in John 20 than the notion that Christ's human nature, being that of a Man Who is also God, is subject to the limitations of physics only to the degree He chooses for it to be.
He misses the point that this makes his suggestion- which, as I acknowledged above, he has now made clear was facetious- only minimally less absurd. Lose the key, and you still have an unwarranted prejudice against the communication of attributes which must, of necessity, accompany any real Incarnation.
Comments
"The Son of God, the second Person in the Trinity, being very and eternal God, of one substance, and equal with the Father, did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon him man's nature, with all the essential properties and common infirmities thereof; yet without sin: being conceived by he power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, of her substance. So that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion. Which person is very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only Mediator between God and man."
That's the level of definition, though. When it comes to applying this principle in a practical way, the WCF is considerably less successful. Section 7 is a complete train wreck:
"Christ, in the work of mediation, acteth according to both natures; by each nature doing that which is proper to itself; yet by reason of the unity of the person, that which is proper to one nature is sometimes, in Scripture, attributed to the person denominated by the other nature."
Up to the semicolon, it makes sense and is orthodox. It even carefully attributes the action to the Person "BY each nature" rather than to the natures themselves. After the semicolon, though, it's incoherent. First, how can the unity of the person be introduced by the word "yet," as if it were a new consideration being introduced, when it is in fact the basis of the statement just made? Second, how many persons do we have here? The clause "attributed to the person denominated by the other nature" sure makes it sound as if we have a person for each nature. Third, if we assume that they couldn't mean that (because it would completely contradict what they've just said), we could make a helpful edit and change that perplexing clause to "attributed to the Person, as denominated by the other nature." But then the question arises again, what the heck is "yet" doing introducing this sentence? They would end up saying, "Even though the one Person acts by means of both natures, Scripture sometimes attributes human qualities to that Person while at the same time calling Him God." And that would be complete nonsense, since the habit of Scripture they describe _depends on_ the fact that the Person acts by means of both natures. In fact, if the Person really is composed of two natures, there is no need to explain it as a scriptural figure of speech when that one person is called both man and God. So it doesn't seem as if the WCF could mean THAT either, but the only other option I see is to read it as teaching two persons in Christ.
Completely incoherent.
What I want to know is, what is an attribute and what is a property? Do you think they are the same or are they different?
Moreover, if the divine nature is simple, how could it have properties to communicate and how could it communicate any one of them without all of them?
www.energeticprocession.com
No stitching or gluing necessary. Just a simple bottom line: neither
of Christ's natures, since the Incarnation, has ever done anything in isolation from the other. The moment you ascribe even the proper attributes of one nature only to that nature, and not to the whole Christ- to the God/Man, Jesus- you've effectively denied the incarnation.
That's not really hard. It does seem a little strange, though, to find a Calvinist suggesting that we *are* the ones who are artificially stitching the two natures together. The apt analogy I've always heard us that Calvinism glues them together like two boards.
BTW, I regret that Pr. McCain linked to my post while I was still in the process of composing it (unfortunately, I couldn't get my computer to paste in Blogger until it was posted, and he was just too fast. The "razor" in the title was Occam's Razor, and I suggest you re-visit the completed post before you attribute anything to me.
You wrote "neither
of Christ's natures, since the Incarnation, has ever done anything in isolation from the other."
I am curious, when do natures perform acts or do anything?
www.energeticprocession.com
A property is something which is inherent in that something or someone. My identity is a property. So is my humanity. Were I to be so fortunate as to turn into Eric Phillips, or so unfortunate as to turn into a chair
or a salamander, I would no longer be me.
It is certainly the case, as no orthodox Chalcedonian would dispute, that there are some things- omnipresence comes to mind-
which are characteristics of Christ's divine nature, and not of His human. Similarly, literal gender is an finitude is a property of human nature. The point which Calvinists seem to miss is that neither Luther nor any Lutheran has ever claimed that because of the hypostatic union omnipresence (or ubiquity, if you prefer) becomes a property of Christ's human nature. Rather, we simply point out that whatever can be properly described as a property of either nature is- whenever and to whatever degree He wills it- also an attribute of the other.
Or, to put it another way, while it is completely proper (and in fact necessary) to talk about properties of either Christ's human or divine natures as being unique to that nature, neither nature exists in isolation
from the other. What is true of either nature is not simply true of that nature as a property; it is also true of the other as at least a possible attribute- again, finding expression as such to the when, where, how, and to the extent that He wishes.
The key is that while it's possible to discuss the properties of each nature seperately, they never are seperate. Because of the hypostatic union- because of the communication idiomatum between Christ's natures- what is true of one nature is true of the Man Who is God, and the God Who is Man- of Jesus.
Thus, on the cross, God dies- something which, given the immortality which is a property of divinity, would otherwise be impossible- because the Man Jesus, Who is God, dies. And similarly, the body and blood of the Man Jesus behaves in a way alien to the properties of humanity- i.e., inability to efficaciously will its own presence
in more than one place at the same time, and even in the non-local realm of being in which it is a property of God's nature to dwell, but not so a property of humanity.
God did not cease to be God because He experienced death through the hypostatic union as He could do in no other way. And Christ's humanity does not cease to be fully human because He is present on a multiplicity of altars on the same Sunday morning by using His perogatives as God to efficaciously will it.
Rather, Jesus- Who is both God and Man- shares the properties of both divinity and humanity- which are the properties of the person of Christ, while only, properly speaking, of one of His natures. These individually find expression as He wills, without ceasing to be, properly speaking, properties of one nature, and only attributes of the other- to the extend that He wills them to be.
In other words, in the person of Christ, two entities with very different properties co-exist in a relationship which occurs only in one other place: in the relationship of Christ's body to the bread, and His blood to the wine, in neither case merging into a third thing any more that in the incarnation Christ's humanity and divinity merged into a third thing.
Hope that helps.
And we don't get to tell Him that He can't do something because it isn't properly a function of the proper hypostasis.
Thanks for the lengthy and thoughtful reply. While I don’t have a dog in the fight concerning Lutheran/Reformed theology I do think Christology is important so that said, let me offer some constructive criticisms.
Attributes are judgments of the mind about objects so that while an object may be simple or non-composite, there can be many different judgments we can make about it. Attributes then are something in our head, not in the object, even though what we judge about the object can still be true. Attributes are therefore aspects.
Properties on the other hand are distinct inhering qualities that are really different things like whiteness or tallness. Properties are therefore features. Strictly speaking, given that God is simple, God has no properties. (Last time I checked, this was a teaching that Lutheranism adhered to. Please correct me if I am mistaken.) All of the things that we judge to be different about God are actually one and the same thing in God-namely God. God’s justice is God’s mercy is God’s wrath, which is God. Attributes don’t pick out different things in God, they are just our way of thinking of one thing in different ways because we cannot think of all of the things that are true of God under just one concept.
So then, the divine ousia or essence has no properties on such a view to communicate. Moreover, whether the communication you are proposing comes about by an act of will by the divine hypostases or not, it doesn’t seem possible to say that properties of the divine ousia are communicated to the human ousia. And since attributes are judgments of our mind about a simple object, one attribute can’t be attributed without all of them since God is simple unless of course the communicatio idiomatum is simply a tranfer of names or labels, which I don’t think you would agree to. The attributes are all one and the same in God and only plural in our way of thinking about them. Consequently I don’t understand how you can consistently state that there could be, by an act of will or not, a communication of divine properties or attributes from one nature to the other.
I have no sympathy for the Calvinist position and I agree that it tends towards Nestorianism but I think that what they are worried about is not what Lutherans state, but the logical consequences of what they state. If a communication of attributes were possible and they are all identical, how then can one be communicated and not the others as well? I agree that the Calvinist position is wrong, but I am not clear at all on how your position actually precludes it or shows it to be in error on this point since you both seem to agree that God is simple, God has no properties and attributes are judgments of the mind. Given the above, I don’t see how it is completely proper to speak of properties of the divine nature since the divine nature is simple and hence has no properties. On both the Lutheran and Reformed view, God simply is what he has.
I agree that the natures are never separate but are always hypostatically united so that the divine hypostases subsists in each ousia and each ouisa is enhypostacized by the divine hypostases. So while I agree with the communicatio idiomatum, it can’t be a communication of properties since the divine essence has no properties and it can’t be a communication of attributes since attributes our judgments of our mind about a simple object and since the attributes are actually identical, communication of one implies communication of all on pain of denying divine simplicity and affirming composition in the divine essence. The schema you are working with doesn’t appear to me to lend itself to the Chalcedonian teaching.
I agree whole heartedly that God dies-one of the Trinity suffers for us. Things predicated of each nature are truly predicated of the one divine person, and furthermore I affirm that things true of deity are in fact communicated to the humanity of Christ to deify it. And the divine person suffers while bringing about no change in the divine ousia. And likewise I affirm that Christ’s deified humanity can be present on a plurality of altars without taking away its humanity. Humans by nature have something like this true of them with respect to the soul already-the soul is present to every point of the body without being reducible to the body or any part of it so that when my finder is cut off I lose a finger but no part of my soul. Multiple presences don’t imply omnipresence. I just don’t see how your talk of properties and attributes could ever possibly map the theology.
In one sense it is true that in the incarnation there is a third object. There are two natures in which one hypostases subsists with the hypostases being the third thing. The hypostases isn’t a result of the union, which is what I think you are trying to rightly deny. But there are three things present in the incarnation. Three is the number and the number is three! ;) In any case I agree with thinking of the Eucharist in terms of the union in the Incarnation.
What seems to be the problem is the shared metaphysic or stock set of concepts between the Lutherans and the Reformed. What would be beneficial would be something like a property that subsists in the divine essence but isn’t identical to it. Then you could easily maintain that the divine essence isn’t communicated to the humanity and hence no charge of confusion but also maintain a true communiction and deification of Christ’s humanity. Take Moses taking on the glory of God for example. Certainly Moses participates in God’s glory and is transformed but he doesn’t cease to be human. What happens to him is supernatural without him ceasing to be human. The divine glory energizes so to speak his humanity-it is humanity supercharged if you will. Second, dump the idea that God is absolutely simple so that you can consistently maintain a real distinction between God’s essence and his energy/glory. The whole Calvinist line of thinking then dissolves. In other words, dump the Platonic notions of simplicity and attributes to be consistently Chalcedonian.
Thoughts?
www.energeticprocession.com
P.S. As to your comment that Christ’s natures never doing anything in isolation from the other, my point was that the natures never did anything, the person united to the respective nature did and does lots of things.
I'm glad you agree with the Lutheran take on the relationship between the earthly elements and Christ in the Sacrament being essentially the same as between the hypostases in the Incarnation. I'd argue that our view is a "Chalcedonian" view of that relationship, whereas Rome's Eucharistic theology would be Docetic and the Protestant view, Ebionite. One of Luther's illustrations of the relationship we're talking about, BTW (and like ubiquitarianism, it's an illustration, not a proposal of dogma) was that between fire and iron when an iron bar is heated. That sounds a bit like your own discussion of the divine energia to me.
Which might be a good place to explain something which needs to be understood precisely so that where Lutheranism is coming from can be plain.
Pr. McCain and I have disagreed on
occasion concerning whether or not Lutherans should be considered "Protestants." Historically, of course, it was to us that the name was first given. But we are such odd theological ducks in the Protestant world- "sacramental Protestantism" is almost an oxymoron, and the very Platonism which animates Protestantism forces it not only into christological error but into a denial of the Apostolic teaching regarding Baptism and the Eucharist to which we, of course, take strong exception- that I, like many confessional Lutherans, am not entirely comfortable being lumped together with them.
However, if we accept that classification, a point my seminary advisor, Dr. Ralph Quere, used to make might help things come into focus. If one considers pre-Reformation Christianity on one hand, and post-Reformation or "Protestant" Christianity on the other, Calvinism would the Protestant analog of Roman Catholicism, and Lutheranism, the Protestant analog of Eastern Orthodoxy. The former churches are obsessed with philsophical classification, and don't seem to notice that human philosophical systems force the divine into an arbitrary, alien and creaturely straightjacket. The latter churches are, on the other hand, far more comfortable with paradox and mystery, far less the dotting of "i's" and the crossing of "t's-" and far more willing to let God be greater than our categories.
You are correct, to a point, in saying that the Reformed fear the "logical conclusions" of ubiquitarianism. It should be noted, however, that Calvinists (and most Roman Catholics, too) fail to understand exactly the point I tried to make in my post: that there are no "logical conclusions" to a mere illustration- unless, of course, one feels compelled to press that illustration beyond either its intent or its utility.
Ubiquitarianism, again, is something neither Luther nor the Confessions teach. It rather is what happens when you note the defects of Platonic christology, and then try to force the resulting observations into Platonic categories!
The way Luther dealt with the distinction between our human need for divine attributes and the ultimate unknowability of God was his distinction between Deus absconditis and Deus revelatus. God as He is in himself- the "hidden God," or"the naked God," as Luther also called Him- is not only unknowable but unapproachable. We cannot look upon His face and live. We may behold the trailing away of His glory- His energia, if you wish- from behind, as He passes by, but nothing more than that.
But He us to know Him. So He gave us a way to do that: He gave us His Son, in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily (as much, ironically, of a direct and propositional repudiation of Calvinist christology as that Pauline statement is!). We can know Him because He has condescended to be one of us, and to enable us to know Him as He has chosen to reveal Himself, in our terms, to be.
