Freedom, Necessity, and the Knowledge of God

Paul D. Molnar

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567700179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Theologie

Paul D. Molnar discusses issues related to the concepts of freedom and necessity in trinitarian doctrine. He considers the implications of "non-conceptual knowledge of God" by comparing the approaches of Karl Rahner and T. F. Torrance. He also reconsiders T. F. Torrance's "new" natural theology and illustrates why Christology must be central when discussing liberation theology. Further, he explores Catholic and Protestant relations by comparing the views of Elizabeth Johnson, Walter Kasper and Karl Barth, as well as relations among Christians, Jews and Muslims by considering whether it is appropriate to claim that all three religions should be understood to be united under the concept of monotheism. Finally, he probes the controversial issues of how to name God in a way that underscores the full equality of women and men and how to understand "universalism" by placing Torrance and David Bentley Hart into conversation on that subject.

Chapter 1 God, Freedom, and Necessity: KARL BARTH AND THE CURRENT DISCUSSION

The question of whether creation is necessary to God has long been an issue for Christian theologians in light of the traditional understanding of the creatio ex nihilo. Christian theologians traditionally have rejected the idea that the world is coeternal with God ever since that notion was identified and rejected in Origen’s understanding of God’s relation with the world.¹ Theologians realized that to presume creation is in any sense necessary for God or coeternal with God would blur the distinction between Creator and creature. This, in turn, would obliterate God’s freedom in such a way that one might then conceptually confuse and reverse the roles of Creator and creature by somehow reducing God to his creative function. According to Thomas F. Torrance, it became increasingly evident in the fourth century that without a clear distinction between the eternal generation of the Son from the being of the Father and the creation of the world by the will of God bringing something into existence from nonexistence, “the Church would finally lapse back into paganism.”²

In essence, the problem to be considered here concerns the fact that the Christian understanding of creation was, as Georges Florovsky held, “alien and even unintelligible to the Greek mind.”³ The reason for this is that “the Greek mind was firmly addicted to the conception of an Eternal Cosmos, permanent and immutable in its essential structure and composition. This Cosmos simply existed. Its existence was ‘necessary,’ it was an ultimate or first datum, beyond which neither thought nor imagination could penetrate.”⁴ While the shape of the cosmos was in flux, it nonetheless was thought to exist necessarily since “its very existence was perennial.”⁵ Florovsky went on to explain that for Christians, “the Creation of the world was conceived as a sovereign and ‘free’ act of God, and not as something which was ‘necessarily’ implied or inherent in God’s own Being.”⁶ To make his point, Florovsky cited Gilson’s well-known remark that “it is quite true that a Creator is an eminently Christian God, but a God whose very essence is to be a creator is not a Christian God at all.”⁷ His point was simply that “the very existence of the world was regarded by the Christians as a mystery and miracle of Divine Freedom.”⁸

If Florovsky is right, and I believe he is, then it is crucial to recognize that whenever the world is thought to be necessary to God, God’s freedom in himself and his freedom to act effectively as savior and redeemer for us become unrecognizable as acts of God in creation since they cannot be distinguished from creation itself. This chapter will address this theme by focusing on exactly what difficulties arise in the thinking of a number of contemporary theologians who either claim to follow Barth’s thinking or critique it in order to advance views of God’s relations with us that ascribe both necessity and freedom to God. Relying on Barth’s view that while God’s eternal being is necessary in that he could not be other than the triune God and still be God, I will argue that he nevertheless rightly held that God does not act out of need just because he is free as the one who loves in himself, and therefore God can and does love us in freedom on that basis.⁹ Failure to recognize this leads to views that God needs the world and needs to be perfected and such views tend to undermine the freedom of grace with the idea that God is somehow dependent on creation, as we shall see.

