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Is God Necessarily Who God Is? Alternatives for the Trinity and Election Debate
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 April 2013
Abstract
As a contribution to discussions of the relationship between trinity and election, in this article I explore the helpfulness of a return to ancient modal and metaphysical theological distinctions. At the forefront of trinity/election debates has been Bruce McCormack's controversial claim that election could be conceived as logically prior to, and the motivation for, God's being triune. Steering clear of questions about the right interpretation or trajectory of Karl Barth's theology, I attempt to identify the motivating theological convictions of this debate's interlocutors and find constructive options which maintain or address those convictions. One option I defend is the possibility that triunity is not logically prior to election.
I begin with an analysis of three central theological convictions which seem to be at the heart of the trinity/election debates. They are: (1) a revelation axiom – that knowledge of God's nature is governed by the particular historical revelation of God in Christ; (2) a nuanced commitment to divine immutability; and (3) divine libertas a coactione – God's being free in nature and action from external constraint. I then contend that if more attention is paid to modal and metaphysical options with respect to the existence and essence of God, one will see that there are a number of viable positions which respect these convictions.
I argue that at least some of the conceptual difficulties of McCormack's position can be eliminated if we properly distinguish kinds of necessity in reference to God's being and if we dispense with any notion of priority between God's essence and God's willing God's essence. With respect to kinds of necessity, I recall the ancient distinction between properties that are (a) necessary consequents of God's essence, (b) contingent and (c) a necessary consequence of God's essence given certain contingent states of affairs. Those distinctions, along with clarifications about the nature of divine freedom vis-à-vis his essence and actions, allow us to see the range of theological positions which remain faithful to the relevant concerns of the revelation axiom, divine immutability and divine freedom.
I conclude that, while it is problematic to defend the logical priority of election over triunity, McCormack is justified in his claim that granting election as part of God's essence does no violence to divine freedom and he is perfectly entitled to the view that God's essential properties, including both God's fit-for-election-hypostatic-configuration and God's being the electing God are mutual aspects of God's single self-caused being.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2013
References
1 McCormack, ‘Grace and Being’, in Webster, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 92–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see clarifications given in his Foreword to the German edition of Barth's, KarlCritically Realistic Dialectical Theology (repr. in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), pp. 291–304)Google Scholar; ‘Seek God Where He May Be Found: A Response to Edwin Christian van Driel’, Scottish Journal of Theology 60 (2007), pp. 62–79; and ‘Election and the Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger’, Scottish Journal of Theology 63 (2010), pp. 203–24. At the 2011 Barth Conference in Princeton, NJ, McCormack delivered a paper titled ‘Processions and Missions: A Point of Convergence between Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth’ in which he continued to defend and clarify his position.
2 ‘What Barth accomplished with his doctrine of election was to establish a hermeneutical rule which would allow the church to speak authoritatively about what God was doing – and, indeed, who and what God was/is – “before the foundation of the world”, without engaging in speculation’ (McCormack, ‘Grace and Being’, p. 92).
3 See Kevin Hector, ‘Immutability, Necessity, and the Limits of Inference: Toward a Resolution of the Trinity and Election Controversy’, a paper presented to the Logos Philosophical Theology Workshop at the University of Notre Dame, 28–30 May 2009.
4 See Rauser, Randal, ‘Rahner's Rule: An Emperor without Clothes?’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005), pp. 81–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 McCormack explains, ‘the Logos incarnatus is both asarkos (the so-called “extra-Calvinisticum”) and ensarkos (having become embodied). Thus, the identity of both the Logos incarnandus and the Logos incarnatus is the same’ (‘Seek God Where He May Be Found’, p. 68).
6 Hector, ‘Immutability, Necessity, and the Limits of Inference’, p. 19.
7 McCormack confirms this: ‘Van Driel rightly notes that I am motivated throughout by two concerns: to safeguard divine immutability in view of Barth's affirmation of divine suffering in CD IV/1 and to ensure that “in the incarnation God is not just playing a role”– i.e. that Jesus Christ is not merely an accommodation of an as yet unknown eternal Son.’ ‘Seek God Where He May Be Found’, p. 68.
8 McCormack, ‘Grace and Being’, p. 97.
9 McCormack offers penetrating accounts of Protestant debates in christology and Barth's contributions to them, but he offers his own modifications. ‘I would find the root of kenosis in the eternal obedience of the Son and would make its content to consist in a relation of willed receptivity to all that would come His way in and through the assumed human nature in time – or, alternatively expressed, willed non-use of the divine attributes of omnipotence, etc. through or upon His human nature. To put it this way is not only to create an ontic space in the eternal being of God for the genus tapeinoticum; it is also to define God in the second mode of His being by means of the assumed human nature. The second Person of the Trinity has a name and His name is “Jesus Christ”.’ McCormack, ‘“With Loud Cries and Tears”: The Humanity of the Son in the Epistle to the Hebrews’, a paper delivered at ‘The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology’ Conference, St Andrews, Scotland, 19 July 2006, p. 16.