If you would know God, Luther says, look to Christ. Interestingly, it was this very christocentricity which Pr. McCain urged upon the Reformed at which the Reformed blogsphere, with its determination to figure the Hidden God out, took such rhetorically ineffectual umbrage.
God did not intend that we know Him in the sense of analyzing Him like a bug under a magnifying glass, and certainly not "know Him" in the sense of domesticating Him. That's something to which other theological traditions may aspire, but never Lutheranism. Rather, we aspire to know Him as Who He has seen fit to reveal Himself to be - and that means to know Him, moreover, in the face of His judgment and His wrath (God's "alien work," as Luther put it) as One Who is for us.
To be sure, when one considers what God has revealed about Himself, we end up with attributes. But these attributes are not merely things which exist in our minds. They are not, as our Platonic culture insists, imperfect human models of a perfect divine Reality. Like God's
"He-ness" in spite of a lack of literal gender (Christian feminists, of course, tend to miss this point), these are self-predications.
They are His own characterizations of Himself, and therefore valid in a sense that mere philosophical concepts cannot be. And because philosophical reasoning must necessarily filter that self-revelation through subjective and errant human categories and frames of reference, we- unlike both the Roman Catholics and the Calvinistic Reformed- are deeply suspicious of it, to put it mildly.
But this is a point neither Roman Catholics nor Reformed Protestants have an easy time understanding. Yes, the Reformed are afraid of the logical consequences of ubiquitarianism- because they wrongly think that we assert it as anything more than a model of the problem with a specific, philosophically based (and therefore filtered and skewed) version of "processed, chopped and formed" revelation (I find it interesting, btw, that while Roman Catholics also all to often buy into the nonsense about Lutherans supposedly teaching "consubstantiation," they in my experience tend to understand ubitquitarianism as precisely the illustration of the fallacies of semi-Nestorianism it was intended to be, rather than jumping to the conclusion that it is somehow a christological affirmation).
The blog to which Evan directs us is
a very good example of such theological Hormel Spam, and the elaborate lengths to which it goes to make the point over and over again that Scripture doesn't really mean what it plainly says is the inevitable result of philosophy being used as a filter for divine revelation.
The notion of the "energia" as a third thing is one I'm certainly willing to explore. My reservation is that it, too, is a philosophical construct. So, of course, is "hypostasis;" that isn't an automatic disqualifier, but only an occasion for examination of the term for its authenticity in terms of God's predication of Himself in Christ. I know that it has its origins in the Fathers. I wonder if you could say more about the concept's relationship specifically to the way the Scriptures speak of the
Well, anyway. Is this helping you to understand where we're coming from? I'm enjoying this conversation very much, BTW.
I agree with the general point about the union in the Incarnation being the model for the type of union in the Eucharist but I don’t think it would be fair to say that I agree with the Lutheran explication of what that union amounts to.
To be fair, Rome’s account of the Eucharist could only legitimately be glossed as Docetistic if we understand them to mean substratum by substance, rather than subject or individual thing. I think it is pretty clear that they mean the latter and not the former. Substances in the latter sense can legitimately retain the properties of their constituents while being more than just the sum total of those constituents. Don’t get me wrong, I think transubstantiation is wrong, but not for those reasons.
I agree that Lutherans have used fire and the iron bar example. It is a very old one from the Fathers. So it is no surprise that it sounds like my position. My concern would be whether the Lutheran view could map on to the patristic model, which I don’t think it can because it inherits specific categories like attribute and ideas like absolute simplicity, that preclude it from doing so. Just read Plotinus’ Ennead 6, Tractates 7-9 and then compare to any major Protestant/Lutheran explication of the doctrine of God.
I am not particularly interested in any supposed uniqueness of Lutheranism since uniqueness doesn’t imply truth. The way I see it, there are a variety of shades of Protestants and most of them share some family resemblance. Lutheranism like Anglicanism retains some of the more Catholic remnants and that certainly gives it a different flavor than say the Baptists or the Presbyterians. As things stand, I don’t see Lutheranism any less “Platonic” than the Reformed. Platonism is a quite plastic system or rather family of systems. Plato and later Platonists were quite adamant for example concerning the limitations of reason in accessing the divine and that reason was inadequate. An acknowledgement of the limitation of reason doesn’t imply that one isn’t Platonic. And given the historical sources for the Lutheran doctrine of God in the Augustinian tradition, its pretty obvious that its roots and major concepts are still quite Platonic.
I think your gloss and comparison of Lutheranism with Orthodoxy rests on a popular though mistaken understanding of Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy isn’t “mysterious” “mystical” and doesn’t embrace “paradox” if by that is meant a rejection of reason, logic and the non or irrational. Many Byzantine theologians are just as logic chopping as any of the Scholastics, while not employing the scholastic method. Likewise, you could hardly ask for more theological precision than what one finds in say Maximus the Confessor, Basil or Gregory of Nyssa. What the Orthodox mean by mystical is directly tied to our doctrine of God, specifically the real rather than merely formal distinction between God as he is in himself (ousia) and as he is present in his activities/energies/glory. Since we don’t share that, then we don’t share the meaning of “mystical.”
I am not convinced or even clear that there are no logical conclusions from a mere illustration since the illustration is supposed to illustrate an idea and ideas do have implications. Moreover, often the Fathers argued that heretics were not only wrong in the positions they held, but also wrong because of the implications of those positions. So if A believes X and X implies say Arianism, then X is wrong and A is somewhat morally culpable for teaching Arianism, whether they were aware of it or not. This was because the Devil was the primary architect for all heresies. Logical implications or no, I am willing to put the tar-baby of ubiquitarianism aside, primarily because it seems to be a consequence of a problem rather than the problem itself. With what I propose, ubiquitarianism, the illustration or anything like it, becomes simply unnecessary.
As you recount it, Luther’s treatment of the divine attributes and the incomprehensibility of God doesn’t seem to be different from the classic Platonic, Augustinian and Scholastic treatment of it. (See De Trinitate 4-6) While everyone agrees that there is some distinction between God ad intra and God ad extra, the question is what kind of distinction that is. Since Lutherans and I believe Luther as well, held that God is simple in the tradition of Augustinian Neo-Platonism (as do the Reformed), then the distinction falls out of our inability to subsume every truth about God under one concept so that there is something always left over from our considerations, but the plurality is in our considerations, not in God. I don’t see any reason to think in my own reading of Luther, Melanchthon, Chemnitz or any other Lutheran theologian that they were differing significantly from this view, but perhaps you could correct me here.
Also, the revelation of the Son I think doesn’t do the kind of work you seem to want it to do and here is why. If the Son is God, then the revelation of the Son is also in some sense incomplete in that it doesn’t exhaust God. It doesn’t reveal God without remainder. Since the Son is God, the Son is also in some sense ultimately hidden. If God is simple, then what exactly does the Son reveal? I agree with the Christological emphasis that in Christ is revealed and made known the Trinity, but I think so because of what I believe about Christ as the only member of the Trinity revealed in the OT and because the Son is the Logos of the Father in whom all of the many wills or logoi of God exist. (Col 2:3)
I think knowledge of God is perfectly consistent with an analytical and propositional approach. The results of such an approach are genuine and legitimate, while being inadequate since they only grasp the energies/activities/logoi of God and not his essence. So for the Orthodox, it is both analytical and existential. The analytical gives us truth but not the whole story. Negation or apophasis doesn’t mean that we falsify the analytical but that we recognize it as inadequate. So there is no possible way to “domesticate” God while it also being true that what we know of God in nature and revelation is genuine and true.
Perhaps I wasn’t fully clear about attributes. Attributes are judgments of the mind about a simple reality, so that what they say is true of the object but not in the way that it is said because our way of grasping in speech the object requires composition. So when we say that God is a Father, it is true that he is so, but the expression is inadequate because all Fathers of our experience are composite. The notion of an “attribute” is straight out of Platonism, specifically the middle and late Platonists. It finds its way into Augustine and up through the Scholastics and into the Protestant Reformers practically without exception.
In defense of Plato for a moment, Plato doesn’t think that material objects are bad copies of the Forms. In the Phaedo for example, he is quite clear that the form of the Equal actually exists in the real world. He explicitly states that there are equal sticks and stones and that such things are genuine manifestations of the Equal. Material bodies are inadequate then not in that they are poor copies of the Forms, but because they are temporary manifestations of them, but they are genuine manifestations of them nonetheless. The furthest thing from Plato’s mind, throughout his entire career is that the Forms are judgments of our mind. That is Ockham or Kant, but not Plato.
My concern with the Lutheran approach that you have outlined is that it seems to gloss God’s relation to us exclusively in terms of will and more specifically, that it understands the relation between the two natures in terms of will. A possible problem here is that Jesus has TWO wills indicating that the will is natural and not hypostatic. To talk of the Jesus using his human nature in this way or that seems to imply that it is the divine will that is using the humanity as a tool or instrument and that is a specifically Nestorian way of looking at the Incarnation. Jesus’s divine hypostasis is uniquely united to his humanity so that the divine person uses the faculties of both natures. This is how it is possible for Jesus to will two different and incompatible things as one person in the passion. (Matt 26:39). The divine will doesn’t use the human nature because the divine will is a faculty employed by three persons, it isn’t a person. Moreover, a personal union is not a union of will but hypostasis and this is why the communication of divine powers isn’t strictly speaking the consequence of a volition but rather of the union itself. The way you have been talking as if God can do anything he wants with the humanity of Christ seems to imply that deity is using humanity as a volitional instrument rather than a nature that God the Son is enhypostatically united to and subsists in. That is, he wills by a human faculty or power of willing which the divine will never determines or over rides. To do so would separate the Son from the Trinity by making him as a divine person subject to necessity and God is not necessitated by anything, not to mention obliterating the imago dei.
As for filtering concepts, concepts that we employ to frame issues are only problematic if they distort and contextualization doesn’t entail conceptual distortion. So I think you should be concerned about distorting concepts rather than contextualizing ones.
I commend the Lutherans for maintaining the communicatio idiomatum which includes not just predications of each nature to the one person, but predication of divine powers inhering in the humanity of Christ, even on pain of irrationality. But I don’t think the concepts that the Lutherans are working with are adequate to the task or that the appeal to paradox or “mystery” there is even necessary. There simply can’t be a transfer of attributes because attributes are mental judgments about a simple reality. And there can’t be a transfer of properties since the divine essence has no properties because it is simple. I think Lutherans to be consistent, logically, Patristically and Biblically, should just dump the (early) Platonic doctrine of a simple essence. Don’t be surprised-I think the same of the Catholics and Reformed as well. ;)
I can just as easily talk in biblical terms rather than philosophical ones. The Biblical material frames the conceptual space for me so it doesn’t matter if we talking about energies and essences or God’s acts, glory or what is inscrutably true of him known only to himself. I should point out though that dunameis and energia are biblical terms employed both in the NT and the LXX. As for the conceptual space, perhaps a basic sketch will help. God is said to be seen on numerous occasions and yet the Scriptures say that God is never seen. God’s glory is seen and then we are told that in seeing God’s glory, they saw God. So there is God as he is never known, God as he is known and these are *two different things* since the glory manifested *isn’t an idea* in the head of the observes, whether it be Moses and Israel in the desert or the disciples and Christ on Mt. Tabor. That is, the distinction is real, not conceptual. The Bible does the distinguishing so it isn’t a matter of Platonic reification or any such nonsense.
Moreover, the Bible speaks of us taking on this glory and it speaks of it as becoming partakers of the divine nature, specifically in terms of God’s immortality, eternal life, etc. We can add to this the theophanies in the OT where God is manifested as a kind of fire, such as on Mt. Carmel or the Burning Bush or the temple sacrifices. Even angels are spoken of in terms of fire and light, which explains why humans were generally terrified at their appearance-hence “Fear not!” and why they are said to be “like” God. It also explains a lot of the judgment language in the Bible as God as a consuming fire and the flames of Hell, which would make Jonathan Edwards happy. Further, God is said to be “light” and given the manifestation of his glory (doxa) as something real and identified with God, which no created effect could legitimately be, we know that such language can’t be reduced to metaphor. For more Biblical material, just pick up the Dictionary of OT or NT Theology, Kittel or any other major lexigraphical work and check out how the Bible uses doxa or glory and power.
On a different note, since Hays has his popcorn in hand, for pedagogical purposes I toss out a tongue lashing just for his viewing pleasure. Calvinists like Hays I think wish to maintain a lack of practically any influence of one nature on the other because they are thinking of unity in terms of identity because they are thinking in terms of essence only. They simply don’t have a concept for energy or activity. If there is any transfer, then the human has to become the divine essence and presto! Eutychianism.
For them, if Jesus is a divine person then there can be no legitimate human experience of Christ or so their thinking goes. Part of the problem is that they often either consciously or unconsciously identify person with intellect or mind. This means that Jesus can’t have any human experience or ways of thinking if he is a divine person. What they miss is that mind, like will is a faculty of a nature, which is why there aren’t three wills or intellects in the Trinity, but only one and why Jesus has two wills and intellects, not one in the Incarnation. The hypostatic union isn’t a mental union between two minds, one human and one divine. A hypostasis is something different than a mind. I corrected Hays on this point months ago, but he seems not to have thought through the problem. Jesus doesn’t have to be a human person to have genuine human experiences.
