Faith, Freedom and the Spirit

The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology

Paul D. Molnar

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780830839056
• eBook ISBN:
  9780830880188
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Distinguished scholar Paul Molnar adds to his previous work, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity, to help us think more accurately about the economic Trinity, about divine and human interaction in the sphere of faith and knowledge within history. Exploring why it is imperative to begin and end theology from within faith, Molnar relies on the thinking of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance in dialogue with other contemporary theologians (Catholic and Protestant) about divine and human freedom.Powerfully argued and meticulously documented, Molnar's magisterial study begins with an extensive discussion of the role of faith in knowing God and in relating to God in and through his incarnate Word and thus throughthe Holy Spirit. From there he proceeds to consider the divine freedom once again as the basis for true human freedom, discussing how and why a properly functioning pneumatology will lead to an appropriately theological understanding of God?s actionswithin the economy. He considers perils of embracing a historicized Christology, proposing an alternative way of understanding the connection between time and eternity that is christologically focused and pneumatologically informed. And finally, hediscusses at length how the doctrine of justification by faith relates to living the Christian life in the power of the Holy Spirit and the economy of grace.

1

Thinking About God Within Faith

The Role of the Holy Spirit

In his review of my book Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity, John Webster noted that it was “a piece of polemic in the best sense of the term: critical analysis and clarification with an eye kept firmly on a rich and fruitful set of dogmatic commitments.”1 As such he suggested that it should be read as “a ground-clearing exercise: part protest, part alarm signal, part dismantling of the shaky edifice of modern economic trinitarianism.” That such a “ground-clearing” exercise was needed at the time I think will be acknowledged by anyone who realizes the importance of recognizing that a properly conceived doctrine of the Trinity cannot simply be the embodiment of our human experience of relationality or of our religious ideas writ large. Any serious understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity must be shaped by who God eternally was and is as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Many reviewers saw clearly that what I had to say about the immanent Trinity as the indispensable premise of what takes place in the economy was based on God’s personal economic self-communication in his Word and Spirit. Thus it was not arbitrary. Yet, for some strange reason there were some who claimed that I held that a proper understanding of the doctrine could not begin with the economic Trinity because I was critical of those who claimed that one could not begin thinking about the immanent Trinity from experience.2 Of course that is not what I said at any point in the book. Any such idea would have circumvented revelation at the outset in an attempt to know God directly instead of mediately through his incarnate Word and through faith that is enabled by the Holy Spirit. Knowing God the Father through his Son and in and by the Spirit means acknowledging that it is always God, who alone exists self-sufficiently as the one who loves, who enables our knowledge of him and our actions as those who live as his witnesses here and now. What I argued was that a proper theology that begins in faith does indeed involve our experience of God, but in that experience we know that it is God and not our experience of God who is the object of faith and of knowledge. This chapter will involve a careful analysis and comparison of the view of mediated knowledge offered by Karl Barth with the view offered by Karl Rahner. Barth’s view, it will be argued, does justice both to knowledge and experience of God just because it takes the action of the Spirit seriously and operates explicitly within faith all along the line. Rahner’s view, which intends to speak of our knowledge and experience of God, as does Barth’s, differs from Barth’s approach by its apologetic attempt to validate knowledge of faith from the experience of self-transcendence. By contrasting these views I hope to clarify why fideism is unacceptable while thinking within faith is required in order to properly understand human and divine interaction, especially when it comes to knowing that our experience of God really is an experience of God and not just an experience of ourselves extended to the nth degree.

