Barth's Ontology of Sin and Grace

Variations on a Theme of Augustine

Shao Kai Tseng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367023935
• eBook ISBN: 9780429680786
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In recent Barth studies it has been argued that a key to understanding the theologian's opposition to natural theology is his rejection of substantialist ontology. While this is true to an extent, this book argues that it is a mistake to see Barth's 'actualistic ontology' as diametrically opposed to traditional substantialism. Probing into Barth's soteriological hamartiology in Church Dogmatics, III-IV, a largely neglected aspect of these volumes in recent debates on his understanding of being and act, it shows how his descriptions of sin, nature, and grace shed light on the precise manners in which his actualistic ontology operates on both a substance grammar of being and a process grammar of becoming, while rejecting the metaphysics underlying both grammars.

Looking at issues such as original sin, universal salvation and human will, Barth is shown to be radically redefining the relationship between humans, their actions and the divine. This book argues that human 'nature' is the total determination of the human being 'from above' by God's grace in Christ, while the existential dimension of the human being is also totally determined 'from below' by the Adamic history of sin. This serves to demonstrate Barth's endeavours in eliminating the vestiges of natural theology within the Western tradition handed down from Augustine.

By exploring these issues this book offers a fresh insight into Barth's relationship with his theological forbears. As such, it will be vital reading for any scholar of Barth studies, the problem of evil, and theological ontology.

1
Sin and substantialist ontology

The Augustinian background of Barth’s theological grammar

Introduction

This chapter is on Augustine’s construal of sin in the framework of his substantialist ontology. The purpose is to elicit the ontological grammar underlying his hamartiology, which will be important for our discussions on Barth’s actualistic reorientation of Augustine’s substantialist and meontological treatment of moral evil. I will not attempt to offer any original interpretation or assessment of the Latin Father’s thought, the subtleties of which are far more sophisticated than can be presented in this chapter. For the purpose of this book, I shall discuss only aspects of Augustine’s substantialist ontology and meontological hamartiology that are relevant to Barth’s grammatical re-appropriation thereof. Because this ontological grammar originated from classical Greek philosophy, we shall begin with a brief overview of the classical roots of Augustine’s thought.

I The classical roots of Augustine’s ontology

In the 1930s a number of European scholars made important contributions to the discovery of Augustine’s reliance on Platonist thinkers.¹ Ever since then, commentators on Augustine’s theology have debated the classical roots of his ontology, and a number of interpretational paradigms remain influential to this day.² While there are still scholars who think that Augustine’s Latin intellect was incapable of grasping the sophistication of Hellenistic thought, Robert O’Connell, one of the most authoritative readers of Augustine in recent decades, has forcefully demonstrated the Latin Father’s familiarity with Greek metaphysics.³

Regardless of the precise relationship between Augustine and classical philosophy, it is safe to say that at crucial points of his theology he deliberately departs from the ontologies of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and other possible sources of influence (e.g. Porphyry). Even scholars like J. M. Rist who tend to identify basically classical principles operating in Augustine’s ontology would never claim that it is simply Platonic, Plotinian, or whatnot.⁴ Yet it is also true that Augustine takes certain classical philosophical principles to be valid axioms for the development of his theological ontology.

Stephen Menn has helpfully demonstrated that a sound understanding of Augustine’s ontology requires a certain degree of familiarity with Platonism. With technical precision, Menn shows that ‘Augustine was not a Platonist’.⁵ To be sure, ‘to a great extent’ Augustine’s concepts and doctrines of ‘soul and God’ are ‘the same as Plotinus’s concepts and doctrines’.⁶ What sets Augustine apart from the Platonists in the first instance is his commitment to ‘the authority of Scripture’ in addition to his quest for wisdom from ‘the reasonings of the philosophers’.⁷ This leads to ‘un-Plotinian aspects’ of the Latin Father’s ontology that are ‘as a whole distinctively Augustinian’.⁸ His starting point was ‘the Christian scriptures’, and Platonism only provided him with the ‘language’ and ‘conceptual apparatus’ to explicate ‘Christian doctrine’.⁹ Though he tried to do so ‘purely in terms of’ Platonist ontology, ‘the fit is rough in places, and no Platonist could be pleased to read … that the highest God had’ involved Godself in an act of incarnation.¹⁰ In a word, on Menn’s overall balanced reading, Augustine is ‘heavily indebted to’ Plotinus, but ‘can break from the [Platonist] tradition’ because of his ultimate commitment to the authority of the Christian scriptures that he accepts by faith.¹¹

While Menn’s work on Augustine is helpful for the most part, his comparative treatment of Platonist and Augustinian theodicies falls short of offering a decisive focus on the key difference between their respective ontologies, namely, Augustine’s allegiance to the biblical doctrine of creation. In a more recent article, Yonghua Ge follows Janet Soskice to contend that ‘ultimately it is not Greek philosophy but the biblical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo that serves the foundation for Augustine’s metaphysics of being’.¹² Along the same line Bradley Green argues that Augustine changed the definitions of key substantialist terms, including ‘substance’ (Greek: οὐσία; Latin: substantia/essentia), in order to construct a distinctively Christian ontology in line with the biblical doctrines of the Trinity and creation.¹³