I would think that for anyone familiar with the Bible, my recounting of major Biblical events and teachings wouldn’t require a listing of texts, a treatise on the historical usage of such terms and the exegetical argument put in valid form employing predicate calculus, especially in such an informal venue. Sorry, but I don’t subscribe to the “See-Jesus-Run” hermeneutic. I leave the investigation of whether my position lacks any exegetical warrant and I am just spinning in speculative philosophy or whether I am following the Bible’s lead, to the reader. I am not interested taking months of time in reproducing years of reading, arguing and course work on a blog entry just so Steve and his toadies can have an exegetical hard-on. If they can’t manage to recall to mind the Biblical material I reference and think through it, then they had better get off the computer and read the Bible more.
So Bob, have a dark beer. :)
Speak in biblical categories, Acolyte, not philosophical ones. It does make a difference, precisely because the content of a biblical idea and its closest philosphical equivalent are not the same. You have to dialog in a dialog, Acolyte. You have to define your terms (concerning which see Aristotle as to the first obligation of anyone seeking to converse with him), and subject your presuppositions and tentative conclusions to examination. One has only to look to the JDDJ as an example of one way in which a failure to do this can go wrong: Catholics and nominal Lutherans reaching a widely-heralded "agreement" on justification which actually was an agreement on nothing at all, because it failed to deal with the fact that Lutherans and Catholic meant radically different things by each of the words "justification," "grace," and "faith."
I enjoyed this discussion, Acolyte. But it was less than completely satisfying because I was never quite sure what was going on. Biblical, rather than philosophical language, would have helped. So, by the way, would the observance on your part of the distinction between a simile and a metaphor! ;)
Incidentally, I agree with what you say about God's power and glory being indistinguishable from God's being, and in no sense being metaphors. I don't even disagree that it's fitting and proper that we should do so. What I was asking about is why we need to necessarily specify these- well, for the sake of avoiding falling into the pitfalls of imprecise philosophical language-
aspects of God when discussing the hypostatic union. I think you answered that in your discussion of the failure of the Reformed tradition to apprehend them. But I'm not sure that we do, just because we choose to speak of things which are true of God, rather than simply speaking of God.
To say that it is impossible to exhaust all there is to say about God, and yet to suggest that it is possible to ultimately and completely understand anything about Him in conceptual terms is a direct formal contradiction. To understand something only partly involves not understanding much else. Yes, I recognize the Platonic roots of the idea that God in His essence is beyond rational comprehension. Yet apart from the hypostatic union, God's infinitude and our finitude is a gulf in need of breaching- and given our finitude, only He is capable of bridging it.
What makes Platonism a problem for Reformed theology is not that it is Platonic, but that any human philosophical system trumps scripture when it becomes a filter through which it is read, and which is allowed to dictate what it is going to be allowed to mean even by clear statements which, taken in their natural sense, mean something completely different from what iti is insisted that they say. Your own position seems to share that weakness. Were I so disposed, I might even leap to he conclusion that your last paragraph
is a a similar attempt to finesse a confusion of exegesis and eisogesis!
That distinction is the issue between us in our use of the Bible, Acolyte- and not a "see Jesus run" hermaneutic!
What Scripture implies on its own, natural terms is indeed a part of revelation- if that implication is clear enough that it can fairly be established to be something the text intends to imply.
Not otherwise. If otherwise, it's not Scripture that's implying, but the exegete. And that isn't exegesis; it's eisogesis. In fact, it's the very definition of eisogesis!
Humans err- and that includes wise and holy humans- often read their own mistaken preferences and concepts into revelation. We often can't help that, and as long as we realize that we're doing that there is nothing wrong with it. The concept of theoglommena is an important one in Lutheran theology. The fact that theoglommena are so often and so easily confused
with revelation even in a Lutheran tradition armed with that distinction as an ongoing crisis among us, and one against which- as you doubtless know, if you've read this blog much- against which I've often inveighted. But operating from the implications of Scripture is nonetheless a very dangerous business.
Let me correct a mistaken impression you seem to have gotten about what I wrote. I have to accept responsibility for this, because in re-reading what I wrote, I can see that I expressed myself badly. Neither does Luther.
Neither Luther nor Lutheranism (nor I myself, no matter how I misspoke)
maintain that we only encounter God apart from Christ. We encounter even God's beneficence every day in the First Article blessings which make life possible. Even the pagans, before they ever encounter the Gospel, know the power and divine nature of God (Romans 1). These were essential biblical teachings, and essential affirmations both for Luther and for Lutheranism.
What can't know is Who this God Person(s) is, anyway- and how He is disposed toward us. There is a great deal we cannot know about His being. Despite the inclination of some of the Fathers to claim such things, the Trinity, for example, is something we never could have known unless it was revealed to us (I believe you use some of the same kind of bad logic in your assertion that biblical descriptions of God in
terms of fire as something other than metaphors- as opposed to similes-) but that's an entire conversation in itself.
It isn't your failure to cite chapter and verse to which I object, Acolyte, concerning matters which clearly are found in the Bible. It's your failure to show that what you derive from them is exegesis, not eisogesis. Nor is it the informality of the venue that's involved; it's your begging the issue by equating the presence of material in Scripture with its proper, or even defensible, application.
All any of us said, or do say, is that it exhausts all that we can reliably say about God- because it is all that we are authorized by God to say. Big difference. The exact opposite, in fact.
Speculative philosophy is errant humanity talking thorough its hat, forcing God into straitjackets which do cannot contain them, aspiring to figure out what cannot be known- and then presuming to claim divine authority for the errant and purely human result. I repeat: precisely because we cannot exhaust all there is to be said about God, we are confined to what He has authorized us to say about Him.
You suggest dumping the Platonic concept of simple essence. I propose we do something even more radical: dump philosophical speculation entirely, and go what what we've been told by the One about Whom we can definitively say nothing else.
Acolyte, don't you see that your attempt to partially rescue such a presumptuous concept as transubstantiation from the consequences of the denial it requires of the plain assertion of I Corinthians 11:26 that what is received is "this bread," and not "this body of Christ which merely retains the accidents of bread," is not only a rationalization, but requires at least a willingness to countenance the denial of what the text actually says? It's the same kind of stuff as Triablog and the others engage in when they exhaust such space trying to establish that "is" in the verba doesn't really mean "is," or that God really doesn't love "the world," and that John 3:16 doesn't intend to claim that.
I agree with some of what you say about Scripture's use of doxa, ekousia, dunamis, and so fourth. What I question is whether your denial that "light," "fire," and so forth can be dismissed as metaphor. We agree that it is not simile. Specifically, we disagree as to whether, in their natural sense, the passages which discuss these phenomena indeed dictate that they be understood as you suggest. To discuss that, we need to discuss the individual passages. I'm afraid there's no way around it.
Philosophy has a role in theology. It's a means to discuss ideas; as such, we can't do without it. But it can become a tool of obfuscation as easily as of elucidation. More easily, in fact. Chalcedon and the Ecumenical Creeds use philosophical categories to describe what the Apostles taught. But when we go beyond what is written, and use even concepts which appear in the Bible in ways which simply don't follow from the way in which the Bible uses them, we are not operating on the authority of the Bible. We are operating on the authority of our own presumption.
It's not a question of whether we can "map in on the Patristic model." It's that the Patristic model is useful only insofar as it reflects the Apostolic one. We do not aspire to map in on the former, but the latter. The former is a deeply respected and often helpful but nevertheless human and therefore ultimately unreliable source. The latter is the oracles of God.
Again, it will not do to dismiss this distinction as a "see-Jesus-run" hermaneutic. It's simply a matter of distinguishing from what God has told us, and what admittedly often very holy but fallen and fallible human beings have speculated on the basis of that revelation.
So I'll lift my glass of Guinness to the Eastern tradition for having preserved for us so much that is so important, even as I lift my prayers that the distinction between biblical exegesis and eisogesis- as well as between revelation and speculation- might be more widely observed among its followers. Perhaps some time we can discuss our
differences in terms of hermaneutics rather than philosophy, and on the basis of what we've been told by God about Himself rather than what we think we can figure out about Him.
And that is the real difference between us, Acolyte- not the distinction between God and His nature, an absurd distinction if there ever was one.
In conclusion, I am not so foolish as to think that we do not have a great deal to learn from the way theology is done in the Eastern tradition. You've sharpened some important points, and illuminated others, precisely by your drawing attention to matters which are understressed in Reformation theology, and I thank you.
Where I think we differ is my conviction that you guys have some even more important things to learn from us. But then, that's must another way of saying that you're Eastern Orthodox, and I'm Lutheran.
I am at the start of the post, but I wish to comment rightaway, as former calvinist, I concur with your assertion, Calvinism at least the Atlantic kind, is rationalistic. In effect, ration takes over sola scriptura and over sola fide. Also, anything that can not be explained should not be believed type of thing. More later.
Lito
I don’t think Orthodox theology is hard to nail down. The problem that most people have is in locating scholarly and clear writers, working past popular works. It is like this with any tradition, more or less. If someone wanted to learn about Lutheranism, it would take them time to figure out who was best to read and who is not. It would also take some time to assimilate the categories and vocabulary.
I thought a big chunk of the last post was put in biblical categories. And I am not exactly sure why a biblical concept and a philosophical one can’t be exactly the same. Albeit there are plenty of cases where this isn’t true. But I don’t see any reason to think an equivalence isn’t possible and you haven’t proffered one for thinking so. (It is rather funny that a Lutheran would cite Aristotle!) Moreover, you ask me to speak in biblical categories and then to define my terms. How exactly am I supposed to do both without employing philosophical terms and categories or stipulating a semantic equivalence between biblical and philosophical terms? The Bible very rarely defines its own terms and never in any formal way does it do so. If it did, we wouldn’t need terms like homoousious, hypostasis, or forensic.
I don’t think you are clear on the distinction between aspects and features. Aspects are judgments from different viewpoints about a single reality, whereas features are individual subsisting entities or “parts” of an object. On your view, God doesn’t have any features, just aspects. The reasons why we need to specify these is that first they are part of the doctrine of God and the Incarnation. Second, because the Bible itself forces us to make such distinctions. If we don’t take the distinction to be real, but rather merely nominal or formal, we end up in all kinds of problems. For example, if justice, wrath and mercy are just different aspects or attributes, then this means that in God they are identical in God. If so, how would it even be possible to explain why some people get one thing and others get another? It wouldn’t since what they are receiving would be the very same thing. Moreover, we would run into other problems either bordering on conflating the essences or dividing them in such a way that there is no real relation between them.
In fact, you could say that my stint here was an invitation to put aside various Platonic categories of simplicity and attributes and think about the doctrine of God and the Incarnation more biblically. It is only because Lutheranism imbibed, along with Calvinism the idea of simple essences and the consequent notion of an attribute that generate the dispute in the first place. Why not just dump both of them in favor of the Biblical distinction between God known to himself and God as present in his divine powers (dunameis), glory (doxa) or mighty acts (energia)? The language of speaking of things that are true of God in terms of attributes is a consequence of Platonism that Lutheranism inherited from Rome. Furthermore, I do think that you need to jettison for the same reasons the Reformed do, namely that you can’t consistently maintain Chalcedonian Christology because attributes can’t be transferred and the divine essence has no properties to transfer. In order to maintain the deification of the humanity of Christ, and consequently our own in glorification, simple essences and attributes have to go.
I haven’t said that God is incomprehensible and yet it is possible to understand everything about him in conceptual terms. We know God by his mighty acts, his energia as the Bible says. But we do not know him, and indeed it is impossible to do so, beyond them, as the Bible says. We indirectly infer that there is one essence from the common acts of the three persons-creation, redemption, so forth. They all perform the same acts and so they must have the same essence. But the term “essence” is just a marker to denote causal power and hence is a limit. Unlike Catholicism and Protestantism, there is nothing like the beatific vision in Orthodoxy-there is no grasping of the divine essence by human reason, ever. This is why the Orthodox speak of God as “hyper ousia” or beyond being. The designation of ousia or essence with respect to God is indirect and hence apophatic. There is a reason why our reason is limited because reason grasps being, and God an intra is simply no being at all. There is an event horizon of reason where the categories of reason simply no longer apply and this isn’t because of our cognitive limitations but because of what God is or rather, is not.
I agree that only God is capable of making himself known but making himself known doesn’t exhaust him or identify his economic activities with his ad intra once, which is why the Filioque is false. Without divine simplicity for example, the filioque is impossible because there is no reason for thinking that just because the Son sends the Spirit in the activity or economy of redemption, that what the Spirit’s person consists in is being sent by the Son.
As for limiting ourselves to Biblical terms, I think you should do so or show where the Bible uses terms or concepts like divine simplicity or attributes. It simply doesn’t. Those are philosophical positions and strategies to explain deity garnered from late platonism. On that score the Reformed, Rome and Lutheranism are all bedfellows. The soteriological position of all three actually fall out of these commitments. If God is simple, then we cannot be said to be partakers of the divine nature, but something created like God. Consequently the Reformation traditions and Rome both agree that saving righteousness is a created effect. Rome thinks it is a created inhering quality of the soul and the Reformation traditions take it to be a kind of mental relation-they are two sides of the same coin. Neither of them can maintain the Biblical position that we become partakers of the divine nature because they adhere to the platonic doctrine of simplicity and that there is nothing more to the divine nature than ousia or essence. To become a partaker of the divine essence is to be God essentially, which is impossible.