Faith and the Knowledge of God

Very early in II/1 Barth objected to Augustine’s description of a type of knowledge of God in his Confessions that he considered to be problematic because it was an attempt to know God by way of “a timeless and non-objective seeing and hearing” (II/1, p. 11).3 While Barth also noted that elsewhere in his City of God Augustine himself advanced the kind of “mediate, objective knowledge” that Barth himself believed was the only way we could have knowledge of God through his Word and Spirit, Barth persistently rejected any sort of “non-objective” knowledge of God because any such knowledge necessarily and always bypasses the place and manner in which God reveals himself to us, namely, his incarnate Word. Any attempt to know God that seeks some form of direct knowledge of God (a knowledge without the mediation of his incarnate Word), in Barth’s view, always would mean the inability to distinguish God from us; and that would then mean our inability to speak objectively and truly about God at all. Barth therefore understood faith to mean “the knowledge of God” (II/1, p. 14). But this meant the knowledge of God as an object; knowledge of the truth. Yet, because God is not an object within a series of other objects, it is impossible to come to an objective knowledge of God via “a general understanding of man’s consideration and conception, but only in particular from God as its particular object” (II/1, p. 15). For Barth, “God is not God if He is considered and conceived as one in a series of like objects. . . . Faith will have to be denied if we want to take our stand on this presupposition. God, as the object of knowledge, will not let Himself be placed as one in a series” (II/1, p. 15). For this reason Barth insisted that he did not teach “this distinction between the knowledge of God and its object on the ground of a preconceived idea about the transcendence and supramundanity of God,” and neither did he teach it “in the form of an affirmation of our experience of faith”; instead he insisted that he taught it because of what he found “proclaimed and described as faith in Holy Scripture” (II/1, p. 15). And that faith, according to Barth, “excludes any faith of man in himself—that is any desire for religious self-help, any religious self-satisfaction, any religious self-sufficiency” (II/1, p. 13) precisely because faith in the biblical sense “lives upon the objectivity of God. . . . Take away the objectivity of this He [namely, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit] and faith collapses, even as love, trust and obedience” (II/1, p. 13).

I mention this understanding of faith here because, while my first book on the Trinity was an attempt to explain that unless our God-talk is grounded in God’s own existence, that is, an existence that God retains even in his closest union with us, which does indeed take place in revelation (which includes God’s actions as reconciler and redeemer) and in faith (which involves our acknowledgment of God as God and our fellowship [communion] with God), all our talk about God and our relations with God become simply descriptions of our own religious experiences and agendas instead of descriptions of who God is, what God does for us in history and how God enables us to live the life of faith. The fact that so many theologians thought they could begin their theologies not only with some sort of self-confidence in the strength of their religious experiences, but that they could even claim that “trinitarian life is also our life”4 suggested to me that those approaches to God had missed God’s objectivity precisely because they did not in fact begin and end their thinking in faith by acknowledging God’s objectivity as just described.

Because I followed Barth to insist that unless God’s actions for us in history are seen against the background of God in himself who was and remains eternally triune and could have remained the triune God without us, even though in fact he chose not to, some readers erroneously concluded that I had adopted a view of God as independent of us in the sense that God remained locked up within his own trinitarian relations and thus remained apart from us. Any careful reader of my first book on the Trinity certainly never could have reached that conclusion. Those who did reach that conclusion did so, I suspect, because they had already collapsed the immanent into the economic Trinity by implicitly and explicitly arguing for a “dependent” deity, that is, a God whose eternal being was and is in some sense constituted either by his decision to be in relation with us or by his actually relating with us in history. My first book was an attempt to show that when a properly formulated doctrine of the immanent Trinity is allowed to function throughout one’s theology, then one of the things that is necessarily excluded as a possibility is the idea that God’s relations with us in history were or are in any sense necessary to him. In this regard I made a distinction between factual necessities and logical necessities, the former referring to the fact that when God acts toward us in his Word and Spirit, we can then say that it was necessary for God to be incarnate, for instance, but only in the sense that, in light of the fact that that is how God has chosen to reconcile the world to himself, we cannot think of God in himself at all without thinking of God through his incarnate Son as the reconciler and redeemer. But that does not mean and can never mean that God realizes his Sonship or any aspect of his eternal triunity by means of suffering for us or by means of his becoming incarnate and acting for us as the reconciler and redeemer. We will consider some of these ideas once again as the book develops.