10 ‘The triunity of God is a function of the divine election. To be sure, neither precedes the other chronologically. But it is God's act of determining himself to be God for us in Jesus Christ which constitutes God as triune.’ ‘Seek God Where He May Be Found’, p. 67. McCormack appeals to Barth, ‘There can be no Christian truth which does not from the very first contain with itself as its basis the fact that from and to all eternity God is the electing God. There can be no tenet of Christian doctrine which, if it is to be a Christian tenet, does not necessarily reflect both in form and content this divine electing . . . There is no height or depth in which God can be God in any other way.’ CD II/2, p. 77.
11 McCormack, ‘Grace and Being’, p. 99.
12 ‘Actualism’ is one of seven modes of thought George Hunsinger identifies in Barth's work. He defines it as follows: ‘“Actualism” is the motif which governs Barth's complex conception of being in time. Being is always an event and often an act (always an act whenever an agent capable of decision is concerned).’ How to Read Karl Barth (Oxford: OUP, 1993), p. 4.
13 ‘Divine “essence”, on this view, is something hidden to human perception and, finally, unknowable.’ ‘Grace and Being’, p. 98.
14 ‘Seek God Where He May Be Found’, p. 74; and ‘Karl Barth's Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 8 (2006), p. 248, n. 4.
15 Hunsinger, George, ‘Election and the Trinity: Twenty-Five Theses on the Theology of Karl Barth’, Modern Theology 24 (2008), p. 194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16 ‘Seek God Where He May Be Found’, p. 67.
17 ‘The problem, rather, is that McCormack's move appears to make God's self-determination into an abstraction: whereas Barth identifies God's self-determination in the concrete interaction between Father, Son and Spirit, McCormack abstracts this self-determination from this relationship and makes it into a “thing-in-itself”. Divorced from the concrete relationship of Father, Son and Spirit, God's decision to be God-with-us becomes an “absolute will” rather than God's eternal, triune act. Hector, Kevin, ‘God's Triunity and Self-Determination: A Conversation with Karl Barth, Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005), p. 258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Molnar, Paul ‘The Trinity, Election and God's Ontological Freedom: A Response to Kevin W. Hector’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 8 (2006), p. 295CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Molnar, Paul, ‘Can the Electing God be God without us? Some Implications of Bruce McCormack's Understanding of Barth's Doctrine of Election for the Doctrine of the Trinity’, Neue Zeitschrift fuer Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 49 (2007), p. 220Google Scholar; van Driel, Edwin C., ‘Karl Barth on the Eternal Existence of Jesus Christ’, Scottish Journal of Theology 60 (2007), pp. 54–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, Hunsinger, ‘Election and the Trinity’, p. 181, n. 7.
18 ‘Only if the Trinity is the presupposition of election rather than its consequence can Jesus Christ be a co-equal partner in the pre-temporal divine decision.’ Hunsinger, ‘Election and the Trinity’, p. 193.
19 Hector, ‘Immutability, Necessity, and the Limits of Inference’, pp. 6–7.
20 Molnar, ‘The Trinity, Election and God's Ontological Freedom’, p. 306.
21 E.g. on necessity of the consequent (necessitas consequentis) and necessity of the consequence (necessitas consequentiae), see Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 1.10, 30b32–40; on preceding necessity (necessitas praecedens) and subsequent necessity (necessitas sequens), see Anslem, Cur Deus Homo, 2.17; on the distinction between necessity of nature (necessitas naturae) and necessity of force (necessitas coactionis) see Aquinas commenting on Augustine in Questiones Disputatae de Veritate, 22.5; on absolute necessity and necessity ex hypothesi, see Liebniz, Discours de métaphysique, 13 (1686).
22 Edwards believed that part of God's essence was having a diffusive disposition, and that creation was, therefore, a necessary consequent of God's being. See esp. Concerning the End for which God Created the World, in Works of Jonathan Edwards: Vol. 8: Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
23 ‘God's being is constituted but in a most concrete, particular relation’: ‘Grace and Being’, p. 99.
24 McCormack affirms that, ‘a statement which takes the form “God would be God without us” is a true statement and one whose truth must be upheld at all costs if God's grace is to be truly gracious.’ ‘Seek God Where He May Be Found’, p. 76.
25 McCormack addresses this head-on when he rejects a Hegelian interpretation of his view: ‘Grace and Being’, pp. 99–100.
26 It should also be noted that granting the necessity of God's creating a world with human beings does not mean that all the details of that world are necessary – as Jonathan Edwards seems to have thought. It does not rule out instances of human libertarian freedom.
27 ‘Seek God Where He May Be Found’, p. 67.
28 Ibid.
29 Perhaps this could warrant McCormack's affirmation that ‘God is triune for the sake of his revelation’ (‘Grace and Being’, p. 101), so long as one equally affirms that God is revealed for the sake of his triunity.