I agree that any philosophical system that attempts to trump Scripture is problematic, but I don’t see Lutheranism doing anything different. It adheres to the notions of simplicity and attributes at the cost of being faithful to the biblical witness concerning deification, not to mention Christology of Triadology. Moreover, you keep asserting that philosophical concepts that we use to understand Scripture are filtering and therefore distorting, but this is a non-sequitor. You need to give a reason to think that such and so concept distorts. I wear glasses and they filter what I see, but it doesn’t follow that they distort what I see. Philosophical systems that attempt to trump Scripture aren’t so because we employ them to understand the biblical material.
As for the clear sense, what is the clear sense of 2 pet 1:4 Bob? What does Peter mean when he speaks of partaking of the divine nature? Can’t be attributes because those are our judgments. Can’t be properties because per simplicity God doesn’t have any. So where is the implication there, Bob? As for philosophical concepts guiding Scriptural interpretation and distorting Scripture’s meaning, I think the shoe is on a foot other than the one you think it is. So who is doing eisogesis here Bob? “Oh it doesn’t REALLY mean that we become divine and partake of God’s nature. It means we become ‘like’ God by being united to some created effect, either some created moral/legal relationship or some inhering quality.” This is why Trent and the Reformers are of one mind when it comes to the righteousness whereby we are made righteous-it is not God’s righteousness as he is righteous but a righteousness similar to his own, specifically merited by the man Christ Jesus. (Which implies Adoptionism and Arianism BTW) So from an Orthodox viewpoint, you aren’t saying anything fundamentally different than Rome on Justification. Rome is the realist perspective on created grace and the Reformation is the Nominalist perspective on created grace.
Lutherans distrust reason because nature and grace are two fields that have no real overlap in their thinking. Grace always trumps nature and nature has nothing good to offer. This is the consequence of identifying nature and grace so that after a fall from grace, since nature is grace, nature no longer has any positive value. That is to say, Lutheranism, like the Reformed are pre-lapsarian Pelagians. Since reason is of the realm of nature and not of grace, reason can’t ever legitimately apply or completely overlap with that which is of grace, namely Scripture. This is why you keep speaking of philosophical concepts as if they always distort or can never fully map Scripture’s meaning. By contrast, I don’t see a need to dump philosophical thinking with respect to Scripture. First because reason isn’t intrinsically immoral, Second just because reasoning is human doesn’t imply that it is intrinsically in error. If that were so, it would imply Apollinarianism both in Christology and in how we gloss inspiration of the Bible. Third, what I have offered isn’t speculation, while I admit it has philosophical content. I don’t find that to be problematic because I don’t see nature and grace as being opposed, that is, I think that reason and revelation fit hand in glove. Fourth, it is simply impossible to interpret Scripture, let alone the newspaper without philosophical concepts. If it were possible, we wouldn’t need things like the Nicene Creed to nail down the semantic content of Scripture. Semantics outruns syntax which is why no list of grammatical rules will necessarily give you the semantic content of the signs. This is why extra biblical signs are needed.
I just see no reason to take the language of fire, light and glory as metaphorical or as similes since the Bible gives us cases where that is exactly what people saw and experienced. The motivation for taking such language as metaphorical is the commitment to divine simplicity. “It can’t be talking about something real, but rather something like fire or like light.”
If you are concerned about limiting yourself to what God declares about himself in Scripture, then where in Scripture does it teach divine simplicity and the notion of an attribute?
As to Transubstantiation, I wasn’t trying to rescue it. I was trying to represent it fairly, even though I don’t believe in it. Rome doesn’t take substance in the sense of a substratum but rather an individual “this.” The way you were reading them seemed to me to be in the sense of substratum, some underlying goo in which qualities inhere. As far as Rome’s concerned the underlying stuff of bread is still bread, but the individual thing is not, it is Christ. As Orthodox, I am just as much opposed to defining the eucharist using Aristotle as anyone, but that doesn’t entitle me to be unfair. There are real problems with Rome’s theory but that doesn’t strike me as one of them.
The Biblical matter on glory, power and mighty acts are pretty straightforward. I see no reason to take them as either metaphorical or as similes. The accounts are largely historical narratives and reporting what people see, hear and sometimes even touch. Doesn’t sound like a comparison to me. I am fully open to discussing the individual passages. How about starting with Ex 34:29-35?
As for patristics, we disgree because I think Christ’s humanity is deified and therefore so can the humanity of other persons. That is in part what it means to be a Father of the Church. I don’t think the Church is a merely human institution because it has been and is being deified. Christ takes up all of humanity into himself, not a part. And because I don’t adovcate the Pelagian identification of nature with grace I consequently don’t endorse anthropological Manicheanism. Just because its human doesn’t make it unreliable. The Reformation low ecclesiology is a consequence of a faulty anthropology and christology.
You ponder whether we could sometime discuss hermenutics rather than philosophy. My question would be, the difference is…?? As I came from the Reformation tradition, I am not sure what I have to learn from it. Given what I take to be its deformed views on Triadology, Christology, Anthropology and Ecclesiology, anything good there strikes me as good insofar as it isn’t distorted. I don’t mean to be rude, but that is how I see things. If there isn’t a distinction between God and his nature, I’d just love to see your gloss on 2 pet 1:4. I have seen a plausible Reformation (or Catholic) interpretation of it.
true significance. It ill-behooves the Orthodox, of all people, to call the Lutherans, of all people, even semi-Pelagians!
We disagree, Acolyte, because you deny what the Scriptures assert concerning the consequences of the Fall upon both the human intellect and the human heart.
What have you to learn from the Reformation, Acolyte? To begin with, whether, on what subjects, and to what degree you disagree with it.
Before you even read what comes next, be aware that I agree with it only to an extent. Unfortunately, Orthodoxy's heretical anthropology prevents it from understanding how nature is crippled by sin, and how desperately in need it is of grace. I wish that I did not see anathema of Galatians 5:4 hanging over your head, Acolyte, but I do.
What follows will, I think, demonstrate that precisely on the issue of theosis our traditions are closer than you seem to be aware. I think it also demonstrates the jello-like qualities of Orthodoxy that theosis and justification by faith could be equated (Paul Hinkley, quoted below, is anything but a confessonal Lutheran).
This from an Orthodox website- http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/frag_salv.aspx
Despite its regrettable decision to patronize Luther with regard to his acquaintence with the Fathers, I think you might be interested to read what it has to say specifically in light of how at least the Lutheran Reformaton understands 2 Peter 1:4:
Perhaps one might expect that Martin Luther—who led the "justification by faith" battle cry in the sixteenth century—would have pointed out the apostate nature of theosis in the Fathers and in what he called "the Greek Church." His writings indicate a familiarity— albeit a superficial one— with the Greek patristic tradition. Yet we find no such censures; in fact, theosis imagery is testified to in his very writings! This has been known for some time. As Marc Lienhard pointed out nearly twenty years ago: "One is not able to exclude entirely the idea that the theme of divinization was present to a certain extent in the mind of Luther. The contrary would have been astonishing when one remembers how familiar he was with the patristic writings." Indeed, "For Luther deification is the movement between the communicatio idiomatum and the beatum commercium. This leads straight into the heart of the concept of justification by faith. This faith has to be understood as taking part in the life of Christ and through Christ in the life of God. Luther designates this movement as deiformitas, in which the believer becomes identical ‘in shape’ with God justifying her or him in Christ. Herewith is underlined that deification and justification assume, amplify, and deepen each other."
In his commentary on Galatians 3:9, Luther unequivocally states that "The one who has faith is a completely divine man, a son of God, the inheritor of the universe. He is the victor over the world, sin, death, and the devil." It is in Luther’s Dictata super Psalterium that a group of Finnish scholars have focused much attention recently, finding within it strong deification imagery. Spearheading this new scholarship is Simo Peura’s groundbreaking Mehr als ein Mensch?, which traces the theme of deification in Luther between the time period 1513 – 1519. Taking a critical look at this effort, Beilfeldt summarizes some of the findings in the Dictata. In the scholion on Psalm 117 (118):12, Luther writes concerning the Christian: "On account of faith in Christ who dwells in him, he is God, the son of God and infinite (est deus, dei filius et infinitus), for God already is in him." And "In the commentary on Psalm 84 (85) Luther speaks of a ‘mystical incarnation of Christ’ in the ‘new people of faith’" and that "he uses an image strongly associated with deification. The righteousness of Christ looking down from heaven actually elevates believers by ‘making them heavenly’ (coelestus): ‘Therefore Christ came to the earth so that we might be elevated to heaven.’" In a final sample, Beinfeldt explains that "If Luther were interested in deification at all, it can hardly be imagined that he would miss the opportunity provided by verse 6 of Psalm 81 (82) (‘Dii estis, et filii Excelsi omnes’). In the interlinear gloss he distinguishes between ‘being gods’ and ‘being sons of God’: ‘I say to you who are good: You are gods because you are born of God from the Holy Spirit, not through nature: and you are all sons through the adoption of the most high God the Father.’ To be a god is thus to be born from the Holy Spirit, the spirit which makes one just before God. Luther adds in the marginal gloss that here the speaker ‘passes from the deceitful body to the true one;’ he moves from his own goodness to that of God’s. The imagery of the scholion is even stronger: ‘…you are of God and are not men…gods and sons of the most high are recalled by him to his own condition (statum).’ To be deified is to be called back from human sinfulness to God’s own state. Through the birth of the Holy Spirit in the believer, God adopts the person, and brings them up to his own state."
Indeed, there have been recent fruitful discussions between Lutheran and Orthodox scholars on the subject of salvation (see Note-H) that reach the exact opposite of Jones’ conclusion in SBP that theosis is incompatible with justification. The Rt. Rev. Michael C.D. McDaniel testifies that "the Lutheran emphasis on justification in light of the Orthodox emphasis on deification has revealed that, while Lutherans speak of ‘faith’ and Orthodox speak of theosis, both understand the Christian’s hope as ‘belonging to God.’ The Lutheran concern to specify the means of salvation and the Orthodox concern for its meaning are two insights into the one unspeakably wonderful reality that God, by grace alone, for the sake of Christ alone, has forgiven our sins and given us everlasting salvation." Echoing these sentiments, Paul Hinlicky testifies that "As a Lutheran, I want to say that the Orthodox doctrine of theosis is simply true, that justification by faith theologically presupposes it in the same way that Paul the Apostle reasoned by analogy from the resurrection of the dead to the justification of the sinner." He further explains that "The Lutheran doctrine of justification offers an Eastern answer to a Western question: Jesus Christ, in his person the divine Son of God, is our righteousness. He is the one who in obedience to his Father personally assumed the sin and death of humanity and triumphed over these enemies on behalf of helpless sinners, bestowing on then his own Spirit, so that, by the ecstasy of faith, they become liberated children of God in a renewed creation." Dialogue between the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland and the Russian Orthodox Church concluded that "the traditional Lutheran doctrine of justification contains the idea of the deification of man. Justification and deification are based on the real presence of Christ in the word of God, the sacraments and in worship." "When justification and sanctification are properly modulated," Henry Edwards explains, "neither excluding justification by faith alone nor the fruits of that faith, a coherent message results which can be translated into the Orthodox term theosis…The Lutheran catechisms, the Augsburg Confession, its Apology, and the Formula of Concord all contain statements compatible with theosis."
An interesting paper on the subject by the Missouri Synod's Prof. Kurt Marquart of the Ft. Wayne seminary can be found at http://www.ctsfw.edu/library/files/pb/1054
Much more of this, Acolyte, and we may need to reconsider our mutual anathamas!
I'm glad you see the irony in a Lutheran quoting Aristotle.
You're not being rude. You're being honest. The bottom line, as much as both of us wish it were otherwise, is that each of us considers the other to be a heretic- as one who, in consequence of beliefs at variance with the Faith once delivered to the saints, stands in peril of his soul. For my part, to be equally honest, what is involved in any dialog on this point is the degree to which theosis, properly understood, might modify my impression that Orthodoxy fails to perceive the very core of the Christian faith, and then distorts the apostolic teaching concerning that core- the doctrine of justification- to the point at which to subscribe to its teaching is in serious danger of incurring the anathema of Galatians 5:4.
I'm not asking you to define your terms without using philosophical language, Acolyte. I'm merely asking you to establish that the philosophical language you choose to use is equivalent to the biblical language. It seems a reasonable request! I'm asking you to distinguish between Christianity as
divine revelation and Christianity as human invention. That, too, seems
not unreasonable.
What's the difference between what's hermaneutical and what's philosophical? Hermaneutics sets out to understand a text on its own terms; philosophy seeks to take what it understands the text- rightly or wrongly- to say, and then to proceed on a course more or less independent of the text to establish what may or may not be true- but is not necessarily what the text says. In fact, for philosophy the text is finally dispensible, since it's not the text, but reason, which is the ultimate concern anyway! It's not a difficult distinction, but it is an important one.
