Post Edited (Tom) : 6/20/2009 12:45:05 AM (GMT-5)

Hi Bruce-

Bruce: I'd focus on that the independence (or really non-independence) is not about God but about us. WE are in God's heart, the cross is in God's heart from the beginning of all that has a beginning.

Tom: The question is, Does God’s determination that there begin to exist a world itself (that is, the determination) have a beginning? Do you get the question? It’s important. It’s at the heart of what it means to say God is self-sufficient or self-existent.

Bruce: But the Word does not have a beginning, He just has an origin in the Father.

Tom: Right. So your making a distinct between the origin of the Son (without beginning) and the origin of the determination/intention to create the world (which determination DOES have a beginning; i.e., it is not a defining element of God’s essence). McCormack doesn’t make this distinction. He says the choice to create is definitive of God essentially; that is, God is only triune in and through his choice to create and his election of the Son as incarnate. There is no other God.

McCormack says the incarnation determines the identity of the Logos/Son. In other words. McCormack would say that God cannot contemplate himself as Father, Son and Spirit without the determination to create defining these relationships. There’s no perichoresis apart from the intention to create. That intention DEFINES God trinitarianly—essentially.

Bruce: So I disagree with McCormack.

Tom: I thought you would!

Bruce: The Father has his Word and his Spirit before any creation/creating. I think I'd agree that God relates (even before creating) differently with the creation than within the Godhead.

Tom: You’d definitely be on the other side of the issue from McCormack, right. But McCormack’s question for you (and me) would then be: How in the world can you presume to know anything about God ad intra, God sans creation, outside of who God says he he in Christ? All we know about God we know from Christ (here’s Barth’s insistence upon revelation; not wrong in and of itself mind you). Christ identifies God for us. And Christ does so as the incarnate and resurrected one. Thus (so the reasoning goes), there IS NO GOD who does not create and incarnate. We must conclude from the fact that God did create and incarnate that there is no God apart from creation and incarnation. We’ve got nothing outside of the incarnate Christ upon which to think of God in any terms other than incarnation.

Bruce: So I'm not with McCormack but I am with the Caliph of Damascus.

The Father has his Word whether he creates of not. But the ecstatic love of God disposes God to create. Further, it disposes God to create a world that needs saving -- and at the same time the creation requires being one in need of saving to be what it is. That's the best I can do, Tom.

Tom: And that’s great! Let me pass over what you say from “Further, it disposes God to…” onward for right now, because whether God’s love, if it should create, would be disposed to create a world “needing to be saved” is a separate issue. Let me just ask you about this:

“The Father has his Word whether he creates of not. But the ecstatic love of God disposes God to create.”

Absolutely no problem here. McCormack would disagree with the first part and say you have no grounds within the constraints of what God has revealed to you in Christ to conclude that the Father would have the Son even if God had never created. McCormack says these “What if…?” scenarios are senseless speculations that we have no right to ask and no resources to answer. I think he’s wrong. But so just you know.

The second part of what you say is REALLY important: “The ecstatic love of God disposes God to create.”

Here every little shape of meaning is important. And D had better show up ‘cause there's a GREAT conversation right here in these words! Let me suggest two things and you tell me what you think:

1) If God is the fullness of loving, personal trinitarian being without creation, that can ONLY be because the ecstatic movement of love is essentially fulfilled by God in God with God. That is, love’s ecstasy just IS the begetting of the Son. This is why God “need not” create at all. We can conclude nothing negative whatsoever from the supposed choice never to create because God would be full and his love fully ecstatic and replete within the trinitarian relations. God’s love doesn’t BECOME ecstatic when God creates is what I’m saying. I think you agree too.

2) But (1) doesn’t mean God’s love isn’t in fact ALSO ecstatic in creation. Of course it is. In creating, God is exercising a ‘disposition’ that defines God, a disposition for creative, loving self-expression. Yes. The all-important question is this: Are all God’s dispositions necessarily/essentially exercised (like the disposition to beget the Son and spirate the Spirit? Or may SOME dispositions be exercised contingently/non-essentially, i.e., if the situation arises? This is THE subject of Greg’s PhD dissertation by the way. Ha! And here we are again.

