Karl Barth and the Purification of Divine Simplicity

Johnson investigates Karl Barth's critical appropriation of the doctrine of divine simplicity. While Barth is critical of traditional formulations of the doctrine, he understands himself to be refining the doctrine rather than rejecting it. Barth notes that Scripture attributes a diverse set of perfections to God in describing his salvific actions. These diverse perfections, however, have a fundamental unity: God does not contradict himself, but rather his perfections describe his unified, trustworthy agency. For this reason, we can know that in God's inmost being, God is not self‐contradictory but utterly unified or simple in his self‐fidelity. Johnson points out that a key element of Barth's doctrine of God is that it can never be the mere deduction of an abstract, transcendent entity; rather, it must begin with the transcendent God's relationship to creation, and therefore must begin with Jesus Christ, who reveals the true being of God. Johnson identifies three guidelines for speaking of Barth's doctrine: each one of God's perfections must be seen as perfections of his one divine being; God's one being does not exist above and behind his revealed perfections; and God's revealed perfections are essential to his divine nature. On this basis, Johnson explores what Barth has to say about the relationship between God's freedom and his self‐fidelity, including as this regards his freedom to live his one eternal life for us.     

Divine Simplicity in Historical Perspective: Resourcing a Contemporary Discussion

This article seeks to resource contemporary discussions about divine simplicity by exploring how this doctrine was understood throughout patristic and medieval church history, especially with respect to the relation of divine simplicity to the doctrine of the Trinity. It argues, first, that there have been different versions of divine simplicity throughout church history, though most current treatments focus on the Thomist version. Second, it suggests that divine simplicity had a greater role in the witness and worship of the church than is generally recognized today. Third, it argues that many of the differences between contemporary and ancient treatments of divine simplicity boil down to more basic ontological differences. Finally, it draws attention to the close connection between divine simplicity and the Trinity throughout church history, and suggests that the doctrine of divine simplicity provides a more reliable means of grounding the Trinity as monotheistic than the doctrine of perichoresis.     

The Consubstantial Otherness of God: Divine Simplicity and the Trinity in Hans Urs von Balthasar

Martin explores divine simplicity according to the twentieth‐century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. She grants that Balthasar does not provide a traditional presentation of the attribute of divine simplicity. In his doctrine of the Trinity, Balthasar emphasizes such themes as distance, “hiatus,” and infinite difference, none of which seems to promise a robust doctrine of divine simplicity. Indeed, some have suggested that Balthasar's Trinitarian theology does not allow for traditional claims about divine simplicity. Martin argues, however, that one finds in Balthasar's Trinitarian theology the doctrine of divine simplicity, assumed as an internalized starting point and rooted in his understanding of the analogia entis. This can be seen, for example, in his various engagements with Aquinas as well as with contemporary thinkers such as Gustav Siewerth and Erich Przywara. Likewise, when addressing the issue of whether the Trinitarian Persons can be “counted” according to our normal understanding of number, he insists with Evagrius that God is simple. In the same context, he similarly draws upon Plotinus, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Tertullian, Ambrose, and Aquinas. Martin therefore gives particular attention to the Theo‐Logic and to Balthasar's affirmation in his Trinitarian theology of the points that the divine Persons are fully God, the divine attributes are identical with each other in God, and the distinction of Persons has to do not with three parts of God but with opposed subsistent relations.     

Thomas Aquinas’ Divine Simplicity as Biblical Hermeneutic

Long draws from the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann's commentary on Jeremiah some strong reasons for rejecting the traditional teaching on divine simplicity. Above all, for Brueggemann the book of Jeremiah simply will not work if God is simple: God explicitly tells Jeremiah that God suffers and also that God changes in response to Israel. According to Long, however, Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity actually upholds the points that Brueggemann draws from Jeremiah. Long argues that theological accounts of divine simplicity should especially have two purposes: to serve as a way of manifesting in speech the mystery of the Triune God, and to affirm God's transcendent sovereignty over creation. In light of Brueggemann's approach, Long examines four early Reformed theologians: Peter Vermigli (1499‐1562), Girolamo Zanchi (1516‐1590), John Biddle (1615‐1662) and John Owen (1616‐1683). While Biddle rejects divine simplicity, the others uphold it. Long shows that their teaching on divine simplicity focuses on God's transcendent sovereignty over creation. By contrast, Long finds Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity to be more helpful in upholding Brueggemann's insights, insofar as Aquinas uses the doctrine to defend the simplicity of the Triune God. Rather than focusing on God's sovereign power, Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity focuses on getting the Trinitarian processions right.     