That you even can ask the question speaks volumes. It manifests first an apparent inability on the part of the Orthodox to understand that the prophets and the patriarchs were Jews, not Greeks- and operated with a worldview do drastically different from that of Aristotle or Plato that
to fail to see the difference between them is to distort the biblical witness beyond recognition. Those concepts and themes which you rightly point out are obvious in Kittle become anachronisms and cultural non-sequiturs when they are filtered through an alien and thoroughly human system of thought, which would have been incomprehensible to those whose writings you invoke. You have a great deal of work to do before those Hebrew themes authorize the Greek philosophical constructs with which you seek to equate them- and philosophy is not the tool with which that work needs to be done. The task, rather, is exegesis. As it stands, the naive equation of such utterly alien concepts is eisogesis at its worst.
Sorry, but to see God, for example, as literally "the phenomenon of combustion manifested in light, flame, and heat" (Webster)does such obvious violence to the intention of Deuteronomy 4:24 that it simply doesn't bear serious consideration. It's certainly true that on occasion He may have been experienced as precisely that. But that hardly justifies a literal equation of the Creator of the Universe with a chemical process by which potential energy inherent in wood or coal is transformed into light and heat!
As to what people saw and experienced, in Genesis 15, Abram has a vision in which God is manifested as a smoking pot. Is God,
then, in His essence a smoking pot?
Mind you, none of this means that any given case the mediated experience of a Being Whose
Presence must, as He told Moses, be mediated or at least ameliorated lest it be lethal. We cannot look upon the Face of God and live. We cannot experience God in a way which would render word studies in Kittle definitive for understanding His essence.
Now,the Hebrew concept of God's glory (shakina)is not, for example, incompatible with the use you want to make of it. But you have to estabish the equation, and not merely assume it. We have to struggle with the text in order to determine just how it can be brought to bear on our theology. We can't simply make its meaning up as we go along, or impose upon it meaning we find elegant or pleasing.
Secondly, Scripture is about revelation; philosophy is about speculation. Our complaint concerning Constantinople, Geneva, and Rome alike is precisely their common inability to distinguish between the two. The question of what Jerusalem has to do with Athens is a valid one! The difference between Scripture and philosophy is the difference between God speaking, and man speaking. I think you underestimate the importance of that distinction!
I hasten to add that there is no requirement implied that theology in general, or Christology in particular, be discussed only in the framework of a Hebrew thought-world.
Nor do I suggest that the language of Greek philosophy is incapable of accurately and authoritatively bespeaking the biblical revelation about Christ. We aren't Hebrews, either!The problem arises when Old Testament themes concerning the shakina, for example, are blithely and naively transubstantiated (to coin a phrase) into Greek philosophical concepts- especially when one then proceeds to take that concept, and run with it in directions not necessarily authorized by the text, or by anything much at all other than the
individual's sense of what seems as if it might be true. The presence of a Hebrew concept in the Old Testament does not make it an Aristotelian or Platonic category, at least on its own terms- and when one "goes beyond what is written," as St. Paul urges that we refrain from doing, one need not equate the fruits of one's own reverie with the oracles of God!
In short, there is no reason why what is biblically true cannot be affirmed by philosophy. It just can't be reached by philosophy. And given the subject matter- He Whose ways are not our ways, and whose thoughts are not our thoughts- the conclusions philosophy reaches can be true only relatively, and only accidentally. The human mind is simply not a reliable guide to what transcends it. God Himself- notably in a text I've already quoted more than once in this discussion- points out that very thing. His thoughts are simply not our thoughts, and no
rhetorical effort can turn that assertion inside out!
It's up to you to show that your filters don't distort content, Acolyte. It's up to all of us to show that our filters don't do that. It will not do simply to assume that they don't. If we can't do that, or won't, we have no claim on anyone else's assent.
There is an additional advantage to discussing theology in Scriptural rather than philosophical terms, insofar as this is possible- especially when one party in the discussion not only is not particularly interested in philosophy, but regards it as a snare, whereas both parties recognize the significance of Scripture. Having a common vocabulary does tend to contribute to successful communication!
Your suggestion that we speak of God in terms of a distinction between God as He is known to Himself and God as He is known in His glory, power, and mighty acts sounds in most respects much like Luther's distinction between the hidden and the revealed God. I miss in it only an emphasis on something which Luther went to great pains to stress specifically about Exodus 20:2- the first giving of the Commandments, and which is by no means absent from Exodus 34, either: His revelation of Himself in these ways, and most of all in Christ, as being for us.
By the way, I've never used the term "divine simplicity" in my life prior to this conversation. In fact, if I've used it at all, it's been in reference to your repeated use of hte term. And while the term "attributes" does not appear anywhere in Scripture to my knowledge, Scripture in many places predicates qualities of God. In Exodus 34, God predicates them of Himself!
Stating this as clearly as you finally have at an earlier point in this conversation would have helped.
Whether speaking of God this way- and I would suggest that it is more characteristically Lutheran than a discussion of God according to His attributes. But while Scripture does not use the word "attributes," it does use predicates to describe God.
Oh. And by the way, the "high" ecclesiology of the Eastern and Roman traditions is the result of an anachronistic projection of an historical development- the monarchical episcopacy, which first appears in the late Second Century-
into the Church's very beginnings, and the fanciful ascription to it of a significance which it historically simply does not have.
As to your discussion of transubstantiation, I have to admit that while I see the distinction between saying that the ontological significance of this bread is the body of Christ and saying that it isn't bread, I don't see that this accurately describes the Roman position. If it retains only the accidents of bread, but not the substance, it looks like bread, it tastes like bread... but it certainly seems, on my understanding, in that case not to be bread. I may be missing something, but attempts to slice the loaf quite as fine as you're doing in your admirable attempt to be fair seems to me to be less of an assertion than a word game. That's one more pitfall speculative philosophy can get you into- and yet another reason to be wary of it. Sometimes it's possible to so fall in love with distinctions that one fails to notice that they no longer make a difference.
And when one presumes to define the physics of a miracle,no amount of fairness will render what results less than an abomination, no matter how thin one slices the philosophical loaf.
I reply that he needs to read Luther, who deals with the issue otherwise than as I think he assumes.
Hold on to that distinction between God as He knows Himself to be and God as He is known in His power, glory, and mighty acts. As I said, it sounds to me rather like Luther.
It's possible that I've been misunderstanding you, just as you've been misunderstanding me.
Mind you, while justification may well assume something like theosis in Lutheran terms, that does not make theosis and justification equivalent. Nor does it minimize the biblical necessity of insisting that it takes place by grace through faith, and that it is thus that even our good works are given (Ephesians 2:8-10).
The divine nature is uncreated, and yet glorified human beings will partake of it. That is not pantheism any more than the Trinity is pantheism, because our sharing in the divine nature is our sharing in Christ. You don't need to build your theology on some explicitly delineated distinction between divine essence and energies in order to see that.
The divine "properties" Bob is talking about and the divine "energies" that Acolyte is talking about are one and the same thing. Absolutely identical.
concerning every human being ever born,
with the sole exception of Christ: fallenness, together with its implications.
Lutherans aren’t the only ones who think that they are not smart enough to figure God out. Just about every Christian tradition endorses that thesis. Lutherans, like practically all Reformation traditions have a Manichean anthropology that they posit, in part because they think it will act as a hedge against rationalism. The Reformed do the same thing, which forms the basis of their objection to Natural Law theories of ethics. Moreover, and more principally, as I noted before, the Lutherans identify nature and grace, just as the Reformed do so that a fall from natural righteousness entails either a purely Pelagian or Manichean anthropology. The preceding state just amounts to a pre-lapsarian Pelagian anthropology. If the Reformers had followed Augustine’s distinction between nature and grace, perhaps things would be different. In any case, the Reformation distrust of reason is rooted in their view of nature/sin an the resulting Manichean anthropology.
The Easterners didn’t think Pelagianism was a serious threat either because they hadn’t been exposed to it and it had no real presence in the East or because they thought it was easily refuted, unlike Nestorianism and Monophysitism. They had bigger fish to fry. They condemned it in any case thereby securing the East from silly accusations of Pelagianism. Saying that we deny what the Scriptures assert is a nice polemical claim, but that’s about it. While the Orthodox affirm an inherited corruption we don’t affirm the cacophony of Reformation views because they are Manichean and conflate nature and grace. Besides, we don’t think creatures are powerful enough to over ride God’s irresistible will concerning the imago dei. In any case, it doesn’t answer the points I made here and previously about pre-lapsarian Pelagianism.
Since one good anathema deserves another, I wish I didn’t see Numbers 26:61 and Galatians 1:8 hanging over your head, but I do. Now, what has that accomplished Bob? As if I didn’t know the Lutheran and Reformation views on Orthodoxy? I haven’t read everything that the Lutherans have published but I have read a good share. I have listened to Preus, Rosenbladt and plenty of others for a number of years.
Strictly speaking, the Orthodox don’t equate theosis with justification, but rather see justification in terms of God’s declaration as grounded in the state of the believer, specifically their participation in the divine life. Broadly speaking, justification has more than one sense for the Orthodox. God is vindicated or justified by the redemption of the world. Christ is justified or vindicated in his resurrection. Humanity is justified or vindicated from the sentence of death/annihilation. And individuals are justified or vindicated personally when they align their wills with God’s in faith.
And I have already read what you cited so let me give you my analysis of it. The question is not if Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Vermigli, Hooker, Cranmer or any of them retained the language of deification. The question is whether they can consistently affirm it or not. The formal issue is grounded in the material issue of what deification for the Reformers amounts to, and it doesn’t seem to amount to what the Fathers taught, and it seems to always want to shy away from and/or lessen the language of Scripture concerning it. Moreover, the Finnish material generally focuses on the Early and pre-schism Luther so at that point there is good to believe that Luther is just regurgitating the Catholic view. And none of the later material shows how a belief that God is a simple essence is compatible with becoming that simple essence leaving the point at issue unanswered. And as you well know, ecumenical dialogical documents have a serious flaw if their methodology is taken in a stand alone way. It is profitable to see how much overlap there could be between rival positions, but this by itself is not sufficient for reunion. What needs to be examined are exactly those points where there isn’t overlap. What you cite tosses around the words but doesn’t give us any reason to think that the overlap is anything more than superficial. And, nothing in what you cite tells us what deification amounts to-what does it mean to become the simple essence of God? And if not the essence of what, then what? Something created obviously. Even the article you cite says that we are united to and become not God but united to a created object.
“Mannermaa treats this also in terms of the contrast between the upward reach of human love towards all that is great and worthy and impressive in itself (scholasticism!), and the downward reach of God's love, which does not find, but *creates,* its own object.” http://www.ctsfw.edu/library/files/pb/1054 p. 194
This is just the same old Catholic doctrine of created grace in a new dress. The Orthodox don’t think that grace is created because we think grace is nothing other than the divine life. Our notion of a virtue is different and the Orthodox don’t limit deification to coming about through one and only one virtue, but through all of the activities of God.
Look at how Luther thinks of deification,
“And that we are so filled with "all the fullness of God," that is said in the Hebrew manner, meaning that we are filled in every way in which He fills, and become full of God, showered with all gifts and grace and filled with His Spirit, Who is to make us bold, and enlighten us with His light, and live His life in us, that His bliss make us blest, *His love awaken love in us.” * http://www.ctsfw.edu/library/files/pb/1054
p. 196
Notice, God’s love brings about created effects in the soul. Again, this is the same old doctrine of created grace. Here again, notice what is said concerning Osiander,
“It is a question of "this indwelling" or "such indwelling," that is, Osiander's sort of "indwelling of God's essential righteousness" that is rejected.” p.201
So the righteousness whereby we are made righteous is not the righteousness intrinsic to God but extrinsic and consequently a created effect. Trent says the same thing. The only difference between Trent and the Lutherans is that Trent is a Realist about created righteousness and Lutherans are Nominalists about created righteousness, for the former it is a created inhering quality and the latter a created label. And this is a consequence of seeing the divine essence as simple because it is impossible to partake of the divine essence. If that is all there is to God then deification must be construed in terms of becoming some created analog to God and this is nothing other than what the Arians taught. Since God was simple and by essence Father, it was not possible for the Son to be deity by essence, so salvation consisted of becoming *like* God in some created way. So thinking that we become like God in some created way implies that either the union with God isn’t real or if it is, Christ is a creature. This is why Faith for the Reformers was a worthless virtue-a mere conduit or tool-the union cannot be real but nominal and therefore there is no partaking of the divine nature. Faith has instrumental value only. It is a means to reach up and lay hold of the merits of Christ, as Pelagius taught. You can see how Luther consequently sees Christ in adoptionistic terms with respect to our righteousness-it is something earned. Here is how the doctrine of deification is compromised.
"Faith thus looks at the person of Christ, how this person was placed under the law for us, bore our sin, and in his path to the Father rendered to his Father entire, perfect obedience from his holy birth to his death in the stead of US poor sinners.” P. 202
So the righteousness whereby we are declared righteous is not the righteousness of God, but a created effect of Christ’s earthly labor. Again, same old doctrine of created grace. And if we are united to a created effect, HOW is this a plausible exegesis of 2 pet 1:4? The divine nature by definition isn’t created. So if our union with God is constituted by a created effect, a nominal relation, then either we aren’t united to the divine nature by becoming what it is, or Christ to whom we are united is created, or we are only united to Christ’s humanity. The last option is Nestorianism. The second option is Arianism. The first option flat out what denies 2 pet 1:4 says. Again, no plausible exegesis is given, just a tossing around of the traditional and Biblical vocabulary.