Hart says “there’s no unrealized potential in God.” Whatever God can do God does do (or is doing). Whatever disposition God can exercise, God must (and does) exercise. And that’s why Hart has the problems he does that I referred to above. But this idea that whatever dispositions God possesses God exercises (thus, no unexercised dispositions) undermines the very claim that “the Father has he would whether or not he creates.” The only way we can say God is the triune God of love whether or not he creates is if God is this same God whether or not he exercises the disposition to create, since creation's coming to be is co-terminous with God's exercise his dispostion to create. See this?

You can’t say God remains the God he is “whether ornot he creates” and then also say “there is no unrealized potential, no unexercised dispositions” in God. Attributing a “whether or not” to God presupposes in God some dispositions that are exercised non-essentially or freely. And to the extant you suppose God has unrealized potential or dispositions to act this or that way which he may or may not exercise, to that extent you step out of the Orthodox tradition, as far as I can tell.

Right, D?

Bruce: God both changes and does not change with creating. And his not changing does not change, but his changing changes...but yet does not change...but yet in another way changes in the incarnation of the passion.

Tom: I know what “I” would mean by saying this. And I can only hope you mean the same thing. Yes. I totally agree.

Bruce: Most I've written in a while, and no pictures of links to boot!

Tom: I love it too. Grateful. Thanks B!

T

Post Edited (Tom) : 6/20/2009 12:09:21 PM (GMT-5)

Tom:

The only way we can say God is the triune God of love whether or not he creates is if God is this same God whether or not he exercises the disposition to create, since creation's coming to be is co-terminous with God's exercise his dispostion to create. See this?

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/20/2009 3:54:54 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/20/2009 3:56:23 PM (GMT-5)

Fr. Hopko.  Speaking the Truth in Love.

Jesus - I Am   38:04April 10, 2009

Where and why in the Scriptures is the term "I Am" used to refer to Christ and why is it so critical to His identity?

Play in popup Direct Link (right-click to download)

McCormack’s view is also expressed also by David Wright (emeritus at U of Edinburgh) in the volume McCormack edits (Engaging the Doctrine of God):

“But we need to go further: what is at stake here is not simply the centrality of the sacrificial crucifixion in the plan of salvation but the implantation in the sphere of the eternal Godhead of the temporal life and death of the Lamb. The human experiences of Jesus, climaxing in the death and burial, belong eternally to the being of God. What does this do to our doctrine of God?”

Back to McCormack in the same volume, from his concluding chapter on Barth & Open Theism:

It has been a long-standing contention of mine that Karl Barth’s theology experienced a final clarification and critical correction as a consequence of his revision of the doctrine of election in 1936 and following. At the root of this revision lay the idea that the primary object of election is God himself. The content of God’s “primal decision” was his determination to be God in the covenant of grace and to be God in no other way. What makes this decision truly “primal” is that there is no other being of God standing back of it, hidden in the shadows, so to speak. “There is no height of depth in which God can be God in any other way.” [Barth] The eternal event in which God chose to be “God for us” is, at the same time, the eternal event in which God gave (and continues to give) to himself his own being—and vice versa. So there are not two eternal events, one in which God gives being to himself and a second (following “after” the first) in which he enters into a relationship with the human race; these are, in fact, one and the same event. Thus divine election stands at the root of God’s being or “essence.” This is the revolutionary insight set forth in Barth’s doctrine of election.

Other Barth scholars disagree that Barth ought to be read this way. Catholic Barth scholar Paul Molnar has nearly gone ballistic in arguing against this. But it’s not important to me whether this view accurately represents how Barth ought to be read. If it does, so much the worse for Barth. If it doesn’t, so much the worst for the view.