Thinking About God from Within the Economy

All of this is by way of saying that in this sequel to my first book on the Trinity, I will still be in dialogue with Karl Barth and contemporary theology. But this time, instead of doing a ground-clearing exercise by showing how and why a doctrine of the immanent Trinity is crucial to every aspect of theology, I will attempt to show (without forgetting what was established in that book) exactly how one might begin a theology with “man in the presence of God, his action over against God’s action.”5 In other words, instead of beginning with the doctrine of God, I will begin from the human side with our human experience of God. But I will attempt to do so in such a way that what is said derives from an understanding of God’s actions in relation to us as the basis on which all human action flourishes and has meaning. Karl Barth once said that “Trinitarian thinking compels theology . . . to be completely in earnest about the thought of God in at least two places: first, at the point where it is a question of God’s action in regard to man, and secondly, at the point where it is a question of man’s action in regard to God” (PTNC, p. 458). This means that whether theology begins with God or with the human, it must be aware of the fact that God the Father encounters us in his Word that is spoken to us; and through the Spirit of the Father and the Son, God himself enables us to hear his Word. Because God encounters us in this way, Barth said, a theology guided by the Trinity “cannot seek to have merely one centre, one subject. . . . To the extent that it sought to resolve itself into a mere teaching of God’s action in regard to man, into a pure teaching of the Word, it would become metaphysics” (PTNC, p. 459). Yet, any theology that “sought to resolve itself into a teaching of man’s action in regard to God, into a pure teaching of the Spirit . . . would become mysticism” (PTNC, p. 459). Either way, we would end with a God who is not the Father, Son and Holy Spirit because this God cannot be known via metaphysics, that is, by exploring being, because theology is focused not on being in general as is metaphysics but on the specific being and action of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in himself as the one who loves in freedom and as the one who loves us in his actions for us and with us in history. Or we might conjure a God who can be known directly and not mediately. Such a God would end up being identical with ourselves, such that one might then say “trinitarian life is also our life”! In this book I will follow Karl Barth once again and argue that “A pure teaching of the Word will take into account the Holy Spirit as the divine reality in which the Word is heard, just as a pure teaching of the Spirit of the Son will take into account the Word of God as the divine reality in which the Word is given to us” (PTNC, p. 459). Beginning in this way does not mean I am abandoning what I said previously about the immanent Trinity. What it does mean is that a serious theology properly focused on the Holy Spirit as the enabling condition of our knowledge of and love of God will always allow for the fact that knowledge of and relationship with God means union with Christ and thus union with the Father.6 Trinitarian thinking thus will always allow God himself to be the determining factor in all that we think, say and do.

The Importance of the Holy Spirit

As is well known, Barth was critical of Schleiermacher for focusing too much on our human relations with God, although he did not condemn him out of hand because he believed that “A genuine, proper theology could be built up from such a starting-point” (PTNC, p. 459). That anthropocentric starting point might work, according to Barth, but only with “an honest doctrine of the Holy Spirit and of faith” (PTNC, p. 459). In spite of the dangers, which were all too obvious to Barth, and which I tried to point out in my first book on the Trinity, namely, the danger of reducing God to a description of our own experiences of ourselves and the danger of confusing God with ideas developed on such a basis, I agree with Barth that theology could begin with the human as long as it is “the pure theology of the Holy Spirit; the teaching of man brought face to face with God by God, of man granted grace by grace” (PTNC, p. 460). But it is crucial to note that for Barth one cannot have a proper theology of the Holy Spirit without recognizing “the divinity of the Logos”; a theology of the Holy Spirit must be a theology of faith that proves itself such by the fact that “it is the divine Word that forms its true centre” (PTNC, p. 460). In contrasting Martin Luther’s view of faith with Schleiermacher’s, Barth discloses what would become a persistent theme throughout the Church Dogmatics, namely, that true faith arises as a necessity because it is a miraculous creation of the Holy Spirit. That does not mean that the Spirit replaces our human decision of faith; rather it means that our free human decision is an act of obedience that is constrained by the hearing of God’s Word spoken to us through the scriptural witness. That is why, in contrast to Schleiermacher, Barth could say

He [Luther] neither needed to model the concept of faith to comply with a certain world view, nor did he need first to work out the indispensable nature of this concept. The concept of faith, rather, is already posited, both in its content and in its range, in and with his conception of the Word. (PTNC, p. 462)

The difference, in Barth’s view, lay in the fact that “the divinity of the Logos is pre-supposed as unequivocally as . . . the divinity of the Holy Spirit” (PTNC, p. 462). Without this decisive connection, in Barth’s view, one must wonder whether it is the Holy Spirit that is in view at all!