Gerald Boersma’s 2016 study on Augustine’s early theology of image offers an extensive and detailed examination of the Latin philosophical background of his ontology, and discusses the Greek metaphysical roots of the Latin thinkers before him. Boersma argues that in order to speak of both Christ and the human creature as images of the triune God, Augustine redefined the metaphysical concept of substance in his early theology to allow for different manners of participation in the source of the image.¹⁴ Boersma, like Menn, takes note of the early Augustine’s heavy reliance on Plotinian ontology and the Platonist concept of participation.¹⁵ Meanwhile, Boersma contends that the early Augustine is committed to a distinctively biblical-creationist ontology affirming the natural goodness of material substances.¹⁶

Of course, how consistently Augustine upholds the biblical principle of creatio ex nihilo to resist dualist theories of substance and basically Platonic understandings of ontological analogies remains a topic of debate in contemporary scholarship. Archie Spencer has shown, in my view quite correctly, that Augustine is largely responsible for having made Platonic patterns of analogical thinking and speech the dominating paradigm for subsequent Latin theology.¹⁷ In the same vein I will argue that the basically substantialist approach to theological ontology in the Latin tradition is largely the result of Augustine’s overwhelming influence. However, we must also bear in mind that Augustine’s ultimate commitment is to the Christian scriptures. He accepts the scriptures in their entirety, while, as Gillian Evans has shown, Plotinus’s ‘Enneads contain a theory of evil which … Augustine rejected as a whole’ even though he ‘retained many of its parts’.¹⁸ Even Rist and O’Connell, who tend to emphasise classical philosophical principles operating in important parts of Augustine’s works, would not deny that there is at least an express intention in the Doctor of Grace to uphold his biblical-creationist ontology. That is, we must credit Augustine for having introduced distinctively biblical and Christian ways of thinking to the theological ontology of the Western tradition, however much we might see the tradition handed from him as needful of critical correction.

II Augustine’s biblical-creationist ontology of substance

i Creatio ex nihilo and Genesis 1:1–2

One distinctively Christian feature of Augustine’s ontology that sets it apart from classical ontologies in general and Platonism in particular is the doctrine that God created out of absolute nothing everything that is not God. A succinct summary of the doctrine is offered in Augustine’s celebrated Enchiridion:

The cause of created things, whether in heaven or on earth, visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the creator who is the one true God, and that there is nothing that is not either himself or from him, and that he is Trinity, that is, Father, the Son begotten from the Father and the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the same Father, and is one and the same Spirit of Father and Son.¹⁹

This distinctively Augustinian doctrine did not come from classical philosophy, but from Augustine’s exegesis of Genesis 1. Exegetical soundness aside, creatio ex nihilo is for Augustine a biblically revealed truth that he accepts by faith, rather than a philosophical dogma deduced by reason. Extensive exegetical writings on Genesis 1 are found in at least five major places in the corpus of Augustine’s works, which show that his understanding of creatio ex nihilo underwent significant development through different phases of his career. These include, in chronological order, On Genesis: Two Books Against the Manichees; On the Literal Meaning of Genesis: An Unfinished Book; Books 12–13 of Confessions; On the Literal Meaning of Genesis in Twelve Books; and Books 11–14 of City of God. Discussions of the role of ‘unformed matter’ in God’s creation of the universe ‘out of absolute nothing’ pervade his other works as well.²⁰

Augustine’s earlier works suggest that God created the world out of formless matter that was somehow just there, but in his mature writings he is clear that information occurs at the very instant of original creation. In one initial act of creation, God made both physical and spiritual matter and informed them with God’s eternal Word to give rise to every kind of substance, each endowed with its own nature (Gen. 1:24–5). Here Augustine departs from Aristotelian hylomorphism and Platonist matter–form dualism in a significant way: matter can be physical as well as psychical, and form is intrinsic to both physical and spiritual matter because information is part and parcel of creation.

How Augustine’s understandings of physical and spiritual matter accord with the notion of ‘heaven and earth’ in Genesis 1:1 is a problem that took him some time to figure out. He came to the conclusion that the term refers to the totality of reality consisting of informed matter. The more troubling passage is Genesis 1:2, which mentions the tohuw and bohuw (‘formless and void’), the ‘darkness’, and the ‘face of the deep’. Augustine understands this biblical passage as indicating that God created the orderly world from formless matter. Yet, as we just saw, he insists that matter cannot exist apart from forms. Both spiritual matter and physical matter were informed upon creation, for God created everything goo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dediaction
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Sin and substantialist ontology: the Augustinian background of Barth’s theological grammar
• 2 God and nothingness (CD III/1–3): Barth’s actualistic reorientation of Augustine’s meontological grammar
• 3 Barth’s actualistic hamartiology (CD IV/1–3, §60, §65, and §70): prolegomenal considerations
• 4 ‘The Pride and Fall of Man’ (CD IV/1, §60): original sin and the history of Christ
• 5 ‘The Sloth and Misery of Man’ (CD IV/2, §65): Barth on the bondage of the will
• 6 Condemnation and universal salvation: Barth’s ‘reverent agnosticism’ revisited (CD IV/3, §70)
• Epilogue: Barth’s paradigm shift: an actualistic reorientation of Christian ontology
• Bibliography
• Index