Tom

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/22/2009 11:44:21 AM (GMT-5)

More McCormack:

Traditional metaphysics held that it is not possible to speak of God without first speaking of something else. All talk of God begins as talk about something else—as talk about the cosmos, perhaps, or as talk about what it means to be a “person” on the human plane. And the hope was that through a series of negations (removing from divine being the imperfections proper to creaturely being) and a series of analogies (making God to be like us in that he “has” certain qualities or attributes that we also have but has them perfectly), one would eventually arrive at talk about God that was really talk about God and not just an endless chain of self-referential statement. Barth held that on the basis of metaphysical reasoning, such a hope was bound to end in disappointment; one can never truly talk about God by speaking first of himself or herself, or his or her experiences. Talk that begins with the creaturely must also end with it. If talk about God is to really to be possible, then it must begin and end with the event in which God gives himself his own being—as Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. In putting it this way, what I am suggesting is that human language and divine being must inevitably fall apart where the event in which God gives himself being and the event in which our language finds it ground are conceived of as two distinct events. Where, on the other hand, the event in which God gives himself being is the event which founds our knowledge of him, there divine reality and human language do not fall apart. And so Barth holds that God is the self-constituting, self-speaking, self-interpreting God whose “talk” of himself is the event in which responsible human speech about him is made possible. How does one talk about God without talking about something else? By resolving never to speak about God on any other basis than that of the incarnation. To speak of Barth’s doctrine of God as “postmetaphysical” and to speak of it as Christologically based are to say one and the same thing.

Thoughts?

I’m thinking that it’s unnecessarily restrictive to limit what one can say about God to what God reveals in Christ. Surely Scripture’s testimony of Israel’s history reveals SOMETHING about God. I’m also thinking that EVEN IF one were to limit what one says about God to Christ, one still isn’t justified in claiming that God “gives himself his own being” in the Christ-event. God achieves his ‘being’ in creation and incarnation. All that follows logically (as Blocher pointed out) from the actuality of God’s incarnating in Christ is that the possibility of God’s incarnating in Christ.

Tom

Forgot to post this earlier.

The issue back of all this is that of ‘theological method’; the hermeneutics. McCormack’s criticism is that for both classical and open theists the “order of knowing” runs opposite to the “order of being.” That is, although the being of God above and prior to the being of all other things, for both classical and open theists the knowledge of God is based upon a prior knowledge of creaturely reality, so that they reason inferentially from created reality to making conclusions about uncreated reality. It’s the whole natural theology issue that Barth fought against.

I think there’s certainly a point to made here about simplistically reading off our experience some supposed truth about God. But at the same time, there just is no stepping outside our created contexts to access truth about God. And that includes God’s revelation in Christ. McCormack says the event of God in Christ is the one place where the being of God and the being of the world coincide in one and the same place. So ONLY in Christ can we be confident that our “God-talk” accurately communicates truth about God’s being.

In principal I agree. The problem is that the revelation of God in Christ doesn’t come with a theological handbook explaining or interpreting the event. We still have to INTERPRET God in Christ. It’s not obvious. And even for those who concede that God is revealed in Christ, it simply doesn’t follow that Barth’s approach to explaining the meaning of the event follows from simply positing the event of revelation. Barth (and McCormack) seem to think that the mere FACT of God’s revealing the himself in Christ leads to certain theological conclusions about God. But it just doesn’t.

If you have McCormack’s Engaging the Doctrine of God, check out Henri Blocher’s chapter “God and the Cross.” It’s worth the whole book. Excellent chapter. He argues that all we MUST ask about the being of God based on the incarnation is what sort of God makes this event POSSIBLE: If God is capable of the Cross, what does it teach us about God? We are justified in inferring from actuality to possibility only, not in inferring from actuality to actuality. That is, logically speaking, all that’s entailed in the incarnation and crucifixion is that God is the sort of being who MAY incarnate and taste death for us (not that God may only have his being in the determination to incarnate and taste death for us). The theological question to ask based on the Cross, says Blocher, is “What sort of God must God be to be capable of the Cross?”

Blocher discusses (and disagrees with) Jungel’s view (alongside McCormack’s) that in Christ the “being of God realizes itself as love” and that “God’s self-distinction occurs for the sake of God’s identification with Jesus.”

That’s the problem.

T

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/24/2009 2:36:38 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Tom) : 6/24/2009 5:11:43 AM (GMT-5)