Fully Alive

The Glory of God and the Human Creature in Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Theological Exegesis of Scripture

Jason A. Fout

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780567672049
• eBook ISBN: 9780567659453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Numerous contemporary theologians depict divine glory as overwhelming to or competitive with human agency. In effect, this makes humanity a threat to God's glory, and causes God's glory to remain opaque to human enquiry and foreign to human life. Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar have avoided this tendency, instead depicting God's glory as enabling people to participate in glorifying God. Nevertheless both accounts fall short of their initial promise by giving one-dimensional accounts of human obedience to God within largely conventional divine command accounts of ethics. The form of human obedience they present as compatible with divine glory does not actively overwhelm the human, but rather brackets out her agency as inappropriate in the face of divine revelation or command. And so, ironically, on these accounts God's glory remains opaque to human enquiry and foreign to human life. This study builds a case for seeing divine glory as intrinsically relational, creating a sociality which allows for a human agency transfigured by God's glory. Moving beyond Barth and von Balthasar, this work turns to theological exegesis of Scripture to construct an alternative account of divine glory. This glory is worked out in the act of glorifying: first in God, then in divine glorifying of humans, creating a responsive human glorifying of God; and finally in processes of honouring or glorifying among humans. Divine glory is shown to be consistent with a responsive and creative human obedience to God, and shown to constitute human agency which is creaturely and dependent yet not overwhelmed.

1

The Glory of God and Human Agency: Initial Considerations

Rowan Williams on revelation and divine agency

In the essay ‘Trinity and Revelation’, Rowan Williams raises the question of how language about God is authorized. The Church has made theological claims for millennia; given that these claims may not be ‘verified’ in a crudely literal sense as one might verify a claim about an obviously empirical entity – say, the pavement, or a plant – then how might such claims be authorized?

Traditionally, the response has been that revelation authorizes these claims. Yet, as Williams maintains, ‘[if] revelation is seen as the delivery of non-worldly truth to human beings in pretty well unambiguous terms, discourse about God cannot be said to have roots in the ordinary events on which we depend for the “authorising” of our usual speech.’¹ On this view of revelation, it is, in effect, removed from history and abstracted from human processes of coming to understand. The end result of these processes is then presented as a fait accompli, delivered whole and static; the product is presented without means of tracing its formation or rethinking the decisions and processes of understanding which went into it. In short, this model of revelation is heteronomous: human authorization to speak of God ‘simply becomes an appeal to unchallengeable authority’.² There is only a short distance between such an appeal and mere power or force. Such authorization is put beyond deliberation or interrogation; one is simply subject to it and obedient to it.

Williams is particularly concerned about this question in regard to the doctrine of the Trinity and how one might say meaningfully of God that there is both threeness and oneness.³ ‘Learning about learning’ involves careful attention to the way that doctrinal affirmations are developed, not apart from but within ‘historical process and decision’.⁴ To learn about how doctrinal formulations have arisen in their particular ways requires attending to the actual shaping of them by humans at certain times and places; there can be no illusion of a ‘pure moment’ in which they are delivered whole, finished, and unambiguous – heteronomy is a potential problem in both revelation and doctrinal ruminations which are based on it.

This point interrogates not merely a view of the Bible as abstracted from historical process and human understanding, but also a view of the councils and formularies of the Church as standing free of historical process and human understanding, as well as a view of reflection on genuine humanity and the ‘true message’ about it lying ‘behind’ the Bible as unaffected by historical process and human understanding. This is not intended to rule out the possibility of divine involvement in any or all of these processes, but simply to point out that while divine involvement is not self-evident or unambiguous, the human process is widely well-attested. Nor does this render null and void such elements of theology as the Bible, the touchstones of ecclesial tradition or the depths of human life; to cast these aside simply because they are implicated in contingent human processes would be reductionistic.

The difficult task is specifying how these might all be implicated in the human and at the same time how they might also be seen as revelatory; how one might fully recognize the historical and contingent processes which went into human reception and human understanding of them, without reducing them to only these processes – and rendering them either superfluous or subject to cynical manipulation. Indeed, inherent in the notion of revelation is the idea that it is not something merely self-constructed, or something discovered: it is given, as a gift. As Williams puts it, in revelation ‘before we speak, we are addressed or called’.⁵ At the same time revelation is not some isolable element apart from the human or the historical. This book does not take up the ‘difficult task’ of resolving this issue, but takes seriously the tension present in the notion of the given and revealed within human history, understanding, and contingency. The two can neither be reduced to one or the other, nor meaningfully separated. If this tension is important for revelation and doctrinal formulation generally, then it will be central for an account of divine glory and human agency as well.

Williams’ concern for authority in speaking to concrete historical circumstances is a deeply theological one. If the question of how the Church’s language is learnt is neglected, then the Church’s authorization – authority – in speaking such language ‘simply becomes an appeal to unchallengeable authority, and theological language is thought of as essentially heteronomous, determined from an elusive “elsewhere”’.⁶ Williams proceeds to show that this heteronomy is a feature of more than one type of theology, yet within the essay he does not probe more deeply into just why this heteronomy might be a problem. I would like to suggest three specific ethical and theological elaborations on this theme, with a view towards showing why a heteronomous account of divine glory and human agency is problematic.

First, if authority becomes unaware of the means of its being constituted then this forgetfulness amounts to a lie, presenting authority and its forms as that which they are not. In the case of the Church, this authority has been taken, at times, to be self-evident and indisputable, particularly in the face of questions and challenges. This forgetfulness then allows the power – of whatever shape – associated with authority to be bent towards preserving and defending the authority itself. This is deeply problematic theologically, as defensiveness and self-preservation militate against the Church’s dependence on God for its existence, and against the Church’s embodying a loving service to the world.