Simplicity and Language: Bonaventure's Semiotic Asymptoticism

Luy engages in a close reading of Bonaventure's doctrine of divine simplicity. He offers this reading in light of a keen awareness of contemporary critiques of the doctrine, especially from philosophers of religion who suggest that divine simplicity either means that our human words really cannot say anything intelligible about God, or that divine properties that are surely distinct (such as justice and goodness) are in fact absolutely identical. In sum, Luy recognizes that the doctrine of simplicity challenges the intelligibility of religious language. He points out that medieval thinkers, too, recognized this challenge, but they regarded it as a salutary reminder that God is ultimately incomprehensible to finite minds, even though we can speak true things about God. In expositing divine simplicity according to Bonaventure, Luy shows that Bonaventure expects that creation itself is designed to reveal God's limitless self‐communication. Divine simplicity, then, serves to affirm divine perfection, in a manner limited by the effort of finite words to express the infinite; but divine simplicity also reflects the “semiotic universe” that allows for, and exalts in, the wondrous expression of the divine plenitude.     

Plotinus on Divine Simplicity

Gavrilyuk attends to divine simplicity according to the third‐century AD pagan philosopher Plotinus. He shows that Plotinus draws his doctrine of divine simplicity from the earlier Greco‐Roman philosophical tradition, in which the nature of the “first principle” was highly contested. Aristotle offers a history of the early debate, with Anaxagoras being the first to glimpse the first principle’s simplicity. The Platonist philosophers conceived of the first principle as incorporeal, and on these grounds linked the first principle to simplicity. For his part, Aristotle associated simplicity with the absoluteness of pure actuality. The Stoics, with their essentially material understanding of the divine, ignored or denied divine simplicity. Plotinus draws upon the reception of Aristotle that is found in Alexander of Aphrodisias, Numenius, and Ammonius. According to Gavrilyuk, the signal contribution of Plotinus consists in setting forth the strongest possible doctrine of divine simplicity. Indeed, for Plotinus God’s utter simplicity means that God cannot even be thought, because thinking requires the duality of subject‐object. Plotinus conceives of the divine One as above divine Mind (nous), since the latter contains a unified plurality but not the perfect simplicity that marks the unknowable One. Gavilyuk ends his essay with an account of the qualifications made to divine simplicity by philosophers and theologians who are less radical in their doctrine than is Plotinus. He emphasizes that the Enneads’s key metaphysical insight, utterly ruling out any kind of composition from the One, has the benefit of being supremely intellectually coherent and elegant.     

Schleiermacher and Reformed Scholastics on the Divine Attributes

Schleiermacher's doctrine of the divine attributes has been controversial from its day until the present, with various nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century figures seeing it as a theological novum. Recent work has clarified Schleiermacher's understanding of the status of the attributes, challenging the simplistic readings of his critics. However, the charge of novelty still has not been addressed. I argue in response to this charge that Schleiermacher's doctrine is best explained as an inheritance of the Reformed tradition. Not only is Schleiermacher's doctrine of the divine attributes nearly identical to that of his Reformed Scholastic predecessors, but Schleiermacher holds the same conceptions for the same reasons.     

The Patience of God the Creator: Reflections on Genesis 1:1–2:4a

This article proposes that Genesis 1:1–2:4a be read in terms of an exercise of divine patience – an act of ‘letting be’ and ‘letting happen’ wherein God establishes, guides, waits on and endorses the free action of non‐human creatures. It first articulates a doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, affirming that God is solely responsible for the establishment of a dynamic, complex and valuable cosmos. Next, it contends that God's creative efforts include the empowerment of non‐human creatures who reward God's patience and commit themselves to the task of creatio cooperativa. It then argues that the emergence of human beings is a creative act undertaken by God and non‐human creatures, such that the human bears both the imago dei and the imago mundi. In conclusion, the article considers the relationship of divine and human action, the limits of the idiom of causality, and the possibility of developing a doctrine of creation in light of the witness of the Hebrew Bible.     