What is worse, the article in question not only gets the Orthodox teaching in the person of Gregory Palamas wrong but chides the Orthodox teaching concerning theosis.
“For Luther, clearly, deification does not mean that God and His uncreated light are directly and experientially accessible by means of devotional exercises.” http://www.ctsfw.edu/library/files/pb/1054
p. 195
Note footnote 35 which reads,
“35 Such is the case, apparently, with Gregory Palamas. One may see Georgios Mantzaridis, The Deifcation ofMan (Crestwood, New York: Saint Vladimir's Seminary
Press, 1984), 96-104.”
First, Palamas doesn’t think that ascetical practices draw down divine power. They simply prepare one for the divine powers. The activity of God is gratuitous so that the ascetical practices do not force God’s hand in any way. In fact, Palamas says that they aren’t even necessary because the giving of the divine powers or theosis is gratuitous. Second, what such exercises do is align our wills with God’s, just as Jesus aligned his human will in freedom with the divine will in his passion without any predetermination by the latter. I don’t see how it is possible to draw the conclusion that the author does from Mantzaridis’ book.
And notice that Marquart bemoans the fact that deification was obscured and practically lost among the Lutherans. But it has never been lost among the Orthodox who have maintained it even at the point of a sword whether from Turks or Crusaders. The fact that the Orthodox can preserve such teachings for 2,000 years without alteration, while the Lutherans, in a generally free society can’t manage to do it for 400 seems to undercut the plausibility of Lutheran theological judgments.
In any case, at the time that the Russian-ELCF were taking place, the Russians were desperate for dialog as a means of easing Soviet persecution. By getting the public eye on the Russian church, persecution lessened since the Soviet’s didn’t want any bad PR. What is more, it seems to me that you are talking out of both sides of your mouth. First it’s the case that we are heretics, and then it’s the case that you too believe in theosis! If we are heretics, then it isn’t possible for you to believe the same view of theosis as we do. For my part I can’t see how you have addressed how the divine essence on your view can have qualities to communicate or how attributes as judgments of our minds about a single reality can be transferred. Nor has anything you have cited or written addressed how it is possible to become a partaker of the divine essence, unless you think there is something else to the divine nature than the divine essence.
For the Orthodox, the core of the Faith is the Trinity and the Incarnation. One’s soteriology is simply a consequence of ones views about Christ. A defective Triadology and Christology imply a defective anthropology, soteriology and ecclesiology. Sola fide isn’t going to help you much if you worship the God of Eunomius.
Fair enough to ask me to show that my usage of extra biblical terms map biblical semantics. I thought I did a bit of that in the last post. I also noted that this is not the venue for a full blown exegetical study and invited you to check out how the Bible uses some terms like doxa, dunameis, & energia. Pick up any lexigraphical work and read for yourself. The usual entries aren’t but a few pages either in Kittel, Brown or some other standard Hebrew/Greek lexigraphical work.
Some notions of hermeneutics set out to grasp authorial intent, but not all do for not all take it as unproblematic that there is such a thing to grasp. That is an implicit philosophical commitment of some hermeneutical systems and hence hermeneutics has philosophical content making it difficult if not impossible to separate the two. If a philosophical position is committed to the idea that the text is the source of truth, then it doesn’t follow that philosophical reflection implies that the text is dispensable. Consequently your assertion that philosophical reflection dispenses with the text is a non-sequitor at best or a bald and unsupported assertion.
The Hebrew worldview gets modified over time so that a hard and fast line cannot be drawn between the “Hebrew mind” and “the Greek mind.” Moreover, a good portion of the OT and the NT employ Hellenized vocabulary. I am not saying that Plato and Aristotle should be swallowed whole and uncorrected. In fact, that is part of the Orthodox beef with Rome and Protestants, they do in fact swallow them whole on their doctrine of God and the underlying concepts employed in Christology. In short, we see the difference between Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and the Prophets and Apostles-Rome and the Reformation don’t. Their adherence to notions like absolute simplicity, attributes, and anthropomorphical exegesis come right out of the Greeks. Just read books 2-3 of the Republic or Ennead 6. Tractates 7-9 for clear examples. If the Lutherans didn’t adhere to uncorrected Greek concepts, they wouldn’t adhere to the Filioque.
I have offered reasons for taking the biblical witness as being mapped by the philosophical terms I employed (and actually the terms are still biblical terms). In fact, it is your position that is employing non-biblical terms like “attributes.” What is more the biblical usage of such terms themselves rest on prior medicinal, linguistic, religious and philosophical usage. You have yet to give me anything more than an ad hominem to show that my usage doesn’t in fact map the biblical usage. And you have yet to actually show that the Lutheran adherence to divine simplicity is compatible with the idea that God’s glory is deity but isn’t identical with the divine essence. Nor have you offered any plausible exegesis of 2 pet 1:4 that takes the passage in its primia facia meaning.
I don’t know why you would consult Webster for usage of Biblical terms. Moreover, the Orthodox and Biblical position isn’t that God is light or fire in the sense of chemical reactions. Biblically the burning bush shows you that this is not so, which is why Moses was puzzled at it-the bush burned but was not consumed. The fact that you take the Biblical text to be talking about natural fire shows that you aren’t paying attention to what God’s Word says. Natural fire consumes wood. Now there is no reason, other than prior philosophical commitments, to think that the fire that Moses saw wasn’t a real fire. But thinking that it was a real fire doesn’t imply that it was a natural fire. Like some carnal Hebrews you take the Scriptures meaning in a carnal or materialistic sense. Hence your argument is a straw man. The same could be said for the light that shone from Moses’ face. It was a real light, but not a natural light. And the light that Christ manifests at the Transfiguration is also a real light, but yet not a natural light.
And, your language that God is experienced “as that” seems to betray the idea of an attribute. “We experience God as that, but he isn’t really that.” Putting your straw man aside, I don’t know why one would be inclined to take the Biblical data that way unless one had prior philosophical commitments that precluded taking the passage in its plain meaning. And it shows that your position is exactly what I said it was, essentially the same as Rome-namely that these are created effects and not God himself.
Your smoking pot example isn’t quite fair to the Scriptures or to my position. So here is your argument.
1. If we take the Orthodox reading of X passage, we end up with absurdities and attributing improper things to God. (If P, then Q)
2. But we cannot believe absurdities and attribute improper things to God, (Not Q)
3. Therefore we cannot take the Orthodox reading of X passage. (Not P)
Your argument is in the form of modus tollens and is perfectly valid. Before I consider the argument I want to note that your proffered interpretation rests on a Platonic hermeneutical practice. Take a look at Republic bks 2-3 where Plato argues that anything false or crude attributed to the gods has to be reinterpreted in a symbolic or allegorical way. This method was picked up by Augustine (See on Christian Doctrine) and transferred up through the Scholastics to the Lutherans. And this is the hermeneutical principle that underlies your interpretation. It is crude to attribute to God being a “pot” so therefore it must be symbolic. So much for philosophically free hermeneutics Bob!
Notice further that your argument and interpretation aren’t an attempt to actually exegete the passage. It is an application of a hermeneutical principle based on philosophical assumptions to rule out a possible interpretation. Nothing in your argument is derived from the text but rather is an act of bringing something to the text. Isn’t that the eisegesis, Bob? Who is letting their philosophical commitments obscure the Scriptures now, Bob?
While the argument form you give is valid, it is not sound, because the consequent is false. Taking the passage at face value doesn’t commit us to an absurd view because the face value of the passage isn’t teaching that God is a “smoking pot.” The text refers to an oven, but ovens in western civilization for quite some time are very different than what the term here refers to here. Jars were filled with charcoal and lit. Dough or other objects were placed on the heated jar to cook them. The jars themselves could become red hot and therefore do double duty as a source of heat as well as light. Such ovens were common among the Hebrews. (Lev 7:9, 11:35, 26:26, Ex 8:3) Sometimes they were used as incinerators. (Hosea 7:6-7 Mal 4:1) Akkadian texts give us some further insight as to their significance. The sending out of a torch, a lighted oven, brazier (literally, “lighted coals”) was a magical practice to ward off sorcerers or evil powers. The lighted coals or burning furnace had significance for Abram at the cutting of the covenant. This is seen in v. 1 of Gen 15 where God states, “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield.” God manifestation as a burning and bright furnace shows that Yahweh is powerful enough to protect Abram as well as expiating his offenses. Abram’s sense of dread in v.12 therefore makes sense in light of the fact that he is in the presence of God and not something created.
But we aren’t done yet. While there are two subjects denoted, the furnace and the torch, I note that you ignore the torch and take only the oven or furnace to be an absurdity. Since the verb is singular this implies that the subject is in fact one and the same. The oven/furnace is the torch. A literal smoking pot isn’t the same as a torch. Clearly then what the text is describing is a source of great light and heat that passes between the sacrificed animals. Furthermore, we know it was God that passed through sacrificed animals. Here what we have is nothing different than what Moses sees at the burning bush a supernatural fire. Consequently, nothing in the passage commits us to believing anything absurd about God, but only that God is what he says he is brilliant light and a consuming fire. The idea of an earthen pot or God as a clay pot isn’t in the text which leads me to believe that you didn’t actually bother to check the text in any serious way. And I never argued that God in his essence was ever manifested or knowable. I argued just to the contrary. God as a fiery furnace or great light is God in his energies or powers. Consequently your account doesn’t amount to an exegesis of the passage or a counter example to my view but a casual reliance on an English translation used to construct a straw man. As such it is a dismissive approach that fails to engage my position and the text and therefore has no argumentative value.
To say that God’s being must be mediated presupposes a specific metaphysics where God is being, a specifically neo-platonic and scholastic teaching. God doesn’t say that his presence must be mediated or improved. That is what you are bringing to the text. But the text itself neither says nor implies any such thing. What Ex 33 says is that God is genuinely present but there is more to God than Moses or any man could ever know. If there is such a mediation going on the text it isn’t a mediation by anything other than what is deity. If the divine presence were mediated by something other than God, then God’s glory or “goodness” would be created, which is obviously a mistake if not blasphemous. Moses both sees and doesn’t see God. If that which “mediates” the divine presence is created, then what Moses sees isn’t God, which makes a liar out of the text.
Shekina isn’t the only word used for glory but kabod is also used, btw the way. And as I have pointed it repeatedly, it is used in just the way I am using it, namely as deity but not deity in its fullest or exhaustive existence, that is, essence. If you dispute my claim that this is how the terms are used, then please give me a reason for thinking so rather than hitting the air with ad hominems about supposed philosophical prejudice.
Philosophy isn’t about speculation, unless you mean of course theoretical or analytical, then I agree. Philosophy is about discovering the truth through truth preserving inferences. Since all truth is ultimately God’s truth, there is no antithesis of truths known in philosophical reflection. Consequently true philosophy will have theological presuppositions and theological content. The sharp divide you wish to make just isn’t possible. What one needs to watch out for is a philosophical perspective that distorts theological content. Philosophy though is inescapable and the fact that Lutherans like yourself employ neo-platonic categories like attributes and beliefs like divine simplicity shows this to be true. I distinguish between God speaking and man speaking, but I don’t think that they are necessarily opposed, lest divine inspiration be turned into a kind of mania. Such an essential opposition would have disastrous consequences for Christology (Docetism, Nestorianism, Eutychianism) as well as the doctrine of God (Manicheanism). Nothing natural is opposed to God, because everything natural is good because God creates it. So God’s speaking and man’s speaking are not essentially opposed. Jerusalem and Athens then are partners not adversaries.
You accuse me of “blithely and naively” changing the meaning of biblical terms into philosophical concepts that their original usage will not bear. But you already admitted that the Biblical usages are consistent and not incompatible with the concepts I have brought out. You haven’t shown that I have “run with it” in all kinds of directions that are not warranted by the text. Second, I have given reasons for thinking that they are not just compatible but co-extensive which you have yet to address. Third, and more specifically, the idea a distinction between essence, power and activity is not specifically Greek. You can find it in lots of cultures, specifically Mesopotamian cultures that pre-date Abram’s leaving of Ur as well as cultures that we know that the Biblical writers were exposed to. The distinction isn’t essentially a Greek one but reflects a common understanding of the cosmos that the Biblical writers as well as their culture and the surrounding cultures employ.
As for Isaiah 55, the passage refers not to theoretical capability but to God’s righteousness contrasted with human wickedness. Besides, it’s a no brainer that all Christians affirm divine incomprehensibility in some way or another. On the Orthodox view we simply reject the neo-platonic, scholastic and reformation traditions of understanding God as esse or being. God is hyper ousia or beyond being and this is why philosophical reflection has a limit. In anycase you regard philosophy as a “snare” then why am I using Biblical terms and you are using non-Biblical terms imported from neo-platonism?
I know that a distinction between God ad intra and God ad extra is common to practically all Christian traditions. That is not the question. The question is how is that cashed out. For Augustine, the Carolingians, the scholastics and the Reformers it is cashed out as an epistemological difference which is why they employ the concept of attribute. We attribute to God different things by judging them to be different, while realizing that in God they are all one and the same thing on pain of denying divine simplicity.