Second, because of the Church’s theological account of humanity it is crucial that the process of authorization of claims be acknowledged rather than allowing claims to be presented simply as delivered whole and finished. The Church holds that all are touched by sin, even those within the Church itself. Claims of any kind, particularly claims which are not straightforwardly verifiable, may be used to mask and promote one’s self-interest at the expense of others and thus to legitimize sin. This sort of manipulation – whether from cynical exploitation or ignorant naïveté – reduces the Church and its message to an instrument of personal advancement, a practice which has been condemned unreservedly as idolatry.

Finally, following on from these elaborations, there is the issue of ideology. When heteronomy in terms of doctrine or revelation persists over time and becomes a regular feature of institutions and communities, then this heteronomy and its deliverances become an ideology, a self-justifying account of reality which purports to stand beyond question or reason. This ideology extends and justifies power maintaining power; it further provides abundant opportunity for idolatrous reduction of the Christian faith. But it also reifies the expression of that faith. Williams observes at the conclusion of his study of Arius that, in the wake of Nicaea, ‘the loyal and uncritical repetition of formulae is seen to be inadequate as a means of securing continuity at anything more than a formal level; Scripture and tradition require to be read in a way that brings out their strangeness, their non-obvious and non-contemporary qualities, in order that they may be read both freshly and truthfully from one generation to another.’⁷ Williams is suggesting that faithfulness to the Church’s witness is not guaranteed by identical repetition, but rather requires innovation for the sake of continuity. If that is true, then ideology and its reifying effects must be held in profound suspicion as factors resisting the interrogation and enquiry which faithfulness requires. It also requires that practitioners become proficient in making judgments about the ‘performance’ of Scripture, tradition and even revelation.

If heteronomy ends in ideology and reification which militates against faithful continuity, then as a means it betrays that which it purports to depict. Williams summarizes this well:

Theologically speaking, an appeal to the Church’s charter of foundation in the saving act of God, rooted in the eternal act of God, can never be made without the deepest moral ambiguities, unless it involves an awareness of the mode of that saving act as intrinsic to its authoritative quality and as requiring its own kind of obedience. That is to say, the God who works in disponibilité, vulnerability and mortality is not to be ‘obeyed’ by the exercise or the acceptance of an ecclesial authority that pretends to overcome these limits.⁸

The character of heteronomous theological claims contradicts the character of that which it professes to represent and, again, on these grounds warrants profound suspicion. The elemental conviction here is that the content of revelation shapes the form of its revealing.

So heteronomy in theological claims is problematic: it fosters a forgetfulness which is tantamount to a lie; it veils the potential for detecting human sin through manipulation of such claims; and it leads to ideological reification, which betrays the Church’s message in both form and substance, by resisting change undertaken for the sake of continuity and by inadequately conveying the character of that to which it witnesses. These three theological problems of heteronomy are offered to show what is at stake in this concern, and to show its relevance as an ongoing concern of this study – and if correct, for the rest of theology.⁹

Given the prevalence of heteronomous notions of revelation – whether biblicist or literalist versions, liberal or ‘experiential-expressivist’ versions, or traditionalist, ‘magisterial’ versions – this remains a live issue. As mentioned above, Williams turns to the work of Paul Ricoeur to construct a non-heteronomous account of revelation, particularly as regards the doctrine of the Trinity. But Ricoeur is an apt conversation partner for this project in other ways as well, being a subtle and dedicated reader of the Bible, and in his hermeneutics and phenomenological work trying to do justice to the shape of human life and contingency. For the purposes of this chapter, it will be helpful to move from Williams’ essay to Ricoeur’s, to deal with his concept in some depth by way of introducing the larger task of this present work.

Paul Ricoeur on revelation and human agency

In his essay ‘Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’, Paul Ricoeur explores the possibility of constructing an adequate notion of revelation.¹⁰ To do so, he attempts simultaneously to overcome heteronomous notions of revelation and also the autonomy of the self-constituting subject – or to overcome the twin ‘pretensions’, as he puts it, of both theology and philosophy.¹¹

Ricoeur turns first to the matter of heteronomy in revelation, to critique, as he terms it, ‘the accepted opaque and authoritarian understanding of this concept’.¹² To do this, he focuses on what he designates the ‘originary level’ of the notion of revelation, calling it the ‘confession of faith where the lex credendi is not separated from the lex orandi’.¹³ In this way, he means to move his consideration away from an abstract, context-less, ahistorical sense of revelation, a ‘body of doctrines imposed by the magisterium as the rule of orthodoxy’, which results in a ‘massive and impenetrable concept of “revealed truth”’.¹⁴ Abjuring this as essentially heteronomous, he instead moves towards the elemental constituent of theology: in his terms, ‘the believer who seeks to understand himself through a better understanding of the texts of his faith’. This is the realm in which the confession of faith is found and about which theological discourse occupies itself. As such, Ricoeur co...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Glory of God and Human Agency: An Introduction and Overview
• 1 The Glory of God and Human Agency: Initial Considerations
• 2 The Glory of God according to Karl Barth (1)
• 3 The Glory of God according to Karl Barth (2)
• 4 Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Glory of God
• 5 The Glory of God in Scripture: A Theological Engagement with Exodus, 2 Corinthians and the Gospel of John
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Index
• Copyright