Necessity and Divine Freedom

Karl Barth maintains that in connection with the Father’s eternal begetting of his Son, God has freedom to will or not to will creation, but that

He does not have this freedom in respect of His being God. God cannot not be God. Therefore—and this is the same thing—He cannot not be Father and cannot be without the Son. His freedom or aseity in respect of Himself consists in His freedom, not determined by anything but Himself, to be God, and that means to be the Father of the Son. A freedom to be able not to be this would be an abrogation of His freedom.¹⁰

Nonetheless, Barth insists that God’s acts of creation and incarnation are not at all demanded by his essence because God’s actions are free in the sense that God does not even need his being to be who he is since as God, he already and always simply is who he is as the triune God who loves in freedom: “The freedom in which God exists means that He does not need His own being in order to be who He is: because He already has His own being and is Himself.”¹¹

Having said this, Barth therefore insisted that it is appropriate to consider what God “might have done” when thinking about the fact that God did not and does not need us but nonetheless freely chose to love us. Thus, Barth maintained that

it is only in this antithesis that we can really understand what He has done. In this light one can also see how dubious it is to set the doctrine of the Word of God in the framework of an anthropology. In that case the freedom of the divine purpose for man can be asserted only at a later stage, while it is really denied by the starting-point.¹²

These remarks by Barth rule out any idea that in electing us God could be thought to give himself his being as triune. In fact, they rule out any idea at all that God gives himself his being since, as God, he already and eternally is who he is in the freedom and perfection of his act as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and thus as the one who loves.¹³ Accordingly, for Barth,

in the intertrinitarian life of God the eternal generation of the Son or Logos is, of course the expression of God’s love, of His will not to be alone. But it does not follow from this that God could not be God without speaking to us. We undoubtedly understand God’s love for man, or in the first instance for any reality distinct from Himself, only when we understand it as free and unmerited love not resting on any need. God would be no less God if He had created no world and no man … Only when we are clear about this can we estimate what it means that God has actually, though not necessarily, created a world and us, that His love actually, though not necessarily, applies to us.¹⁴

Importantly, Barth very clearly avoided the error of Origen by asserting that “the eternal generation of the Son by the Father tells us first and supremely that God is not at all lonely even without the world and us. His love has its object in Himself. And so we cannot say that our existence as that of the recipients of God’s Word is constitutive for the concept of the Word.”¹⁵ This series of statements should not pass without explaining that the position for which I am arguing in this chapter, which takes Barth’s stated position on freedom and necessity seriously, is diametrically opposed to the views of Bruce McCormack and some of his followers who think that God did indeed give himself his eternal being in electing to be God in relationship with us. McCormack claims that there was an important change in Barth’s thinking between CD I/1 and IV/1 such that in CD II/1, for instance, Barth could describe “the work of reconciliation and redemption as a ‘fundamentally new work’ ”¹⁶ while in CD IV/1 Barth rejected this idea.¹⁷ Therefore, he alleges that in CD IV/1 Barth does not think of the incarnation as “a new event in God when it happens in time.”¹⁸ While it is new to us as the revelation of what had been a hidden mystery up to that point in time, McCormack claims that

it is not new to God because it is the outworking in time of the eternal event in which God gave to himself the being he would have for all eternity. We have before us here another piece of significant evidence demonstrating that an important change has taken place within the bounds of the Church Dogmatics. In I/1 … Barth insisted that the incarnation was a new event in God’s life. In IV/1, he denies it.¹⁹

However, the text that McCormack cites in support of his view (CD IV/1, 193) does not actually support his claims here since Barth never says that God gives himself his being. In fact, Barth argues that the mystery which is revealed in Jesus is offensive because in Jesus Christ what is revealed is that “for God it is just as natural to be lowly as it is to be high, to be near as it is to be far, to be little as it is to be great, to be abroad as to be at home.”²⁰ Following this, he holds that because God chooses to become present to us in the world created by him and yet characterized by sin,

He chooses to go into the far country, to conceal His form of lordship in the form of this world...