St. Gregory Palamas on the Divine Simplicity

Plested focuses on the doctrine of divine simplicity according to Gregory Palamas (1296‐1357/9). He is well aware of the long tradition in the West of considering Palamas's distinction between the divine essence and the energies to do harm to the reality of divine simplicity—even if many recent books on divine simplicity ignore Palamas. Plested thinks that this is in part due to the selectivity of Western readings of Palamas's corpus. Although for Palamas the divine essence is truly (not merely conceptually) distinct from what Plested terms the divine “actualizations,” Palamas insists repeatedly that his point does not undermine absolute divine simplicity. In fact, as Plested shows, Palamas considers that the real distinction between essence and energies not only supports, but indeed flows from, the doctrine of divine simplicity properly understood. Plested admits that recent Orthodox interpreters of Palamas, such as John Meyendorff and Vladimir Lossky, tend to give little attention to divine simplicity except by way of contrast with Western accounts of the doctrine. But Plested argues that Palamas's doctrine of divine simplicity is better interpreted as in accord with the fundamental intuitions of his Latin contemporaries, even if expressed in a different metaphysical framework. Examining certain lesser‐known works of Palamas, Plested identifies a set of important interpretative keys for understanding Palamas's account of divine simplicity, including the normative role of the principles of the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680‐1) and the necessity of appreciating the historical contexts in which he wrote specific works.     

From humility to envy: Questioning the usefulness of sad passions as a means towards virtue in Spinoza's Ethics

In the Ethics, Spinoza defines certain traditional virtues such as humility and repentance as species of sadness and denies that they are virtues. He nonetheless holds that they can turn out to be useful as a means towards virtue—in fact, the greatest virtue of blessedness—in the life of someone who is not guided by reason. In this paper, I examine Spinoza's relatively overlooked claim regarding the usefulness of sad passions as a means towards blessedness. In taking up Spinoza's treatment of humility as my case study, I show that there is a tension between this claim and his other explicit commitments in the Ethics. More specifically, after considering his views regarding the consequences of humility—including, most notably, its susceptibility to envy—and conditions of achieving blessedness, I show that humility cannot effectively be said to bring about cooperation and push “weak‐minded” people in the right direction so that, in the end, they may be free and enjoy blessedness. I conclude by suggesting that if we must rely on passions as a means towards virtue in the Spinozistic universe, we must rely not on debilitating sad passions such as humility, but on joy‐based social passions such as love.     

On the limits of divine power

This paper considers the question of whether there are truths independent of God's power. It defends a traditional conception of divine power, according to which God's power does not extend to logically necessary truths, such as those of logic and mathematics, against Cartesian voluntarism, here taken as the doctrine that every truth falls within the compass of God's creative will. The paper argues that the voluntarist position is internally inconsistent. It concludes that if God is an absolute, unconditioned reality, then there must be truths that are independent of God's power.     

Trinity,Simplicity and the Status of God's Personal Relations

It is commonly argued by Christian philosophers and theologians that the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity is incompatible with the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. First, it would seem that the presence of relations in God suggests a composition of substance and accidents in him. Second, if all that is in God is God, as simplicity claims, then it would seem that one could not maintain the real distinctions between the divine persons, as the Trinity requires. In answer to these challenges this article seeks to recover Thomas Aquinas' and the Reformed scholastics' emphasis upon the subsistence and pure actuality of the personal relations in God. The article concludes that while God's personal relations are really distinct from each other, there is no real distinction between the personal relations and the divine substance and that the Trinity and the doctrine of divine simplicity are thus agreeable.     