Among contemporary theologians, Barth’s student Thomas F. Torrance saw and maintained this connection with unparalleled determination by taking his cue from Athanasius, who insisted that our understanding of the Spirit must be governed by our understanding of the Son who is homoousion with the Father so that the Spirit, who is one in being with both the Father and Son and who is sent by the Father and by the Son, must never be confused with the human spirit. That, for Torrance, was the crucial error embedded, for instance, in the theologies of Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich. I will not develop Torrance’s important and helpful thinking here because there will be occasions for that development as the book proceeds. Here I simply note the importance of connecting the Spirit and the Word in such a way that one could not in truth be referring to the Holy Spirit if and to the extent that one’s thought is not necessarily and from the outset governed by the Word and by faith.

This insight led to another. While faith is indeed a human action, as just noted, most attempts at apologetic theology inevitably try to establish the divinity of Christ in a way that bypasses the Holy Spirit as the one who alone enables true faith. As Torrance emphasized, and Barth would agree, no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Spirit. Hence, in his Christology, Torrance insisted that we must begin with the “fact of Christ,” by which he meant that we had to begin our thinking by acknowledging his true divinity and his true humanity as witnessed in the Scriptures. There was no way we could build up to this recognition and knowledge, in his mind, because the only way to grasp it was through the actions of the Word and Spirit, on which we utterly depend.7 In other words it had to be revealed to us, and revelation included the idea that the Holy Spirit was active here and now enabling our hearing of the Word spoken by and through that Spirit. It is extremely interesting to note that for Barth, Schleiermacher’s mistake at this point was that “As an apologist he was bound to be interested in understanding revelation not strictly as revelation, but in such a way that it might also be comprehensible as a mode of human cognition” (PTNC, pp. 462-63). This led him to offer a view of mediation that did not see faith as revelation and thus as “a correlate to the concept of the Holy Spirit . . . but as a correlate to this human experience [religious consciousness as such]” (PTNC, p. 463). And this led him to conceptualize faith and Christ by equating them with experience and history so that he turned “the Christian relationship of man with God into an apparent human possibility” (PTNC, p. 463). At this point Barth maintains that the Reformation theologians never took this approach because there was only one mediation of God to humanity, and that is the mediation of “the Father in the Son through the Spirit in the strict irreducible opposition of these ‘persons’ in the Godhead” (PTNC, p. 464). Because this mediation simply cannot be conceptualized “as a mode of human cognition,” Barth insists that it “is unusable in apologetics” (PTNC, p. 464). This is an enormously important point because if theology is faith in the Word of God seeking understanding, then any attempt to formulate a theology of faith that tries to build up to it will automatically subvert the truth, which is that the possibility of theology is and remains grounded only in God and not in us.

In the remainder of this chapter, then, I will spell out just how Barth understood faith as a mode of revelation in a way that did not undermine but rather enabled free human decisions—decisions that became free because they took place in obedience to the only one who could truly enable human beings to act in freedom, namely, Christ himself. There are very interesting descriptions of faith by Barth in CD I/1, II/1 and especially in IV/1. I think it would helpful to see how Barth’s thinking is shaped by his view of the Trinity with a view toward developing the thesis of this book, namely, that a proper understanding of theology starting from the anthropological side can do justice both to divine and human freedom in a positive way as long as it develops strictly within faith as enabled by the Holy Spirit. The chapter will conclude with a brief comparison of some of the key points stressed by Barth with another very different view of faith offered by Karl Rahner. The comparison will set into relief the point of this book: when the Holy Spirit is allowed to function as the one who both enables faith and unites us to Christ, then we not only come to know God with a definite certitude, but we come to know ourselves in Christ in positive ways that would be closed to us ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Thinking About God Within Faith: The Role of the Holy Spirit
• 2 The Role of the Holy Spirit in Knowing the Triune God
• 3 Considering God’s Freedom Once Again
• 4 Origenism, Election, and Time and Eternity
• 5 The Perils of Embracing a “Historicized Christology”
• 6 Can Jesus’ Divinity Be Recognized as “Definitive, Authentic and Essential” If It Is Grounded in Election? Just How Far Did the Later Barth Historicize Christology?
• 7 The Obedience of the Son in the Theology of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance
• 8 A Theology of Grace: Living In and From the Holy Spirit
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Praise for Faith, Freedom and the Spirit
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press