This approach is not compatible with Exodus 33 for example. Exodus 33 tells us that Moses sees God but not as he is in himself. So there is that is God but not God as he is in himself. Now on the Catholic and Reformation reading this could be glossed in two ways. Either it is the case that Moses doesn’t see God but sees a created effect in which case this reading denies what Exodus 33 in fact says, namely that Moses saw God. Or Moses sees God as he is in himself, but since God is simple, Moses judges what God is to be different things because he just isn’t cognitively able to take God in under one concept. Moses therefore sees the divine essence but compositely. The latter reading runs afoul of the passage since the passage denies that anyone can see God as he is in himself and it leaves unexplained God’s protection of Moses. If Moses sees the divine essence, God as he is in himself but judges it to be diverse things, then God’s hand is unnecessary since no matter what, Moses simply lacks the cognitive equipment to see the divine essence as it is. So what I would like to see from you Bob is an explanation of how on your view of God, there can be something that is God, not an attribute, but that isn’t God as he is in himself, that isn’t the divine essence. Gee, sounds like the essence/energies distinction to me.
I am not surprised that you have never used the term divine simplicity. This is because for most Christians of the Reformation traditions, they spend the vast majority of their time on soteriological side shows rather than Christology and Triadology. Just pick up any Lutheran or Reformed theological text. The vast majority of the space is spent on soteriology and usually just rehearses the basic scholastic outlook on the doctrine of God. The fact that you haven’t heard of it doesn’t surprise me a bit. I think if you look through Luther, the Book of Concord, Melanchthon, Chemnitz or any major Lutheran treatment of the doctrine of God, I think you’ll find the doctrine there that God is what he has. That God not only lacks physical composition, but that all of the things we think of as different things (omniscience, omnipotence, benevolence) are actually identical with the divine essence and with each other. The majority of Reformation thinkers just sucked up the standard Thomistic or Scotistic readings of the teaching as found in Augustine, specifically On the Trinity, 4-6. Take a look at the Lutheran theologian Baier’s comments as they are fairly typical.
“7. The divine attributes are divided into negative and positive. The negative attributes are: unity, simplicity, immutability, infinity, immensity, eternity. The following pertain to the class of positive attributes: life, knowledge, wisdom, holiness, justice, truthfulness, power, goodness, perfection. 8. The unity of God, when spoken of absolutely says that the essence of God is undivided, when spoken of exclusively says that we recognize God to be the only God, besides whom there is no other. 9. The simplicity of God, spoken of absolutely, is that through which God is truly and really free from all composition.”
John William Baier's (1647-1695) Compendium of Positive Theology
I agree that scripture says many different things about God. You seem to think they are “qualities.” But again, qualities aren’t the same things as attributes, so does the fact that you are speaking of qualities mean that you have abandoned the ideas of divine simplicity and attributes? Qualities are inhering distinct things in an object and consequently are features rather than aspects. You seem to be consistently waffling and/or confused on the difference between a quality/property/feature and an attribute/aspect. Qualities or properties then are not something possible on the Reformation view of God since God has no properties or qualities. This is why the Lutherans cannot consistently maintain the Christological doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum. If God has no properties then the divine essence can’t communicate them to the human essence. To speak of predicating attributes doesn’t help either because it implies taxonomic Nominalism and either makes the predication fictional and forensic or implies a confusion and identification of the two natures. This is because on the Catholic and Reformation readings there is nothing else to a nature than essence. Since attributes are judgments about an essence either it is the case that the essence has been communicated so that the predication is genuine and real, or the essence hasn’t been communicated and the predication is nominal and forensic. The former is Eutychianism and the latter makes the Transfirguration, not to mention the post-Resurrection appearances a deception fostered by God (his humanity isn’t deified, it just looks that way.
As for your parting swipes at Orthodox ecclesiology I think you are confused as to what the doctrine of Apostolic Succession requires. It doesn’t require the idea of monarchial episcopate if by that one means one bishop, over one geophraphical location. There were multiple bishops in an area at times and in other places there were only deacons and presbyters. Some places only had presbyters and some only had deacons and some only had a bishop. This kind of lack of uniformity is exactly what we would expect to find in the early days of the Church. In terms of form, all that the doctrine of Apostolic Succession requires is that the bishop is the font for the other two lower orders of ministers and consequently only bishops could legitimately ordain. And that is not an invention of the late second century. We find it actually quite early in Clement of Rome, the Didache and Ignatius of Antioch and I’d argue you can find the same teaching in the NT in the Johanine and Pauline corpuses. Probably the clearest example is Ignatius and Ignatius is ordained by Peter and Paul and dies a martyr at about 107 A.D. and that is not “late second century.”
As for Transubstantiation, what you need to ask yourself is, what does Rome mean when it says that the substance of the bread does not remain? What does Rome mean by “substance?” I am not trying to slice the loaf any more thinly than the way in which Rome does so. That is part of being fair to a position.
As for your last few comments, I have read Luther as well as other Reformation thinkers on the subject. Luther doesn’t differ in any significant way from the Augustinian tradition on the point in question.
As to Orthodox anthropology it is quite true that we view what is essential to humanity as being identified in the Incarnation. This is one reason why the Incarnation is central to anthropology. Orthodox anthropology then is Christ centered because Christ is the lens through which all doctrines are correctly understood. We begin with the Trinity and Christ rather than with abstract notions of humanity or humanity in an inessential and corrupted state. To do the latter is to subsume Christology to anthropology which is to put the creation before the creator (idolatry) and commits oneself to Manicheanism. Moreover, Christ is the image or icon of God and we are made in his image or icon. So if you want to know what the tokens are, you look to the proto-type, which is Christ. So the Orthodox have good biblical and systematic grounds for understanding anthropology through the lens of Christology. We don’t begin with speculative and rationalistic methods to yeild abstract concepts of “humanity” in general but rather with Jesus Christ. If one wants to know what true humanity is, look to him!
Doing theology in this way then permits us to keep ourselves clear on the distinction between person and nature since that distinction is fundamental to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The same is true for anthropology since humans are not just instances of natures but are persons as well. A person subsists in a nature and the person uses the powers of that nature (intellect, will, etc.) to act. Sin is therefore a personal misuse of our natural faculties and therefore isn’t something natural. Since sin is personal and we don’t inherit persons, but natures, there is no inherited sin or guilt. There is an inherited weakened, corrupted, dissolving nature. But nature qua nature is still good because nothing natural is opposed to God.
If we confuse these two categories so that person swallows up nature we get the idea of inherited guilt or collective personal sin. If nature swallows up person we get the idea of either a sinful nature (Manicheanism) or a pure nature unaffected by sin (Pelagianism). (To think that human persons can alter their nature is to think that they can thwart the irresistible will of God with respect to what God wills human nature to be. The imago dei can never be erased.) Both are unbiblical teachings. This is why the Orthodox for example think that Mary was purified at the Incarnation while rejecting the Roman dogmas of the Immaculate Conception. She inherits corruption but no personal guilt. We affirm that Mary died-Rome doesn’t nor can it because they, like the Reformed and Lutheran identify personal guilt with natural corruption. To be quite fair Bob, I don’t think you have any serious acquaintance with the Orthodox doctrine of Ancestral Sin. In any case, we take sin seriously we just aren’t Pelagians or Manicheans.
Lastly, I am still waiting for an explanation of how divine attributes can be legitimately predicated of the humanity or transferred or how a simple deity can have a plurality of qualities or properties to communicate to the humanity of Christ. I commend you on maintaining that Christ’s humanity is deified, but your philosophical commitments bar you, like the Reformed from being faithful to the Bible as well as Chalcedon.
You couldn't be more mistaken. There are degrees of simplicity as evidenced by the essentially Thomistic and Scotistic ways that the Lutheran and Reformed Dogmaticians gloss divine simplicity. This is because Thomas and Scotus have different degrees of simplicity in an attempt to cash out Augustine's teaching. Scotus thinks that there are formal distinctions in God and Aquinas not even those. See Preus' Post Reformation Lutheran Dogmatics, and Muller's Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics for details.
Moreover, things in can be simple in terms of a lack of physical composition, metaphysical composition or formal composition.
If you think that God is simple, then what do you mean when you say that created beings partake of it?
And Bob and I aren't talking about the same thing since Bob is confused about the difference between a property and an attribute and Bob's view denies that God has any properties because God is simple. So no, we aren't talking about the same thing.
Created beings partake in the divine nature in Christ. Through union with Him, we share in His divine life.
And yes, you and Bob _are_ talking about the same thing. Bob did not deny that God has properties; He said that God _is_ His properties. That's different. He says God is His properties, you talk about uncreated energies. He says po-tay-to, you say po-tah-to. You've got no superior understanding of the matter, you just have a more convoluted way of talking about it, married to a groundless conviction that no one from the Western tradition can possibly understand your subtleties. So tired.
Your definition of Manichaeanism could use some work. Teaching that nature can be corrupted by creaturely sin is not Manichaean. The Manichees taught that fleshly nature was corrupt in its essence, simply by virtue of being fleshly, and thus that it was corrupted by the _creator_ of flesh, not by the creatures. It's a very different doctrine.
Just repeating over and over that created beings partake of the divine nature doesn’t address what I asked. If the divine essence is simple, how is it possible for creatures to partake of it or participate in it? Using the Trinity as you did before won’t work since on no one’s view do we ever participate in the essence of the Trinity as the divine persons subsist. Your proposal would imply expanding the members of the Trinity to include all of the redeemed, which I take to be an obviously heterodox conclusion.
And you will have to excuse me but I am not accustomed to just believing some claim by mere assertion. If you think that Bob and are talking about the same thing, then you need to give a reason for thinking so. Being the blog equivalent of a broken record doesn’t amount to an argument. And while it is true that Bob hasn’t denied that God has properties, he has also conflated the concepts of attribute and property, indicating that he lacks as yet a clear grasp of the concepts. And given the history of Lutheran and Reformed theology it seems pretty clear that their adherence to divine simplicity rules out the idea of metaphysically distinct objects in God and consequently properties or qualities. When you speak of properties or qualities then you are using it in terms of attributes.
And saying that God is his properties won’t prove beneficial for all kinds of good and interesting reasons. God has the property of being creator. If God is his properties and God exists necessarily, the God is creator necessarily. But not the latter, then not the former. What is more, to say that God is his properties implies that they are all identical in God and with God. How then is God not a property? Take God’s knowledge and God’s will. Certainly there are things that God knows but doesn’t will. Knowledge and will can’t be identical in God because they aren’t even co-extensive. And an energia isn’t the same as a property. Energia is an activity, and not state or just an inhering quality. The concepts are not identical. Perhaps rather what I have written seems convoluted to you since you apparently lack any familiarity with the way these concepts have been employed historically. In the absence of any argument given by you, I think I will keep my own judgment on the matter seeing I actually work in the field of metaphysics.
As for Manicheanism, it comes in all kinds of flavors. Strictly speaking you are quite right, the Manichees thought that the body was demonic since they identified matter with evil and instability. But one doesn’t have to be a card carrying member of the Manichee club to be Manichean. Lots of people are Gnostic in their views without mapping on perfectly to everything that the Gnostics taught. Jehovah’s Witnesses are said to be modern day Arians even though they don’t teach everything the Arians did-the JW’s don’t think the Spirit is a person, whereas Arius did. The idea that human nature is evil after the fall had a number of adherents and Augustine, among others recognized it as Manichean regardless of whether they were members of the church or some other religious body. Furthermore, while the Manicheans explicit taught that the evil deity created the material body evil and the position you seem to be professing adherence to says that the creature made human nature evil, both converge on the idea that human nature is evil and intrinsically opposed to God. So the matter may differ but the convergence gives the same result Now it doesn’t much matter to me if we call it some other name, just so long as we recognize that the view isn’t Biblical. And the better theologians of the Lutheran and the Reformed tradition go out of their way to make it clear that human nature qua human nature isn’t altered by the fall but only suffers from a privation. I suggest picking up Augustine’s discussion of the matter in the City of God, books 12-15.
In any case, it is simply wrong to think that humans could alter their nature since God’s will cannot be thwarted. Moreover, if human nature is altered then which nature does Christ take up? Certainly not my nature if my nature is now different than pre-fall Adam’s. Such a view forces us either into Eutychianism whereby the humanity of Christ is some new third species or some form of Apollinarianism since Christ couldn’t have taken on sinful nature from the womb of Mary and it be our nature. So he would have had to have gotten it from somewhere else.
I'm sorry you don't think I'm "well-read in the Patristic corpus." It so happens that I'll be defending my dissertation for a PhD in Patristics (Early Christian Studies) at the Catholic University of America in March.
I know that the Essence and the Energies are distinguishable, but both divine. I know that God in Himself is Beyond Being. You shouldn't assume ignorance here. I'm just saying that when Bob says that God and His properties are one, he is saying the same thing you say when you say that the Essence and Energies are both divine. The two models map to each other quite well. The fact that the Scholastics were philosophically less sophisticated than the Neo-Platonists does not change that, and St. Augustine of course (the main one you're blaming in all this) was a Neo-Platonist, not a Scholastic. He understood that. There IS a relationship of identity between the divine Essence and Energies, because they are both GOD. The difference between them is that between God-in-Himself and God-as-revealed... just like the difference between God and His properties the way Bob was putting it.