After Heidegger: Transubstantiation

Recent debate over transubstantiation (especially Jean‐Luc Marion's defence of it) has concentrated either on transubstantiation as a kind of embarrassment in consequence of modern physics, or on the extent to which it is both a doctrine elaborated in the light of metaphysics and recoverable in consequence of metaphysics having been overcome. In this sense the tension between Aquinas' apparently metaphysical formulation of the doctrine and the less overtly metaphysical formula adopted by the Council of Trent (in its refusal to speak of ‘accidents’) has indicated a way of ‘rescuing’ or ‘recovering’ the doctrine. This article argues that such a recovery is a false trail. Pope Paul VI was right to be wary of relativising the Eucharistic event to the believing community in any doctrine of transignification. Alternatively, attempts like Chauvet's and Macquarrie's to restate Eucharistic event in terms of Heidegger's Geviert presuppose Heidegger has succeeded in destroying the metaphysics of presence, so that they can use the fruits of his researches. What is actually at issue in thinking through transubstantiation is how the doctrine relates to conceptions of the physical: Aristotelian, what comes to be Newtonian, or postmodern conceptions which appear to eschew physics altogether. Heidegger's contribution to the debate would better point to how knowing anything means being included in and (self‐) disclosed by what I know. A re‐investigation of transubstantiation might therefore take into account the extraordinary reappearance of the term ‘transubstantiation’ in current non‐theological investigations of performativity (especially in the work of Judith Butler). Here transubstantiation would include not the maximal meaning of bread and wine as signs constituted in das Geviert, ‘after’ substance has been critiqued, but their minimality, in enacting a change in (our) substance (self‐realising). This would confirm the divinising meaning of the Eucharistic event, which stresses how we are caught up into the divine. Thus, whereas in transignification the Eucharistic event occurs in consequence of the will of the community of believers, in transubstantiation it is the enactment of the community as community that is at issue, an enactment in consequence of no act of will of its own. In terms of the postmodern and non‐theological appropriation of the word transubstantiation, this means that I who participate in the Eucharistic am re‐ordered, or re‐materialised, or ‘trans‐substantiated’ in the Eucharistic event.     

A Parsimonious Model of Divine Simplicity

Many recent treatments of divine simplicity have been highly critical of traditional accounts of the doctrine. Critics have challenged whether the doctrine is coherent and whether it can be squared with a robust theology of the triune God. Yet the theological tradition is largely persuaded that the doctrine of divine simplicity is not only coherent and true, but also that the doctrine of divine simplicity is needed for an account of the Trinity that does not fall into the trap of tritheism. In addition, both Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions include conciliar and confessional support for the doctrine, and allow for more than one way of accounting for the doctrine. This essay offers a constructive account that seeks to avoid some of the most significant concerns raised in the recent theological and philosophical literature. It depends in important respects upon work being done in analytic theology on the use of models in theology, adopted (with suitable amendments) from the philosophy of science. After giving some dogmatic context, three versions of divine simplicity are laid out. Then, a parsimonious version of the doctrine is set forth and considered as a potentially fruitful model, which may have theological utility. The essay ends with some remarks about the way in which this new model of the doctrine may have value in ecumenical theology.     

Works of Love in a World of Violence: Kierkegaard,Feminism, and the Limits of Self‐Sacrifice

Feminist scholars adopt wide‐ranging views of self‐sacrifice: their critiques claim that women are inordinately affected by Christianity's valorization of self‐sacrifice and that this traditional Christian value is inherently misogynistic and necrophilic. Although Søren Kierkegaard's Works of Love deems Christian love essentially sacrificial, love, in his view, sets significant limits on the role of self‐sacrifice in human life. Through his proposed response to one who requests forgiveness, “Do you now truly love me?” Kierkegaard offers a model of forgiveness that subverts traditional ideals of the self‐sacrificing and submissive woman while keeping love central. The question asserts self‐love, involves redoubling and double danger, and expresses a refusal to imitate Christ's suffering. I propose a reading in keeping with Grace Jantzen's vision for a feminist philosophy of religion, which reads against the grain and “seeks to break through to new ways of thinking that may open up divine horizons.” My reading is further supported by Kierkegaard's contention that everything essentially Christian bears a double meaning. In light of the subversive potential found in the discrepancy between apparent love and actual love, as well as the duty to name the sin of one who has behaved in an unloving manner, I argue that Kierkegaard's philosophy of love resists simplistic understandings of self‐sacrificing love.     

Divine Omniscience: Is God's Foreknowledge at Risk in the Context of Contemporary Science?

Abstract

Does quantum indeterminacy threaten the classical theological doctrine of divine omniscience? Certain popular interpretations of quantum physics have challenged conventional ways of thinking about time and space, being and becoming. Consequently, the traditional doctrine that God knows all things, including future contingent events, has recently come under debate. This paper explores how the way we think about time affects the way we think about God's relation to time. Theologians need to be careful when appropriating scientific theories in their theological reflections because interpretations of those theories often bring along unnecessary metaphysical presuppositions. Using an interpretation of special relativity that focuses on the Lorentz transformation, this paper shows that modern physics does not truly challenge the doctrine of divine foreknowledge. In fact, modern physical theories can actually deepen theological reflection on the classical doctrine of divine omniscience.     

A PEIRCEAN RESPONSE TO THE EVOLUTIONARY DEBUNKING OF MORAL KNOWLEDGE

The evolutionary debunking argument advanced by Sharon Street, Michael Ruse, and Richard Joyce employs the logic of Paul Griffiths and John Wilkins to contend that humans cannot have knowledge of moral truths, since the evolutionary process that has produced our basic moral intuitions lacks causal connections to those (putative) truths. Yet this argument is self‐defeating, because its aim is the categorical, normative claim that we should suspend our moral beliefs in light of the discoveries about their non‐truth‐tracking origins, when it is precisely this claim that relies upon the normativity under attack. This article cites Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) to argue that such self‐defeat can be avoided by expanding upon the basic structure of the argument put forth by Griffiths and Wilkins, provided that one embraces a version of realism that corresponds with Peirce's doctrine of final causation. So construed, final causation reconciles real generals (including real moral values) with natural selection and undergirds further speculation of moral facts within values per se.     

ROBERT JENSON ON THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF CHRIST

In his recent two‐volume Systematic Theology, Robert Jenson offers an account of Christ's pre‐existence that is, in several important respects, an original contribution to the literature. In this article, I offer a critical interaction with Jenson's doctrine. In particular, I show that what Jenson has to say about (a) divine eternity and (b) the relationship between philosophy and theology, have important bearings on his construal of Christ's pre‐existence and, in the final analysis, skew what he has to say on the matter. I conclude that Jenson's account of this doctrine, though suggestive and insightful in several respects, is unsuccessful, indeed, incoherent, as it stands.     

SCIENTIFIC UNIFORMITY OR “NATURAL” DIVINE ACTION: SHIFTING THE BOUNDARIES OF LAW IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In October 1862, the Duke of Argyll published an article in the Edinburgh Review entitled “The Supernatural.” In it, Argyll argued that contrary to the prevailing assumption, miracles were “natural” rather than “supernatural” acts of God. This reconceptualization was a response to the controversial publication Essays and Reviews (1860), which challenged orthodox Biblical doctrine. Argyll's characterization of a miracle was not novel; a number of early modern Newtonian thinkers had advanced the same argument for similar reasons. New in this nineteenth‐century reconceptualization, however, were (1) the recent geological, physical, and evolutionary developments and (2) the introduction of German higher criticism. Argyll and the neo‐Newtonians thus attempted to construct a philosophico‐theological alternative, which would constitute a middle‐position between the traditional acceptance and liberal rejection of miracles. I argue finally that 21st‐century debates on divine action in fact exist as part of a longer historical tradition that dates back to Augustine.     

ACHIEVING A SCIENCE OF SACRED DOCTRINE*

Aquinas claims that sacred doctrine is a science, or scientia. All scientiae involve demonstrations containing principles which yield conclusions that are necessary and certain. The principles leading to sacred scientia are the articles of faith. Those articles are contained in Scripture and constitute the premises of demonstrations the conclusions of which form sacred doctrine's content. Because of those articles' divine origin, we can expect them to yield conclusions the truth of which is guaranteed. According to William Abraham, however, Aquinas must demonstrate Scripture's divine origin as a condition for achieving a sacred scientia. In the absence of such a demonstration, we cannot be certain that the articles contained in Scripture are God‐breathed, nor can we be certain that the conclusions deduced from them belong to sacred doctrine. Abraham argues that Aquinas's putative demonstration of Scripture's divine origin fails and—consequently—so does his attempt to establish a sacred scientia. In this paper, I will show that Aquinas never intended to provide such a demonstration, nor does he need to in order to secure sacred doctrine's status as a scientia. Furthermore, I will show that achieving sacred scientia is not, pace Abraham, an epistemological undertaking but a spiritual discipline that eventuates in knowledge of and love for God.