Augustine's use of "absolute simplicity" is different from yours, because he's just expounding on what "simplicity" _means._ You're speaking as if "absolute" is just one kind of simplicity, and there are others.
"There are a variety of notions of divine simplicity in the history of theology."
Ok, now you're maybe starting to say what you mean. Of course there are different NOTIONS of divine simplicity. It's just that to the extent that any of them actually portray simplicity, they necessarily portray _absolute_ simplicity. So if you want to compare and contrast Augustine's concept to that of Maximus or Aquinas or someone else, fine. Just don't call it "absolute" simplicity, as if the simplicity taught by the others were somehow not absolute as well.
You ask, "If the divine essence is simple, how is it possible for creatures to partake of it or participate in it?"
Well, let's make a deal here. You tell me how the Hypostatic Union is possible, and then I'll tell you how Divinization is possible. Do you really expect to understand one without the other? We are in Christ, connatural with Christ, and Christ is God. That is how we partake of the Divine Nature. We share His life. If that's not the answer you're looking for, I can't help you, and anyone who says he can is full of it.
Acolyte again:
"And given the history of Lutheran and Reformed theology it seems pretty clear that their adherence to divine simplicity rules out the idea of metaphysically distinct objects in God and consequently properties or qualities."
Er... what history is that? The history in which Lutherans and Reformed repeatedly assert that God DOES have properties / qualities / attributes / perfections? It takes an amazing amount of cheek to appeal to "history" (when what you are really appealing to is a peculiar insistence on the philosophical implications of the term "absolute simplicity") to prove the opposite of what history actually demonstrates.
This bright line you are trying to draw between "property" and "attribute" doesn't work at all. If the Energies are God-as-revealed, the term "attribute" focuses on the "revealed" part, and the word "property" focuses on the "God" part, but the two words refer to exactly the same thing, which is why all the words I've separated by /'s in the last paragraph can be synonymous. When we speak of God's attribute of say, goodness, we do not mean simply "I perceive Him to be good," we mean, "He is objectively having-to-be-perceived as good, because He is Goodness Itself."
As for your thought experiments:
Experiment 1: "God has the property of being creator. If God is his properties and God exists necessarily, the God is creator necessarily."
Being CreatOR is not a property. It's a role. Accident, not Essence. He has the property of being creatIVE. And yes, He has that necessarily. Whether He chooses to exert it or not is His own business.
Experiment 2: "...to say that God is his properties implies that they are all identical in God and with God. How then is God not a property?"
I don't know how anyone could derive the statement "God is a property" (singular) from the statement "God is His properties" (plural), so this one doesn't get off the ground.
Experiment 3: "Take God’s knowledge and God’s will. Certainly there are things that God knows but doesn’t will. Knowledge and will can’t be identical in God because they aren’t even co-extensive."
At the level of God-in-Himself, they are in fact identical. As God is beyond being, that is by definition beyond our understanding. What yo usay here works only at the level of God-as-revealed (where properties / energies are differentiated from each other).
As for "energy" being an activity and "property" being a trait, that's a very weak argument, and you should know it. The two can be distinguished from each other, of course, just as "property" and "attribute" can be, but when the Divine Essence is the other thing you are talking about (you know, to the extent one can), a strange thing happens: all three words mean the same thing in that context. If this were not the case, if this point of yours held any water, you would be unable to speak of any of the divine energies in the abstract. You would not be able to speak of God's Goodness, for instance--only say that He does good things.
As for Manichaeanism, yes, actually you DO have to believe the body was created evil in order to be a Manichee. It's the cardinal defining doctrine, for crying out loud. If you think you can call us "Manichaean" when we don't believe that, all bets are off. Don't be lazy, find a word that actually works.
Acolyte again:
"the better theologians of the Lutheran and the Reformed tradition go out of their way to make it clear that human nature qua human nature isn’t altered by the fall but only suffers from a privation."
Yes, they do. So what's with the crazy talk about Manichaeanism?
Acolyte again: "In any case, it is simply wrong to think that humans could alter their nature since God’s will cannot be thwarted."
Obviously it could not have happened if God had not granted them free will. But He did.
And finally, that bit about Eutychianism is nonsense too. Look, if Christ had a human nature SANS PRIVATION, that is not a tertium quid, it's HUMAN NATURE. A dog with three legs and a dog with four legs are both dogs, and a man with a fallen nature and a man with an unfallen nature are both human beings. We aren't talking about some humanity derived from heaven rather than from Mary's womb, but rather about the healing of the humanity He assumed.
"For the East, God's wisdom is not the same as God's justice, God's will, or God' knowledge as they are for Augustine."
Hold up. They aren't the same for Augustine either. That quotation you gave from _De Trinitate_ says that God is Goodness and God is Justice, but it does not say that His Goodness and Justice are the same thing.
Acolyte again: "It is because they are real and distinct in God."
If you mean that they are both God, then I've been saying that too. If you mean that _even in the complete absence of Creation_ God would still be divided into Essence and Energies, I find your statement incoherent, impossible to demonstrate, and pointless anyway.
Just so you know, I don't intend any slander when I attribute Neo-Platonic ideas to you.
Augustine _does_ recognize multiplicity in God. It's just the kind of multiplicity that is also unity. It's not like he denied the Trinity or anything.
Something tells me we're about to talk about the filioque.
BTW, congragulations to Doctor Eric Phillips, whose defense of his dissertation at Catholic University was successful.
Although my comment is now way late -- it's clear that this discussion ended a while ago -- I do feel compelled to speak up (as a fellow philosopher) on behalf of Acolyte and say that the notion that "absolute divine simplicity" is just a redundancy, or that all divine simplicity is necessarily "absolute" simplicity, seems absolutely (pun intended) to hold no water when one considers the recent and relevant literature in theology/philosophy of religion (as Acolyte himself has noted). The name "absolute divine simplicity" (or some variation thereof) is widely used in the literature to pick out a kind of simplicity that is indeed distinct from other, non-absolute varieties. Philosophers Eleanore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, for example -- perhaps the two foremost English-speaking scholars of Augustine/Aquinas, at least in recent philosophy -- have an article with the very title, "Absolute Simplicity," which attempts to elaborate upon this specific view of divine simplicity; in fact, the dialogue on "absolute simplicity" generated by this article continues with another philosopher named James Ross, who also uses the phrase (and, as we (ought to) know, philosophers -- analytic philosophers in particular -- are very careful about their language). Aquinas himself, too, in Summa Contra Gentiles (I 38), says that "God is absolutely simple," and goes on to elaborate exactly what this means. But beyond these meager examples, there is a wealth of articles and books available which also speak of "absolute divine simplicity" (or some variation thereof) and explicitly distinguish it from other, non-absolute simplicities. This chapter from Dr. David Burrell's book, Faith and Freedom, cites the Stump and Kretzmann article on absolute simplicity and goes on to explain this sort of (Thomistic, and perhaps also Augustinian) simplicity as against other (non-absolute or non-Thomistic) forms, noting that its distinguishing characteristic is that it says that God's essence is His existence (and vice versa) -- on this view, roughly, God's essence just is (identical to) His activity (although of course the view is ultimately more substantive than this). Burrell seems to take this to pick out the distinctly "absolute" kind of simplicity, and I think Acolyte would absolutely agree with that characterization. Beyond Burrell's chapter, however, there is seems to be conclusive evidence that there are non-absolute divine simplicities, which are distinct from and hence not necessarily absolute simplicities (contra Eric's assertion), in Professor Christopher Hughes' monumental (and head-popping) book, On a Complex Theory of a Simple God. Professor Hughes, who taught at Cornell and King's College in London (if we're going to mention qualifications), wrote this work specifically on Thomas' view of divine simplicity, and he clearly and repeatedly says that this is absolute divine simplicity as opposed to other, non-absolute simplicities. This is from the front flap of the book (I don't have the work with me right now, so this is all that I can cite):
"Hughes argues that Aquinas fails in his attempt to reconcile absolute simplicity with the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. According to Hughes, an absolutely simple God is an impossibility, a being too lacking in structure to exist. Moreover, since Aquinas' teachings on the Trinity and the Incarnation presuppose his untenable account of absolute simplicity, they inherit its untenability. Hughes also offers a philosophically interesting, but weaker, account of divine simplicity [note that the modifier "absolute" is not used here, and this view of simplicity is called "weaker"]" (emphasis added).
Given that Hughes thinks that an absolutely simple God is an impossibility, but also thinks that God is simple and does exist, it follows that his weaker account of simplicity is about a kind of simplicity that is not absolute; Hughes holds that God is simple but not absolutely simple. So there is a clear distinction drawn in this work, and Hughes clearly holds that there are divine simplicities that are not necesarrily absolute divine simplicities. In the face of all of this, one could perhaps claim that Hughes' view ultimately is an absolute simplicity too -- contra his own detailed and substantive explanations to the contrary -- but the burden of proof is on the asserter, and it hasn't been satisfied. I am fairly confident that it cannot be (unless we start changing the meanings of words).
Best to all,
Jason
P.S. Just for fun (for the Lutherans here), one can also find Lutheran theologian Francis Pieper at least using the phrase "absolute simplicity" in his Christian Dogmatics, volume 1, p. 428.
Thanks for coming by. And how can I- a Missouri Synod Lutheran- argue with anyone who cites Pieper? :)
In children's catechism we are accustomed to teaching that God has specific attributes, such as omniscience, omnipresence, goodness, love, graciousness, and others. Yet there is something misleading about this listing of "attributes" in God. God is none of these things and all of them par excellence. Indeed the LCMS catechism hints at this by pointing out that God is greater than any possible listing of "attributes." Such a listing of attributes has its purpose in teaching children, but that is not all there is to be said about the divine characteristics.
God is His attributes. He is love and greatness and holiness in such a way that He cannot be more or less of these things. They are not characteristics that come and go, like a man who is usually patient and kind who becomes waspish and argumentative when he is having a bad day. There are also characteristics that could compete with each other as though His power could conflict with His love, in the way that a human father might face an ethical dilemma between what he has the power to do and what love would dictate that he do. No such dilemma exists in God whose love and power are perfect because He is perfect. Even God's perfection is not a thing which describes God. There is not "perfection" to which we could compare God and then judge him to be perfect. But perfection is God and God is perfection and this is true of whatever other things may be said about God (how we grope!). He is the standard by which all other things are to be judged.
Such attributes in God are not distinguishable except under the weakness of his self-revelation in which He reveals Himself to us in terms that we are capable of digesting. But in God there is a "simple complexity." All that He is is Himself. This is why we Christians will say that God is a Trinity. All that God is is what each person of the Trinity is. This simple complexity defies human reason to unravel it. And thus we have a God who is greater than our ability to understand Him. For a God greater than our minds, we can be profoundly grateful! So while we do not have the capacity to unravel the simple complexity of God, God has the love to unravel the dark complexity of human wickedness by sending His Son born of Mary to bear our sins.
"God is truly called in manifold ways, great, good, wise, blessed, true, and whatever other thing seems to be said of Him not unworthily. But His greatness is the same as His wisdom. For He is not great by bulk, but by power. His goodness is the same as His wisdom and greatness, and His truth the same as all those things. In Him it is not one thing to be blessed, and another to be great, or wise, or true, or good, or in a word to be Himself.
"Neither, since He is a Trinity, is He therefore to be thought triple (triplex) otherwise the Father alone, or the Son alone, will be less than the Father and Son together. Although, indeed, it is hard to see how we can say, either the Father alone, or the Son alone; since both the Father is with the Son, and the Son with the Father, always and inseparably. Not that both are the Father, or both are the Son; but they are always one in relation to the other, and neither the one nor the other alone. But because we call even the Trinity itself God alone, although He is always with holy spirits and souls, but say that He only is God, because they are not also God with Him, so we call the Father the Father alone, not because He is separate from the Son, but because they are not both together the Father.
"Since, therefore, the Father alone, or the Son alone, or the Holy Spirit alone, is as great as is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit together, in no manner is He to be called threefold. This is because bodies increase by union with themselves. For although he who is united to his wife is one body; yet it is a greater body than if it were that of the husband alone, or of the wife alone. But in spiritual things, when the less adheres to the greater, as the creature to the Creators the former becomes greater than it was, not the latter. For in those things which are not great by bulk, to be greater is to be better. And the spirit of any creature becomes better, when it joins to the Creator, than if it did not so join; and therefore also greater because better. 'He,' then, 'that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit'(1 Cor 6:17): but yet the Lord does not therefore become greater, although he who is joined to the Lord does so. In God Himself, therefore when the equal Son, or the Holy Spirit equal to the Father and the Son, is joined to the equal Father, God does not become greater than each of them severally; because that perfect-ness cannot increase. But whether it be the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit He is perfect, and God the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit is perfect. Therefore He is a Trinity rather than triple" (St. Augustine, On the Trinity, 6.7-8).
Prayer: O Holy Trinity, You have revealed Yourself to us on the lips of the prophets and apostles that we might know You in the way that You desire. Your compassion for us leads us to know You as the God who knows us with affection and effect. Send Your Holy Spirit, the bond of love between the Father and the Son, to lead us into all truth, that we might worship You in humility and faithfulness until our life's end. Amen.